Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that isn’t the worst podcast, it’s just a tribute.

I’m your host this week, Aaron, and with me is Shea!

I’m Shea, and this week I learned that horses get farted on more than any other animal.

Round Table

Quick announcements. The last few shows have come out a few days after our stated Friday release. Part of this is because, due to work and life schedules, Thursday has become the de facto recording day, and getting the show recorded, edited, reviewed, documented, and prettied is usually more than one evening’s work — especially as we’ve exceeded our 30min target runtime now… for like 2 months solid. With that in mind, our new plan is to release Monday mornings. Patrons are likely to get their episodes — complete with exclusive stories and outtakes — Sunday or whenever the production process is completed.

This week asks a simple question: if you tickle a yeti, does he grunt? … Shea?

This Week’s Beer

Is the Salt Creek Citra IPA From friend-of-the-shows Brendon!
Thanks, buddy.

• https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/54696/400897/

America IPA at 7.7% ABV and too few scores to do the math on.

• Aaron: 9


• Shea: 9

The Worst Year

So, 2021 was not ideal, but everything’s relative. Let’s talk about the worst year.

Some of you may have an idea of where I’m going with this because you listen to Scathing Atheist and thereby Citation Needed.

1816 — The Dawn Of Jussssstinian’s Suckage

To be clear, 1816 sucked. Nearly 2020 levels of suckage. Per Noah, it led to famine, mass migration, and Mormonism. Mount Tamboura in Indonesia erupted in 1815 and put 100 cubic Kilos of Mount Tamboura into the atmosphere. The island basically just died. The dust that entered the atmosphere caused lowered global temperatures, known today as the “little ice age” for good reason. Sulfuric fog, acidic rain, and massively polluted water killed crops and starved entire contents. India lost its monsoons. China found them. Even artwork from the time got… bleak. So anyway, millions of people died and that’s a real downer.

Still not the worst.

For the worst year, we need to go back another thousand and change…

Welcome to 536 A.D. The world is a gross, illiterate, dumpster fire. The revival of the Roman Empire was… not going as planned. There was famine, plague, oh, and the sun was blocked out to a near-biblical degree for 18 months. Real cats and dogs living together, real wrath of god stuff.

536 is such a terrible year, in the middle of a terrible decade, that I’m not even going to try to bury the surprise of it all in my usual low-hanging comedic fruit way. There’s no need. Each day in 536 was worse than the previous, delivering a nearly endless supply of terrible to punctuate this essay.

A lot of what we’ll talk about comes from records made during Justinian’s attempt to reunify the empire. He traveled with poets and scholars to record what he hoped would be his exploits — rather than the string of seemingly unending uprisings and secessions it actually was.

Well… ye-olde writers and ice cores, dendrological records, and historical metallurgy.

It should be noted that when I say “reunify,” I actually mean “push a massive and bloody war engine across Eurasia” that wouldn’t end until the 550s. What it did do was spread plague all over the damn place. Turns out fighting entropy isn’t a winning gambit.

So, we start the year off with wars, the general terribleness of 536, and the Earth having a terrible rumble in its tummy. That rumble was what is now pretty widely considered to have been a massive Icelandic volcanic eruption. Like, dwarfing Krakatoa or even Tambora. We’re talking real “end of days” stuff here.

I say that most researchers agree on a volcanic eruption, and I’ll get to the evidence for that, but there are a few folks who prefer other theories, the most notable of which (that is, the one that’s not completely, obviously, stupid) is Sozin’s Comet.

The idea was that the Earth was struck by the comet and instead of giving Fire Benders extraordinary powers, it killed everything. This theory is somewhat undercut by pyroclastic debris seldom coming from space. We’ll talk about the evidence for volcanoes in a bit.

Either way, the northern hemisphere was covered in a thick, black, cloud layer not entirely dissimilar to what we think of when talking about Nuclear winter.

Of the event, the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.”

Michael McCormick, a history professor at Harvard University and co-author of the Antiquity paper, whose studies provide much of what we know, said

It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight, the ancient witnesses really were onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”

Cassiodorus, a Roman politician wrote that “we marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon.” He would continue to describe the sun’s ”bluish” tint, that the moon had entirely lost its luster, and the “seasons seem to be all jumbled up together.”

Speaking of, it’s springtime for China and Eurasia. Winter for… China and Eurasia.

The climate is going nuts and raining dirty, acidic, water on the lucky places. Everywhere else got toxic, yellowish, dust instead of water. The Nan Shi (a 6th-century chronicle) noted Hui [whey], that fine yellow-ish dust, covered the chilled and darkened land. And, in case you’re wondering, like eternal darkness and summer-frost, Hui was not good for crops or your lungs.

Now, all of this sounds bad, sure, but a little cold weather can be dealt with eh?

Not by crops, which died en mass.

The global temperature dropped 1.6 to 2.5 C, or because you probably live in the states, 34.88 to 36.5 F. So… a lot. It was the coldest recorded decade in the past 2300 years, known now as the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in the spring of 536 lasted in western Europe until about 660, and it lasted until about 680 in Central Asia,” McCormick says.

So, let’s talk about global famine and how that sucks.

The near-total loss of crops did two things very well. First, the global economy — such that it was at the time — stagnated. Macro and micro-economies ground to a halt with no goods to trade, and therefore no coin to tax, etc. It was a “trickle-up” of debt if you will. Second, without crops or money famine consumed Europe and not long after, the steps of Asia.

So now we’ve got resource wars to boot. As the year went by, war and famine started mass migrations of people looking for safety.

And where people go, gross follows.

Bubonic Plague has entered the chat…

Procopius continued

men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”

History buffs will know that this came to be called Justinian’s Plague. A dubious remembrance, but a legacy nonetheless. It’s remembered as being a particularly rough bout of bubonic, killing an estimated 100 million people, which seems like a lot until you also count deaths from famine, war, other pestilences, and exposure to the now entirely unpredictable elements. Never mind what the sun being blocked out for over a year does to people… hint: it’s not good.

Since no one yet had jars to keep their farts in, disease ran wild. And no, that wasn’t a nod to Shea’s patron story last week — one of the more common ways to “defend” from the miasma of plague was to fill your beak mask with roses, or, if you were in the middle of global crop die-offs, farts. As long as you weren’t smelling plague, you were gonna be ok… until you got the plague and it killed you horribly.

The population of Europe and Asia was starving, cold, and warried, making them even more prone to illness than they already were — and this was way, way before vaccines, penicillin, or even the notion that illness was anything other than evil spirits living in your blood. Needless to say, it went poorly.

The rat-based parasites that spread the plague were stunted by the colder weather. Unfortunately, those that made it were carried into people’s homes by rats seeking any warmth they could find. While fewer carried plague, they were all living in people’s hovels putting the already less-than-100% population in direct contact with bubonic plague and other terrible illnesses.

Since all of that is just terrible for Eurasia, let’s talk about Peru.

Are you familiar with Peru’s Moche people?

If you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel bad, they’re not around anymore. At the time they were a leading civilization in the area because of their fishing prowess and incredible-at-the-time irrigation systems. Unfortunately, the Earth going all emo also cooled the ocean causing a sort of El Nino, that in turn did a real number of aquatic life. This all but ended civilizations that rely on the ocean. Many survived, the Mache did not. As for the irrigation, it stopped mattering due to the lack of everything else plants need to survive.

For real and for true, the entire planet was feeling the mode on this one.

But don’t take my word for it. Previously mentioned Harvard historian <a href="ht