Goose Chase Podcast

Episode 93: Marion Stokes, the Ultimate Archivist

This week we're talking about Marion Stokes. Ever heard of her? If you have, 10 points for you, you were paying more attention than we were. Marion was an activist, a television presenter, an intellectual, and a collector and archivist of lots of things. We don't want to spoil this one, but her greatest accomplishment would span 33 years and produced a prolific collection you won't believe. 

Episode 92: The Mad Monk

This week we're talking about someone who you've probably heard a bit about: Grigory Rasputin. Known as the Mad Monk, and major influencer to the Romanov family, Rasputin will forever be enshrined in a certain amount of mystery. That's by design, too: He certainly made deliberate attempts to generate a certain amount of mystique, and lots of stories persist about him to this day. We sort over the many legends of Rasputin to try to get to the most likely truths about this mysterious man from the reaches of faraway Siberia. 

Episode 91: Crypto Killed the Radio Star

This week we're talking about number stations. If you watched LOST while it was on the air, you might recognize the idea: radio stations around the world which seem to do little more than spit out a series of numbers every now and then, read by a human voice or sometimes just tones. People have speculated lots about what they're for and what they do. We talk about the stations, as well as some concepts of cryptography that make this old school tech very appealing for information secrecy. 

Episode 89: The Countess of Code

If you're looking at this message, you owe a chunk of your experience with computers to Ada Lovelace, the mother of modern computing. All the way back in the 1830s, she saw the beginning of where computers might be headed, and yet it would take almost 120 years for anyone to notice her genius. Tonight, a love letter to the history of the computer decades before the big mainframe computation computers we know today. 

Episode 88: Duane the Overconfident Writer (PART 2)

In our last episode, we talked about Duane the Great Writer, the purveyor of a series of online books and a philosophy that may well have been outright lifted from Eckankar and Paul Twitchell. We left off on the discovery that there is a massive other side to Duane's materials, and that's on YouTube. But it's not published by him. It's the channel of Kelsey Lynne Brown, a writer in her own right and the host of lots and lots of material on Duane. This week we explore the extended Duaneverse, other people in his orbit, and the only whiff of scandal that Dave can trace to them (but a significant one)

Episode 87: Duane the Overconfident Writer (PART 1)

In this episode, we're talking about something with a weirdly small and specific Google footprint. DuanetheGreatWriter.info is the home of something called the Worldwide Educators, or the NuPresentation foundation, and it is a treat for the eyes. The website contains a lot of information on what they represent, and maybe not in any particular order either. It's interesting; something definitely emerges, themes and concepts and values that repeat, but the author, his works, his foundation, and himself as a person are actually kind of elusive. This one felt like a Goose Chase scoop. The more threads we pulled, the more questions we had. In tonight's part 1: Who the heck is Duane? 

Episode 86: Don't Call It Murder Park

This week, we're talking about a park with a historically bad reputation, but don't hold that against it. Baltimore's Leakin Park has been the home of so many body dumps that it's been referred to as an unofficial/unregistered graveyard. We talk a bit about the history of the park, its years of activity, and some reasonable explanations for why things got so bad there. Or were they really so bad? These days they'd like you to know it's been heavily rehabbed, but there's still a lot of stories to tell. 

Episode 84: Area 51 - Let's See Them Alien Cheeks

Area 51 is back in the news lately after a Facebook event called "Storm Area 51" has attracted 1.4 million attendees. It's all tongue in cheek, of course... except it's got enough of attention to draw a response from the U.S. military and has made one town in Nevada mighty nervous. We're talking about the history of Area 51, a little bit on the official and unofficial stories, and a look at this meme-abundant event that has changed in scope and focus, with a brief glimpse of what is to come. 

Episode 83: The Proof is in the Fruitcake

This week, we're talking about fruitcakes! Now at home, you're probably saying to yourself: "What?" We know. It's a strange launch point. But this is a fascinating episode. The fruitcake has been around for longer than we thought in more forms than we knew, and to make it even more interesting, fruitcakes were the center point of a truly astounding late 20th / early 21st century caper. This widely despised cake is so much more interesting than we knew. Follow along with us. 

Episode 82: The Immortal Woman

This week our super special guest Aubrey is back with a real mindbender of a topic. What would you say if we told you that a woman who has been dead for over 60 years is not only still around, but there are in fact around 734 million of her that have come and gone? Would you say that's bananas? We did. We're talking about a woman whose cells have lasted for decades. The story of those cells is amazing, exciting, saddening, and enlighening.