Episode 299 - Der Loch Ness Fuhrer

[Mike]

So many segments! There’s listener feedback and updates on the Cuties movie controversy, plus we try to check in with the viewers in Hey… How’s It Going? Aidan’s got three full topics to discuss on his Gaming Table, and Mike’s going to space on the Science Corner. The guys talk about returning to the moon and the possibilities of life on Venus and Mars. On top of this, the Unnamed History Segment explores the mysterious connection between the Loch Ness Monster and Adolf Hitler. Mike rants about Time Travel Top Ten lists in his absolute nerdiest of nerd rages. And then the guys talk about three different podcasts in a Pod People segment that quickly morphs into Word of Mouth. All this, and there’s still five all-new, listener-submitted questions from R2 on the Pod-O-Matic. Not to mention a full round of Listener Betrayal where we ask about name-calling and naughtiness plus even better questions of Kyle. A solid 120 minutes of head-banging, rock-n-roll-style entertainment! Listen NOW!

Enjoy!

[Kyle]

Terlingua is not a ghost town. It’s a small isolated town in West Texas. We’ve worked in their community garden three or four times over the last ten years.

[Mike]

And according to the internets, it is ALSO four ghost towns.

[akiva]

I hate to debunk you, especially about a conspiracy theory, but there are stories about the Loch Ness Monster before 1933. Saint Columba saw it in 565--in fact he saved someone's life abjuring the monster--and there are other Scottish stories about something mysterious in the Loch. The modern version of the Nessie story dates to 1933, but the stories are much older.

[Mike]

Yeah, you win. I should have mentioned St. Columba, but A) it doesn't really match the Nessie legends and feels shoehorned in, B) my narrative is much stronger without it, and most importantly C) I completely forgot about it while recording.

What I know: more than a century after the event, someone reported that Saint Columba rebuked a water beast in the River Ness in 565. A saint drove off a beast with the power of God. This river monster was folded in with lake monster after the 1933 stories.

I'll admit that my personal research was meager, so there might be a lot of other verified stuff out there. I'm generally pretty lazy. But I checked as far as Wikipedia and The History Channel and The Iverness (whatever they call their paper), and saw the agreed upon timeline of:

565 - St Columba saw something in the river
1933 - Reports of Loch Ness Monster go viral
1934 - People start relating stories of previous things they had heard (especially that doctor who is purported to have seen something in 1870).

The other reports I've seen are even sketchier than the above, but again, I'm lazy and didn't dig too deep.

[akiva]

There were folktales in Scotland of a monster in the loch, so the St Columba story isn't the only old reference to it. I suspect that the older stories were vague and contradictory, but they were there.

[Mike]

[akiva]

Maybe that's correct--maybe there were no folklorish mentions of the monster until people began to "remember" them after 1933. That's not what I've heard, but history has a way of being revised retroactively.