Madness Madness‪!‬ Erin Byrne & Amanda Clay

Any of your better cheese experts will tell you there’s nothing that pairs better with a fist-sized hunk of Government Cheese than a couple of British ghost stories, one almost certainly made up, the other definitely made up. Warm up your false vocal chords for some fake ghost sounds, and learn more about the chain of government f*****y that ended with the son of a bitch Ronald Reagan offloading warehouses of third-rate Velveeta to his most hated enemy, Poor People!

My freshman year in college I (Brian) got like, Freshman Drunk at a house party where a home video was playing. My friend Jeff appeared in the video several times, and apparently every time he was onscreen I would slur, from the living room floor, "there's Jeff." The story of Gef (he's Welsh!) the Talking Mongoose seems not dissimilar, except the house where it took place was definitely harder to get to, from the sounds of things. Good thing College Brian wasn't addicted to drugs, or he might have wound up at Narconon, a "drug rehab" program that's "definitely not a Scientology front" and is surely "not responsible for the deaths of numerous patients over the years due to its foundation on utter quackery spouted off by an oily maniac." Dodged a bullet there!

We don't like to brag or anything, but the people behind Madness Madness have accomplished some pretty incredible feats of combat prowess, to the point where several hit movies have been based on our exploits: Avatar, Avengers: Endgame, Avatar: The Way of Water, Titanic, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Jurassic World, The Lion King, The Avengers, Furious 7, Top Gun: Maverick, Frozen II, and of course Barbie. That’s more than $27 billion at the box office just from the ones we can name off the tops of our heads, so honestly we’ve got nothing to learn from Frank Dux, a fight choreographer and semi-professional liar whose “life story,” the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme breakout “Bloodsport,” pulled in a mere puff of dust to the tune of $11.8 million worldwide, which I don’t even think is enough money to wipe your ass with these days.
Nonetheless we’ll hear about this valor-stealing boomer schmuck, then imagine him dropped into Cassadaga, Florida (formerly New York), the fortune-telling capital of the world, mouthing off to a series of increasingly irritable palm readers until the ghost of Patrick Swayze manifests and Road House roundhouses him so hard he lands in a different ZIP code from his medals of honor, which turn out to be made of cardboard and cellophane anyway. Join us, won’t you?

Aine’s in town! In honor of friend of the pod/friend of us as actual people, today’s episode is all Australia, all the time! There’s Corn Thins! Mike invented them! There’s Tim Tams! Some saint or another invented them! And there’s research that yields phrases like “singer Paul Joseph, Donny McCormack (ex-Nutwood Rug Band), The Larrikins and Ian Farr!” Former Nutwood Rug Band members infested the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, a surprisingly thoughtful invasion of a small town in New South Wales during the sixties; decades earlier, significantly less thought was given to the entire enterprise known as the Emu War, which you may know by now was not won by non-Emus. Join us, won’t you?

Florida’s state government isn’t the only bunch to get a bug up its collective ass over Disney not being fundamentalist enough: Turns out there’s a storied history of Old Testament fanboys opening entire theme parks, except instead of a theme there’s the Bible, and instead of a park there’s the Bible. Today we learn more about this string of inexplicable failures, plus one man’s equally successful plan to boost Americans’ frog intake by several hundredfold. Albert Broel is the author of “Frog Raising for Pleasure and Profit,” and believe us when we tell you that’s not even the best part of Albert Brull. All this, plus Doug! Our friend Doug is here, and we love him. Also there's a lot of singing, and most of it's pretty great. Doug! Songs! Frogs! Fundamentalists! It’s all here!

Like reasonable people everywhere, we here at Madness Madness, when considering the accurate and true representation of American Indians in film, television, and literature, immediately think of Germany. Thus none of you will be surprised to learn of Karl May, creator in the 1890s of the “Old Shatterhand” novels, the Wild West adventures of the titular benevolent whitey and his “blood brother” Winnetou, a wise chief of the Apache, a formula that would in no way lead to an utterly bizarre century-plus-long fixation by Germans on American Indian life as portrayed by a man born in the Kingdom of Saxony.
You know what Old Shatterhand didn’t have? Access to driver’s education snuff films, the bread and butter of one Richard Wayman, a man with access to a vast store of color film and a frankly troubling affinity for the Ohio Highway Patrol. Wayman’s literal snuff films—“Signal 30,” “Highways of Agony,” “Mechanized Death”(!), and of course “Hell’s Highway”—routinely terrorized driver’s education students from the ‘50s through at least the early ‘90s. His interests also included filming “sting” operations to publicly humiliate gay men and producing disastrous telethons featuring Sammy Davis Jr. Meet both these white guys on this episode of Madness Madness!