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Join us in the skies off the coast of California in this episode. We'll talk about the US Naval airship L-8, the mysterious disappearance of its crew, and its brief time as an airborne ghost ship!

Re-upload. Join us as Ella explains the events of a fateful night that sent a crew of 29 to the bottom of the largest freshwater lake in North America. We'll discuss shipping tonnage, the incredibly dangerous weather systems of the Great Lakes, and talk a little about Gordon Lightfoot's haunting tribute to the disaster. This episode was taken down due to a copyright concern; we'd quoted some lyrics from Lightfoot's song in the initial version of this episode. Those quotations have been removed and I'm glad to be able to put this one back up for everyone. -Greg

Join us as we head to the mid-1800's and learn about a very specific blight that nearly crippled the French wine industry!

Another deep-sea oil rig, another disaster; in 1983, five saturation divers were killed when their air pressure was explosively decompressed. This episode covers a truly awful way to die.

How does a train wind up outside of its station, standing on its face? Well, the answer involves a perfect storm of operator negligence, bad brakes, and good ol' financial incentive.

Greg and Child Unit A explore one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of all time, and why a simultaneous massive decrease in the human population may be a case of correlation, not causation.

On this episode, we're going to the city of Seoul to take a look at another example of how greed kills people. In 1988, a building was constructed to maximize profit and minimize expense; in 1995, its inevitable collapse caused the most non-wartime deaths South Korea has experienced. We'll talk about construction techniques, building codes, why regulations are important, and how to not move gigantic air conditioners.

We're going to the dry and drought-blasted British Isles of 1976 for this (short) episode; we'll talk about ladybirds, the population boom-and-bust cycles of insect life, and how weird weather can throw an entire ecosystem into red-shelled chaos.

To kick off our 2024 season, I thought we'd cover the insidious disaster that is Conspiratorial Thinking! We'll discuss how our brain can get short-circuited in the strangest ways, why it takes fear and lack of self-reflection skills to be a true believer... and why this stuff cannot be dismissed and how we can all do a better job of guarding ourselves against it. Fun. Sources: Due to being available on a whole bunch of different platforms now, it's come to my attention that our Sources don't always make it to each listener at their preferred listening-platform; therefore, I'm going to be doing a better job of listing the complete sources in the episode itself.

Back in 1977, Star Wars was a phenomenon that changed the film industry. In 1978, some CBS executives tried to replicate the magic for TV and the results were... legendary? Just probably not in the way they intended.

Ella takes a dive into color theory and the bizarre history of Fuschia - the color and the man it was named for. And why it may not be a real color at all.

On this extended sidebar, Ella brings us the story of the Ourang Medan, a ghost ship found floating in the middle of the pacific with the entire crew dead. Or was it never found, its only survivor finding his way to a barely-inhabited atoll and living just long enough to relay how his whole crew had perished due to some unknown force? Or was it found in the straits of Indonesia, with the deceased crew all staring upward in abject horror? It's a creepy story with a fairly mundane truth living in its center.