Mass for Shut-ins: The Gin and Tacos Podcast

In 1996 a loutish young Briton got drunk and, on a lark, asked a tiny island nation if he could be their poet laureate. Mind you, the nation has no poet laureate and doesn't really do European-style poetry at all. That's ok, he doesn't know how to...

Agatha Christie's two most popular characters - Poirot and Marple - can only exist and make sense in a universe in which the police simply cannot solve crimes. If they could, why would they need a weird Belgian private detective or a random old lady...

What if I told you that right now you can get a new car very nearly for free? Sounds like a scam, right? Well thanks to Hydrogen Fuel Cells, the Technology of the Future of 2002, you can. With some caveats. Crazy, right? Now what if I also told you...

In the late Sixties through the Seventies, John Brisker was widely known as the meanest, toughest man in professional basketball. After winning ABA titles in Pittsburgh and punching his way through a few tumultuous seasons with the Supersonics of the...

After a player died from being hit by a pitch in 1920, Major League Baseball banned the "spitball." But it allowed 17 players whose careers were determined to be dependent on it to continue throwing it. A century later, baseball is still dealing with...

In 1975 a right-wing loon purchased 300 acres of swampland outside Cape Canaveral with the dream of building a theme park recreating the experience of a US Special Forces barracks in a rural Vietnamese hamlet at the height of the war. Visitors could...

Will the US mint a trillion-dollar coin? Probably not, but in 2001 the tiny island nation (I know, I know) of Vanuatu created $300 million overnight by quadrupling its sovereign debt using as its stated collateral a 182-pound ruby that may or may not...

Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928 had little immediate impact on the world because it took over 15 years to crack the secret of how to mass-produce the it. Until that happened, penicillin existed more as an idea than as a medical...

Guest: Mike Konczal () returns with his new book, . We take a look at all the great things government used to (or could) do a pretty good job of providing for Americans but no longer does because we've turned them over to The Free Market, which isn't...

Guest: David Parsons (@davidlparsons) from the excellent history podcast joins me to discuss Gerald Ford's disastrous rollout of a nationwide vaccination program in 1976 to combat a swine flu pandemic that didn't materialize. Vaccine recipients...