Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

Oh, yeah. Have you guys seen there's a Watchmen series that's coming to HBO?

This one, like, what's his name? Rorschach's Mask is literally just like a sack with kind of like, you know.

I don't know that it is. I think it might even be either a deeper exploration of the series with more of the, because, come on, you need more than a movie to really like go deep into that book, right? There's so much stuff in there that they couldn't put in.

Dude, I just rewatched it.

I don't know. I loved it.

I don't know. And maybe it is just nostalgia.

I think the reason for me was that that was such a formative graphic. That was the first graphic novel I ever read where I was like, oh, I see what graphic novels can accomplish.

So I felt like it was very sacred to me and to see someone try to do, I felt like it was a valiant effort, but I also didn't really care for Zack Snyder's style anyway.

Alan Moore hated it.

Yeah. Alan Moore is like-

I don't think he watched. He probably didn't even watch it.

No, he does write excellent comics for fun. But I think it's to support his main hobby, his main passion, which is just hating stuff.

Oh, geez.

If you go to hbo.com slash Watchmen, the first thing you see is nothing ever ends.

Yeah, and the little blurb, oh, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross doing the music. That's pretty dope. And it's a show run by Damon Lindelof, who I believe did Lost.

That's correct, along with J.J. Abrams.

And unlike Dr. Manhattan's quote, unlike his observation in the fictional world of Watchmen, this, love it or hate it, is the reality in which we have collectively lived for the span of this episode.

You can go to the Book of Genesis, verse one, chapter 26. The verse says, let's make man in our image, not my are as in plural, you know, and that starts the process of like, oh, wait a minute, we are who is that?

Do you dislike the government? Maybe you're a bit cynical and skeptical of everything. This book will help you discern conspiracy fiction from fact in a witty and engaging way.

Perfect for flipping through with friends while you guys want to feel like you're smart or something. Great illustrations as well by the book.

Fitting its Weight

Could you read the title of this book?

Yeah Economics For Dummies, which I think is a mean non-answer when someone asks why the why the health care system is so broken.

The American book by Ostrander and Schroeder, these two journalists wrote a book in 1970 called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.

And he says the best way to think of a bubble in financial terms is to think about a stock that people keep buying mostly because other people are buying the same thing. It's a herd movement.

And they said the best known examples of recent bubbles would be the mortgage crisis, the homes that people live in in the US.

And the problem here is that people say, people feel like companies like Navient and Wall Street investors and colleges and universities are accelerating this bubble because people are saying, well, college education is worth so much over the span of my life that I should go to college even if it costs twice what it did when my parents went.

Remember that Disney movie Holes from the early 2000s? It's called Holes. I never saw it.

It's described of Wikipedia as a neo-western comedy drama based on a novel by Lewis Soccer from 1998, starring Sigourney Weaver, Patricia Arquette, Shia LaBeouf and John Voight.

So you know what? I'll put that on the list to either read the book or watch the film because I had no idea that existed.

You know, one of the most recent books about Mars that I really enjoyed was The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. I don't even want to spoil it, man. I'm not even sure what genre it is.

Nathan is very much considered a horror writer. Like he had several things adapted from his previous anthologies, but I wouldn't call The Strange a horror novel. God, I want to know if anybody else has read that one because it stays with me. It's like kind of a Western.

So I think that kind of, oh, it's so good. I might read it again.

What was it? Three who wrote Heinlein wrote Red Planet, right? Yeah.

Red Planet. It's just I don't know. I haven't read in a long time, but it is. I do recall it being a really cool Heinlein novel about colonizing Mars.

Stephen King recently published his latest horror anthology or I should even at this point just say fiction anthology called You Like It Darker.

Just finished it. Amazing. Really good. It's super.

The idea of trolls as an embellishment on human interaction with Neanderthal has been explored extensively in fiction. William Golding the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies wrote about it in a novel called The Inheritors

In her 2021 book, Growing Up in the Ice Age, as well as her more recent work from just last year, Rethinking Neanderthals, an archaeologist named April Noel from Canada, University of Victoria, she broke down these questions like how much genuine consideration have homo sapiens given to the life form of the Neanderthal and she notes this DNA stuff we're talking about She says, quote Researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals offering new insights into their biology as well as our own There is no longer any doubt that human beings and Neanderthals interbred

In her 2021 book, Growing Up in the Ice Age, as well as her more recent work from just last year, Rethinking Neanderthals, an archaeologist named April Noel from Canada, University of Victoria, she broke down these questions like how much genuine consideration have homo sapiens given to the life form of the Neanderthal and she notes this DNA stuff we're talking about She says, quote Researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals offering new insights into their biology as well as our own There is no longer any doubt that human beings and Neanderthals interbred

And he goes back most likely to another controversial figure, sort of a David Icke of her day called Helena Blavatsky.

And in 1888 or so, she writes a book called or she collects some lectures and things she had said previously about the idea, something you referred to earlier, Matt, the idea that there are lizard people who are part of an ancient civilization that was once more advanced than humanity, but met with great great peril and disaster.

Howard has this story in The Shadowed Kingdom, wherein Conan the Barbarian runs into these serpent men, which are pretty much beat for beat. The dragon men from The Secret Doctrine and the other stories that Blavatsky took from and surprise, Conan.

So it goes back to the way she describes. I think it's five races of like humanoids that have existed throughout time, and she's ripping off a lot of ancient myths from the Indian subcontinent.

This is the reason they were also popular in their day.

And then Blavatsky is another person who said she read this one book and she was doing meditations and she was again, almost a message was being channeled through her that becomes what is known as The Secret Doctrine.

But in that there is this concept that these serpents of wisdom, these great dragons, whatever all this stuff is, they are a group of some form of creature that uses serpents to describe them, right? That live underground.

They live underneath some type of pyramidal structures.

Everybody check out George's Marvelous Medicine, by the way.

Roald Dahl's best conspiracy book, I think.

It's like that scene in The Witches by Roald Dahl where behind the closed doors, that's when they take off their human masks and only then can they let their lizard faces breathe a little bit.

Roald Dahl, amazing author.

The Witches adaptation was really good, too.

Very good. Very scary.

And don't bother with The Witches remake.

The original 90s Witches is where it's at.

I did. I didn't know there was a remake.

It was a straight to HBO Max thing. It was not good. It was directed by somebody of note, actually, but it was very, very bad.

And Hathaway plays the Grand High Witch.

You can't fill freaking Angelica Houston's square toed shoes. You just can't do it.

There's a great book with a really long name from Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg.

The Lore and Mythology of Amphibians and Reptiles.

Amazing. It's a very specific book. From Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, Adder's Fork and Lizard's Leg.

And this author, Marty Crump, also talks about the reptilian conspiracy of today being related to the mythology of the Naga from India, half cobra, half human creatures.

Indica in the fifth century BCE and the actual-

Which means in the couch.

The actual book or the manuscript is lost to time and we only know about it because we hear other writers, later writers, name-checking it.

He is kind of the first cryptozoologist.

He's saying, oh, I heard about this one thing, you know, and I heard about this other thing.

He writes that amongst these same men, there is found an animal, I have to lapse into the voice, called the manticora, which has three rows of teeth like a comb. The face and ears of a human and bluish eyes. It is red in color with the body of a lion and a tail with stingers like a scorpion. Its voice is as if the sounds of the pipe were mixed with a trumpet and it is a creature of great speed which avidly goes after human flesh.