What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Because all the weapons were checked to see if they were fired recently. It's SOP to eliminate them from the scenario.

Assuming, of course, that there was no coverup.

[Rev. Rye]

Now, another weird new thing I learned from Last Podcast on the Left, during the long and frustratingly incompetent investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper, one fake confessor managed to derail the whole thing, by writing sufficiently creepy letters and a tape.

Transcript of the tape:

I'm Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but Lord, you are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are lettin' you down, George. They can't be much good, can they? The only time they came near catching me was a few months back in Chapeltown, when I was disturbed. Even then it was a uniformed copper, not a detective.

I warned you in March that I'd strike again. Sorry it wasn't Bradford. I did promise you that, but I couldn't get there. I'm not quite sure when I'll strike again, but it will definitely be sometime this year, maybe September, October or even sooner if I get the chance. I'm not sure where, maybe Manchester; I like it there, there's plenty of them knocking about. They never learn, do they, George? I bet you've warned them. But they never listen.

At the rate I'm goin', I should be in the book of records. I think it's eleven up to now, isn't it? Well, I'll keep on going for quite a while yet. I can't see myself being nicked just yet. Even if you do get near, I'll probably top myself first.

Well, it's been nice chatting to you, George.

Yours, Jack the Ripper.

No good looking for fingerprints, you should know by now it's as clean as a whistle. See you soon. 'Bye. Hope you like the catchy tune at the end. Ha-ha.

That song?



Yes, the Golden Girls somehow managed to play a crucial part in this investigation before the show even premiered. Okay, it was the original Andrew Ross version, but listening to Marcus play the tape and warning us that they did not manipulate the content of the tape in any way and hearing this song threw me for a loop.

And, of course, this guy was not the actual Ripper, just a sad fucker who decided to confess because he thought it was the only way he could give his life some significance. And apparently, the Yorkshire Police sent the tape to the FBI, and they immediately told them it was a blatant hoaxster. They did not listen until the actual killer confessed over two years (and nine victims, five of whom died) later.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Today, I learned that Francis Wharton, a backwoodsman who lived in British Columbia in the 1950s, made himself a set of dentures from the teeth of a deer he’d killed. This enabled him to eat the deer with the deer’s own teeth.

Kinda cool, really.

Boru

[The Valkyrie]

Today, I learned that Francis Wharton, a backwoodsman who lived in British Columbia in the 1950s, made himself a set of dentures from the teeth of a deer he’d killed. This enabled him to eat the deer with the deer’s own teeth.

Kinda cool, really.

Boru

But do this with people...

[Rev. Rye]

The H.L. Hunley was the first submarine to sink a ship in battle. It was made by the Confederate Navy and required eight men paddling it around with no periscope navigating by blind reckoning, and while it did sink the Housatonic and kill five men, it managed to kill a total of 20 Confederate soldiers, plus the ship’s designer. First run, five men drowned And they raised it. Second run, all eight men died (including the designer), and they raised it again. Finally, the third run was successful, with one ship sunk, plus the Hunley, which was not raised until 2000 because nobody knew where it was. Surprisingly, this Confederate ship managed to kill more Confederates than many Union soldiers had a chance to.

[Rev. Rye]

You know Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket? He was apparently meant to be a bad drill sergeant all this time. Looking through the TVTropes page on the film, R. Lee Ermey, who was apparently very good at his job in real life, deliberately played Hartman as a very bad one who only stayed on the job because he stayed just close enough to the rules to not get caught.

What's legitimately surprising is that while looking for specifics, it's really bloody hard to sort through the question of "did he suck at his job" through answers of "My drill sergeant was really this much of a hardass" or "what he did wouldn't fly today," which doesn't answer the question of "by the admittedly probably low standards of Parris Island in 1967, what is he doing wrong?" To be fair, given that most soldiers don't get the chance to go through basic more than once, it's hard to get the sort of experience necessary to compare and figure out what makes a good drill sergeant. 

Apparently, he was far more physically abusive to the recruits than was accepted (the sort of humiliating beatdowns he gives wouldn't fly, and the most that would be permitted would be a short, sharp, shock for attention's sake, although even that was never officially condoned by the top brass), and his book counterpart was even worse and even gave one recruit a lemon swirly. Also, he apparently wouldn't actually have interacted much with the recruits, leaving that to the Junior DIs who are essentially scenery in the film.

Of course, I could really see this from scenes like this:



Praising a mass murderer while his victims were barely cold. I'd say yikes, but then again, he also praises Lee Harvey Oswald, and I don't know what's worse, the fact that he's praising the assassin of the most consistently popular President of his lifetime, or that he's praising his marksmanship when it was actually shockingly poor. I know that there's a lot of people who claimed Oswald was a mediocre shot who managed to get an extremely lucky shot. The more I look into it, this perception is exactly backwards. The issues of his marksmanship scores aside (which I'm not even sure how to interpret, because some sources claim the scale used starts at 190 and ends at 250 for whatever reason), he was using a rifle with a 4x scope at 88 yards, which means JFK's head should have covered the scope. Meanwhile, we have a missed shot, one shot that grazed the neck, and one off-center head shot. Which should have been a hell of a lot easier. And the issue of poor taste aside, that's the sort of marksmanship he's lionising? 

And, naturally, this scene:



I don't know how true this was in 1967, but Gunny would have had to notice the signs that Gomer Pyle was losing his mind. The book explains this because the troop's already lost a couple recruits and he doesn't want yet another washout, and the movie could easily be explained as "Hey, I'm getting results and that's what matters." But his actions in this scene are inexcusably stupid; he's got a crazed recruit pointing a fully loaded weapon at him and instead of calling the MPs to take him away and Section 8 him before sunrise, he walks up to him and keeps insulting him. And naturally, he gets shot in the chest for his stupidity.



And, of course, here's a guess at what would have gone down if that scene happened IRL.

[Sal]

I honestly didn't know about Manchester Orchestra.

Look and be amazed:

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

When BBC Radio banned the great George Formby's song 'When I'm Cleaning Windows' from being played over the air (referring to it as 'a disgusting little ditty'), Formby sent a letter asking what BBC Radio would find acceptable.  They replied that as long as he used words that could be found in a standard medical textbook, there wouldn't be a problem.

Formby immediately tested this by submitting a song titled, 'I'm Positively Riddled With Chlamydia'. The song was rejected and, sadly, appears to have been lost.

Boru

[tackattack]

Rockdove makes the best house slippers I’ve ever known. It like jeggings for your feet

[Rev. Rye]

Today I found out that Morrissey has published a very shitty novella called List of the Lost that's basically American Psycho with zero self-awareness and not even the extreme violence that sucks people into that book.

The plot basically involves four teens who kill a homeless guy with a single punch. In theory, this leads to a curse on their half-mile relay team (an event that apparently does not exist in reality). In practice, the plot barely exists and only as a break from Morrissey's ranting.

Some highlights:

• Moz wrote a blurb that's formatted as a review, and it still reads like he's quote mining from a negative review that he thinks he can make positive.
  
• EVERYBODY speaks with the same convoluted prose that Morrissey uses. Compounding this error is that he decides to make it take place in Boston, the American city with the most distinctive accents of any American city. I understand that not every Bostonite sounds like Jimmy Fallon's Boston Teen, but somehow, I get the feeling that a Boston where everyone talks like Morrissey is very unlikely.
  
• This wouldn't quite be as bad if Moz' prose style involves lots of sentences like
  

  With just over a month to go before the competition where middle- and long-distance events shape lives forever, our foursome pack life’s inessential essentials in migration for a holistic fortnight at a sportsman’s haven known as Natura,  a no-nonsense collegiate retreat where countryside affiliations commune in one heady scholastic clash, where a single-track road led the hidden pavilion of an abandoned plantation shadowed by giant dawn redwoods five meters in girth; where deadly dale led to stumpery woods and slippery stepping stones criss-crossed over dangerously racing rapid rivers.

  Or insults like "You should be forced to live face down in your own feces, as you probably do anyway, if only for general identification purposes" or a description of a sleepy suburb as "the lush houses of beddy-bye shut-eye snoozled in sleepland."
• A bizarrely misogynistic attitude which is made all the more puzzling when, during the middle of a dissertation on Bonanza (yes, really), he lets slip that he believes that people only inherit genes from their mothers.
  
• He sets the novel in 1975, but bizarrely, devotes a rant to Margaret Thatcher. If this was set a decade later (especially if it took place in Britain), this would at least make sense. But this is 1975 and they're Boston teenagers. I strongly suspect that, at this point, the only possible way they would have known about her is if they watched Monty Python reruns on PBS and heard a passing reference to her (even though Reginald Maulding was mentioned even more and Thatcher is given three references total in the entire series if the scripts I found online are any indication and the most substantive insight the series brings about her is that her brain is in her knee), and I suspect that even among most Brits at the time, she'd most be famous as the milksnatcher, although given Morrissey's views on animal products, I can't imagine that even that would set him off.
  
• A sex scene that's part ridiculous one-liners and part descriptions of the physical act of love that recall a dog shitting on a rug. 
  

More info hyeah.

And the funny thing: his autobiography was actually readable, so he has zero excuse for making something like this.