Miniskirts in the Sky (and other strange history)

Buckle up. This week's show is proof that truth may be stranger than fiction.

True Stories Podcast

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
The population of atheists this country is going through.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because I put my hand on a book and
made a wish and working together for a more rational world.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
If you know me, you know how much I love
to tell story. This is an assembling of three six
nine I think twelve different true stories, stuff that I
have featured on my other show, but I just wanted
to bring them together. Here is a nice distraction, weird history,
interesting stuff from decades, even centuries past entertainment for you

(01:21):
and yours. So here we go with some stuff that
you may not have heard that actually happened, real events
involving real people. Here we go. I'm Sat Andrew's and
what you're about to hear is a true story for celebrity,

(01:46):
influence and even power few positions rival vans of the
Supreme Pontiff, the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope. Now,
the church is no stranger to strange stuff, but one
centuries old court case ranks right up there. In the
ninth century, pope's were very much political animals, even more

(02:10):
so than today. They had the power to appoint various
political rulers. Pope Formosis ruled the Papal states from October
of eight ninety one to April of eight ninety six,
five years, but his tenure was a troubled one. Lots
of maneuvering and taking sides and validating one group while

(02:32):
invalidating another. The details are really really messy, but the
short version is this, Pope Formosis was involved in a
big blow up over the coronation of Charles the Second,
which angered a ton of powerful Catholics. Power players turned
on him. He had to flee Rome. He was excommunicated

(02:54):
from the church, but over the course of time he
would go on to get a harden. He would return
to Rome, and then he decided he was going to
liberate Rome from the current emperors. He was going to
have an alliance with a guy named King Arnulf of
the East Franks. He was going to use King Arnoulf's

(03:16):
army to mobilize an attack on Italy. There would be
an overthrow. I mean, it was just a big, big,
complicated thing. But both men, Foremosis and King Arnulf fell ill.
So this anticipated liberation of Rome fell apart. So are
you with me? Pope Foremosis had angered political power players.

(03:40):
He was excommunicated, he was removed as Pope, ran for
his life, got a pardon, and then tried to come
back for a grand takeover of the Rome that he
had just been kicked out of before his plans fell apart.
Now his successor as Pope was Stephen the sixth, and

(04:03):
Pope Stephen would never forget the scheming and the betrayals
of his predecessor. He was so enraged that he ordered
Formoses to be brought up on charges where he would
have to answer for his crimes against Rome, against humanity,
against God. Formoses was accused of violating canon law. He

(04:26):
was accused of perjury, He was accused of usurping the
papacy and violating the will of the Almighty. So there
he was in the courtroom former Pope Formoses. He was
sitting stoically dressed in his ecclesiastical robe as the charges
were argued in front of him. He was being defended

(04:48):
by a church deacon who articulated the best defense he
could muster. But it was all for nothing. This was
a show trial. On top of that, an earth quake
hit the region right in the middle of the proceedings.
That seismic event was portrayed as the righteous indignation of

(05:08):
God himself. So it's no surprise that Pope Stephen the
sixth would see his guilty verdict. He would oversee the
punishments of the betrayer. All of the former Pope's consecrations, appointments,
and ordinations were instantly nullified. His robes were stripped from

(05:29):
his body, and he was dressed in filthy rags. Three
of his fingers were hacked off. These were known as
the fingers of consecration, used to give blessings and formosis
was thrown into the Tiber River. This was a common
practice against Rome's most infamous criminals. This was a place

(05:51):
of disposal for the garbage for centuries. The Tiber had
swept away the bodies of political rivals, emperorsestion martyrs, and
enemies of the people. Legend says that even ponscious Pilot
had been tossed into the Tiber. Pope Stephen the sixth
had had his revenge in eight ninety seven C. But

(06:16):
his victory would not last long, and neither would his reign.
Stephen himself would be soon removed, imprisoned, and killed. And
yet the history books don't remember Pope Stephen for his
own death. He is remembered for putting a predecessor on trial,
a show trial, with the guilty verdicts all but guaranteed.

(06:41):
That court case has been made all the more famous
with this knowledge, the knowledge that the accused Foremosies, who
was sitting adorned at attention in the defendant's chair, the
man who said not a word, well, he didn't say
a word because he couldn't speak. Formoses had been dead

(07:06):
four months. Pope Stephen had been so outraged that he
ordered his enemy's corpse to be dug up for the trial.
He wanted to see that face, the deceased and decaying
face of Formoses, as the trial was held and the
verdict rendered. And when Formosis was stripped, dismembered, and tossed

(07:31):
into the Tiber, he wouldn't he couldn't feel a thing.
So now you know the history, the account from eleven
hundred and twenty eight years ago about a living pope
who tried a dead one, and who in that Roman court,
as the accusations flew, literally looked death in the face.

(08:07):
I have always envied people who can draw. I am
in awe of Stephen Wiltshire, who is really good at
drawing cities, and I mean detailed drawings, tremendously impressive work,
and he does it all freehand. I mean, the guy
drew New York City three hundred and five square miles

(08:28):
of the Big Apple depicted on a nineteen foot long canvas.
Stephen sees it, he draws it. What a remarkable gift. Yet,
until he was five years old, Stephen had never uttered
a single word. Born with autism, all verbal languages seemed
like foreign languages to him. People wondered if he would

(08:51):
ever say anything. Until one day in his kindergarten class
at a London school for autistic chill. It was a
special day, the whole class going out on a field trip,
and when they returned, Stephen spoke. He said the word paper.
The teacher asked him to repeat his request and again

(09:14):
he said paper. Then she asked Stephen if he could
speak another word, and he did. He said penn well quickly.
Stephen Wiltshire was given paper and pen, and he began
to draw the places he had just visited. Using this
newly discovered sense of place, his instructor was able to

(09:37):
teach him the alphabet by associating letters with each of
the buildings that Stephen drew. A for Albert Hall, B
for Buckingham Palace, Z for the zoo, that kind of thing.
Stephen's parents started entering him in art competitions, with each
drawing bringing fresh attention and new admirers. Steve and himself

(10:00):
couldn't really understand why he was getting so much attention,
Why what he was doing was so remarkable, Why would
so many people care. In a BBC interview about her son,
Annette Wiltshire said, quote that he has a gift makes
no sense at all to Stephen. He knows that he
draws very well, but he picks that up from other people.

(10:22):
He sees the warmth on their faces. They tell him
how much they like his work, and that makes him
very happy. He loves the attention, and Stephen would continue
to get attention for the work of his pencil, including
attention by CBS's early show in two thousand and nine.

(10:43):
They asked this young prodigy to draw New York City
in glorious detail. They provided a helicopter so Stephen could
get overhead references to everything, and when Stephen was done
with the surveys, his canvas was prepared at the prestigious
Pratt Institutes, and over the course of four days with

(11:06):
headphones playing tunes from his iPod, mentally immersed in this
fresh cityscape, Stephen drew most of Manhattan, the Hudson Shoreline
of New Jersey, the George Washington and Verrazano Narrows, bridges,
Ellis Island, the bridges to Queens and Brooklyn, and so
much more, section by section, connecting the city together in pencil.

(11:32):
Now you can see and even purchase a print of
this at Stephen's website Stephen Wiltshire dot co dot UK,
and I will link that website in the show notes.
You'll also see his drawing of the Eiffel Tower, of
panorama of London, the Chicago River, Pershing Square in downtown

(11:53):
Los Angeles. He has drawn Hong Kong, Rome, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai,
Jerusalem and more. His drawing of Tokyo required a canvas
more than thirty two feet long. Stephen's talents have been
featured in books, They've been displayed in fine art galleries
and elsewhere. He drew a twenty ten panorama of Sydney,

(12:17):
Australia to raise awareness and money for Autism Spectrum Australia,
a terrific charity, and he is the subject of a
twenty nineteen documentary film called Billions of Windows. Yeah, you
need to see this guy's work, and I think you
should start with that first city drawing that I mentioned

(12:39):
a second ago, the great city of New York, drawn
in astounding detail over four days. And when you look
at it, remember this fact. Stephen Wiltshire didn't shoot reference
photographs from the air. He shot photographs with his brain.
Stephen has a photographic mind. And when he drew almost

(13:03):
the entire city of New York way back in two
thousand and nine, he did it all from memory after
looking at those buildings from above in one helicopter ride
that lasted twenty minutes. Man, the early days of commercial

(13:35):
air travel were really something, and not just because humanity
had entered this exciting new world of travel in the skies.
Twentieth century commercial planes were also little tubes of sexism.
The first ever commercial flight happened on the first of
January nineteen fourteen, from Saint Petersburg to Tampa. Decades later,

(14:01):
in the nineteen sixties, commercial flight was well established, with
airlines like TWA, Pan American Continental, and of course many
of the names that you and I see today. Yet
most of the twentieth century was largely a man's world,
with glass ceilings. In corporate culture, working women paid less

(14:24):
than men, commonly expected to stay home, cook clean, raise
the kids, serve the husband. They were, also, of course,
objects to be ogled. So let's say that it was
the nineteen thirties and you were a female applying for
work as a stewardess, which was the common term at

(14:46):
the time today its flight attendant. Early airlines had strict
appearance guidelines for women, As reported by The New York
Times in nineteen thirty six, girls who qualified for hostesses
had to be petit one hundred to one hundred eighteen pounds,

(15:07):
five feet tall to five four ages twenty to twenty six.
Women would be subjected to physical examinations four times a
year to ensure that they still had the quote bloom
of perfect health. In other words, flight attendants in the

(15:28):
nineteen thirties were required to be female, young, and hot.
I wonder if men wrote those rules. Air travel had
really opened up After the Second World War. The role
of stewardess was often seen as a glamorous profession. Be

(15:48):
gorgeous and see the world. But still, flight attendants were
required to be young, beautiful, white, heterosexual, feminine, and very
put together the perception of America's perfect woman. If you
gained too much weight or you cross the age of

(16:08):
thirty five, congratulations, you're fired. Uniforms were what you might expect,
form fitting dresses, often short skirts, and high heels. Imagine
walking the aisles in those at high altitudes, and you
can imagine the avalanche of sexual harassment that these women endured.

(16:32):
And imagine this scenario. From nineteen fifty three to nineteen seventy,
United Airlines offered men only executive flights between New York
and Chicago and between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Women
and children were forbidden to fly on those planes. Just men.

(16:56):
Males whose perceptions of male ness were molded by the
often unenlightened attitudes of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The
perfectly made up stewardesses ensured that those men would be
properly doted on. They wore their form fitting mini skirts.

(17:17):
They served up hot coffee, steaks, and cocktails. They even
offered complimentary cigars. The planes were wired for the male
business world. Before liftoff and after touchdown, business men could
have flight attendance be their secretaries, going to the back
of the plane to make calls to clients from the plane.

(17:40):
Telephone stewardesses also helped to provide teletype printouts with closing
market prices delivered to the pampered patriarchs in their comfy chairs.
And these amenities were how United marketed these flights to men,
with newspaper ads showing male masters of the universe on

(18:03):
the planes, smoking pipes, playing cards, drinking alcohol, and being
served by pretty girls in pretty dresses. Of course, sexism
has always been with us, and even after women's rights
movements spearheaded rule improvements toward a more egalitarian corporate culture

(18:25):
in the eighties and nineties, on the ground and in
the skies, today, female flight attendants remain in the crosshairs
of staring eyes and groping hands. The Association of Flight
Attendants union representing fifty thousand people, still says that harassment
is everywhere. It happens every hour of every day, proving

(18:49):
that even at thirty seven thousand feet, some mines remain
in the gutter. But still, I suppose we have come
a fair dis distance from man air that seventeen years
span where males filled the planes and females literally fed

(19:10):
their notions of manhood. The next time you fly, thank
of flight attendants, any and all flight attendants. They will
tell you that their job is difficult and demanding, with
days away from home and exhausting service to thousands of
strangers every single week. They endure the leers of men

(19:32):
still locked in those antiquated notions of sex and sexism.
And if you are one of those guys who insist
on being a guy, hey, perhaps the window will provide
a more appropriate view. And that is a true story.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
True Stories Podcast dot Com.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Oh, I've got more fun, interesting, bizarre, and entertaining or
hopefully entertaining true stories for you. We continue next. You
are listening to an assembling of real stuff, things that
happened with real people, science, history, trivia, and more. It

(20:31):
is kind of a one after the other rapid fire
series of true stories. I'm Seth Andrews and what You're
about to hear is a true story. Nineteen ninety one,

(20:51):
the University of Cambridge, England, two innovative men invented something
so unique, so novels ground breaking, so useful that you
and I would see around eight billion versions of their
invention in use all around the world today, the webcam.

(21:13):
These two researchers worked in a seven story computer lab
at Cambridge and they were trying to make a locally
networked surveillance camera that would broadcast video from one location
to computer monitors throughout the entire building. Now this seems
so quaint today, so easy to do. Modern webcams are

(21:36):
built into our entire lives, our home and office computers,
even our cell phones. And they're amazing technology. Full color,
four K resolution, enhancements to take out the background or
ad decorations, all kinds of bells and whistles. But this
was way back in nineteen ninety one. The time and

(21:56):
radio stations were playing both grunge bands and color bad
Converse was the popular tennis shoe. The Soviet Union was
dissolving the big computers at that time, the Apple II,
the Commodore sixty four, the Radio Shack TRS eighty, standard
IBM office computers PCs often ran on Windows three point zero,

(22:21):
the installation of which required seven separate discs that would
be loaded one after the other into a drive. Installation
could take hours, and the National Science Foundation had just
opened the Internet for commercial use, introducing the World Wide
Web and eventually connecting billions of us in real time.

(22:45):
Nineteen ninety one. This was the time of the Intel
four eighty six microprocessor, where a twenty five megahertz processor
speed and four meg of memory were revolutionary. Now compare
that twenty five megahertz then to four gigahertz today, four

(23:07):
meg of memory then to perhaps thirty two gig of
ram today. It's funny. Computer culture a quarter century ago
was both the time of Enlightenment and the Dark Ages.
And something like a networked camera sending a single video
feed to a building of computer users. Nothing like that

(23:31):
had ever been done before, but these researchers, Quentin Stafford,
Fraser and Paul Jardetski at the University of Cambridge set
themselves to make a webcam so they could give their
fellow researchers the ability to surveil the happenings at point A,
streaming to their individual monitors at points bced etc. Quentin

(23:54):
wrote the software using the X window system protocol. Paul
wrote the server program. The camera feed was a staggering
one hundred and twenty nine grayscale pixels and it wasn't
actually video. This camera would only be able to snap
three photos a minute to send up the chain. And

(24:16):
remember this was two years before web browsers could even
display images, So Fraser and Jardetsky had to write a
specific program just to allow visuals to stream to everybody's computer.
But they did it. They built it, they programmed it,
they activated it. They connected researchers and academics and a

(24:39):
seven story Cambridge computer lab to a three frame a
minute webcam feed that these people would obsess over. They
would obsess over it, and not just because of the
groundbreaking technology you see computer innovation, code writing, etc. These

(25:01):
things require lots of hours behind a computer, hard work
requiring a focused brain, brains which crave stimulation. But people
were tired of walking the whole building to one specific breakroom,
only to find that the coffee pot was empty. That's right.

(25:28):
The first webcam was built so that a building full
of Cambridge researchers could see if there was any coffee
made before they got up and walked all the way
down to fill their mugs. Programmer Quentin Stafford Fraser actually
called his custom program ex Coffee and it saved thousands

(25:48):
and thousands and thousands of needless steps down halls and stairways.
It also let everybody know when someone needed to make
fresh coffee. The X coffee camera has become part of
technology history. It actually has its own wiki page. It
is listed on computer history chronologies. And when that laboratory

(26:12):
was moved in two thousand and one, the primitive little webcam,
the first webcam, was finally switched off for the very
last time. The story of that turning off was covered
in The Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. The last
of that series of coffee machines in that breakroom monitored

(26:33):
by webcam. The last one was eventually sold to a
German news website via eBay. It was restored and switched
on in the magazine's editorial office, and that coffee maker
now sits in the Hinz Nicksdorf Museum. Oh what a
marriage coffee and the ability to see remotely whether or

(26:56):
not the coffee is made. That love of the sacred
Java provided the launch point for the webcam we used
today in zoom meetings, webcasts, FaceTime with family and friends,
all of that from coffeecam. The late author and humorist
Terry Pratchett once said, coffee is a way of stealing

(27:20):
time that should buy rights belong to your older self.
Thirty five years ago to Cambridge programmers bought time for
seven floors of coffee drinkers. How could they know way
back then that their coffee caam would change the world.

(27:49):
Would you rather be popular in people's minds or would
you rather be popular in terms of usefulness? Well, this
is the dilemma of one of the the most used
type faces in the world, Comic Sands. Comic Sands is
a sans serif typeface. It was first produced in nineteen

(28:12):
ninety four. Of course, as seraf is that small line
or stroke that's attached to the end of a larger stroke,
and a font saraf fonts often look a lot more
regal for some. A saraf free or sans serif typeface
just looks unsophisticated and Comic Sands has really sent the

(28:36):
snobs over the edge. This typeface was first introduced way
back in the nineteen nineties with the Windows ninety five
plus pack. It was conjured up by a Microsoft designer,
a man named Vincent Connair. It was inspired by the
lettering in the comic books that he had in his house,

(28:58):
specifically The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchman. He was
developing a text style for a speech bubble for a
Windows ninety five program. It was a help program with
a little cartoon dog, so if you had a question
or you couldn't find something, you would ask Rover and

(29:18):
a cartoon speech bubble would pop up and for Rover.
Vincent wanted an appropriate typeface vibe. Vincent had seen other
fonts used in cartoon speech bubbles, usually times New Roman,
a business font. It just looked off. He wanted something

(29:38):
more playful and friendly, targeted to younger people who were
totally into these fancy new computers. But his comic sans
creation was not originally intended for anything really beyond Rover
and the Windows ninety five help function. So imagine Vincent's
surprise when sands started showing up in formal documents and

(30:03):
workplaces around the world, in business letters, brochures, school papers.
Advertisers were using it on signs and promotions, even these
big highway billboards. A cartoon typeface had left its bubble
and gone mainstream. But oh the haters, they came out

(30:27):
of the woodwork comic sands, this uncouth, unclean, commoner typeface.
It was so beneath them. And it wasn't long before
hating on comic sands became a kind of sport. Just
a few years ago, according to an article on myfonts

(30:47):
dot com, one of the head designers at Twitter had
tweeted that the use of comic sands was the number
two complaint taking up their server space. The number two
comple from people number one the airline industry. Interestingly, number
three was justin Bieber. But the overall complaint seems to

(31:12):
be that if someone reads something that looks to cartoony,
they trust what they are reading much less. There is
an entire book just about fonts. It was written by
Simon Garfield and published in twenty twelve. It's called Just
My Type, and it opens up our world and our

(31:33):
eyes to the design, the flare, the nuance, the arts
of the letters that you and I type every single day.
The book is a history of and a love letter
to type faces, which are now more than five hundred
years old, hearkening back to the invention of the printing press.

(31:53):
If you browse Simon's book, I would wager you will
never see a street sign, or a building logo, a
movie poster, a convention program, or even an everyday email
without noticing the seriffs or the lack of seraphs, whether
it's small, medium, large, regular, bold, italic, and the subtle

(32:16):
and even not so subtle power of these characters in
the things we read. For being so small, the font
sure does a lot of heavy lifting. There are over
two hundred thousand fonts out there. The first sans serif
typeface was invented in eighteen sixteen by a printing pioneer

(32:39):
named William Caslon the fourth The first digital fonts originated
with none other than Steve Jobs. Before he left college
to go co found Apple, he took classes in calligraphy.
The early Macintosh computers had fonts that Steve Jobs made,
naming them after his favorite cities Chicago, Toronto, Geneva, etc.

(33:05):
The first machine printed and mass produced Bible was the
Gutenberg Bible. This was pressed in fourteen fifty five in Germany.
The font was Textura. Helvetica is really popular today. By
the way, Helvetica is the Latin word for the place
of its creation, Switzerland. When man landed on the Moon,

(33:30):
NASA needed a font for its aluminum plaque that the
astronauts left right there on the surface of the Moon
during Apollo eleven. It is no surprise that they picked
a twentieth century typeface called Futura. Oh but comic Sands,
it was never a consideration, and even now for almost

(33:53):
every application. Those who may even secretly like comic Sands
maybe just too nervous to admit it out loud. But
perhaps it is time for us to take a stand
against the bullies, the shamers, the haters. Maybe we should
start typing this underdog font loud and proud. And to

(34:17):
all of those who remain stuck in their snarkiness and snobbishness,
I leave you today with one simple question. Beyond assisting
a cartoon dog who was assisting computer users, and beyond
not taking itself too seriously and spreading a little cheer

(34:39):
out there. What did comic sands ever do to you?
Here's a piece of trivia that I was not aware of.
Did you know that it is forbidden for a British

(35:03):
monarch to sit even for a second, even casually, even
when invited to do so. It is forbidden for a
British monarch to sit on the throne of another king
or queen. I did not know this well. That fact
relates to a widely reported story involving perhaps the most

(35:25):
famous royal in recent history. She was Queen of the
United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from February sixth, nineteen
fifty two until her death September eighth of twenty twenty two,
the monarch of thirty two sovereign states and fifteen realms,
on the throne for seventy years and two hundred fourteen days.

(35:47):
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary or Queen Elizabeth the Second. Eight years
before her death, she had been touring another great hall
in Northern Ireland, paying a visit to the royal estate
of another not of the British realm, and she was
taking in the history and hearing the stories, and doing

(36:08):
and saying, Queenlee things. And she was so respected and
so admired by her hosts that they invited her to
sit on the throne of another king. But for reasons
of royal protocol, Queen Elizabeth politely refused, because the ancient

(36:30):
rules for the royal family specifically said sitting on the
throne of another might be considered an act of aggression. Oh,
but they continued to encourage her, Please go ahead, It's
totally fine. Yet, Queen Elizabeth would only smile and remain standing. Now,
whether or not you support the idea of a royal family,

(36:52):
we have to admit the institution and its people have
been the centerpiece of some remarkable history. Of course, you
and I, who have followed some of the Shenanigans of
the royal family throughout history, have seen kings and queens
and princes and princesses involved in some interesting scandals. But

(37:13):
Elizabeth herself remained mostly above it all. Her coronation on
the second of June nineteen fifty three would be the
first ever televised coronation ceremony for a British royal. Tens
of millions would tune in to watch this new queen
be crowned and take her thrown the only throne suitable

(37:34):
for a British monarch, which was the reason that sixty
four years later she would politely refuse to take a
seat on that other throne inside that other great hall
in Northern Ireland. But wouldn't it have been something to
see Queen Elizabeth the Second sitting there, perhaps being photographed

(37:57):
for posterity, at rest the great seat inside the throne
room of the Red Keep in the city of King's Landing, which,
of course is not a real city, it's a set,
And right there inside that set she was surrounded not

(38:20):
with the royal subjects of another actual king, but with
actors and producers, screenwriters, directors, all of them, surrounding this
famous seat of power, forged at the order of Agon,
the conqueror, first of the Kings of the House Targarian,
fashioned from the swords of the king's vanquished enemies, and

(38:44):
located right there in the Red Keep's Great Hall at
King's Landing. That's right, Queen Elizabeth was playfully invited to,
for just a moment, feel a different kind of power,
the kind craved by ambitious schemers throughout the Seven Kingdoms.

(39:04):
By taking her place on the Iron Throne from the
television series Game of Thrones. I've got three more of
these things on the way, another twenty minutes of true
stuff that happened in our history. Hang on. Your support

(39:34):
is appreciated. Thanks for being a part of this community
and for becoming a patron. And if you are not
a patron, check out patreon dot com slash seth Andrews.
And here we go with our final round of true stories.

(39:59):
Is there anything more magical than a beautifully made wedding dress?
Of course, beauty is subjective, and I think we have
all attended ceremonies where we looked up and thought, this
doesn't quite work for me. Whether it's the wedding dress,
or the bride'smaid's gowns, or the tuxedos on the groom

(40:20):
and grooms men. Certainly it's not our choice. It's all subjective.
But something didn't quite hit well. I can imagine how
my wife and I might have reacted if we had
attended the December twenty nineteen wedding of a British woman.
She decided to go with an Italian theme, an Italian theme,

(40:43):
And I'm going to come back to this in just
a second. Honestly, it's kind of fun when brides and
grooms decide to mix things up, to do something out
of the box, even the weirds and the wild, and
there are real examples out there that would be impops
to forget. There was one woman she decided she wanted

(41:04):
her wedding to have flower power. Her entire wedding gown
was all carnations from neck to floor, white and pink carnations.
I couldn't help but think of the movie Midsummer. A
bride in Las Vegas decided to go full Vegas. She
got married as a show girl in a silvery one

(41:27):
piece revealing long legs and high heels. Her head dress
was amazing, In fact, it was taller than her actual
head and stitched to her back were gigantic angel wings.
About ten years ago, The Times Union reported a trend
for brides who were also avid hunters. They could opt

(41:49):
out of the veil and instead, at their ceremony walk
the aisle wearing deer antlers. In twenty sixteen, The to
Day Show featured away that you could have your cake
and eat it too. It was a wedding dress totally
made out of cake. Now this one was not actually wearable.

(42:11):
It was a sculpture, but still the weddible dress was
something to behold and then consume. There was an actual
edible dress. It was worn by a bride who showed
up for photographs looking like Candyland. The gown was made
with merengue flowers, swirling macaroon dots, and a head piece

(42:34):
made from lollipops. One woman with a sense of humor
called her custom gown the I Need a Drink dress.
The whole thing was a walking mini bar all around.
The long skirt was a frame with cup holders slotted
for thirty mimosas, complete with little umbrellas, and after she

(42:59):
walked the eye well she served her guests. In twenty fifteen,
students at the Miami International University of Art and Design
Fashion created a classic dress called mcdee Couture. It was
made entirely of McDonald's food packaging, nine hundred white sandwich rappers,

(43:23):
sixty yellow sandwitch rappers, and twenty fry boxes that were
flattened out and wrapped around her waistline as a belt.
You know, I wonder if these rappers had been previously used.
Can you imagine the model bride smelling like a happy meal.
That same year, ABC News and other outlets reported on

(43:47):
a contest which took place in the city of New York,
the eleventh Annual toilet paper Wedding Dress Contest. Fifteen hundred
people entered showing off goal made from nothing except Scharman
toilet paper, tape, glue, and thread. I am guessing you

(44:08):
did not want to get these things wets. And of
course that British bride who went with the Italian theme.
Her gown was designed to look exactly like a Pepperoni pizza.
The fabric of the entire dress was a pizza print

(44:30):
in the colors and shapes of pizza with white, yellow
shades of cheese. The train spotted with huge circles designed
with the texture of pepperoni, and a stitched brown border
resembling a crunchy baked crust. Why would the couple do this, well,
both of their families had long enjoyed a weekly pizza night.

(44:55):
This was a tradition they had enjoyed with their parents
and one they had passed on to their the children.
Pizza was simply a way of life, and it seemed
like a way to get married. That bride got a
lot of ridicule on social media for choosing something so tacky,
but hey, it's her moment, it's her dress, it's her choice,

(45:19):
and of course beauty is in the pie of the beholder.
Nineteen thirty nine. The war between Finland and Soviet Russian

(45:39):
is known by historians and a few history buffs, but
it is not really talked about much for obvious reasons.
The world was facing down the threats from Hitler's Germany
and Japan's ambitions to expand its empire, and so Finland,
a tiny country of about four million, going head to
head with its gigantic Russian neighbor. Well, that's a story

(46:03):
that often gets lost in the shadows, but this situation
would become known as the Winter War. Finland had just
gained independence, or a kind of independence, from Russia after
World War One, but in October of nineteen thirty nine,
Joseph Stalin demanded the right to establish military bases and

(46:25):
revise borders. The Baltic States submitted Finland would not, so
Russia decided it would take what it wanted by force,
and this was supposed to be an easy victory for
the Soviet Union. But oh, they were in for a
big surprise. Beyond the brutal cold and those lands just

(46:46):
above the Arctic circle, with the ice and snow and
frost bite and terrain, and the fierce Finland resists, the
Russian army came to encounter a man of only five
foot three who would himself be his own army from
the trigger end of a sniper rifle. His name was

(47:06):
Simo Haya. Snipers have great utility in times of war.
They can keep large numbers of enemy soldiers pinned down
as everybody fears being the next victim. The sniper looks
his victims in the face. The targeting is individual, the
kills are personal. Few things can demoralize an army like

(47:29):
a well hidden and accurate sniper. You wouldn't think that
a guy who was once a simple, finish farm boy
would generate all that fear, but this seventh son of
eight children learned to shoot out on the farm. Simo
was familiar with the dense forest and changing elements of
the outdoors. When he joined the local civil Guard at

(47:52):
the age of seventeen, it was immediately apparent he was
gifted with a rifle. His room was filled with trophies
from ing competitions. This guy could hit a small target
six times in a row in one minute from one
hundred and fifty meters using just a bolt action rifle.
Two years later, in nineteen twenty five, he started his

(48:15):
mandatory fifteen month military service. He qualified for formal sniper
training in nineteen twenty seven, and he joined his comrades
to battle Russia in the nineteen thirty nine War. His
condition for joining was that he be allowed to use
his old training school rifle, and his commanders agreed that gun,

(48:37):
an M twenty eight thirty seven point six y two
caliber weapon, would go on to make history. Simo aimed
at his targets using only iron sights. He did not
want to use a scope. He said the scope might
reflect the sun and expose his position. Sometimes he would
put snow in his mouth to keep his exhaled breath

(48:59):
from being noticed by the enemy and from his concealed
positions across the field of battle. Simohea sent death to
Russian soldiers like no one else. His average more than
five kills per day, his highest total for a single
day twenty five, and the killed count didn't include those

(49:22):
that he dispatched with a submachine gun. A whole other
kind of war he was waging as a single soldier
fighting for Finland. Now, the targets weren't hard to spot.
Russian troops, for some reason, were assigned brown uniforms and
a snow covered battlefield, while finished troops cloaked themselves in white.

(49:45):
The Russians were sometimes ordered to attack while crossing frozen lakes.
Many of the vehicles, the tanks and trucks, would actually
crack down into the freezing water through the ice. Russian
morale was very low, and yet on the Finland side,
Simo Hayes's story was a morale booster throughout the country.

(50:06):
This guy was lethal, he was effective, he was successful,
and yet in March of nineteen forty he would prove
mortal as a Russian explosive detonated right next to him,
shrapnel striking his head. It was assumed that Simo was
dead until a fellow soldier saw his leg moving slightly,

(50:30):
with his left cheek and much of his upper jaw
blown off of his head, and with so much loss
of blood, it seemed unlikely he would survive. But after
fourteen months and twenty five surgeries, Simo lived, and for
his actions in battle, he was commissioned a lieutenant and
ultimately given the prestigious Knight of the Mannerheim Cross Award.

(50:55):
He was disfigured for life, but he never complained. He
would live to the age of ninety six, passing away
in two thousand and two. In any context, it would
be remarkable that a single soldier could amass so many
sniper kills and a single deployment so many that he

(51:15):
would become known by his nickname the White Death. Five
hundred and five confirmed kills. But what's even more interesting
is that seem Ohea, one man with an iron sight
and snow in his mouth, carried out those five hundred
and five kills in just over three months. For obvious reasons,

(51:45):
sim Ohea, the White Death, is considered the most lethal
sniper in history. Twenty nine year old Steve Callahan had
designed and built his very own sailboat, and that sailboat

(52:08):
had a purpose. He was going to sail a transatlantic
race that was known as the Mini trans At the
starting points was Penzance, Cornwall, England. There would be a
stopover in the Canary Islands and then onto the finishing
point at Antigua. Thousands and thousands of miles on the

(52:28):
ocean with a certain class of boats. Steve and the
other captains were sailing something called a sloop. This would
be a relatively small boat with a single mast. It
had sails fore and aft, and there would be one
person on board. I mean the captain was the crew.

(52:49):
This was the boat that belonged to Steve until it
was soon claimed by the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Steve had christened his vessel the Napoleon Solo, and as
he was an American, he sailed out of Rhode Island
toward the starting point in England. That's thousands of miles

(53:12):
just to get there, and the event had not even started.
But he did arrive and in January of nineteen eighty
two he lined up with all of the other captains
to kick off the Great Mini Transact Solo Race. And
when I say solo, I mean solo. It's just you
and the ocean in a potentially homemade or experimental boat.

(53:36):
No external help with navigation, no computers, no satellite link,
no contact with the outside world. With maybe one exception.
The boats had a single short range radio that would
allow captains to talk to each other if they were
close by, maybe a range of ten miles, and that

(53:56):
was it. January nineteen eighty two race began and Steve
and the others headed out southbound from Cornwall toward Tenerief.
But the weather turned nasty. The boats got kicked around,
some were damaged, a few of them sank. The captain's rescued.

(54:18):
Steve's boat had taken a pretty serious beating, so he
limped to Loch Conronia, Spain to make repairs. After he
got fixed up, then it was down the coast of
Spain and Portugal out to Madeira and the Canary Islands.
After that began the long North Atlantic journey to the

(54:39):
Finish Line and Tiga in the Caribbean, over four thousand
miles floating on forty five feet of do it yourself construction.
He started his last leg of that journey on the
twenty ninth of January nineteen eighty two, and it was
smooth sailing for the first week, but then the weather

(55:02):
turned and Steve's sailboat was ravaged by gale force winds.
He managed to keep it afloats to keep moving westward,
but then on the night of February fourth, Steve suddenly
heard and felt a deafening smash into the boat, possibly

(55:22):
a large shark or maybe a whil something big, something solid.
Whatever it was, it had ripped the hull of the
boat wide open, and the ocean was pouring in. So
there in the dark on the sinking Napoleon solo, Steve scrambled.
His only choice was evacuation. He grabbed the inflation tabs

(55:45):
on the life raft. He tethered that raft to the boat,
and then as it continued to fill up with water,
he desperately went back and forth from raft to boat,
harvesting as much as he could, and it's impressive how
much he was able to salvage. A piece of cushion,
a sleeping bag. He got the emergency kit, which had food, navigation,

(56:08):
charts of flashlight, solar stills for making drinking water, a
small spear gun, and even a book a survival manual.
By the time dawn arrived, Steve Callahan had separated from
his sunken sailboat. He was drifting on that raft westward

(56:29):
with the ocean current. Now, the rescue raft did have
a radio beacon, but the aircraft passing overhead, well, they
were too far away to pick up the signal. The
raft had a flare gun, and Steve would fire that
gun as nine different ships would ultimately pass nearby, but

(56:51):
none saw the light of those flares. So there he
was on the water in the middle of nowhere. Steve
wasn't just looking for an island. Steve was the island unseen,
unheard totally by himself, and he knew what that meant.
So the sailor became a survivalist with a plan. Those

(57:14):
solar stills and some fresh rain provided drinking water. He
rationed himself to just one cop of water a day.
He was able to catch some fish with the spear gun.
He mapped out a daily routine. He would stretch and exercise.
He would use the sun and the stars for navigation

(57:34):
as he tried to push himself with the oars as
best he could day and night. Day and night, Steve
drifted with the winds and the currents. And the days passed,
Steve's body began to deteriorate. He was sunburned and covered
in salt water sores. His equipment started to break. He

(57:57):
had to constantly fix punctures in his raft. At one
point he was surrounded by sharks, but never underestimate the
survival instinct, the will to live. That may have been
the most important tool Steve used on his Atlantic drift
day and night, day and night until April twentieth, nineteen

(58:22):
eighty two, just southeast of Guadalupe, Steve was discovered and
rescued by fishermen who quickly rushed him to shore and
then off to the hospital. He made a full recovery
in the weeks after, and Steve would go on to
keep sailing for years to come. In the book that

(58:43):
he wrote about his experience, Steve Callahan talked about those
nights under the stars. He called what he had seen
a view of heaven from a seats in hell. And
I can't really argue with the hell parts, given how
many days he was a drift back in nineteen eighty two,

(59:05):
Steve's sailboat sank Friday, February fifth. He was rescued on Tuesday,
April twentieth. I don't know could you do it? Could
you survive out there for seventy six days? Steve Callahan did,

(59:28):
retrieved and rescued after drifting alone on a raft in
the ocean for two and a half months. You probably

(59:49):
know what a death mask is. I'll get into the
deeper backstory in just a moment, but I am most
interested today in what is arguably the most seen, replicated,
and publicly known death mask in history. It has also
been the most kissed, the peaceful mold of Lea Conway

(01:00:12):
de Lescene. Nobody knows her name, but I'll bet you
have seen her face. Even long before the mummifications of
ancient Egypt, death masks had been made before photography was invented.
Death masks were a way of preserving the detailed physical
features of someone who had passed away. A drawing, a painting,

(01:00:36):
or any two dimensional replications just couldn't capture who that
person had been like a three D casting wood. Death
masks have been used to help record the faces of
anonymous and soon to be buried corpses in case families
were out there looking for a missing person. They were

(01:00:57):
used for honor and memory. They gave continued life to
royalty and nobility. Death masks have been made of iconic
figures like Beethoven, Napoleon, Oliver Cromwell, Nicola Tesla, Richard Wagner,
even the French philosopher Voltaire. The less famous have also

(01:01:18):
been immortalized or at least memorialized in wax, plaster or
some other hardening material, the hands of babies who died
in childbirth, criminals whose remains were studied by medical science,
and everyday people who died young and old, their only
remaining identities, forever sleeping or staring into future generations. Who

(01:01:45):
was the unidentified female that you and I know so
well today, even if we don't know that we know her?
Who is le Conway de lessene Well. The cast itself
dates back to the late eighteen hundreds. It is of
a teenage girl who may have died by her own hand.

(01:02:08):
For whatever reason. Her body had been found and retrieved
from the Sene River. There were no markings or signs
of trauma upon the body, hence the suspicion she may
have taken her own life. The pathologist at the Paris
Morgue saw her, and he was apparently so struck by

(01:02:28):
her beauty that right there he made a death mask
out of wax. That mold would soon be replicated, then
embraced and displayed by others who were also captured by
her beauty, her serenity, her peacefulness. The French philosopher Albert
Camieu would compare her smile to that of the Mona Lisa.

(01:02:52):
That smile with closed eyes, even features and serene expression
became the inspiration for many stories and works of art
at the time. Some women were said to fashion their
own style to match hers. Go ahead, google the image.
Google the death mask of the Unknown Woman of the Sin.

(01:03:15):
See the face, that peaceful face. Imagine who she might
have been, what she might have been thinking, how she
had lived and why she had died. Wonder what she
might have thought about her unintended immortality and celebrity being
compared to art displayed as art well into the twenty

(01:03:38):
first century, and also being the most kissed face in
the world. And I'll bet you've kissed this face yourself
if you have ever taken CPR training. Back in nineteen
sixty two, men Asmund Lair Doll and Peter Sapphire introduced

(01:04:03):
the first medical simulator for teaching CPR. It was a mannequin,
which they called the risusi Annie Doll. Lairdahl had been
a toy maker when his son was only two years old.
The boy had fallen into water and drowned, and Lairdohl
had saved his son using CPR, and he became convinced

(01:04:24):
that others could save lives as well, if only they
could be taught the technique. How would they do so?
They needed a mannequin, a mannequin with a peaceful face
that would make students feel less uncomfortable, and so Lerdahl
and Sapphire used the death mask of the Anonymous Teenager

(01:04:48):
to mold their life saving teaching tool. And since its introduction,
the anonymous face of a girl from the eighteen hundreds
has met the lips of millions and millions people who
have no idea they are breathing a simulated kiss of
life on a famous face in death. So the next

(01:05:11):
time you see somebody using that life size CPR doll
to learn the technique, let them know they just kissed
the mysterious beauty, the Anonymous Teenager, the unknown woman of
this sin. And that's a true story.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
True Stories podcast dot Com.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
I hope those were fun for you. I've often heard
the saying the truth is stranger than fiction. I don't
know if that's true or not, but I don't know.
There's some wild, fun, entertaining, crazy stuff out there that's
part of our history and part of our culture, and
those are often the stories I like to tell. So
appreciate you being here, be said, and I will see

(01:06:01):
you back here next time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
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