0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Scoring Strange. This is Episode 216. And with me, as always, are…

BR: Oh, that’s my cue. Ben’s here.

0:00:33
Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward. Hey, hey. The gang’s all here. Huzzah, huzzah.

0:00:53
PR: Yeah, I took a short break, but I’m back.

0:00:56
CW: That’s the longest short break in the history of short breaks.

0:01:00
PR: Yeah.

0:01:01
CW: But you were doing a lot of stuff. I remember you were playing music, you were getting certifications and doing stuff in your professional life, and good for you.

0:01:10
PR: Yeah, it was a lot. I thought I was going to be able to do a lot more at once. And when those balls got up in the air, boy, did I have trouble catching them all. But yeah, so I’ve recorded some new music that will be out soon. I’ll probably talk about it on the podcast in the near future. And yes, I’ve been chasing certifications and moving up in my job. So now I’m officially an engineer 2 for what it’s worth. And as a matter of fact, I am currently finishing up an AI certification. So that may come into play in the near future.

0:01:45
CW: Oh, that should come in handy.

0:01:48
BR: All right, so what’s everybody skeptical of this week?

(MUSIC)

0:01:59
CW: Well, you guys know I’m always, always skeptical, as everybody should be, about news that comes out immediately in the aftermath of a big event, especially a violent one. And unfortunately, here in Vegas, last Wednesday at UNLV, we had a mass shooting and all the ensuing panic that usually comes with a mass shooting. And I call it panic specifically because the number of victims turned out to be three and one other person badly injured. Now, I hesitate to say only three as the only correct number of murders is zero. Zero is the only correct number of those. Maybe everybody has already seen this in the national news or if you’re a local listeners, you know all about it. A 67 year old man who had been rejected for a job went to the Lee business school and shot four professors and then he was killed by police he’s also sent out weird letters to professionals across the country in academia and It’s coming out that he had a real interest in conspiracy theories, Ben you you blogged on this a few days ago, too. Didn’t you?

0:03:07
BR: Yeah, you know, I saw that coming out and you know, it’s it’s it’s pretty eerie. I mean, it’s got sort of echoes of the Unabomber. It’s got echoes of what Luke Helder did many years back with bombs. So it’s, you know, unfortunately, we’re seeing another case where, you know, you may or may not be a direct line, but certainly conspiracy theories can have dangerous consequences, especially when you’re sort of provoked to act on them.

0:03:35
CW: Yeah. Well, the story that’s unfolding now, like a week later, is the misinformation and the panic and the rumors that were swirling around during the event itself. Because this was like, I mean, all the TV channels here were just on this for the whole day when it was happening and in the immediate aftermath. Vegas, I think, is uniquely positioned as we were the site of the worst mass shooting ever in history, but in the modern era with TV crews, back in October 2017, upwards of like 60-something people lost their lives at the shooting by Mandalay Bay here. Now, as a result, and this is a good thing, our police have been really effectively drilling on what to do in the case of a mass casualty event. And some of those plans were immediately put into place when word came out that there was a shooter at UNLV. Response time was something insane, like 90 seconds. They got there super fast. The cameras around UNLV were immediately blacked out. Command centers were set up and the I-15 was shut down. Shutting down I-15 is like, I mean, that’s a major thoroughfare. That’s the major thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Las Vegas. And they just shut it down for hours in anticipation of people. And that made everybody who was watching the news, myself included, think, oh, my gosh, this person has taken out dozens or hundreds of people. What’s going on? And there were also rumors of there’s at one point I heard three shooters. Now, the sheriff, Kevin McMayhill, out here, he gave multiple media briefings and the information he gave was so unlike what everybody was talking about. It was like this night and day thing. He came out and said, well, there was one shooter and the threat has been neutralized. And we have you know, I can’t speak about the victims because I don’t want to say anything wrong. And so everybody was wondering, OK, well, is that one of the three shooters? And how many victims are we talking about? You’ve cleared off the I-15. So when it came out that there were three victims, everybody I was texting with were thinking, well, does he mean three victims so far? Or three victims that they can identify or can get to? And so, yeah, I heard so many word of mouth estimates. One of the rumors I heard was my friend, who’s a paramedic, said that there were seven black tags so far. And I mean, that carried this cache of like, oh, a black tag. That sounds authentic, you know, paramedic speak. Oh, my goodness. But of course, it was completely wrong. Other posts online had, you know, double digits, 26, 28 people, three shooters, like I said. And that panic created other dangers. We’re talking thousands of college kids and staff and professors locked in buildings for hours on end. And there was a reunification center set up. It was like a major disaster. And I saw one photo, I still don’t know what this, what was going on in this photo, but there was a person out on the ledge of one of the buildings, like one of the, like, like a person should not be out there. That’s not safe. And I know now it could not have been the shooter. So it must have been a desperate person on campus not thinking straight and trying to do something to get themselves out of danger. It’s a terribly risky thing. something to get themselves out of danger. It’s a terribly risky thing. So as luck would have it, we do have a misinformation specialist who teaches at UNLV. Her name is Mary Blankenship, and she’s a graduate student researcher at the Brookings Mountain West Institute. She was not on campus during the crisis itself, but she was watching it unfold, and she was quoted article in the RJ about the online misinformation that came out that day. She said, and I’ll quote, for situations like this, typically, official sources first make their announcements on social platforms anyways, so you’re able to get verified information. But then what you also start seeing on social media is very quickly an influx of tweets discussing gun reforms, disseminating claims and conspiracy theories, which was very frustrating. She noted that this pushes all the useful information down. It makes it harder for people to access it. And it covers up the genuine experiences of victims and witnesses who are there. And as far as what to do about it, I don’t know that there’s an immediate solution. Just, you know, every day, keep pushing media literacy on people that you know and listen to podcasts that tell you how to sift through that information and I don’t know maybe get Elon out of Twitter if we can.

0:08:34
BR: Yeah and just you know just and as you pointed out that this should be common sense but you know take the initial reports with a grain of salt. We saw the same thing happen in the Sandy Hook shootings for example where you have different media reporting different things and the conspiracy theorists jump on this they will hold on here what’s why is there why are there holes in the official story there’s not holes in the official story you have yeah you have you know one one you know police spokesperson giving the information that’s accurate as of that time that yes it may conflict with something that someone else says hours or the next day, that’s not a discrepancy. That is evolving information.

0:09:18
CW: And we also have, we’ve mentioned this before, a couple of technological effects here. When people can listen in on the police radios, which they can now, they hear everything and they take it to be gospel. When somebody screams, I’m hearing shots coming from the north side of campus. Well, I mean, that person is probably telling the truth because the sound of shots echoes and people listening to the report about that on the police radio are like, there’s a shooter, another one on the north side of campus, too.

0:09:50
BR: Right.

0:09:50
CW: And so, yeah, that’s, yeah, it compounds the effect of this information just getting mutated and going out. So I’ll be curious to see how the story keeps going in the news here about in terms of what was done right and what was done wrong in terms of police response and information dissemination and media coverage and everything like that. So with each one, we’ll learn a little bit. And I’m sad to say they keep happening. So we’re going to continue learning. On a much, much happier note, you guys hear about the Times Person of the Year?

0:10:27
BR: This year?

0:10:28
CW: Yes.

0:10:29
BR: I think it was Taylor Swift, if I’m not mistaken. Do you know who Taylor Swift is, Ben?

0:10:33
BR: I do, yes.

PR: That’s a type of bird, right?

0:10:35
CW: The Taylor Swiftie, yes. Well, congratulations to her and likely because she’s, you know, you’ve heard she’s very progressive politically and she’s also very open and she’s encouraged her legions of fans to get more politically active. She’s kind of not well liked in some circles because of that. And in those certain circles, there’s a fair amount of conspiratorial thinking goes on in some of those circles. And so have you guys heard she’s an agent of Satan?

0:11:15
PR: No, I did not see any newsletters announcing that in the satanic annals.

0:11:23
CW: Well, apparently a few people in the Magasphere have come out and claimed that she is working on behalf of the Dark Lord. A guy named Hank Koonaman, Koonman, Koonaman. He’s a MAGA supporter and a self-proclaimed prophet. And he works at the Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska.

0:11:43
BR: Of course he does.

0:11:45
CW: Of course he does, yes. And he has accused Taylor Swift of being part of a conspiracy involving the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. And then in a sermon just a few weeks ago, Kuniman claimed that Swift promotes witchcraft and Satanism and wonders why anybody likes her or would want to support her.

PR: Hmm. Okay.

CW: Yeah, it makes total sense. Right? Yeah. Now, this isn’t the first time Taylor Swift has faced such accusations. In October, there was a Republican candidate for governor in the state of Georgia named Candace Taylor, influencing innocent minds to be enticed with the dark side of spirituality.

BR: What does it even mean?

CW: Yeah, that’s not quite coming out as…

BR: The dark side of spirituality?

CW: It sounds very witchy-wooey, but maybe not quite Satanist in its accusation there. Sounds a little church-leader to me. Yeah.

0:12:43
BR: Could it be, oh, I don’t know?

0:12:45
CW: I think she’s got more to worry about from Kansas City fans if their teen starts losing. But speaking of real abominations, Alex Jones is back on Twitter. Slash X. Do you guys hear about that?

PR: Great.

CW: What could go wrong? Now, he’s been banned since 2018 and his Twitter account has now been restored to him. This comes after Elon Musk held a poll asking if Jones should be let back on. And he titled it with the words, Vox Populi, Vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. So 70% of the voice of God clicked yes on that. And, yeah, I guess it comes down to a poll. That’s great, on Twitter, which already, we know the flaws of that here.

0:13:45
PR: Yeah, and I think he’s announced that his show is now exclusive to Twitter slash X. So he was handed a platform and then some.

0:13:58
CW: So this is like essentially the same thing that happened with Tucker Carlson, right?

0:14:04
PR: Pretty much.

0:14:05
CW: Yeah, it’s not improving the real estate there. Elon, what are you doing?

0:14:10
PR: No, and I mean, you know, advertisers have been, you know, jumping ship and a lot of people have too. In fact, I haven’t deleted my account, but I have done very little on Twitter, except for the occasional joke or something. But I’m kind of at the point where that ship is sinking so fast I’d be surprised if it really mattered. I mean a platform is a platform and that’s not a good thing from the side of someone like Alex Jones. It’s becoming a really bad platform to be on in general and maybe the slight silver lining is that with everyone bailing on it, itís going to continue to struggle until it either gets new leadership or just flat out fails.

0:15:05
CW: Yeah, I’ve got conflicting desires here because I want everything Alex Jones touches to die and turn to dust and not make a profit. But I do want him to make enough money and make it in a very clear, recorded, easily tracked and traceable and non-fraudulent way so that he can pay off all the parents that he owes settlements to.

0:15:33
PR: Yeah, and hopefully, you know, as I did break down a while ago, he is under a hell of a microscope when it comes to his financial information. So hopefully that continues to be there and people will see that, oh, you’re on a platform where you’re making money, so we need to see where that money is.

0:15:54
CW: Yeah. And apparently it does come as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people that Musk decided to let Jones back on with just a simple informality of a poll. A few years back, he had said unkind things about Alex Jones, deservedly so, in my opinion, saying that nobody should profit or get political points off of the deaths of children. And Elon Musk pointed out that he himself lost his first born child. It was back in 2002. His baby died of SIDS. And that was actually news to me. I’d missed that when it first happened. And I learned the child was named Nevada Musk. As far as Elon’s kids, that’s probably one of the most normal names out of the bunch. But I’ve only known one other kid named Nevada, and that was Nevada Stupak, Bob Stupak’s son. You guys aren’t from Nevada. Have you heard of Bob Stupak?

0:16:52
PR: No.

BR: Is it the guy that you mentioned on the show previously with the huge rollicking estates and all the weird things there?

0:17:00
CW: No, no, that’s Lonnie Hammigren. He was beloved. Bob Stupak was not really beloved, but he built the stratosphere.

0:17:06
BR: Okay.

0:17:07
CW: He was an interesting character. He ran for mayor. He spit on a reporter in the process of running for mayor. It’s a whole big thing. But yeah, long story short, Alex Jones is back on X. Yee-haw. So what’s crossed y’all’s desk? You guys do anything interesting that’s made your skeptical radar jump up this past couple of weeks?

0:17:27
BR: Well, I did recently see the film Napoleon from Ridley Scott.

CW: Oh, how was it? It looks like it’s going to be pretty good.

BR: A little long and allegedly Napoleon was not, which was one of the things that what does everybody think of Napoleon, right? He’s got the tricorn hat or whatever that hat is and of course he’s allegedly short. But as it turns out when I was poking into the inevitable articles articles comparing biopic films to the true story.

0:18:04
CW: Fact-checking. After you saw a movie, you of course had to fact-check it, yes.

0:18:09
BR: Well, I, no, I, as I’ve talked about on the show, I make a very clear distinction between documentaries and feature films.

CW: That is true, yes.

BR: I don’t make any, it frankly annoys me when people are like, you know, that’s not actually historically accurate. Yeah, it’s not a documentary, unless it’s a documentary. If it’s a documentary, that’s one thing. But anyway, but in this case, I was sort of curious and I just happened to be perusing something. And it mentioned that in fact, Napoleon was not in fact shorter than I am, for example, but a lot of people are. And therefore I’m not the standard by which one measure shortness.

0:18:52
CW: Well, not in the 19th century certainly.

0:18:55
BR: Well, at any time. I like to think of myself as tall for the ages.

0:19:00
CW: All right. Let’s get past your Napoleonic complex and talk about the actual Napoleon.

0:19:06
BR: Yes. Well, apparently, he was about according to the pre-metric French measures, he was 5’2 but not in the current measurements that we use. So apparently he was 5 feet 2, I can’t pronounce the French, 5 foot 2. And so if you’re applying the French measurements at the time that’s about 1 and 2 thirds meters which is just under 5’6″.

0:19:40
CW: That’s a four inch difference. So he’s not 5’2″, he’s 5’6″.

0:19:44
BR: And, and again, what are we comparing him to? Robert Wadlow or me or the average Frenchman of the time. In fact, he was a bit taller than the average person. So, but what jumped out at me was there’s actually a caricaturist that played a role in this myth of the short Napoleon.

0:20:06
CW: Yes. Don’t piss off your local caricature artist, people.

0:20:10
BR: Pay them well. So apparently it was James Gilray, who’s a British cartoonist and caricaturist of some note.

CW: Probably the most famous. I mean, besides maybe Hogarth.

0:20:21
BR: And he was hired by pamphleteers and newspapers to do illustrations. And apparently there’s one particular cartoon from 1805 that depicted Napoleon as exceedingly short, which apparently pissed Napoleon off. So this was not posthumous. This was circulating at the time.

0:20:44
CW: Oh, yeah, there was a whole series of little bonies he got called. I read into it after you mentioned it. And he influenced other cartoonists to draw him the same way it became a thing. It became just the way to draw Napoleon was to make him look short, like an angry little toddler, balling up his fists and getting angry, but being the shortest one in the room.

0:21:11
BR: And of course, you know, it fits into, you know, sort of a retrospective psychological profile, right? I mean, Napoleon Complex and angry short man who’s mad at the world and wants to prove himself and this and that. So it’s funny how we took to modern years. It makes sense. But of course, when you when you look at the facts of matters, not quite not quite that way.

0:21:35
CW: I do love that story simply because it’s just so great in terms of the power of the press and the power of a really good image. Napoleon later said in his old age, he said that James Gilray did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down. That’s, oh, chef’s kiss, I love that. that all these cartoons were coming out, Napoleon sent a bunch of notes across the channel to the British government demanding that it censor the press over there. And every single one of them got ignored. Yay.

BR: Yes, sending angry misses from his tiny little rock in the ocean.

0:22:17
CW: Well, and lastly, I have a little bit of good news for all the D&D fans, which I know our listenership contains D&D fans. We’ve mentioned it a number of times. And did you know, Ben and Pascual, that Dungeons and Dragons stamps are being issued next year for the 50th anniversary of the game?

0:22:39
PR: I did not know that, but that is very exciting news.

0:22:42
CW: Yes. Get your letters and get ready to, well, you don’t have to lick your stamps anymore, but you can like put yourself adhesing stamps. I will be using them for skeptic crates in the future. You better believe it.

0:22:53
PR: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna buy a lot of them. I think that’s awesome.

0:22:57
CW: Yeah, you can look for a preview online, just, you know, do a search for, you know, Dungeons and Dragons stamps and you’ll find they’ve got like an image of like, of course, a dragon and a hydra with many heads and a maze and, you know, night and stuff like that. And you’ll recognize the beasties probably better than I will, Ben.

0:23:14
BR: Yeah. And it’s just it’s just sort of ironic because, of course, as some of us of a certain age recall, of course, play at the time, you know, and we’ve talked about this on the show. I mean, it was for for for for a small but vocal minority of people. It was a real threat. Right. I mean, this was, you know, go back to the satanic panic and people freaking out. And I remember parents sort of looking at me side eyes when they say, what are you kids going to be doing playing D&D? Like, ooh.

0:23:47
CW: Yeah.

0:23:50
BR: And to have it legitimized on a postage stamp of all things, I mean, it’s comforting to me that it sort of found some legitimacy despite it going on some 50 years later, or 40, however many years it was.

0:24:05
CW: In like the 2070s, we’re going to have stamps with like Megan Thee Stallion with a bucket and a mop commemorating her hit single from 50 years ago. Things turn around and they’re no longer threatening to the public. But speaking about things that are threatening to the public and then aren’t, we’re going to be talking about absence and a couple of murders that kind of got pinned on absence, and the various machinations that led up to a hundred year ban on the substance. So let’s get to it.

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0:24:41
CW: Well, today we’re going to be talking about absinthe. Now, Ben, have you ever had absinthe? Have you ever drank the Green Fairy?

BR: I was thinking fairy literally, as I often do, and I was thinking of elves in Iceland and this and that, but no. I’m not a big drinker.

0:25:20
CW: Never actually sipped even one little sip of it anywhere?

0:25:24
BR: I have not, no.

0:25:25
CW: Oh wow, that kind of surprises me in all your travels. Well, I had it once or twice, that’s really all I needed. I’m fascinated by absinthe, but not because I enjoy the taste. It tastes like liquid licorice, and that’s not for me.

0:25:44
BR: Yeah, I assume you mean black licorice.

0:25:47
CW: Yeah, a little bit black licorice with herbs and fennels and all that.

0:25:52
BR: I do not like the black licorice. That is one of the candies that I am not a fan of at all. So you’re making it even less appealing, despite its considerable mystique, which we’ll talk about shortly.

0:26:05
CW: All right. Well, after we get that off of our chest there, we’re going to try and sing the praises here of absinthe, because there is some delightfully strange stuff about absinthe, and it stands as a moral panic that we can still learn from. What kind of things do people think of when you think of absinthe? Well, there’s Le Fé Vert, you know, the green fairy, which I’ve already mentioned, the nickname for the drink. You think about the bohemian lifestyle around the turn of the 20th century, people like Oscar Wilde and Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Zola and all sorts of other people.

0:26:46
BR: Yes. And of course, I think I go back to one of my favorite films, Moulin Rouge, which has a bit of absinthe in it here and there. In fact, in the film, there’s an animated sequence, which if I’m not mistaken, is where the fairy Tinkerbell or, you know, not the official Tinkerbell, but a version of Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell like fairy, if I’m not mistaken, is voiced by Ozzy Osbourne.

CW: Oh, really? I don’t remember that part Okay.

BR: But yes in in both the the stage play which I saw in London and also in the film There’s a absence plays a a small but significant role.

0:27:27
CW: Yes, then and you know the reason why you can have an animated sequence pop up is because absent is associated with madness and hallucinations and and also just being poisoned by the things in there. Now, it is a highly alcoholic drink. The historic absinthe was between 45 and 74% alcohol by volume, which is an insanely high proof. The modern cold mixes can be even higher at like as much as 89% alcohol by volume.

BR: Is it like Everclear or something? What is that?

CW: That’s around grain alcohol levels. Yeah, it’s very, very, very alcoholic. All right. That’s why you don’t really drink it straight. You adulterate it with the sugar cube and the water and all that. But we’ll get to that. Now, they say, again, they say that absinthe creates a different type of inebriation that that sort of leaves you clear-headed and it opens your mind. And maybe that’s because it contains stimulants. And that’s why artists loved it, because it could open their mind to all these possibilities. Now, it contained things like wormwood, anise, again there’s that licorice flavor, fennel and other botanicals. Sometimes there’s like two dozen different sort of Swiss herbs go into it. And people drink it in a very ritualistic way with specific tools, like the little absinthe fountains. Have you seen these? They almost look like a bong, but for alcoholic beverages.

0:29:05
BR: Yeah. And that’s one thing that sort of struck me about it. And when you first mentioned doing a show in absinthe, I’m like, all right, why not? You know, check it out. And I was poking around a bit and that it seemed, I guess, complicated. You know, it’s not just something you just shoot back. It’s like you have to. There’s a whole production to it, which, again, I think you mentioned, you know, ritualistic is so it’s part it’s a it’s an experience that I find that inherently fascinating. Right. Because you have, you know, are people drawn to it because they like the taste of it? Well, or is it more a matter of like, oh, we’re going to do this now. We’re enacting. I don’t… it’s… legend tripping isn’t really.

0:29:50
CW: Well, you could you could argue that drinking. I mean, I think there’s parallels there. Yeah, I think we’re going to get Daisy Alston’s opinion on this. She does a lot of foodways. And do they call it drinkways when you’re talking about the folklore of alcohol?

0:30:03
BR: I think foodways covers it all, but I’ll check.

0:30:09
CW: But yeah, you can go on Amazon now and between $85 to $300, you can pick up an absinthe fountain. There’s different ways to do it. The most common way is you put very cold water in the fountain part and you just drip it. It was like a little tiny like lever and you drip, drip, drip, and you place the sugar cube on this little spoon that doesn’t look at all like a spoon. It looks like a very ornate teeny tiny shovel with little holes in it. And the water drips slowly on the sugar cube, which eventually just gets into the absinthe, specially shaped glass. And slowly, the alcohol turns a different color, which is pretty, you know, again, there’s the visual component. You get to see the liquid in the glass change to this opalescent light green color. So it’s almost like a little bit of a chemistry magic trick too.

0:31:08
BR: Yeah, I’m just wondering, and again, I don’t know this, you’ve researched this more than I do, but I’m wondering to what extent is the whole contraption performative? I mean, it’s interesting, it’s cool, you drip water, you drip it over the uvulens, but for example, what if you just put it in the glass and drop the sugar cube in? Would you have the same effect?

0:31:29
CW: I think so.

0:31:30
BR: Okay.

0:31:31
CW: I think you would, but that is a good question. I seem to recall reading some things that say the sugar has to be completely dissolved and has to go in a certain way. But again, there’s many bartenders who have opinions that aren’t necessarily backed up by science. So now today, if you’d like to see more about Absinthe, you can go to the Absinthe Museum in New Orleans. And Absinthe is also the title of a wildly popular show here in Las Vegas at Caesars. Hazel Honeysuckle, a friend of mine, plays a burlesque version of the Green Fairy in that. You’ve seen Miss Honeysuckle. She was at my birthday party. She was dressed as Cookie Monster and took off all her clothes.

0:32:15
BR: I remember that well.

0:32:18
CW: Now, from an art perspective, Absinthe produced a lot of really fun, very, like, stylized images, both from the proponents of absinthe. You can see these beautiful drawings of, like, women sipping absinthe in a cafe. There’s this very French feel to all these drawings and these paintings. And as well as the propaganda against it, you have all these people beset by demons and, you know, the naked lady, you know, formed out of, like, green mist as somebody drinks something and there’s this delightfully naughty, it’s like a satanic panic, but circa 1905, you know? So yeah, so again, it’s also absinthe was the topic of a moral panic. And it’s not esoteric, it’s pretty well known. This moral panic against abstinence has been deconstructed and examined by quite a few people. It’s not as popular as the satanic panic, but it’s pretty well known. There’s a couple of reasons why people go to it, I think. Number one, it’s alcohol related. And in our post-prohibition mindset, people love a good story where alcohol triumphs in the end.

0:33:35
BR: And of course, keep in mind that that’s sort of one of the original vices, right? I mean, you know, greed and gluttony and temperance. And so there’s a long tradition of trying to control people’s alcohol consumption going back millennia.

0:33:50
CW: Oh yes, we’re going to have some things to say about that pretty soon. But people are interested in alcohol stories. I’m not a really heavy drinker myself. I’ve drank socially, but I find myself really enjoying a good YouTube story with a guy pouring drinks and talking about the history of quinine, or the history of this. In fact, I highly recommend a YouTuber named Max Miller. He does a series called tasting history and he has like a 17 minute episode on absinthe and he goes into the absinthe murder and we’ll get to that later, but Yeah, again And fascinating topic, a lot has gone into telling the story of Absinthe. And this panic, the moral panic, was also very long lasting. The ban was put in place like a hundred years ago, and it only really became legal to sell it in America in 2007. Now, I remember buying a bottle of it on a cruise in like the 1990s. I forget where I was, but it was international waters or I was in some, you know…

BR: Everything’s legal there.

CW: I felt so delightfully criminal. My friends and I did that’s where I tried it. That was like and then I tasted it and I’m like, oh well, yeah.

BR: And luckily there there was there was see all around you in which to puke if need be.

CW: Well, we didn’t have that much of it. But we were kind of watching each other to see if we’d hallucinate, because the mythos behind absinthe was that strong. Granted, this was like 1995 or something, but playing on that image of absinthe, marketers never miss an opportunity. It is not hard to find absinthe’s history touted and explained by vendors who are advertising the spirit and want to sort of generate interest on behalf of consumers.

0:35:39
BR: Makes sense.

CW: Yeah.

BR: I mean, there’s always the marketing of the forbidden, even if it’s not really forbidden, just if you hint that it’s naughty or taboo in some way, of course, people are going to want to check it out regardless of its innocuousness.

0:35:58
CW: I’m no stranger to that. Yeah, and this moral panic has become so sort of well-trod that I found an article that was written in 2021 by a guy named Jeffrey Tucker. He was writing it for the Brownstone Institute. If anybody listening has heard of the Brownstone Institute, you probably know where I’m going with this.

BR: Started by Mr. Brownstone?

CW: No, by Jeffrey Tucker, as a matter of fact. The article was called The Moral Panic Over Absinthe Lasted 100 Years. And as I’m reading it, I discover this guy is a Fauci-hating, like, libertarian who worked for Ron Paul, and he simultaneously in this article states that COVID is an overblown panic, just like absinthe was. And then he goes on to suggest that Wormwood might actually have COVID-curing properties.

0:36:50
BR: Hmm.

0:36:51
CW: So yeah, OK. So let’s go back to the beginning. Wormwood. What do you know about wormwood?

0:36:59
BR: Yeah, I think it involves worms and wood. I mean, it’s kind of obvious.

0:37:08
CW: There’s not actual worms.We’re not talking actual worms.

0:37:10
BR: And OK, then nothing. You found one of the many topics I know absolutely nothing about.

0:37:16
CW: Yeah! That was my goal. All right, so wormwood is a bitter herb, and it has been used for millennia, literally millennia, as it’s mentioned in ancient Egyptian papyrus from 1550 BCE, and the ancient Greeks used it too and added it to wine. It’s bubbling around in the back of America’s consciousness here. It’s got some biblical strains to it, and some demonic strains. Now, most alcohol historians trace Absinthe itself to around 1792, when it was introduced as an all-purpose remedy by a Dr. Pierre Ordinaire. And boy, that doesn’t sound like a totally fake name at all, does it?

0:38:28
BR: No, no. Pierre Ordinaire.

0:38:30
CW: Bonjour. My name is Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, you know.

0:38:34
BR: Sacre bleu.

0:38:35
CW: Well, he was apparently a real French guy living in Cuvée, Switzerland. And he developed absinthe and then passed it along to a pair of sisters, the Henriade sisters. And they continued selling absinthe as a medicinal elixir. Now, some of the accounts say that the sisters themselves were making it before Monsieur Ordinaire showed up. And I already don’t like him just from his name, so I’m going to probably think he did steal it from them. But who knows? It’s all hazy. Then in 1797, a fellow named Major Dubier acquired the formula and opened the first absinthe distillery. Then in 1805 he opened a new distellery in Portallier, France. Now, under the brand name of Pernod Fils, this became the most popular kind of absinthe up until the ban was enacted. So it had a long life. The popularity of the drink grew and it was given to French troops as a malaria curative or I should say prophylactic. They believed it would help them avoid getting malaria while they were in Algeria. Now there is something to that. There’s something in wormwood extracts called artemisinins. Artemisinins?

BR: You’re getting quite the workout here on this episode.

CW: I can usually say the French okay but the long botanicals I’m having trouble with here. So anyway, these artemisinins can indeed fight off even the drug resistant types of malaria. So these soldiers were rationed some absinthe as a medicine and they developed a taste for it. And so they continued consuming it after they came home.

0:40:22
BR: I’m trying to picture a lead a battalion of absinthe-riddled…

0:40:30
CW: I don’t know how much they got.

0:40:32
BR: French troops, well…

CW: The general portion tends to be like an ounce at a time, so it’s not like they’re not being handed liters of the stuff. But anyway, by the 1860s, in cafes and bistros all over France, 5pm started becoming known as L’Hueure verte, or the green hour. For a time when European society was very stratified, all classes of people were drinking this drink. Absinthe sort of was the great bridge. People from high and low were drinking it all over the place. Then in the 1880s, we have the introduction of a bug.

BR: A bug?

CW: Yes.

BR: A bug. So someone or something introduced a bug into the system?

CW: Well, not like a computer bug. The winemakers were hit with an infestation of a bug called Phylloxera. And these are little, you know, winged creatures that do what bugs do. And they wrecked a great deal of the vineyards and caused a shortage of wine that year. Now, a shortage of wine in France, sacre bleu!

0:41:42
BR: That is a national emergency.

0:41:44
CW: So absinthe manufacturers stepped up and they changed, now prior to this, absinthe was a little expensive, but they changed the way that they were making it to use a cheaper alcohol source from either beets or grain. And suddenly, because of the shortage of wine and the cheaper absinthe, it was a better deal to buy absinthe. So, I mean, that can swing a market in a very big way. Well, pretty soon, by 1910, the French were drinking about 36 million liters a year, and it was being exported all over to Europe and to the US. Now, it was not without its critics. You can’t have that many dirty, filthy artists getting into something without some folks thinking this must be dangerous. So rumors swirled that absinthe, in some unique way that was much, much worse than mere wine or beer, caused bodily and mental harm. Absinthe caused criminal behavior, mental illness, epilepsy, tuberculosis, I don’t know, toe fungus, name it.

0:42:52
BR: Syphilis, take a pick, okay.

0:42:54
CW: It would be the ruin of France or whatever nation developed a taste for it, so be warned.

0:43:00
BR: Yeah, I mean, I’m looking at this from a public health perspective a little bit and sort of thinking of like, what was the status of the safety of most foods and drinks around this time? I’m guessing absinthe was among the least of their problems, given the things that they could be consuming.

0:43:21
CW: Well, there might be some nuances you’re not thinking of, and I’ll get to those in a second. There was a French psychiatrist named Valentin Magnon, and he’s credited as one of the main drivers for the rumor that absinthe causes hallucinations. Because yes, it actually is just a rumor. No peer-reviewed scientific study has ever shown that hallucinations result from absinthe or wormwood or any of the components. Magnon, however, studied around 250 cases of alcoholism, and he believed that those who preferred absinthe by far were worse than the regular non-absinthe alcoholics. Now these findings about absinthe causing hallucinations, actually, what do you think that did to the market?

BR: Well, I would assume that it led to a burgeoning market. If you tell people how dangerous and exotic and freaky this is, then people are going to be lining up for it.

0:44:20
CW: Yeah, there’s a famous quote by Oscar Wilde talking about how he, as he left the theater. And it just sounded really cool. So artists who were drinking it and popularizing it heard about these findings from this panicked psychiatrist and they were like, cool, man. Awesome. Now, temperance advocates, meanwhile, people who wanted all alcohol to be banned in some way, they latched onto it and aimed their ire specifically at absinthe. These folks had always kind of preferred to tackle the harder spirits and leave wine alone, at least in France. Since wine is so intermingled with French identity, trying to ban wine would be a really heavy lift. So with Dr. Magnon, I’m not sure if he was a doctor, but we’ll call him Monsieur Magnon. Since he was doing this work that labeled absence as inducing madness, it’s like handing this low-hanging fruit to all the temperance activists. They repeated his findings and expanded on them. They were really translating his work for the public, writing pamphlets, creating propaganda, doing all sorts of things to get the word out, that absence would lead to the degeneration of the French race.

0:45:50
BR: The whole sort of ginned up syndrome strikes me as…

CW: Ginned up.

0:45:54
BR: Yeah, you’re welcome. I remember reading that there was… have you heard of railway spine?

0:46:03
CW: Is that from working on the railroad? No, it was.

0:46:07
BR: And I’m I’m not remembering all all the details. But as I recall, there was concerns about the trains might move too fast.

CW: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

BR: And like, and at one point there were concerns about cars, vehicles that, you know, well, we these are dangerous because, you know, if you’re in a vehicle that’s going too fast you could hurt yourself just because because you’re going fast or something so as I’m forgive me as I’m forgetting some of the details but as I recall there was a quasi-moral panic in the 1800s surrounding something called railway spine.

0:46:43
CW: Yeah I remember locomotive travel was was a cause for concern back then.

BR: And people were just and it also reminds me of remember we did the episode on on sounds and dangerous music.

0:47:00
CW: Yeah.

0:47:01
BR: Yeah. Yeah. So just the whole like, oh, my God, this is this is this is new. This is dangerous. It’s going to hurt people.

0:47:08
CW: Well, I’m specifically especially the whole leading to criminal behavior and and the generation of an entire race. I’m thinking of Frederick Wortham and the comic books.

0:47:18
BR: Sure, yeah, yeah.

0:47:19
CW: The comic book moral panic of the 1950s. Although I can’t really compare something as innocent as comic books to actual super high proof alcohol.

BR: Well, if listeners missed it, do check out our three or four part series on moral panics a couple years back. It’s pretty good.

0:47:39
CW: Yeah, well, so these temperance activists were not alone. The rise in consumption of absinthe had not gone unnoticed by the wine industry. After they had bounced back from that phylloxera infestation, they noticed that absinthe still was taking a pretty big chunk of their market. And this led to an unholy alliance of sorts. The wine growers band together with the League Nationale Contre l’Acrosomie, the French temperance movement. I probably butchered that, I apologize. And these two groups actually conspired together to push for a legal ban of absence through, again, the propaganda, the smear campaigns, a lot of pamphlets and art, and leads to the question, okay, is there any truth to this Wormwood thing? Now I did some poking around and in the 1970s, there was a paper that came out suggesting that in one of the compounds in Wormwood, something called thujone was responsible for the hallucinations because it was similar to THC. So they were conjecturing that because it’s a similar thing, it was doing the same thing in the receptors. But again, the researchers needed to first verify that absinthe actually caused hallucinations. It turns out it doesn’t.

0:49:00
BR: So before you try to explain something, be sure there’s something to explain.

CW: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And as a side note, there have been some issues with thujone poisoning fujon poisoning because everything can be poisonous in certain quantities. The dose makes the poison, but the thujon poisoning has never happened from absinthe. The poisoning cases were all from essential oils. Now we’ve talked about essential oils, I mean like a lot of multi-level marketing health bullcrap, they can be under-regulated and super concentrated to the point of being dangerous.

0:49:41
BR: Do you think there’s any chance that if we went on the Goop website, we would find essential oils?

0:49:45
CW: I think you could probably get some thujonecoated eggs to put in places you shouldn’t. Yeah, so don’t do that. But anyway, to get an even, even a slightly noticeable effect from the thujone that’s present in Absinthe, at least the Absinthe from Oscar Wilde’s time, you would have had to have drink so much that alcohol poisoning would have done you in first. But back to the 19th century, Magnon carried out 10 years of experiments with wormwood oil back in his day, trying to figure out what was going on. One such experiment got a lot of press and was written up in 1869 in The Lancet. So Magnon put a guinea pig and a cat and a rabbit into a sealed environment. Not all together, they would not have gotten along, but he did this experiment with a guinea pig and then a cat and then a rabbit, put them into a sealed glass environment with a saucer of essence of wormwood in there.

0:50:45
BR: So this is one of those, so a guinea pig, a cat and rabbit walk into a bar.

0:50:49
CW: Yeah. Walk into a box with a, with a saucer of Wormwood. Yeah. And now as a control, he took a guinea pig and put it in the similar sort of contraption with just a saucer of alcohol. So he was trying to do points to him for actually trying to figure out, okay, is it the Wormwood or is it the alcohol? Let’s, let’s try one with just alcohol and let’s try one with the wormwood essence. So let’s, I’ll quote from him as to the results of this experiment. “The three animals which inhaled the vapors of wormwood experienced, first, excitement, and then epileptiform convulsions. The guinea pig which merely breathed the fumes of alcohol, first became lively, then simply drunk. Upon these facts, it is sought to establish the conclusion that the effects of excessive absinthe drinking are seriously different from those of ordinary alcoholic intemperance.” Now, another thing I found interesting as I scanned through the collective mentions of absence in The Lancet during that time period, I found another little hallmark of moral panics, and that is fear of foreigners. Now, the British-French love-hate relationship is kind of legendary over the centuries, but listen to this like classic shade from 1873. Ben, this will sound snootier coming from you. Can you read that passage from The Lancet, please?

0:52:15
BR: I will do my best. Our neighbors, the French, whenever they take up a new social vice, are pretty sure to invest it with some special features and to pursue it with an energy that is all their own. Moreover, the favorite liquor, which the French choose to tipple, has become more and more deadly in its composition and consequently in its effects.

0:52:37
CW: Those darn French. You did that rather well, Ben.

0:52:41
BR: Well, I can’t fake an accent on this at this remote, but I will do it. I’m glad you liked it.

0:52:50
CW: Okay. Now, the question remains, were people getting effed up on absinthe? Well, yeah, most definitely they were. Were some people dying from it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were. The thing is, there were a lot of poisonous substances used to adulterate absinthe. There was impure alcohol would make its way into there. Sometimes it would be contaminated with methanol. There was antimony and copper salts were used to give some of the off-brands the oozo effect, which is that like turning it milky, light green and the tinge of green that consumers looked for. Now, it kind of reminded me a little bit of what’s what’s done right now to olive oil. Remember, we had that. I made a note. It was episode 154 with D.G. Webster on fishy frauds and fraudulent foods.

0:53:41
BR: I do remember that. And in fact, it strikes me, as you pointed out, this is still happening today. Probably every month or two, I see a news story. It’s often out of like Pakistan, India, places like that, where dozens, sometimes hundreds of people die because they’re basically drinking hooch. And it’s local, you know, local made liquor, which is, you know, it’s cheap and it’s effective, but oftentimes it’s adulterated with, you know, green alcohol or gasoline and things like that. And, you know, they die these horrible deaths of kidney failure. And yeah, I mean, I’ve read many stories again, happening in Brazil, India and elsewhere, where anywhere where, you know, people want very cheap alcohol, you never know what’s in there.

0:54:31
CW: Yeah, yeah. And listeners, you yourselves, although you might not be in such a far removed place as India or somewhere, you’ve probably eaten some olive oil that had green fraudulently injected into it. Hopefully not copper salts, that’ll kill you, but yeah, there’s a lot of food fraud that goes on. You know, wherever there’s money to be made, there’s fraudsters ready to make it.

0:54:55
BR: All right. So we’re talking about adulterated liquor and things like that. But didn’t you mention some like murders and like nefariousness? Where did that come in?

0:55:04
CW: I did! Murder most foul. Yes. The absinthe murders in 1905. Imagine a peaceful Swiss village, a rural community. There was a laborer there who worked on a vineyard. His name was Jean Lanfray. And all indications point to Lanfray kind of being a bit of a foul guy. He was French by birth, not that that means he has bad character.

0:55:33
BR: Wow, you just pissed off half of our audience. All right. Dig out of this one.

0:55:43
CW: Well, I’m saying he was French by birth. The accounts I read did point out that he kind of picked up a taste for absence while he was in the service, like many French soldiers had. Now, he was known to be a burly guy. He was tall and tough, six foot tall, almost 200 pounds. He was also argumentative and very alcoholic, prone to massive bouts of drinking and rage. You know, great husband and dad material.

0:56:13
BR: I’m sure.

0:56:14
CW: So Lanfray drank something like two dozen alcoholic beverages. I forget the actual number, but reading the list made me feel dizzy, just reading the list. But two ounces that day had been absinthe. So he drank those in the early part of the day and then went and worked for a while and came back and had more and more wine and piquet and like all sorts of other liquors and brandies. And after drowning out those two ounces of absinthe with with buckets of wine and brandy, he came home and he notices a pair of boots that he had wanted waxed in the corner and they weren’t waxed. So he becomes enraged, argues with his wife, and shoots her in the head with a rifle.

0:56:57
BR: Oh, I did not see that coming.

0:56:59
CW: She dies pretty instantly. Afterwards, he shoots his two young daughters and then tries to kill himself, but only really succeeds in blowing off his jaw. Now his father had been in the area and been with him for most of the day and witnessed part of this and immediately ran for the police. They collected him and he recovered in the hospital and then was put on trial. His attorneys, again, we’ve seen this in the modern day and age, the Twinkie defense, his attorneys knowing that the cultural temperature of the day held absinthe as this suspicious corrupting force. His attorneys claimed that their client was unduly influenced by the absinthe that he had consumed that day.

0:57:46
BR: Hmm. All right. Yeah.

0:57:47
CW: Like I said, we’ve seen that before. The murder got tons of press and it swiftly started tipping the scales firmly against absinthe. It also fired up the temperance movement, which, again, was already bubbling pretty hot over absinthe, and they sort of found in Lanfray a kind of poster child for absinthism. And I’m going to quote Atlas Obscura here, “it did not help that Lanfray survived his attempted suicide, found by police with a bullet wound to his head, but still conscious. Thus he seemed to embody evil itself, indestructible and uncontrollable, a notion that the growing temperance movement latched on to quickly and effectively.”

0:58:34
BR: So not only does Absinthe make you crazy and wild and, you know, semi-invincible, it reminds me of the myths that surrounded the death of Grigory Rasputin, the mad monk in Tsarist Russia, and the story was that he was so evil and vile and crazy and all these sort of things that he was set upon by his enemies and he was, depending on the version you hear, he was stabbed, he was drowned, he was shot, he was electrocuted, he was beheaded. It’s sort of like this long and he finally succumbed but the story of his death, which is greatly exaggerated, by the way, it reminds me of that where just, you know, the power of the crazed, the berserkers.

0:59:21
CW: Too evil to die. Yeah. Interesting. Well, Lanfrey was found guilty, by the way, and he was sentenced to serve 30 years. He only served three days because at that point he was found to have hanged himself in his cell. So during all this time, petitions were circulating around Switzerland and receiving a ton of signatures, and a constitutional referendum officially banned absinthe by 1908. The Netherlands followed suit in 1909, and then Switzerland in 1910, and then the U.S. in 1912. So this predates even, you know, prohibition over here. Finally, even France banned it in 1914.

1:00:07
BR: So even they had enough.

1:00:09
CW: Yeah, yeah. And now, mind you, absinthe wasn’t banned everywhere. Spain and the UK never actually banned it, but it also wasn’t really popular in the UK. So this kind of allowed, I’m just conjecturing here, this allowed a bit of back and forth. People in the banned countries could still get it abroad. Like I said, when I purchased it, it had this real cachet of like, oh, I can’t get this at home, you know. And the dropping of the bans, I think, has made it a bit more ho-hum. Even now you hear connoisseurs saying, oh, well, you can get absinthe now, but it’s not like it’s the really good stuff from back in the day.

BR: These are people that are 150?

1:00:51
CW: The fact that they weren’t there allows them to just sort of imagine this legendary status of like, what was Oscar Wilde really drinking? Not this stuff. It was much better, you know?

1:01:01
BR: Right. Of course. No, I was celebrating Lincoln’s inauguration with Absinthe. Let me tell you, burned going down.

1:01:11
CW: So there really is still this persistent rumor of like, yeah, Absinthe. It’s almost like no true Scotsman, like, oh, well, sure, the absinthe today won’t make you hallucinate. Because the stupid FDA got involved, but oh, the back in the day, you know, so…

BR: Back when there was cocaine and Coca-Cola…

CW: Yeah, it really did inspire artists and then gave them these mind opening visions. But all we get is this, you know, pale imitation. So, so yeah, it persists now in some form or another. Now, as far as regulations today go, the US has allowed the sale and consumption since March 5th of 2007, when the ban was lifted. But the FDA specifies it must be made with wormwood species that do not have thujone. Remember that compound I mentioned earlier. Now, anything under 10 parts per million will qualify as Thujone-free and is okay to sell in the U.S. The packaging also, I found this interesting from a marketing standpoint, the packaging on any absinthe that you sell in the U.S. cannot, quote, project images of hallucinogenic, psychotropic, or mind-altering effects.

BR: Interesting.

CW: Yeah, so it’s I mean, why can’t you apply that? You know, because it has no hallucinogenic effect. So you can’t advertise it that way. Why can’t the FDA be as rigorous with homeopathy? Please.

BR: There’s nothing in it.

1:02:40
CW: The packaging should not reflect any images of treatment or curing or anything at all. But water just have pictures of water on it. So yeah, for whatever reason, you can’t sell bottles of absinthe with green fairies floating all over it or anything. So each country does have their own rules. And there are always going to be reminders that panics are not a thing of the past. In New Zealand, for instance, some local authorities still have absinthe listed as a banned substance. And in August of 2008, so that’s like not too long ago, Mataura became the latest place to ban absinthe, or I should say re-ban it. This came after a 17-year-old was hospitalized with breathing problems due to alcohol poisoning. Now, this happened after they drank a type of absinthe that clocked in at 89 percent alcohol by volume. So, again, much stronger than your typical absence of the past. So yeah, you know, keep the teens away from anything that alcoholic. That’s a good rule.

1:03:47
BR: Yeah, I could get behind that. It reminds me of a recent case where I think it was at Panera where somebody who was very, very sensitive to caffeine drank their, it’s called charged lemonade.

1:04:01
CW: The lemonade, I just read about that myself. That wasn’t too long ago, yeah.

1:04:05
BR: No, that was very recently. And of course, I’m thinking, well, what did you think charged lemonade meant? I mean, I just…

1:04:14
CW: Well, they didn’t have it, like, clearly labeled from what I saw. And they ended up drinking, like, I don’t know, like, four or five big things of it.

1:04:26
BR: Yeah, anyway, but yeah, now there’s warning labels on it, so I certainly feel badly for the person, but yeah, so if anybody was wondering whether charged lemonade has either extra caffeine or anything else in it, well, obviously it’s not alcohol because it’s being served at Panera.

1:04:43
CW: If I remember correctly, and I paid attention to this because I can’t have caffeine. I caffeine gives me like little heart jiggles. And, and this woman had some sort of cardiac condition. And so she should not have had any caffeine. So she didn’t know that it had caffeine in it. And yeah, so I think there’s a, I think there’s a lawsuit brewing and I don’t give Panera a good chance at winning that.

BR: We’ll see.

CW: Yeah. Anyway, it sounds like we launched off onto a swayso at the end here, we went from absinthe to lemonade.

1:05:14
BR: There you go. The green to the yellow.

1:05:17
CW: Yeah.

(MUSIC)

1:05:18
BR: Well, that was fun digging into absinthe. Not partaking, at least not in my case, but thanks for bringing some of the background there.

1:05:41
CW: My pleasure, it was fun researching that. You know, like I said, I dig a bit of alcoholic history now and again. Now, we’ve got some interesting things brewing for 2024. This is the last show of the year. So, Pascual, I’m glad you made it back for the end of 2023.

1:06:02
PR: Yeah, at least, you know, that’s in my contract. I have to do at least one episode a year. So I’ll see you guys next year.

1:06:04
CW: You have a contract where I need to dig this up what?

PR: Well, I wrote it myself and then I signed it myself.

CW: Oh cocktail napkin.

PR: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s stuck to my wall with a piece of gum.

CW: We hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas and Hanukkah and every other holiday you might celebrate. And after that, I think the next episode we have coming up is going to talk about dark play. And what does that mean? Is it no, it’s not anything kinky. It’s about sort of the folklore of childhood and the games we play as children that are just part of that childhood sphere of dangerous games, Bloody Mary comes to mind. But Ben has a folklore guest that’s coming on, and we will be discussing a little bit of that, which should be really fun in the dead of the winter night, to think about stuff like that, coming up on the next episode. All right, well, until then, everybody, take care.

1:07:09
Bye-bye. See ya.

1:07:10
♪♪

1:07:15
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Transcribed with Cockatoo