For those who would like a summary it goes like this…
A man has had both his legs amputated after being bitten by a white tailed spider!
He didn’t see the spider, and has no evidence he was bitten by anything – let alone any type of spider – but it was a white tailed spider all right!
Scientists and doctors say there is absolutely no evidence that white tailed spider bites cause necrosis, and the media should stop telling people that they do!
Signs of a white tailed spider bite include necrosis and having to have your legs amputated!
Sheeze!
LATER: Oh, and now the story has gone missing and the link goes to a 404 page. I wonder why that is? 😀
LATER STILL: And now there’s a new article that’s actually based in some kind of reality.
Well, it’s now gone 6:00pm in Hawaii, so I figure anyone who’s likely to have been fooled by my podcast gag will have been fooled and I can come clean about it. Yes, it was an April Fools joke. Haha! Aren’t I just great?
Anyway, lest anyone think the entire podcast thing was a long-con leading up to that ridiculous audio file, it’s not (I’m not anywhere near that organised). We are genuinely making a podcast – I just realised a couple of weeks back that making said podcast provided a great opportunity to prank people (and tighten up my audio editing skills in the process). So stay tuned for news on the real premier of Carthago Delenda Est.
In the meantime I thought I’d elucidate on the sources of that clattering bag of madness I thrust upon you all.
The first part is sourced from the amazing Chriddof and his video Mr Sir…
The mini-episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation was edited together from various sources and was largely inspired by the extremely weird and decidedly not safe for work Star Trek: The Disturbing Animated Series which not longer appears to be available online – which is probably good for the future of human civilisation. The “Enough!” is sourced from the famously horrible cut scenes from the CD-i game Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.
The Thames TV sign off was another nod to Chriddof, and was hopefully somewhat disorientating to those who grew up watching both TNG and British sitcoms from the 70s.
The next section uses a couple of weird audio files I obtained many moons ago. The morse code is from a record telling the life story of Samuel Morse in m0rse code (morse code records were a thing for a while apparently). The radio signal is a recording from the famous numbers station Lincolnshire Poacher. Over the top of these is Lemongrab’s freakout scene from the Adventure Time episode You Made Me.
The final section consists of samples from The Garfield Monstrosity segment of the My Brother, My Brother and Me podcast, in which the McElroy brothers discuss a fellow with a rather unusual problem (it is self described as “possibly the grossest conversation ever heard by human ears”, so you have been warned)…
These are mixed over the Moog Cookbook’s amazing cover of Hotel California.
The final section is stolen wholesale from the end of rx’s cover of The End of the World as We Know It, as performed by George W. Bush – which I still think is one of finest bits of audio/video editing I’ve ever seen. This of course features a sample of Winston Churchill’s speech about the battle of El Alamein in 1942.
So there you go, all the bones that were boiled to make the soup. The real podcast should be along… well I won’t say “shortly”. “Eventually” is probably more realistic 🙂
I am happy to report that after spending every evening this week wrestling with Audacity I have finally beaten the two separate recording sessions Rebecca and I did months ago into something I’m not embarrassed (not too embarrassed anyway) to release to the general public. That’s right, episode one of Carthago Delenda Est with Rebecca and James is ready to roll!
In case I’ve neglected to explain this before (I can’t be bothered looking it up right now) the podcast is about lost cities and lost civilisations. Each episode we take a look at a particular city or culture, discuss what we know about it, what we don’t know about it, what happened to it, and what (if any) lessons can be drawn from it. The first episode is (appropriately) about Carthage, the north African city state that challenged the Romans and didn’t come off too well…
We’re not going to officially release it as a proper podcast until I’ve edited up a few episodes (we want a bit of a buffer) but we’ve decided to do a pre-release to get some feedback. So check it out and let us know what you think!
