The Nonsense Bazaar

Admit it, there aren't nearly enough creatures in your life. Weird creatures, cute creatures, mean creatures, there's a whole wide world of creatures out there. And today we're talking about three of them. And with a subtitle like "Water Monsters," you might be thinking we're talking mythical beasts, Nessie's or Champ's or the Kraken. Nope. We're talking real live creatures, but these dudes are most certainly monsters. In this epis...

Sometime during the 20th century, hot dogs became forever linked with an American pastime—Competitive eating—and with the most American holiday, the Fourth of July. One could argue that the business of “major league eating” is everything wrong with consumer capitalism. Because it is. However, today we’ll be taking time to celebrate the absurdity of it all by discovering how Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog contest began and why it p...

These days you can't shake a stick without running into some version of Gnostic Christianity. Why is that?  Gnosticism is absolutely wild and psychedelic, that plays a part. But did counterculture collectively decide one day that Gnosticism was pretty groovy? Well, apart from fragments of texts, writings about Gnosticism from the Catholic church's perspective (heresy!), and underground currents of mystic knowledge, mainstream cultu...

Sequoyah had to deal with some rough stuff this week so in lieu of chaining him to his keyboard and squeezing an episode out of him like an old citrus, we're unlocking an episode of our bonus series where we dive into the weird, disturbing, and hilarious world of internet tulpamancy. What's a tulpa? Well a tulpa (aka "tupper," apparently) is a thoughtform entity created by the power of belief that gains external agency and sentienc...

Who among us can honestly say we've never been tempted to fake our own deaths? You know, get away from it all, start over as fresh as a newborn babe. Today we'll be looking at individuals who were pronounced dead only to miraculously come back or, in the case of Kaycee Nicole Swenson, who never existed in the first place. From England's 'Canoe Man' to the ridiculously dressed Violet Charlesworth to Lil Tay, you'll learn why faking ...

We had a weird day. So this week we're talking about some of the things we've been thinking about recently: nature, defiant optimism, Catholic UFO propaganda, how Willow thought Sequoyah went missing but he was actually just napping, and much more. The state of the union is strong... and ridiculous.  Support The Nonsense Bazaar on Patreon and get access to our bonus series The Corkboard Bizarre and our patron Discord server starti...

This week It’s a touch of the ol’ divine madness in Middle America as we take a look at the highly entertaining and very American art form of revival preaching. From the big top on the frontier to Aimee McPherson, the sexiest preacher who’s ever lived, to Oral Roberts’ saying God was going to kill him if he didn’t get eight million dollars, the tradition of the revival is a type of performance art in a league of its own. It also fi...

Finding yourself with one foot in reality and the other in dreamland is frightening, especially if you were alive in the 1940s when the solution was to remove all your memories by either drilling a hole in your head or hooking your brain up to the medical equivalent of a car battery. Today’s episode takes us back to that time to explore a book of case studies titled Oneirophrenia and how the author, a physician named Ladislas Medun...

You know how they say you shouldn't stare at the sun because you'll go blind? Well, what if that's just what they want you to think? What if the secrets to immortality, an enlarged pineal gland, not needing to eat food, and not needing to wear a shirt on your youtube videos were all unlocked by simply...staring at the damn sun? Welcome to the "ancient" practice of sungazing. Where you stare down the sun until you receive magic powe...

Tiny Tim was once one of the most famous men in America. Everything about him was a spectacle. From his trembling falsetto to his odd mannerisms, it's easy to see how he became America's laughingstock. Most people know him as an entertainer but what about as a husband? While tabloids took shots at Tiny, he was taking shots of his own--at the teenage wife he married on The Tonight Show. She wouldn't be his only wife, however, as he'...

This week we're telling a story that is very much not our normal fare here at the bazaar: a ghost story, a true-crime murder case, and a courtroom drama. But it also happens to be exactly what we're about. The story of the Greenbrier ghost is often told in the context of "that time an encounter with a spirit was used as evidence in a trial." But that doesn't really do the story justice. After 22-year-old Zona Heaster was found dead...

We’re traveling to the past to explore the careers of two game show greats: Ralph “Nobody knows who I am anymore” Edwards and Chuck “They made a movie about me” Barris. Between the two of them, they’re responsible for some of the most famous game shows of the 20th century including Truth or Consequences and The Newlywed Game. We’ll learn how their creations altered the media landscape of the 20th century and discuss the possibility...

Did you know that all of history is nothing but a bald faced lie? That the entire generally accepted arc of history has been fabricated to keep you, dear listener, from realizing your God-given birthright to fancy architecture, free energy and flying turtles? That there used to be a globe-spanning supercivilization with magic sound technology, strong jaws, and craftsmanship and artistry that we can't even come close to approximatin...

This week we’re taking a look at the curious history of one Charles Entertainment Cheese, a robot who claims to be “America’s favorite rat” and built a cardboard-flavored pizza empire which heralded the cybernetic colonization of our childhoods and traumatized generations with animatronic animals dug straight out of the uncanny valley.  We look at the history of Charles Cheese and the various personas he’s inhabited, from rude ciga...

We're headed back to one of our favorite centuries to talk about one of the most famous UFO cases in history. Well, at least on the History Channel. The 1561 "celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg, Germany" entered modern consciousness by way of that spooky Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who wrote about this odd woodcut broadsheet describing a day in April 1561 when the sky filled with all sorts of strange, unidentified objects. Balls ...

On today’s episode we’re taking a look at some of the rather silly psychic experiments conducted by the folks over at the Center for Inquiry, a non-profit organization dedicated to stopping the spread of nonsense and promoting reason and skepticism. We’ll learn about the founder Paul Kurtz, secular humanism, ol' James Randi, and their history of legal battles against the most famous spoon bender in history, Uri Geller. They claim t...

This week we're taking a look at one of the oldest and most influential epic poems in the world. Bhagavad Gita is the centerpiece of the much, much longer Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata and has had a huge influence on culture and spirituality the world over. It's also just wicked cool. Taking the form of a dialogue between the god Krishna and the heroic prince Arjuna right before a massive battle is about to pop off, the Gita has a...

If you're at all into the paranormal or supernatural you've heard the name Charles Fort. After all, his name has become synonymous with the study of anomalous phenomena, or "Fortean" phenomena. He basically invented the genre. Over the course of four books published towards the end of his life Charles Fort documented hundreds of cases of strange doings: fish falls, mysterious airships, teleportation, and much more, while arguing fo...

Who the hell is Greta Garbo? From her alleged espionage endeavors with plans to assassinate Hitler to passionate secret lesbian romances, this Old Hollywood icon lived a life worth discussing (although she would hate that we are doing so). Her intense desire for privacy over fame led her to quit acting at a young age but that didn’t stop the media from being obsessed with her, particularly her dietary habits, love life, and the adv...