Blog Archives
Tea’s Weird Week: Podcast Recommendation: Fur & Loathing
Back in 2021 one of the favorite things I wrote that year was a column (plus a related TWW podcast episode) titled “How a Dogged Reporter Sniffed Out an Alt-Right Furry Infiltration,” in which I wrote about Patch O’ Furr, creator of the Dogpatch Press website, which reports news related to the furry subculture. If you’re interested in learning more about a particular subculture, I recommend finding the media that they themselves create to learn more about them. Although Dogpatch Press reports on plenty of fun stuff going on with the furry fandom, Patch is also important as a watchdog (pun intended) that has put in impressive work exposing potential threats to their world. In particular, Patch has exposed a disturbing and dangerous fringe of the fandom– Alt-Right or Nazi Furs.
Related to that is the case of a 2014 terror attack at the Midwest Fur Fest (in Rosemont, outside of Chicago) in which several attendees were injured in after someone released chlorine gas in one of the hotel’s hallways. To date, no one has been charged with that crime, although there is a clear suspect. Patch dropped me a line to tell me about a new podcast series that delves into this case (and A+ on this title): Fur & Loathing. This series was created by Nicky Woolf, a journalist who writes for The Guardian, and produced by Brazen, a podcast and multimedia platform. Patch’s investigations and insight are a key part of the story.
The podcast is six episodes, with some bonus material, and does a fantastic job delving into the suspenseful twists and turns of this strange case. The podcast team leaves no stone unturned in their extension effort to figure the case out. It is alternately funny, empathetic, surprising, and disturbing.
You can listen here: https://brazen.fm/fur-and-loathing/ and if you scroll down on that page, you’ll find links to Apple, Spotify, etc. Well worth listening if you are interested in a true crime podcast with an unusual, furry twist.
More listening: I was recently a guest on the New Books Network podcast, hosted by Tyler Thier. We discussed my book American Madness, published in 2020 but still very relevant today. You can listen here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/american-madness
Tea’s Weird Week: Hold on to Your Buttocks, TWW Podcast Season 2 is About to Shake Down
There’s many things I like about the Tea’s Weird Week podcast, but one reason it is dear to me is that it’s been a part of my social time, a chance to talk to cool, interesting people, some I’ve known a long time, others I’ve just met. After wanting to do a podcast for years, the pandemic downtime finally caught up to me and like a million billion other people, I got that podcast rolling. TWW has a great crew– my co-host Heidi Erickson, sound engineer Android138, and trivia host Miss Information. We did a 13 episode inaugural season that ran January through April. Like a lot of things I do, it was a case of building an airplane while flying it, but I think it turned out well.
In season one, we had some really fun original music by Android138 and other music guests, an interesting array of interviews with people like writer and UFO podcaster Ryan Sprague, the yodeling dominatrix Manuela Horn, Lake Monster expert Scott Mardis, and Patch O’Furr, a furry investigative journalist, just to name a few. We also did things like an episode based on audio from my 2017 tour of the Luxury Survival Condos.
I love having a weekly discussion with Heidi for the Tea’s Weird Week News segment about topical stories and classic strange cases; a couple people won big answering Miss Information’s trivia, and we closed out each episode with a track by an awesome indie band. I guess the podcast follows a sort of weirdo late night show format– opening monologue/interview, weird news talk, bonus skit stuff (like some of the music bits and the “Comedy Roast of Zorth“), trivia question, song. We try to have fun and inform you about the very weird world around us.
You can listen to the entire season on your preferred platform choice– find the episode list and links to all platforms here: Tea’s Weird Week Podcast | (teakrulos.com)
We’re working on a new 13 episode season 2 (summer season) right now and we’ve got a lot of great stuff going. I’m going to tell you about the first 3 episodes we got in production and some of the ideas we have beyond that.
(S2, EP01.) Hodag vs. Snallygaster. We love local lore at Tea’s Weird Week. Many small towns across the country have some story about a monster that lurks in the woods, stalks a creepy country lane, or swims in the local pond. We talk with the proprietors of the Hodag Store in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and the American Snallygaster Museum in Frederick County, Maryland about their homespun monsters. (airs 5/21)
(S2, EP02.) The Marvelous Miss Fit. I met Miss Fit– bodybuilder, charity fundraiser, and Real-life Superhero star of The Adventures of Miss Fit while working on my book Heroes in the Night. A stereotype of Real-life Superheroes is that they are dorky, delusional Batman-wannabe white dudes. Miss Fit bench-presses that idea, then body-slams it, then puts it in a headlock. She’s just rad, is what I’m saying. (airs 5/28)
(S2, EP03.) Lost in the Schroeder’s Books Vortex. Imagine a bookstore that looks like something out of an episode of Hoarders, run by a mysterious and eccentric woman, a hodgepodge tsunami of books ranging from the worthless to the priceless. Well, you’ll have to imagine because the West Allis, Wisconsin Fire Department shut Schroeder’s Books and Music down years ago, but we get one last look as the store is being cleared out and remember the sights and smells of the store, plus a dramatic reading of some of the store’s Yelp reviews. (airs 6/4)
After that I’m not sure what order these might appear, but we have episode ideas in the works that include interviewing Nick Redfern about his new book, a visit to our friends at Dead by Dawn Dead & Breakfast in Manitowoc, a Bohemian Grove episode, and much more, plus some great music and intriguing trivia.
After that, we’ll take a short summer vacation and then season 3 will really be all out because it will be our fall season– lots going on. As I wrote in a 2019 Tea’s Weird Week column, “October is Mad Boo-Business.” We’ll be recording live from some events, doing our own live events, some ghost investigating.
You can see me and Heidi do the news segment live in the Tea’s Weird Week Facebook group (and hopefully I’ve figured out how to hook Streamyard to YouTube), we’re going live this Friday, May 14, 5pm CST for S2, ep01.
Tune in!
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American Madness
Apocalypse Any Day Now
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