The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
Geopolitics and Spaghetti Bolognese Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
10,192 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Grin for Paris Hilton, you big stinking Tilda Swinton's. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, maybe consider going back to an earlier episode or even beginning from the start. There's nearly 400 episodes now. I know that seems like a tall order, but a lot of new listeners genuinely do go back to the very start of this podcast and binge the absolute fuck out of it, which is what I like to hear. I intend this podcast to be a perpetual autofictional novel. It's minus two degrees in Limerick City. Now, if you're listening from Canada or I was in Oslo last year. If you're listening from Oslo, minus two degrees mean fuck all.
I was in Oslo last year. It was about minus 12 at nighttime. If I took my gloves off after about two minutes, my hands started to physically hurt. So that's real cold, I understand it. But here in Limerick, it's minus two, and I fucking adore it. The sun is slanty and golden all day. The sky is this thin, baby blue with a little, a little hint of yellow to it, and the air is completely dry. It's this incredibly still, sparkly coldness. And I think it's my favourite Irish weather because it's predictable, you can rely upon it. I've spoken many a time about sunny weather in Ireland.
Yeah, sometimes we get a nice sunny, hot, clear day. But you can never really enjoy it because there's the consistent threat of rain. And when a dry, hot, sunny day, a Mediterranean-type day, actually does present itself in Ireland. We spend all of our time worrying about whether we're enjoying it enough or not. You can't actually relax. You walk into town wearing shorts and you're thinking, oh, fuck it, maybe I should be at the beach. Then you go to the beach and it's like, oh, maybe I should be back at home drying clothes. Look at the wonderful drying that's out there. What a waste to be at the beach. But with freezing cold, December stillness, you know what you're getting? Highly unlikely that it suddenly rain.
If it does, it's not that disappointing anyway because the weather's kind of shit. So when it's freezing cold and dry and clear, you can just relax. You can relax and you can plan things. So what I've been doing is going on very long walks, dressed head to toe in Gore-Tex and padded clothing. And I've even got long johns. I'm wearing fucking long johns. I've got long johns, a set of trousers that go over the long johns, and then Gore-Tex trousers that go over that. Three fucking layers, harnessing the insulatory properties of pockets of warm air. Like I'm a fucking chaffinch up on a tree.
I have an impenetrable, puffy jacket, waterproof, warm, the whole shebang. Fingerless gloves with a retractable mitten attachment. They're called shooter mittens. They're what snipers wear. Well, they're what I wear when I walk around near McCity drinking hot chocolate. And finally, I've got hiking boots, proper decent fucking hiking boots, full divorced dah hiking boots. And of course, a woolly hat and I'm considering a balaclava. I'm considering going full balaclava, the thing that's stopping me from. The thing that's stopping me from wearing a balaclava is, look, we're all adults here. We know that I don't wear a plastic bag on my head all the time, only when I'm on stage.
The vast majority of my life is spent walking the streets with a human face. So I'm, I'm in this strange situation whereby the, the only part of my body that's exposed to the elements is my face. And the solution to that is a balaclava, which is a perfectly acceptable thing to wear when it's this cold. But if I wear a balaclava, walking around Limerick, and all you can see is my two eyes coming out of the balaclava, then I might get recognised in the street in Limerick as blind by. That's how the United Healthcare assassin got caught this week. He's been arrested. He wore a COVID mask and a hat to disguise himself, so all you had was his eyes.
Then the police released a lot of photographs of him with his mask and his hat and his eyes. And he got identified in a rural McDonald's in Pennsylvania because he was wearing a COVID mask. He was wearing a COVID mask and a hat and people identified his fucking eyes. So if he went around with his face, nobody would have identified him. So that's why I can't wear a balaclava in Limerick City. What you want me to say about the United Healthcare assassin? A man who did very, very evil things was shot dead in the street. A CEO of United Healthcare. I know the company has healthcare in its name and we call it a health insurance company in America.
What a company like United Healthcare actually does. It, it's a giant pile of cash that makes money by denying healthcare to the most vulnerable people. Okay, I know we call it health insurance, healthcare. These are just words. The, the actual business model. Is to make profits by denying healthcare. It's quite an evil system. It's a very evil structure that targets the most vulnerable people. Sick people, sick children, people with terminal illness. Illness is part of the human condition. It can't be avoided.
So companies like United Healthcare, they make profits by denying healthcare to people who are dying of cancer. Instead of calling it a healthcare company, we could call it a an exploitation of human suffering company. But we don't say that. This is health insurance. In America, in America, America is quite unique amongst developed nations because it lacks a guaranteed right to healthcare. I'm not saying it's perfect here in Ireland, or it's perfect over in the fucking UK. But our health system isn't driven purely by unfettered capitalism and profit. It is in America. People who get cancer in America, people who get pregnant in America
can end up with serious debt. So people who can afford it in America, they get healthcare insurance. They get health insurance from companies like United Healthcare. And then United Healthcare, it's a giant pile of cash that makes profits by denying people healthcare. But it's, it's not just the insurance companies. In America, because of lack of regulation, the healthcare providers like hospitals, physicians and the drug companies charge way higher rates than they do in other countries. So the, the entire system is pitted against the vulnerable. And when you're sick, you're vulnerable. Human beings get sick. Human, that's, that's part of the human condition. That's what we do.
We're healthy and we get sick. And when one of us gets sick, we should care for each other. Not in America, which I think that's really evil. I don't have any, any other word for that other than that's incredibly evil and it should be illegal. And the CEO of that company was shot dead in the street, was shot dead in the streets. And the person who's been arrested for shooting, a fellow by the name of Luigi Mangione.
He released a manifesto and he clearly states in the manifesto, "The US has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly forty-two in life expectancy. United Healthcare is the largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple and Google. It has grown and grown, but as for our life expectancy, no. The reality is, these companies have simply gotten too powerful and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it." So you have it there unequivocally and explicitly, Luigi Mangione, who's been arrested for, for that shooting, for shooting that CEO, there he is saying it. "I did it and this is why I did it."
And even though you have it there, his manifesto, a lot of the media are choosing not to publish it. MSNBC had a whole article talking about how the shooter had played a children's video game and were trying to blame a video game on why he shot the CEO. The US media is scrambling for any narrative other than, "This man was radicalized by the normalized evil of profit-driven health insurance." And, and the media is doing that because it's playing the role of the ideological state apparatus. The media is propagating and holding up capitalist ideology
to maintain social order and control in a way that feels voluntary. What they don't want is a bunch of American people going, "Maybe what that healthcare company is doing is actually evil. Maybe they're doing an evil thing and that should be illegal and should be stopped." And corporations are frightened because I've seen a number of US corporations this week have started advertising for professional security for their CEOs. In response to the shooting, some health insurance companies have, their, their CEOs' names are no longer publicly available. They took them down off their websites. Also, a couple of days after the shooting,
one particular company called Anthem, another health insurance company. Anthem were about to bring forward a policy around anesthesia, right? Where- If you've got health insurance with Anthem, okay, and you need to go in for an operation, you're gonna go under anaesthetic, obviously incredibly expensive, anaesthetic is profoundly expensive, and anesthesiologists are specialists in America, getting an operation, your anaesthetic could be upwards of a hundred grand to get an operation. So you better make sure your health insurance company is covering your fucking anaesthetic if you're getting an operation. So this company, Anthem, were about to bring forward a policy whereby if
you got an operation, let's just say appendix, but some complication happens in the middle of the operation, and the surgeon has to operate on you for longer than agreed, then Anthem wouldn't cover your fucking anesthesia. To protect profits, so that the insurance company can earn more money. So when you critically analyse it like that, it's evil, that that's that fucking bad, that's cruel, that's evil. But Anthem aren't gonna go ahead with that now. They announced this week that they're not gonna do it. They haven't given the the fact that the CEO of another healthcare company was shot, they haven't given that as the reason, as to why they're not gonna hit with that policy. But the shooting has
has large corporations very, very worried, because healthcare impacts everybody. Everybody gets sick, everybody needs to pay insurance, whether someone's rich or someone's poor in America. A lot of American people have got heart-picking stories about a loved one who suffered unnecessarily because a health insurance company refused to pay for healthcare. They do this three ways, delay, deny, defend, which is a standard practice in the US with insurance companies, when someone comes in who has insurance, wants coverage for their their medical treatment. The insurance company, they'll delay that claim, they'll flat out deny it,
or they'll defend why they shouldn't pay it out. Delay, deny, defend was also written on the the shell casings of the bullets that the assassin used when he murdered the CEO. And he's now a terrorist. He's now portrayed as a radical terrorist. He's a murderer. He's an evil and bad person. Even though he released a clear manifesto saying why he did it, he's been portrayed as someone who was radicalized through video games to deflect from conversations around why health insurance in America might be evil. And why is that clearly, clearly evil system not seen as evil? Why is it, is it completely normalized?
It's normalized through the ideological state apparatus. That's a word I've used before, comes from a theorist called Louis Altuser. Scholes, religion, the media, America is the land of the free. Manifest destiny. The land is yours to take if you can take it, even if there's poor people or indigenous people in the way. This same freedom applies to corporations. Corporations are treated like people in America. A giant pile of cash has the right, the right to do what the fuck it wants to survive and grow bigger. And with this individual liberty to be as free as you want, it's yours for the taking. But if you want to do that, you also have to take individual responsibility. If you're sick, that's on you.
It's not the responsibility of the community. You're free to be wealthy and you're free to be sick. If you're poor, that's your fault. This is America. You're completely free to be whatever you want. If you're poor, it's obviously your fault. So if you do get sick, because everyone gets sick, if you do get sick and you can't afford to pay for it, well, that's on you because you can't be poor in America. You're free to be rich. There's no such thing as poor people in America. There's just rich people that haven't happened yet. Because a lot of the ideology of American capitalism particularly, and these American notions of freedom, they're rooted in in what's called frontierism. America's a colonized land that was only colonized in the past 400 years.
Europeans colonized the place on the east coast and were told, this place is fucking massive. It's yours. Explore, conquer, set new frontiers. Take what's there, it's there in front of you. It was an official policy known as manifest destiny. You'd think a Trump now would make America great again. In eighteen forty-four, the Democrats won and manifest destiny was the phrase. To the west is all this undiscovered land. It's yours. Go forth, go west, take it. This is the land of the free, complete unfettered freedom to take what you want. It's there, but it's the home of the brave. There's your individualism.
You better have your fucking health insurance, better be brave. But manifest all that freedom. It's there, it's there, if you're brave enough, it's there. And what manifest destiny means is it's not a matter of if you become rich and plentiful. It's a guarantee, it's predestined, it's there. You just have to manifest it by going out onto that wild frontier and taking what's yours. Taking what is there for you. But what about the indigenous people? Oh, they're not real. They're not, they're, they're like animals or plants. Just conquer them as well. That's frontierism. That is the narrative, that's the narrative of the United States.
It's, it's the narrative of how history is taught in the United States. Movies, TVs, books, the media, and in attitudes towards business. A corporation's right to profits is like a pilgrim's right to stake a claim in the land and make it their farm. Highly individualistic, highly selfish. And things like regulations and rules, these are basically pesky indigenous people who are preventing you from conquering the land. All of that informs the ideology that normalizes and allows and permits.
A healthcare industry that is clearly evil. No, we cannot treat your cancer because you don't have enough money is evil. Oh, you do have a bit of money, you've got insurance. Well, so even though you have insurance, so you've been given us a lot of money, right? Even though you have health insurance, we're gonna figure out a way to to not pay for your cancer treatment so that we can earn some more money. Is that okay? So that's evil. And and the CEO who oversaw a lot of that was shot dead in the street last week. And do I want to see a bunch of CEOs shot dead in the street? No, but I'd like to see, I'd like that man's job to be illegal.
Healthcare should be a human right, a human right. Nobody should die because they can't afford healthcare. Nobody should be in debt because they availed of healthcare, because they got sick. These things should be unconscionable and illegal. There should be rules and regulations and red tape, and it should be really difficult for individuals and corporations to to exploit people's health for profit. That's not a very controversial position for me to have. And it's also, it's not, it's not a big unattainable dream. They can do it in Canada, completely different health system up in Canada. There's universal coverage up in Canada.
If you're poor and you get cancer in Canada and you can't afford insurance, do you know what happens? Do you get treatment for free, paid for by everybody's taxes? And I'm sure I've got some Canadian listeners who are ready to mail me now because the Canadian health system isn't as perfect as I'm making it out to be. Probably not, I'm guessing not, but what I do know. I know a couple of people, Irish people my age, who've been living in Canada, working there since the last recession. And they want to come home, but they're not. And the reason is, they want Canadian citizenship just for the healthcare, for the healthcare alone. So it's definitely better than Ireland. So I don't want CEOs shot in the street.
Because at the end of the day, that man Brian Thompson, he had kids, he had a family, and they're grieving. But their dad's job was so evil that it should be illegal as a job, it shouldn't exist. And the man who shot him is gonna go to jail for a long fucking time. He's gonna be made an example of. Because what he did is very dangerous and has the potential to cause a class-based revolution in America. It has the potential to raise class consciousness. So he needs to be severely publicly punished by the system to send a clear message to anybody else who's thinking about shooting a CEO, that you'd be punished with the full extent of the law. It's early to call, but I reckon, I think they might go domestic terrorism on him.
I'm not sure if the, if the crime is considered federal yet. I know he 3D printed a gun. But he's gonna be labelled a radical terrorist. And you can agree with that if you like. But you know what's completely normal? Do you know what's not only normal, but it's celebrated? They're 17-year-olds, US soldiers, 17-year-olds right now. And they're deployed in Syria. They're in Syria. The government of Syria fell apart last week. Syria is about to descend into chaos. Now you remember the podcast I did a couple of months ago? About the Middle East, where you can trace, trace the turmoil in the Middle East to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, where Britain and France divided the area of the Middle
East to put it into consistent sectarian division for perpetual chaos. So that it could, if the resources in the Middle East could be exploited to benefit the West. Well, that's still happening. So right now, there's 17, 18, 19-year-old.
American US troops deployed in Syria and I'll tell you what they're doing. I don't even have, I'm not gonna even tell you what they're doing. I let, I let the president of America tell you what they're doing.
And then they say, he left troops in Syria. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They're protecting the oil. We're taking the oil, we're not taking the oil. Well, maybe we will, maybe we won't. They're protecting the facility. I don't know, maybe we should take it, but we have the oil right now. The United States has the oil. So they say, he left troops in Syria. No, I got rid of all of them. Other than we're protecting the oil. We have the oil.
So that's not AI, I didn't fake anything there. That, that's actual Donald Trump, president-elect, saying the quiet part out loud. Explicitly saying that the US troops are in Syria to take the oil. Why is he taking the oil? Because he feels entitled to the oil. That's manifest destiny, right there. That's unfettered American capitalism. We're taking the oil for the freedom of profits. But it's not your oil, and then the people of Syria say, but that's our oil. We thought you're America. The deal was, when America comes into our country, you liberate us and bring democracy. What about our oil?
And then the people of Syria become a sick patient, ringing up their health insurance company under the mistaken belief that they were covered. You are in your fuck covered. That's our oil now because of profits. Cause Trump doesn't give a fuck, he's not mincing his words there. He's explicitly saying why US troops are in Syria. What he's supposed to say is, we are helping Syria peacefully transition to democracy. We are rebuilding Syria. That's what Kamala Harris would be saying. But Trump, Trump is like, no.
You see Kamala, she would do something evil, but tell you she's not doing something evil. I'm gonna do something evil and tell you I'm doing it out of sheer brazenness. So, we're in Syria, taking the oil. We're taking their oil, it's ours now. And the troops are there to defend the oil that we're stealing. Is that okay? And they're gonna get away with it because of chaos. Like I said, you go as far back as the Brits, nineteen seventeen, as soon as they figured out oil was present in the Middle East. All western meddling in the Middle East has been to create chaos and destabilization for the extraction of resources.
To benefit you and me, to benefit you and me as citizens of the global north within the American empire. That sounds like a conspiracy theory. There's no conspiracy theory, that's just capitalism, that's capitalism and colonialism. It feels like a conspiracy theory because we're used to having it described to us using a very different set of words and value systems. And Israel is just a giant western aircraft carrier in the middle of all this. Let's take it back to the man who shot the CEO of the health company. The media will portray this person as a terrorist, as a radical, as a criminal, as a murderer, as a bad person.
That's normalized, that's a normal view within the media, that's how it's gonna be portrayed. What's also completely normal and acceptable is that there's US troops, seventeen year olds, and they are in Syria stealing the oil. And they're gonna shoot dead civilians in Syria while protecting the oil. And then they'll get medals and they'll be called heroes. And the entire ideological structure and framework within the media is gonna portray, it's gonna portray those soldiers as heroes that are protecting freedom and democracy. They're protecting capitalism. They're stealing oil from the people of Syria and they'll shoot anybody who tries to get in their way.
These men are heroes, they're killing for the values of their country. That fellow who shot the CEO, he views himself the same way. As far as he's concerned, the health insurance companies are at war with the American people. So he shot one of them, so now he's a terrorist. Guess who's not a terrorist anymore? Abu Mohammed Al Joulani, the leader of HTS, who overthrew Assad in Syria this week. If you read the media, he is a rebel leader, he's a revolutionary, and he's not a terrorist. He was a terrorist in 2017, when he founded Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian wing of Al Qaeda. Do you remember Al Qaeda?
They flew two planes into the World Trade Center as an act of terrorism and a symbolic act against American capitalism and globalization. ISIS, basically. So, he was a terrorist back in 2017. The US Embassy in Syria, they still have the tweet, the tweet is still up, where they have his photograph, he's dressed in traditional Islamic gear, it's a wanted poster, there's a price on his head. In 2017, the US were like, this fellow's like a terrorist, he's in ISIS. But now, he's called a rebel leader, and he's dressed identical to President Zelensky. And last week, I saw a headline in The Telegraph that said, "How Syria's Diversity-Friendly
Jihadists Plan on Building a State." And that's probably happening, that's probably the CIA, and maybe Mossad. That's what they do. They've done it loads of times before, that's what they do. This fellow was, this fellow was arrested by the Yanks, went in as a jihadi and came out as a revolutionary. He was literally, like literally, a specially designated global terrorist, according to the US. He was up there with Bin Laden. Now he's not anymore, he's a freedom fighter, he's not a terrorist. He's dressed like President Zelensky, he's diversity-friendly, and he's gonna bring stability to Syria. Now, he took Assad from power, but I'm not defending Bashar al-Assad.
He was horrendous, he was horrible. He used chemical weapons on his own people, an absolute- Dictator, but you think America want Assad gone because he's cruel to his people? No. Number one, Assad funds Hamas and gives sanctuary to leaders of Hamas in Damascus. So Israel, who are next door neighbours to Syria, they want Assad gone. Assad was an ally of Iran, so the US and Israel want him gone. There's a huge area of Syria called the Golden Heights, which has been occupied by Israel since the seventies, I think. Now that Assad is gone, right now, Israel are bombing all of Syria's military infrastructure to destabilise and demilitarise the country.
And Netanyahu announced it the other day, they're now effectively, they're annexing the Golden Heights to make it part of Israel. And then on top of all of this, now that Assad is gone, Russia is gone from Syria. So now Russia no longer has a heavy presence in the Middle East. So this is all a big strategic win for America and Israel. And most likely utter chaos and destabilisation for the people of Syria. But that's good for America too, because now they can, as Trump said, they can steal the oil. You can steal the oil when a country is destabilised. That's where our oil came from the last decade. That's what America did in Iraq, under the premise of democracy. So that's what happened in the past week with Syria.
And based on, on past behaviour and how it's been spoken about in the media. I reckon it's, it's the hidden hand of the CIA and Assad. Do you know who else worked for the CIA and was funded by the CIA? Bin Laden. That's not conspiracy theory, it's fact, it's fact. Look it up. In the nineteen eighties, Bin Laden was the head of the Mojahideen in, in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets. And they were fully funded by the CIA. Ronald Reagan called them freedom fighters. And then they became terrorists. The lad who shot the CEO, he's a terrorist. The US soldiers defending oil, defending oil rigs, they're heroes. It's all down to the, the narrative that supports the ideology of capitalism. How the fuck did I start talking about this? This podcast was supposed to be about balonais.
I wanted to do a podcast about balonais.
So yeah, that, that's, that fella who shot the CEO, that's the reason I'm not wearing a balaclava in Limerick. It's freezing cold, it's freezing cold. All I want is to be able to walk around in the cold while every centimeter of my body is toasty and warm. I adore doing that. It brings me great meaning, it brings me great happiness. However, my face is fucking freezing. My face is freezing because the rest of me is so dry and warm. So the logical next step is to, is to wear a balaclava, to wear a balaclava. But the events in the news of the past week have made me realise that I can't get away with a balaclava. I can't wear a balaclava in Limerick City because it's just a set of eyes.
And then a person is going to come up to me and say, "Oh, are you blind, boy? I'm a stranger and I'd like to have an unplanned and spontaneous conversation about horse outside and then I'm gonna run." I literally run away and the parameters of social acceptability for the balaclava change rapidly depending on the speed that you're travelling while wearing a fucking balaclava. So I can walk around Limerick wearing a balaclava, but I can't run through Limerick wearing a balaclava. Now I'm a criminal and if a stranger stopped me on the street to talk about horse outside, I'd run. I would literally, I would run away from them. So thank you to the United Healthcare Assassin for helping me come to the conclusion that
I shouldn't buy a balaclava. And also, like, I adore walking around in the freezing cold while being incredibly warm and dry. It gives me a feeling of control. I strive to operate under a philosophy of, I've no control over what happens to me, but I have full control over how I react to what happens to me. And what I'm referring to there is my emotions, my attitudes, my views. I have the freedom to respond to my environment. And when it's real cold, that, that, that's a harsh, unpleasant environment. So I, I respond to that environment by dressing up really warm. So doing that reminds me that I have the choice to do that with my emotions too.
But when I do that... I realised that it is impossible to mindfully experience the wonderful warmth of being wrapped up in the cold without wondering what it's like for somebody who can't wrap up in the cold. So every December, I buy hats and gloves for people who are homeless on the streets, people who are begging for drug addicts, for people who are going through addiction in particular. It's not expensive. It's like 10 quid. If I see a person on the street who's begging or who's going through addiction, I buy them hats and gloves. And the people who are experiencing addiction in particular, they're very, very grateful. It's clearly,
this makes a massive, massive impact on the quality of their life. Because people experiencing addiction, if they get a tenner, they might not be able to buy gloves and a hat with that money because they're in addiction. So they need their drugs just to feel normal. So I'm saying this, I'm not looking for brownie pints for ye to think, oh, isn't blind by so kind and lovely. It's not a gigantic financial investment. A tenner for fucking gloves and a hat, that's the price of a lunch. But if it's fucking, if it's freezing, if it's absolutely freezing, be the person who thinks of that. Just run into the shop, get the gloves and the hat and give them to that person. It makes a huge fucking difference to their quality of life. Like imagine, like imagine being outside all day long and don't
have a fucking hat and gloves. The other thing is if these people are sleeping rough, something like a hat and gloves, you lose a lot of heat through the head. A hat might save a person's life if they were sleeping rough, you know. And the thing is too, with Christmas, people have their heads up their arses at Christmas. People walk around town just thinking of shopping, distracted by lists and things they have to do. So homeless people don't get noticed as much. But I'm saying, I'm saying this on the podcast because I know, I'm not looking for brownie pints, but I know that ye will listen to this and then one of ye is gonna buy a homeless person gloves and a hat tomorrow. You'd be thinking about it and that's exactly what that person needs. And the reason I think about it is,
I can't, I can't walk around town in my double Gore-Tex and pockets of fucking air, relishing warmth. I can't do that while there's someone else on the street with no fucking gloves and blue hands. And unfortunately, there's, there's quite a bit of that in Limerick, unfortunately. So I actually wanted to speak about spaghetti bolognese on this week's podcast.
Like, I fucking love spaghetti marinara. It's... Do you know what? Let's have the ocarina pause first before I move on to spaghetti marinara's discourse. I play the ocarina now. I've got my big fat bass ocarina, the one that's friendly to the ears of dogs.
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That was the Ocarina pause there. You'd have heard an algorithmically generated advert inserted there. I include the Ocarina pause so that you don't get startled. Don't get startled by an advert. I don't know what fucking advert plays. Acast put in the adverts. Sometimes they're very loud and shocking, so I like to put in an Ocarina pause to warn you. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it keeps you informed, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever the fuck this podcast brings you, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living.
It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I pay for my equipment. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I have the time and space to research and write this podcast each week. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And also, if you're becoming a new patron, please only sign up on a desktop, right?
If you sign up to my Patreon and the Patreon app on an Apple iPhone, dirty bastards, Apple will take 30% of the money that you give me. So please, if you are becoming a patron, try and do it on the desktop through patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And also...
Avoid signing up as a free, a free member. That means fuck all to me. That's just a way for Patreon to harvest your data and to have your email, but it doesn't financially support the podcast in any way. So if you are going to become a patron on Patreon, please give me actual money or listen for free. And also it keeps the podcast listener funded. Means that this podcast is listener funded, paid for by the listener. I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser can come in here and tell me what to speak about or how to speak about things. I can do whatever the fuck I want because this is listener funded. It's how we've been doing this now for seven years, nearly 400 episodes. I adore this model.
It brings me wonderful, immense joy each week to make a podcast about what I'm genuinely curious about and what I genuinely care about each week, rather than worrying about fucking advertisers who just want, they want podcast episodes based on how many listens you can get. That destroys creativity. Okay, some upcoming gigs. All my gigs now are in 2025. So you can get some tickets for Christmas if you like. Vicar Street on Monday, the 27th of January. Come along to that. Beautiful, delicious Vicar Street gig. That one's setting out quickly. February, the 2nd of February, no, sorry, the 9th of February, I'm in glamorous
leisure land in Galway. I have a fantastic guest for that. Friday, the 21st, Crescent Hall up in Drighaide, more glamour. Then 28th of February, Belfast, in the Waterfront Theatre. March, the 7th, I'm in the Ainec down in Killarney. Then on the 13th of March, I'm in the Cork Opera House. April, is it? Fucking Australia, New Zealand, that's sold out. Then 23rd of April, Limerick Fucking University Concert Hall, Limerick. Biggest gig I've ever done in Limerick. Can't wait for that. June, my big massive England and Scotland tour.
So, in, in June, starting on the, is that the first of June? Starting in June, Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich and Edinburgh is in there too. That tour, even though that tour is in June, that's really setting out quickly. People are buying tickets as Christmas presents. So if you do wanna come to my fucking England and Scotland tour, they are in June, which is ages away. If you're coming to that, get your tickets now, cause you might be disappointed. So this was, this was actually gonna be a spaghetti bolognese podcast. I just wanted to dedicate a podcast to spaghetti bolognese.
I didn't expect it to be anti-capitalist geopolitics, but look, fuck it, here we are. That's what felt right, and I think now it's time to talk about spaghetti bolognese. I adore spaghetti bolognese. I enjoy how no two spaghetti bolognese's are the same.
Taste your friend's spaghetti bolognese, it'll be very different to your spaghetti bolognese. It's very difficult to make a bollocks of a spaghetti bolognese. At its most basic level, you're talking about frying some minced beef. And then adding to this, a jar of, of bolognese sauce, generic Italian tomato sauce. You eat this with spaghetti and it's a perfectly acceptable meal. No complaints, it's comfort food, it's filling, and also it has the psychological impact. We process spaghetti bolognese as, as a healthy meal. Even though, if we're being honest, it's effectively a hamburger that shat itself.
Spaghetti is a type of lanky, unleavened, nervous bread. Beef mince is a burger patty that hasn't happened yet. A trainee burger and dal mio tomato sauce is ketchup on a horn. The most basic plate of spaghetti bolognese.
It's a deconstructed burger, it's a hamburger. But if I eat a hamburger for my dinner, my brain doesn't tell myself that I've just eaten a hearty meal. My brain tells myself, "You've just eaten junk food. You've just had a burger. It's just been bread, mince and ketchup." But spaghetti van hornaise is bread, mince and ketchup. Pasta, mince and fucking ragu sauce. But yet it feels as hearty as a stew. Spaghetti van hornaise was the first fancy meal. No, exotic, the first exotic meal that my ma ever cooked for me. Now, I mentioned before about pizzas.
Like, I think it was my seventh or eighth birthday, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had come out. I begged my mother, I said, "Please, can I have a fucking frozen pizza?" These were relatively new things. Frozen pizzas, we're talking early 90s here, frozen pizzas were relatively new in Ireland. And I asked my ma for a frozen pizza for my birthday. She was reluctant because it meant having to turn the fucking oven on. She hated turning on the oven. So my ma fried the frozen pizza for my birthday. But that wasn't the first time that my mother made what she would consider to be an exotic food. Exotic. Spaghetti van hornaise was the first exotic food that was cooked in my house.
I was a very small child, but I remember, the year was 1990, and the reason I remember is that Italian 90 was on TV. This was the World Cup, the Soccer World Cup. I know fuck all about sports, but I remember Italian 90 when I was a little child. Because Ireland, Ireland had done very well in this World Cup, and it was a big deal culturally in Ireland. And the one thing I do fucking remember is Ireland were knocked out of the World Cup because an Italian fella called Scolacci scored a goal against Ireland and knocked Ireland out. But then what happened?
When the commentators on TV or the news media, whatever, everyone was talking about fucking Scolacci, the Italian cunt, is after kicking Ireland out of the soccer tournament. Scolacci, you bollocks.
Whatever happened, some pundit said, maybe the Irish team should start eating spaghetti, should start eating spaghetti like Scalacci and then they'll become better football players. And then my older brother started demanding spaghetti. We want spaghetti for dinner. We want spaghetti like Scalacci. Now, I went looking up the, the Irish newspaper archives to see how many times and when bolognese was mentioned in Irish newspapers. It barely gets a mention. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, you'd have the odd Italian restaurant advertising in a newspaper and bolognese is on the menu.
So it's really only around the late 80s that you start to see bolognese begin to be mentioned frequently in Irish newspapers, particularly a brand of jar sauce called Dal Mio. You have to remember too, and I've told you this before, there's a woman in Limerick, she's in her mid 40s, and her name is Lasagna. The name on her birth cert is Lasagna. I know Lasagna, I know her. She goes by Sanya, her name is Sanya. Anyone who knows her, her name is fucking Sanya. But her actual name on her birth cert is Lasagna because in the late 70s, her parents from Limerick went on holidays to Italy.
They heard the name Lasagna, thought it sounded beautiful and then named their daughter Lasagna. So there's a woman in Limerick and her name is Lasagna. Sanya, Sanya, quite an easy change, but her fucking name on her birth cert is Lasagna. That's how alien and strange European food was to Ireland when we were just entering the European Union. You have to remember before the European Union, Ireland had a, an economic policy of protectionism, very insular, not a lot of imports and a post-colonial sense of, of looking inwards at our Irishness and not allowing anything else in. So that's how you get a girl called Lasagna in the fucking 70s.
So anyway, I'm looking through the Irish newspaper archives and I do start to see an explosion of Dal Mio sauce from about 1985 onwards. Now, I remember my ma saying, we're not cooking that fucking exotic shit. Her exact words, we're not cooking exotic shit in reference to bolognese. And this was about 1990, so. To my mother, this would actually have been considered extravagant, exotic, foreign food, this bolognese, and it was probably expensive compared to other groceries at the time. But my ma gave in because all my brothers were obsessed with fucking scelacci scoring goals.
And she went and bought a jar of Dalmio and a tub of spaghetti, followed the instructions. And I'll never forget it, I was a tiny little kid, it was amazing. It was the mouth feel, the mouth feel of the spaghetti combined with the sauce and meat. Whatever the spaghetti did to distribute the meat, I'd never tasted minced meat like that before. I instantly fell in love with spaghetti bolognese. And the best part was, my ma was pleasantly surprised at how incredibly easy the entire process was. Now, my dad didn't eat any of it, he was terrified, terrified of any strange foods. He said, "I can't eat that, that'll cut the belly off me."
Didn't even know what that meant. My dad didn't eat any. But my ma couldn't believe, like, how much easier it was to cook pasta than boil a lot of spuds and peel them. And then the simplicity of having something like minced meat, which is usually flavourless when it's plain. Getting something like minced meat and just adding a jar to it. And then you get this explosion of flavour that everyone adores. So my ma started to buy Dalmio sauce and spaghetti. Once a week, we'd fucking spaghetti bolognese once a week. And it was my favourite meal from my childhood. Spaghetti bolognese was the first, the first meal I learned to cook when I moved out of home. And I don't think I'm alone in that.
I think it's most people's first meal. It's, it's, it's so simple, but when you eat it, it feels like a proper dinner. It's not chicken nuggets and chips in the oven. It's just as simple, but it feels like an actual meal. And when I started to cook it for myself, I was in my early twenties and I had absolutely no money. So when you're in that situation. You're no longer buying a jar of dol mio. You're making your own bolognese from scratch, using the tins of tomatoes that you get in Aldi for 16 cents. And then you start to realise that the best bolognese is the one that you make yourself from scratch, with garde cloves and fresh basil.
But it was around that time that I started to look for authentic bolognese recipes. What's the actual Italian bolognese recipe if I really wanna make it from scratch? And when you do that, you start to realise spaghetti bolognese doesn't fucking exist. It doesn't exist in Italy. There's no dish called spaghetti bolognese in Italy. If you go to an Italian restaurant, like one in Italy in particular, and ask for it, they don't have it. The dish that we know as spaghetti bolognese was invented outside of Italy, probably sometime after World War II, from maybe soldiers that had been in Italy and returned to either Britain or the US.
But the spaghetti bolognese that we know and love is, it's a vaguely Italian tomato slop recreated by foreigners from memory, which then became so popular in the UK and in the US that Italian restaurants had to begrudgingly add this fake Italian dish to their restaurant menus, because that's all anyone wanted in Britain and in the US. The closest thing to spaghetti bolognese in Italy is... So there's a city called Bologna. That's where bolognese, that's where the name comes from, Bologna. It's in the north of Italy.
And in Bologna, they have a sauce that's called a meat ragù, R-A-G-U. It's minced beef, veal, diced tomato, celery, onions, red wine, and the tiniest hint of tomato paste. But it's a meat sauce, and this is meat ragù from Bologna. And even the name ragù, R-A-G-U, that comes from the French, R-O-G-O-U-T, which is a type of French stew. Because during the Napoleonic Wars, French soldiers brought their beef stew to the north of Italy, and then ragù is based on that. So that's the closest thing there is to spaghetti bolognese. But it's nothing like spaghetti bolognese.
There's no fucking tomatoes in it. So spaghetti bolognese that we enjoy. It's bullshit, it's made up, it's an Italian slop that we just imagine, but it's still fucking delicious, it's still delicious. And over the years, I perfected my own recipe, it's very simple. I start off with the, the sofrito, which is diced celery, onions, carrot and garlic. I fry that, then I add my meat, usually beef mince or a mix of beef and pork mince, chopped fresh basil, salt and pepper, and the most important ingredient of all, San Marzano tomatoes in a can.
They're just incredible Italian tomatoes, unparalleled. And that's what makes my baronese. Sometimes I might add a bit of red wine, other time a bit of Worcestershire sauce, whatever the fuck I want. But the San Marzano tomatoes are what make it, they're the most important ingredient. And what really made me notice this was a couple of years ago, just after the pandemic, my baronese starts to become shit and I couldn't really figure out. It's like, why is it so bad now, what's going on? So what had actually happened, and it took nearly a year to realise this.
I'd bought a new pair of shoes, they were Nikes, Nike fucking trainers, right?
And every time I went to the canned goods aisle to buy my San Marzano tomatoes, every time I reached for my San Marzano tomatoes, I got a tiny electric shock. The shoes were obviously whatever, whatever material the shoes were made out of, they were building up static and whatever particular type of metal these Italian San Marzano tomatoes, when I went to touch this fucking tin of tomatoes, most of the time, it gave me a fairly unpleasant shock. When it happened a second or third time, I began to yelp, yelping like
Like yelping, yelping in duns, touching the tomatoes because I'm getting an electric shock. But the thing is, the yelping, the yelping is then worse than the shock because when you yelp, if you yelp in the supermarket, people stare at you. And I didn't like that one bit, that made me deeply uncomfortable. So I start to get the shocks from the cans of San Marzano. And then I notice each time I go back, now I'm wary, I'm wary of the San Marzano tin. I'm not just grabbing for it now. It's taken me 20 seconds to slowly put my hand towards the tin.
And then I start to experience what's called anticipatory anxiety. So I don't really know when the shock is going to happen. I don't know if it's going to happen and I don't know how intense the shock is going to happen. Now, we're talking about a static shock here against a tin of tomatoes. So nothing major, fucking tiny. But because I'd learned to expect the electric shock, the anticipation of that negative outcome causes it to grow and grow. So then when I finally reach for the tin of tomatoes to touch it, when the shock does occur, I experience it as four or five times as extreme as it needs to be.
The anticipatory anxiety had almost heightened the sensitivity around my finger. So now this tiny shock is deeply unpleasant until I just said, fuck that, no more San Marzano tomatoes. Now, I didn't know it was the shoes. I didn't know it's this particular pair of Nikes. I hadn't a clue, I just thought I was going electric. It was the middle of the fucking pandemic or at the end of the pandemic. I thought I was becoming more electric. So I moved from San Marzano tomatoes in the tin to just no tomatoes at all, little bit of tomato paste. I was following the Bologna Ragù. The electric shocks that I was experiencing from trying to touch the tin of tomatoes
had inadvertently pushed my recipe very close into the direction of the traditional Bologna Ragù. I didn't want to use fresh tomatoes, just it didn't feel right. So I said, fuck it, I'll stick with this traditional recipe, but I didn't like it until. I got rid of the shoes, I got rid of the shoes, and then was able to return to the San Marzano tomatoes to make my delicious baronese. But anyway, there's no connection between the baronese that we eat and the city of Bologna in Italy. But my unique experience of getting electric shocks from tomatoes while trying to make baronese,
that actually does have a direct correlation with the city of Bologna. Up until about the 18th century, people didn't know how the mus- how our muscles moved. People didn't understand how our muscles moved, or how an animal's muscle moved. Like, there was a Roman physician called Galen. So I'm talking ancient Rome, and Galen believed that, because he used to dissect bodies, that the human body moves because we have nerves. But nerves are effectively hollow tubes that send our soul or our spirit down these tubes to our fingers and muscles, and this is how we move. So in the Italian city of Bologna, sometime around the late 1700s, there was a scientist called Galvani.
And Galvani was obsessed with,
you know, how the fuck do muscles move? How do animals walk? What's going on there? What's happening in the soul for movement to occur? So Galvani, he devised an experiment using frogs' legs. He cut the legs off frogs, and he found that by pressing certain metals against the legs of a dead frog, that he could make the legs twitch and move with just the presence of metal on the dead frog's flesh. But the frog is dead, but the legs are moving as if it's alive. So Galvani, he was the first person to discover that muscles move using electricity,
that our brains, and animals' brains, they actually send electrical signals through the muscles, and that's how movement occurs. And what Galvani was specifically discovering there and specifically doing, by pressing the metal against the dead frog's leg, he was generating static, static electricity, and this was causing the muscle to spasm. And that's the exact same process. When I was, when I was in Dun's, in the, in the tin goods aisle, trying to grab my Saint Marzan or tomatoes, and whatever metal that that tin was made out of, and the static build up of my body and the rubber shoes,
my fingers were becoming the frog's legs. I was generating a little static spark and it was causing my fingers to spasm. But the synchronicity I enjoy with this whole story is that, so around seventeen ninety, that's the time of the Napoleonic wars. That's when French soldiers are gonna be present in the city of Bolognese. That's when the recipe, the French inspired recipe of the Bolognese ragout gets introduced. At the same time, there's a scientist in Bolognese who discovers that if he makes static from metal against a dead frog's legs, that this is how muscles move. And then I receive static shocks on my hand in a supermarket
two hundred years later, and those static shocks, unbeknownst to myself, push me towards a more authentic ragout sauce from Bolognese. And I enjoy, I enjoy that synchronicity. Maybe that's mentally insane. Maybe I've gone too far this time. Maybe,
maybe those connections are a bit too much and that would get me diagnosed with schizophrenia. I'm fully aware of the gigantic,
of the absolutely unhinged leap that I've made there. But you know what? I enjoy it. It means something to me. It's something I've thought about. I'm not saying it's true. I'm not saying it's true. I'm not saying there was some type of supernatural frog's legs, Napoleonic stew, time travelling thing going on. I enjoy how static shocks from a tin of tomatoes inadvertently changed my Baronais recipe to an actual Baronais recipe from Bolognese. And that's also the city where it was discovered that static shocks play an important part in, in the movement of muscles. Completely unhinged. I'm fully aware of that. All right, I haven't gone mad. I just think that's fun.
I, I have fun with those type of connections. All right. And I'm very, very grateful that I have the space here. To do that, I can do, I can do that here without judgment and you can take that or leave it. And I'm not suggesting that there's some type of Napoleonic ghost, time traveling ghost stew going on here via electricity and frog's legs. All right, that's all I've got time for this week. That was an absolutely bizarre podcast, I think. That was a bit of a strange one. Not very festive, not very, maybe I'll be back next week with something a bit festive. In the meantime, rub a dog genuflect to a
swan and buy a hat and some gloves for a human being who's absolutely freezing. If that's not too much trouble. Dog bless.
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