Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast A 19th century volcanic eruption resulted in people training Falcons to have sex with their heads About this episode How a 19th century volcanic eruption caused people to train Falcons to have sex with their heads 150 years later Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Do a jobby on God's brawly, you swampy cosbys. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. It's late evening here in Limerick City. I'm watching a blood red sun winking at me, winking at me as it dips over the mountains. I'm going to be recording this one late night because
1:31 Blindboy Boatclub? the weather has been spectacular. Today, it's been a real fucking summer's day. And my air conditioner is not working in my office. And I'm up at the very top. It's fucking roasting. It's 30 degrees.
1:47 Blindboy Boatclub? So I'm waiting for that sun to go down. Oh, it's fucking gorgeous.
1:53 Blindboy Boatclub? It's pink and red. What a pleasure to be able to look at that. But I'm waiting for the sun to go down. And for the air to cool. And for some air to come in my window, because I've no fucking AC, it's roasting. And... What do I see in the distance? I believe someone is burning out a car. The unmistakable thick white plumes.
2:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Of a burnt out car in the distance. Or maybe, benefit of the doubt. Actually, tomorrow, tomorrow. Is bonfire night. April 30th. Sometimes people light bonfires. It's April 29th as I record this. Maybe it's a little practice bonfire.
2:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Bonfire night there. Harking back to the... The Irish pre-Christian tradition of Bialtana. Festival where we welcome in the summer. This weekend in Limerick, we're gonna have... Thing called River Fest. Which is always wonderful crack. There's an international barbecue competition. It's just, Limerick is gonna be wonderful this weekend. The weather will be cracking and there'll be tons of people out. Out on the street, enjoying the place. I'm seeing more and more. Travel vloggers. Travel vloggers. Coming to Limerick. Visiting Limerick. And spending a weekend here. And having a wonderful time.
3:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Lots of them are coming here because of my podcast. I've been tagged in. Like, three videos the past few weeks of travel vloggers. Who've come to Limerick. Specifically because they heard about the place and my podcast. And that does... That fills me with fucking pride. It really does, because... We've got a reputation problem in Limerick. We have had for some time. We're called Stab City. People think that Limerick is a very violent place where you get stabbed or shot, or where gangs run rampant. That's not true. There were gang problems maybe 20
4:05 Blindboy Boatclub? years ago. But the story is too good. The name Stab City is too good. A myth, a narrative emerged all over Ireland that go anywhere but Limerick, don't go to Limerick, it's too dangerous. And that is genuinely, that's had a really negative impact on the city. Tourists just don't come here. They're actively encouraged not to come here. And that's changing. That's flipping. And like even if there's any Limerick people listening, I suppose there is Limerick people listening to the fucking podcast because I sold out the Limerick concert hall there last week, which I wasn't expecting at all. Couldn't believe I did that. So I guess I do have listeners in
4:50 Blindboy Boatclub? Limerick City. I thought I was more of an outside Limerick City thing. But all Limerick people are, we're very aware that the city has an image problem. And any, if you're a Limerick person and you're on a night out and you're in a pub and you meet someone who's here on a visit, we go out of our way to be really nice and friendly to those people because we're conscious of the bullshit, unfair reputation that we have. So it's been incredible to see vloggers from like America and Canada and England coming to Limerick, recording little videos. And all of them are just like, holy fuck, this place is amazing. We have a gorgeous river, huge Shannon River.
5:37 Blindboy Boatclub? Buildings that look on to us were very unique as an Irish city in that a lot of Limerick was designed on a grid, on a grid system. In fact, an engineer called Christopher Coles, who in the 1700s, I believe, he designed an area of Limerick City on the grid system before he then moved to America to work on the grid system in New York. So I love Limerick. That's why I live here. It's my home. And we love it. We love it when people come here to visit and have a bit of crack because our city, the city centre's kind of, it can get a bit empty in the evening times. It can get a bit empty. Hopefully that's going to change now.
6:20 Blindboy Boatclub? There's this new initiative just launched today. The government launched it. It's called Twilight Thursdays and Limerick has been chosen as a city for this. Where basically on the last Thursday of every month, there's going to be like live events, restaurants, food. They'll be incentivising restaurants to stay open later. I think there's 40% off taxis. There's this huge initiative to bring people into the city centre in the evenings on Thursdays. And I'm looking forward to that because Limerick City, I'm looking at it right now at my window. Limerick fucking city as the sun is going down on a summer's evening is stunning. A
7:03 Blindboy Boatclub? coffee or a pint as the sun is going down on Limerick City looking on the river. It's one of my favourite places to be in the world. The only shitty thing about it is that no one's around. Now, if I'm giving you the horn for Limerick, this weekend is a good time to visit. The Maybank holiday weekend Riverfest is going to be cracking. And in Limerick, Riverfest usually, it heralds the arrival of summer. As soon as Riverfest happens, we know that it's summer in Limerick. But for me, summer happens in Limerick when the starlings arrive back to the Bardshit district. If you're a new listener, maybe go back to
7:47 Blindboy Boatclub? an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. But if you're a, if you're a 10-foot Declan or a steaming Queva, you know what the Bardshit district is.
8:02 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a street in Limerick City called Bedford Row. It's a pedestrianized street, beautiful street, where we have restaurants and cafes. And the sun sets down and it's fucking gorgeous. And it's lined with trees that are absolutely beautiful when they have leaves on them. But in the summer months,
8:26 Blindboy Boatclub? it's invaded by starlings. In the evening time, a gigantic flock of maybe 10,000 starlings, they go into the trees in the bird shit district. And they shit violently, they shit violently and aggressively. That's why it's called the bird shit district. I did a podcast about this back in 2023, I believe. The podcast name is called An In-Depth Thesis About Bird Shit, where I, I basically go into the history of bird shit. Fascinating, a fascinating substance.
9:09 Blindboy Boatclub? And I make the case that bird shit is the reason that the earth has a population of eight billion people. And it's a strong thesis. But this street in Limerick, Bedford Row.
9:23 Blindboy Boatclub? So the starlings, the starlings gather in the trees at about 7pm. They haven't started yet, they're gonna arrive. They're in Eastern Europe right now. And they're flying back, they're on their way back, they're migratory birds. They're on their way back to Limerick and I'm expecting them. Probably this time next week, this time next week, they'll be in Limerick City. But they're on their way back now. And the whole summer, every single night, they go into the trees, they chat. And about 10,000 of them, they shit, they shit, they shit so much that when you walk down the street, you can hear shitting. But then what happens is they're shitting on, on pavement.
10:08 Blindboy Boatclub? And the ground becomes grey and slippery with litres and litres of bird shit. And then the stink, the smell of this street is unlike anything you've ever smelled because you're not supposed to smell that volume of bird shit. And this wonderful paved street that we have in Limerick, where our restaurants are supposed to be, you fucking can't walk down it in the summertime. People have their, people literally put their, their t-shirts up over their mouths because the smell of bird shit is so intense and you can slip on the bird shit. And then every morning Limerick Council has to come out in these machines to try and remove the bird shit.
10:53 Blindboy Boatclub? But anyway, the Limerick City Council, they hate it when I draw attention to this. They speak about it in council meetings. It's been communicated to me privately that I should shut the fuck up about it. No, I won't. During the year, a member of Limerick City Council pretended he'd never heard of me.
11:12 Blindboy Boatclub? A Limerick City councillor. Someone brought up in a council meeting my name, blind by, and this Limerick City councillor pretended to have never heard of me. He said that he was too old, he was too old to keep up with these young influencers. This man was born in nineteen ninety. He was being performative. He was pretending, passive aggressive, he was pretending he'd never heard of me. And it was so ridiculous, it made it into the paper, that it, a Limerick City councillor was pretending he'd never heard of the one man in Limerick who is known outside of Limerick for wearing a plastic bag on his head, which is just ridiculous. You don't have to listen to the podcast, but most people in Limerick are aware that there's a man who wears a plastic bag on his head.
11:54 Blindboy Boatclub? But anyway, you, you will not believe what they've done in the bird shit district of the past couple of weeks. You're not gonna believe this. So one of the things I adore about Limerick is, this is a very surreal place. There's a madness here. There's a, there's a surreal madness in Limerick, which isn't deliberate. It just floats in the ether. My favourite example, and I've spoken about this a good few times, but during Covid, during the fucking pandemic, when all the restaurants were shut down for like three months.
12:29 Blindboy Boatclub? And then they were reopening the restaurants and we had to do outdoor dining. Like, I don't know if you remember that, but in Ireland, we, we used to not have an outdoor dining culture because the place was fucking freezing. Then the pandemic hit and we had to suddenly have outdoor dining. So Limerick City Council, they were trying to get everybody in Limerick. We'd had like three months of lockdown, right? We've all forgotten about it. The whole thing was way too traumatizing. We don't like to think about the pandemic. We don't like to talk about it. It's a very strange thing, but we've all collectively, me included, we've collectively forgotten the pain of that. But the first lockdown, we were locked inside for about two months.
13:15 Blindboy Boatclub? And then all of a sudden, it's like restaurants are gonna open, but you're gonna have to eat outside. So Limerick City Council, instead of providing people with actual outdoor seats, instead, instead of providing people with actual seats to sit outside restaurants, they built one giant seat and a giant table. I'm not joking you, I'm talking a hundred feet tall.
13:43 Blindboy Boatclub? They, they built, I'd forgotten about this. They built a giant seat and a giant table as an art installation. And then they got giant forks and giant spoons. Like, I'm talking about six feet tall. And they hung them up off all the lamp posts. No knives, because you can't have giant knives in Limerick City, because it's called Stab City. So they put giant forks and spoons and a giant table and a giant chair. But no actual human-sized chairs that you could sit on. And everyone just went out into the streets going, this is great. What's the fucking point of this?
14:28 Blindboy Boatclub? What's the point of this? Where's the outdoor dining? There is none. There's an art installation instead. And it was nuts. It was just deeply surreal. It was a deeply surreal moment. Well, guess what they've done now?
14:43 Blindboy Boatclub? So this street, the Bardshit District, where Limerick City Council are like, "Don't call it the Bardshit District. Don't speak about the Bardshit problem. We're trying to pretend it doesn't exist. We go out every morning at seven and we wipe the Bardshit away. Don't speak about the Bardshit problem." Do you know what they've done?
15:03 Blindboy Boatclub? There's now a giant sixty-foot mural of a starling in the Bardshit District. And I don't think it's intentional. I don't think they're being ironic. It's like, there's one street in the city where there's so much Bardshit you're gonna slip and it stinks. And we're trying to play it down. I know. Let's put a giant sixty-foot mural of a fucking starling in the middle of it. It's like, it's like they've given up. It's like they've given up and said, "Look, the bards have won, the starlings have won. Let's now worship the starling." Now, it's a gorgeous mural. It's beautiful. It's made by a local artist by the name of Oni Ono.
15:45 Blindboy Boatclub? It's this incredibly detailed, well-painted, beautiful piece of public art. Like, on the side of a building. On the side of a building that was just a blank facade, now you've got this wonderful painting of a starling. But in a way, it is the giant tables and chairs all over again. Like, if you're visiting Limerick and you go up this thoroughfare and it's the evening, like, you're gonna notice, "Holy fuck. This place is dripping with Bardshit and it stinks of Bardshit. And there's a hundred thousand bards screaming and I can't even talk because there's so many bards on this street. And then you look up and there's a giant mural of a bard. There's a mural of the bard that's doing all the shitting."
16:30 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, I love it. I love it. I love calling the place the Bardshit District. And I love the giant mural in the Bardshit District because it's, it's very pagan now. It's a very pagan thing. It's, it's like nature worship. We're in the temple of the bards where they all shit on the ground and you respect this space. But- Like, I'm also aware that I'm a fucking fruitcake. Look, I'm autistic, but I'm aware that I wear a fucking plastic bag on my head. I'm here trying to present a serious podcast about a plastic bag on my head. So it's pot calling the kettle black shit when it comes to Limerick City Council.
17:11 Blindboy Boatclub? But mo- most people, most people don't want a street full of bard shit with a giant bard mural in it. Most people don't want that. They'd, they'd prefer just wine bars and restaurants and things like that. Here's the fucking problem. You can't, so it's hard to enjoy the restaurants and the wine bars on the street in a summer evening. Such is the stench of bard shit. It's that bad that you actually can't even have a pint and you sure as fuck can't eat a dinner. You cannot eat a dinner when six feet away from you. It sounds like it's raining. It's, it sounds like it's raining bard shit from about seven in the evening until nine in the evening.
17:55 Blindboy Boatclub? It sounds like it's raining bard shit on this street. So I'm stunned with the giant bard mural. I, I cannot believe they've done it. What I've always said before about Limerick City Council, no disrespect, but what I've always said is you, you're never, you're never worried about whether or not they're gonna fuck something up. You know that they're gonna fuck it up. That's a guarantee, that, that's just guaranteed. You know they're gonna fuck it up, but what they surprise you with is how they fuck it up. That's not just a Limerick thing. That's not just Limerick City Council. That's an Irish thing. That's any, that's an Irish government type of thing. Again, I've done a podcast on that called It'll Be Grand.
18:37 Blindboy Boatclub? I have a theory, it's a post-colonial theory, that in Ireland, we've got a phrase. The phrase is, ah, it'll be grand, it'll be grand. It tends to mean, ah, fuck it, chill out, don't take it too seriously. Things will work themselves out, things will work themselves out. And it's a wonderful phrase that we have in Ireland and it's, it's very lighthearted. It creates quite a, a stress-free environment. I love it'll be grand. Now, like, speak to people, people who are not from Ireland, who come here to work. Especially if they're from like a diligent culture.
19:16 Blindboy Boatclub? So people may be from, from Northern Europe where things are done precisely and on time. They come to Ireland and they work in a fucking, in a business. And then Irish people are talking about this, it'll be grand, it'll be grand, it'll be grand. It can cause a huge amount of anxiety for German people, for instance. They're like, what the fuck do you mean it'll be grand? Like it'll be grand is the reason our buses don't arrive on time. Like in Ireland, buses don't arrive on time. That's just how it is. There's nothing wrong, nothing's broken. Buses don't arrive on time. Why don't buses arrive on time? Cause it'll be grand. The bus is gonna be here. It's probably gonna be here, but it's not gonna be on time. Cause it'll be grand.
20:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Like I, I was once on a bus to the airport. And the fucking bus driver stopped the bus so that he could get off. And go into a bookies and place a bed on a horse and then came back out and drove the bus. Chaos, but it's also one of those things I do like about Ireland. But my theory is that it'll be grand tends to be fine on an, on an individual basis. But when a group of Irish people collectively together say it'll be grand. Then you end up with fucking chaos. Then you have an environment where nobody's taking accountability. And it's how you end up with, with giant furniture or, or a gigantic.
20:45 Blindboy Boatclub? A gigantic painting of a starling. On a street where they're trying to downplay the starling shit problem. Nobody's being clever there. I promise you. I promise you, nobody's being clever. Nobody's trying to ironically subvert the starling shit problem there. They just didn't think about it. So for this week's podcast.
21:09 Blindboy Boatclub? I wanna follow a thread on some of the themes I'm speaking about.
21:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Kinda like, like a part two, almost like a part two to that podcast I made three years ago called An In-Depth Thesis About Bird Shit. I want to use the bird shit on this street as a starting point. On the other podcast from a few years back, I basically told the story of fertilizer, bird shit as, as a source of nitrogen. For this podcast, I, I've got a theory that a volcanic eruption that happened in the 1800s led to people training falcons to have sex with their heads, and it all ties back to the bird shit district. Hear me out.
21:58 Blindboy Boatclub? So why are there so many starlings in Limerick City? Why is this one street inundated with starlings every summer? Starlings, they're migratory birds. They're native birds, but they, I think our starlings, they fly off to, to Eastern Europe, then they come back. Starlings are fascinating. So, so this is what, you might have starlings in your city. Starlings are the ones who go up into this, into the sky, and they fly as one, and they dance in a pattern in the sky in the evenings, right? Those are starlings.
22:41 Blindboy Boatclub? So what happens in Limerick City with the starlings is you'd be down by the river, like I said, at twilight, having your pint or having your coffee, looking down on the river, and without fail, every night at about twilight, when the sun's going down and it's slanty and peachy, you look out above the Shannon River, and there's your starlings, and they're flying in the air together as one unified shape, right? That's known as a marmoration. Why do starlings do this? They're trying to frighten off predators, specifically birds of prey. If you look at those starlings moving together like a shoal of fish in the sky, sometimes
23:26 Blindboy Boatclub? they even look like a giant bird. It's phenomenal, but they are literally doing that to freak out any falcons or hawks or buzzards that are thinking of eating them. They're freaking them out. Then, once the starlings do that evening dance in the sky, when the sun goes down and the starlings are comfortable that they frightened off any hawks or any falcons,
23:54 Blindboy Boatclub? then the starlings come down and they rest in the trees. And in Limerick, they do this on this Bedford Row Street, the Bardship District. And thousands of them go into the leaves of the trees and they talk and talk and shit and talk and shit. Scientists reckon they're literally communicating about where to get the best food that day. But they're not just talking about food. In their droppings are seeds from plants that they've eaten that day. So like a starling murmuration going into trees and shitting on the ground, that's essential for the, the health of meadows and forests. But here in Limerick City, it's just paving.
24:38 Blindboy Boatclub? There's nothing there, but the starlings don't know. They think that they're in a, in a concrete forest. Now, there's a possibility that these starlings, because there's loads of them, there's a possibility that there's too many starlings because they don't have natural predators anymore. Even though they go up into the sky to do their murmuration, their dance to frighten off their predators, the falcons and the hawks. Even though they do that, the falcons and hawks, they're not in sufficient numbers to eat the starlings. And that's important. This is an ecosystem. Starlings are indigenous birds and there's birds of prey that are indigenous birds. And nature is cruel sometimes, but predators prey on flocks of animals
25:21 Blindboy Boatclub? and it benefits the entire ecosystem. But the starlings don't have predators anymore. So maybe there's too many starlings or maybe they're a little bit too relaxed. Maybe what's needed in Limerick City is a few fucking falcons, a few falcons and a few hawks that can prey upon the starlings and restore a sense of balance. And when I was thinking about that this week and researching it, I went down a fucking mad rabbit hole.
25:52 Blindboy Boatclub? So I started to ask myself the question of, you know, where the fuck are the hawks? Where are the hawks and the falcons and the buzzards? Why did these animals almost go fucking extinct? Why did they almost go extinct? Why do we have to put such great effort into reintroducing birds of prey specifically? Well, I want to begin by talking about a volcanic eruption in 1816. Actually, before I do that, because I don't want to interrupt myself, let's have a little Ocarina pause. Don't have an Ocarina, what have I got here? Scissors. I'm going to clip this scissors here and you're going to hear an advert for something, okay?
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28:49 Speaker 03 Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
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29:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Jesus Christ, this is a very, very strange podcast this week. God help anyone who's a new listener.
29:53 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not even going to explain why I'm doing this.
29:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, you'd have heard an advert there for some bullshit.
30:01 Blindboy Boatclub? This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast, because it's my full-time job. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I buy all my equipment. This is how I earn a living. It's how I pay my bills. I deliver this podcast every week. I write it, I research it, I do it all myself. And that's only possible because it's my full-time job. So if you want to support this podcast directly, please do on the Patreon page.
30:44 Blindboy Boatclub? All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. Once a month, that's it. If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint? Well, you can, but if you can't afford that, if you don't have any money right now, if you don't have a job, whatever the fuck, if you can't afford that, then you 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. Most importantly, keeping this podcast fully independent means I'm not beholden to advertisers. I'm not worried about how many listens I get, how popular the podcast is. I just want to make sure I show up each week.
31:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Show up each week and that every week that I make a podcast that I'm genuinely passionate about and where I'm genuinely exploring my curiosity. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And please, don't sign up using the Patreon app on an iPhone because Apple will take 30% of your money. Fuck that. Do it on a browser or on a browser on your phone. Upcoming gigs. My tour of England and Scotland there in June. That's only a month away now. I can't wait to do that. Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich.
32:08 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm coming doing some wonderful live podcasts with cracking guests. They're gonna be magnificent gigs. Come out, gee cracking tens, and come to my live podcasts in June. And then after that, what the fuck have we got?
32:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Derry, there in September on the 19th. Derry's gonna be good fun. And then, there is a Vicar Street, I believe, also in Dublin in September. So come along to that too. I hope I'm able to record my fucking podcast now when I'm on the road in, in, in England and Scotland. It's an intense tour, a very intense tour, and it's like three weeks. So hopefully, I'll be able to get my shit out. So I wanna talk about the disappearance of, of birds of prey, specifically falcons. Cause all around the world, their numbers diminished. So insects and parasites, fleas, ticks.
33:11 Blindboy Boatclub? These used to be a, a huge problem in, in human society. Even a hundred years ago, less, up until the 1940s. Human beings would have nits in their hair, fleas would be biting them, parasites. A lot of us really take for granted today that we don't really have to think about fleas and nits and ticks as part of our daily life. We don't have to think about these things, they're not around anymore. Like disease too. The fucking plague, the plague that killed millions. In the medieval period, was spread by fleas.
33:53 Blindboy Boatclub? So in 1816, there was this volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora. And it erupted and it was a fucking huge eruption, massive. And it spread an ash cloud into the air that was so high, that 1816 was known as the year without a summer. Europe did not have a summer in 1816. The sun was blocked out from this fucking volcano that erupted. The river Thames froze over. And in Ireland, if you think of, first off, there, there was famines all over fucking Europe cause people weren't able to grow crops that year, cause it was winter all year because of this volcano.
34:37 Blindboy Boatclub? But also what it did was... It forced people indoors. So people stayed indoors all year. They stayed in cramped spaces. It was damp and wet because it was winter all year. In Ireland, you had extreme poverty. So you had these really poor people with no means. Cramped in small spaces all year, staying indoors, trying to stay warm, wearing the exact same clothes every single day because it's freezing all year round. There's no fucking summer. And this led to an outbreak of fleas. So fleas had the perfect conditions that year to explode in population.
35:22 Blindboy Boatclub? And it led to an epidemic in Ireland of a disease called typhus. Typhus, again, it's one of these diseases, you tend not to hear of typhus in the global north anymore. It's an extreme fever and sickness that you can get from flea bites, from infected flea bites. And it kills people. And in eighteen, between eighteen sixteen and eighteen seventeen in Ireland, sixty five thousand people died from typhus. And I think close to a million were infected because of this explosion in the flea population. Because there was no summer. And it wasn't just Ireland. All over Europe,
36:06 Blindboy Boatclub? flea populations exploded unnaturally because the year without a summer, it created perfect conditions for these fleas to breed. Now, we don't really worry about fleas today or parasites of any description because
36:24 Blindboy Boatclub? we've got access, we've got access to hot water. We can bathe ourselves frequently. We've got access to cheap clothing. We can change our clothes frequently. We have access to, we can wash our clothes with hot water and detergent. We've got plumbing. General improvements in sanitation means that us in the global north, we're not really thinking about fleas. We're not thinking, and because we're not thinking about fleas, we're not worrying about bubonic plague.
36:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Bubonic plague, like the plague that killed millions of people throughout Europe. We're not worrying about plague, we're not worrying about typhus. These diseases don't exist for us in the global north because of sanitation. But typhus, it became a huge problem. It was exacerbated by that volcano. But throughout the eighteen hundreds and into the early twentieth century, especially anytime you had a war. If you had a war and you had a lot of soldiers, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of soldiers in battle, and they can't, they're huddled together, they can't wash their clothes, they're not bathing. Those soldiers had to worry about not just getting killed, but an outbreak of typhus.
37:44 Blindboy Boatclub? This fever caused by fleas that could knock an entire fucking army. So armies used to, they used to spray their soldiers and where soldiers were with insecticide. But in the eighteen hundreds, insecticide didn't really exist, not as we know it today. There was a natural insecticide called pyrethrum. It came from, it came from flowers that were very similar to daisies, but it was a limited resource and controlled by the colonial powers. This pyrethrum, the daisy that this natural insecticide came from, it was grown by the British in Kenya and I think parts of India and also Japan.
38:23 Blindboy Boatclub? So killing, killing parasites and insects that can cause these huge plagues and pandemics, this was really fucking difficult and it was, there was limited resources. So even while World War One is happening and World War Two, the world doesn't really have a reliable insecticide until nineteen thirty nine. So in eighteen seventy four, this Austrian chemist.
38:54 Blindboy Boatclub? He found a substance called DDT. And in 1939, another scientist figured, "Holy fuck. This is an insecticide. Not only is this an insecticide, but this is highly effective and it's pretty much unlimited." So now the world goes from having a limited amount of insecticide to unlimited insecticide. So during World War II, the Allied forces, they start spraying this chemical, DDT, fucking everywhere. And it kills insects. It's very, very effective at killing fleas, mites, ticks. All of these really dangerous human parasites that can cause mass illness.
39:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, all of a sudden, we're able to control this. Like you've got huge refugee populations during World War II in the likes of Italy. Incredibly poor, starving, huddled masses full of people, living in an environment that historically, there'd be an outbreak of typhus and they'd all die. Now they're not dying because this DDT insecticide chemical is being sprayed everywhere. And people's, people's lives are not only being changed, humanity is changing. For the first time ever, soldiers and humans aren't worried about insect-borne plagues. The Black Plague, Bubonic Plague and fucking typhus.
40:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Because this insecticide is just incredible and they can spray it everywhere. So World War II is ravishing the entire fucking world. Everywhere is affected by World War II. Everywhere you've got people displaced, poverty, poor sanitation. But this DDT shit that's being sprayed, it's killing all the disease-carrying insects.
40:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Diseases like yellow fever, malaria, these things now aren't a problem. Tropical regions, fucking, millions of people's lives are saved during World War II. But mostly the displaced civilians. A lot more people should have, a lot of people died during World War II. A lot more people should have died if it wasn't for DDT, killing all the harmful insects and the human parasites. But the problem is, this is the world's first ever insecticide. We didn't understand insecticides. It starts to kill all the fucking insects. The DDT being sprayed around the world after World War II, it causes...
41:33 Blindboy Boatclub? The biodiversity collapse that you and I live in today, like it's, it's unfathomable to imagine what the world must have been like 150 years ago. When it comes to animals and insects, it's unfathomable. I've told you myself, like I, I read a short story writer called Liam O'Flaherty, who, he was from the Aran Islands in about 1910. And he used to write stories where he'd describe a lot of nature. And, and when I read his stories, it feels like he's lying. When he talks about how many fish and insects he would see, I, I literally go, this man is lying.
42:12 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's like, no, there was a massive, massive abundance of living things about 150 years ago. Well, DDT, this fucking insecticide after, after World War II, that really started to cause the biodiversity collapse that you and I now just experience as normal. Cause it started to kill all the insects. And then it started to go into the soil and leach into the groundwater. Then it started to kill fish. DDT was really, really fucking bad, but people didn't spot this.
42:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And after World War Two, America, having seen how effective DDT was in preventing the spread of typhus and malaria in a war zone, they now start to use this wide scale
43:06 Blindboy Boatclub? on civilian populations and the rest of the world followed. And just a mad example of how,
43:13 Blindboy Boatclub? of how political ideology can end up in policy decisions in a way you wouldn't imagine. So one of the most destructive campaigns of spraying DDT everywhere was in the 1950s in America.
43:32 Blindboy Boatclub? And this is, so there was this new, there was an invasive insect in America. It was an ant called the red imported fire ant. That was the name of the insect, the red imported fire ant. Came from South America and by the 1950s, it had reached the United States. And it's a harmful enough invasive species. It is harmful, it eats crops. It's not indigenous and it definitely needs to be controlled. And the red imported fire ant is a threat to biodiversity and food systems without a doubt.
44:10 Blindboy Boatclub? But the thing is, in America in the 1950s, that was the height of the fucking Cold War. And America in the 1950s was terrified of Russia and paranoid about Russia and terrified and paranoid about communism.
44:28 Blindboy Boatclub? This period was known as the reds under the bed period,
44:33 Blindboy Boatclub? where America had gotten itself into a moral panic where they believed that everybody was a communist. People were accusing their colleagues of being fucking communists.
44:46 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, you look back at it and think, Jesus, that was mad. It's not too different now to hoe. Right now, under Trump in America, the way that people are being treated on cottage campuses, if they're opposing the genocide in Gaza, we're seeing people who are engaging in protest and activism. And if they're, if they're from a Middle Eastern country and they're engaging in protest and activism on American cottage campuses, secret fucking American police are taking them away and deporting them. But in the 1950s, the moral panic was called Reds Under the Bed. And the people of America were terrified of communists, Reds, Soviets. And the government policy was terrified of Reds.
45:32 Blindboy Boatclub? And this ant, the red imported fire ant, because of its fucking name, because it just happened to be called the red imported fire ant. It meant that the, the, the US Department of Agriculture completely overestimated the threat of this ant because its name, because of the red imported fire ant. It sounded like a communist Soviet fucking spy. So because it'd be like during 9/11, if there was a spider called the bin Laden spider or the jihadi spider.
46:10 Blindboy Boatclub? So the US embarked on this, this massive campaign of spraying DDT fucking everywhere. Over cities, they covered the entire country in this incredibly harsh, dangerous insecticide so that they could kill the red imported fire ant, which itself was driven by ideological anti-communism, which has fuck all to do with ants. America did massive damage, massive, massive damage to its ecosystem by spraying this DDT everywhere. And then the rest of the world followed. Now, the positive side of this thing is... This is one of the reasons why you or I don't have to worry about typhus anymore. This is why you probably have never had fleas or nits in your lifetime.
46:55 Blindboy Boatclub? But it's also the reason the climate is collapsing. What the fuck does this have to do with Limerick City? Well, those starlings, like I said, this flock of starlings, they're possibly, there's probably too many starlings in Limerick City. Because they don't have natural predators anymore. Apex predators are keystone species and when you take them out, you end up with some degree of collapse. What happened? What happened to the eagles, to the hawks, to the falcons? What happened to the birds of prey? Did people kill them because they were killing sheep? DDT, DDT is what happened to birds of prey. But it happened, it, it, it's a strange one.
47:37 Blindboy Boatclub? It happened through a process called biomagnification, right? So
47:46 Blindboy Boatclub? the insects were the ones being killed by DDT. Okay, so insects are getting killed by DDT. But then there's birds that eat the insects. So, so DDT doesn't break down in the environment, it tends to stick around, right? So the insects are getting sprayed with the DDT. Then birds like starlings, starlings are eating the insects. But then the falcons and the hawks, they're eating the starlings. The DDT isn't breaking down. So it means that, that the animals that are at the top of the food chain end up accumulating more and more DDT in their systems.
48:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Like this is the same reason that tuna has a lot of mercury in it. Like they say you shouldn't eat tuna more than three times a week. That the healthiest fish to eat are small fish, like herring or mackerel. But fucking tuna, because tuna is gigantic, tuna is about the same size as a car. There's naturally occurring mercury in the oceans, it's not just because of pollution. So plankton, they absorb mercury from the oceans. Then small fish eat the plankton and then the tuna eat the small fish. And they're apex predators and they're large. So tuna actually has quite a lot of mercury in it. And then we eat the tuna because we're the fucking top apex predator. And you have to be careful about eating tuna and mercury. But this biomagnification.
49:15 Blindboy Boatclub? This is, we ended up by the, by the 1960s.
49:20 Blindboy Boatclub? All around the world, all our birds of prey had massive amounts of DDT accumulated in their bodies. And the strange thing is, so the DDT, it didn't kill the birds of prey. So I'm talking falcons and hawks and eagles and buzzards. It didn't kill them. What it did is it fucked with their capacity to metabolise calcium. And calcium is what eggs are made out of.
49:51 Blindboy Boatclub? So it led to a generation of birds of prey who were laying soft eggs. And then nothing was getting hatched. So by the 1970s, birds of prey were almost fucking extinct. Their numbers had gone very, very small all around the world because of this DDT business. This is where it starts to get fucking mad. So people who worked with birds of prey started to notice this, this collapse, this complete collapse of, of the bird of prey population. And they started to figure out, these eggs aren't right. There's something going on here with these eggs. So even though the birds of prey are having sex with each other and laying eggs,
50:34 Blindboy Boatclub? something's not right here. It was really bad. So, but by the 1960s, there was, let's just take America. There was no wild falcons east of the Rocky Mountains, only a handful. So you're talking, birds of prey were almost gone. By the 1960s, they were almost gone. A memory, like the fucking dinosaurs. And then a professor of ornithology called Tom Cade, he was the first one to go, yeah, I think I know what's happening. I think this is DDT and I think it's getting to the eggs. So a small group of humans stepped up. They formed a thing called the Peregrine Fund. And they stepped up and they said, right, well, we're, we're gonna have to,
51:15 Blindboy Boatclub? we're gonna have to get involved here and we're gonna have to save birds of prey, specifically the peregrine falcon. We're gonna have to fucking save them. There were so few peregrine falcons left that they could not rely upon them to have sex with each other in the wild and to procreate. So this group are like.
51:37 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, we're gonna have to capture sperm from falcons and artificially inseminate eggs. We're gonna have to figure out how to wank a falcon, literally, how do we wank a falcon? And it was really difficult.
51:55 Blindboy Boatclub? First off, they've got really weird tiny cocks.
52:02 Blindboy Boatclub? And then they figured out
52:07 Blindboy Boatclub? three adult humans to wank off a falcon and that they get the falcon horny. This was not working. It, it, it, they were really worried that we think this bird is gonna go extinct because it takes three of us to wank him off and this is, this is impossible. And then this lunatic comes along called Lester Bide.
52:33 Blindboy Boatclub? And Lester Bide, Lester Bide is like, okay, this isn't working. We have to, the falcons are dying. We got, it takes three of us to wank off a falcon. We can't do it. There needs to be a solution here. So Lester Bide,
52:50 Blindboy Boatclub? he raises baby falcons, male falcons from an egg. And he grooms baby falcons to be sexually attracted to his head. I'm a hundred percent serious.
53:07 Blindboy Boatclub? He's raising, hatching male falcons and, and keeping them in isolation and training the falcons to identify his head as a sexual object. And then he invents a hat
53:23 Blindboy Boatclub? called a falcon sex hat.
53:27 Blindboy Boatclub? It's it's a strange rubber hat. I reckon he designed it after a condom. It's
53:37 Blindboy Boatclub? it's like a little hipster beanie on your head, right? But the hat is made out of rubber and it has tiny holes all over it, like like a honeycomb. And literally,
53:52 Blindboy Boatclub? th- th- he would stand there with his rubber falcon hat on and and the falcon would would get horny and and fuck his head. I'm dead serious. And then the falcon is having sex with his head and then ejaculating all over the hat, but the hat has these tiny little little holes in it, all over it, like these honeycomb holes. And now the falcon cum is is being held in in these little concaves in the hat. Now he's got a hat full of falcon cum and he's you he's injecting it into eggs and they're artificially inseminating falcon eggs. And it worked. It worked.
54:33 Blindboy Boatclub? The wild population of falcons that had been decimated by DDT, it's started to be rebuilt by these lads wearing hats and letting falcons fuck their heads. I'm dead serious. And there's entire falcon grooming manuals available about what you need to do to raise a fucking paragon falcon fr- fr- from hatchling and how to make it sexually attracted to your head. And for it to have sex with this rubber hat on your head, it's still being done. I can go online and I can buy one. You can you can go on to Google and you can buy a falcon sex hat for 200 quid. I'm dead serious. Most importantly, this worked. By the 1990s,
55:17 Blindboy Boatclub? so that's 30 years later, by the 1990s, wild falcon populations in in America had stabilized and pe- people stopped using DDT, obviously. By the 1960s, people figured out that this DDT was bad shit. Wasn't the first uh insecticide to destroy insect populations and destroy the environment. I mean, they replaced DDT with
55:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Insecticides that were made from nicotine.
55:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Like nicotine that's in cigarettes, they replaced them with neonicotinoids. And these were sprayed throughout the 1990s, thinking that these were safe. These neonicotinoids, this is what caused, this is why there's no more fucking bees. This is, they killed all the bees, they caused a colony collapse disorder. Someone needs to figure out how to train bees to have sex with their head now. But as bizarre as it is, the person who invented the falcon sex hat, they changed our world. We could be talking about the falcon as if it is the dodo now. A wonderful bird of prey that no longer exists. It was on the brink and it was saved by a mad sex hat.
56:33 Blindboy Boatclub? So here's my proposal, and this is, I got this hot take this week when I was just thinking about the bird shit district. Thinking about all the starlings, thinking about all the shits that they do out there in uncontrolled population. There's no one calling them, no natural calling. And I was thinking about this and I went, yeah.
56:56 Blindboy Boatclub? A volcanic eruption in 1818, you can trace that directly to people training falcons to have sex with their heads. But I propose this as a solution for Limerick and I'd like Limerick City Council to listen. These falcon sex hats are only 200 quid online.
57:17 Blindboy Boatclub? I propose that we put a falcon sex hat on the Terry Wogan statue. That's at the very, very bottom of Bedford Row, the bottom of the bird shit district. We put a rubber falcon sex hat on the Terry Wogan statue.
57:34 Blindboy Boatclub? We hatch some falcons and train them to have sex with his head. And then we artificially inseminate some local Limerick falcons. And then eventually in about 10 years' time, they're gonna cull the starling population. And that's the solution that I propose.
57:59 Blindboy Boatclub? And it might work.
58:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Fucking hell.
58:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, that's all, that's all I've got time for this week. This, in, in the Irish Examiner this week, my podcast was recommended as, as a cure for toxic masculinity in centrist dads. Someone wrote an article and they recommended my podcast as a cure for toxic masculinity. And there's a part of me that wanted to do the, the episode on this topic. Cause I just know there's gonna be, there's gonna be some man called Donald in his 50s is gonna read that article and go, do you know what? I'm gonna give the blind by podcast, gonna give that a chance. I've heard that this, you know, this, this podcast is really on point when it comes to issues of toxic masculinity.
58:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And I want them to listen to this episode. I want this to be the first one that they hear. I hope you enjoyed that, Donald. Okay, that's all I have time for this week. I'll be back next week with another hot take. I don't know. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, let a falcon have sex with your head. You know, it's a strange one that I don't think the sex hat works with other. It only works with the falcon family because they're very highly trainable birds. I don't think it works with aspreys or buzzards or hawks. It's just the falcon family. But anyway, look, I'll catch you next week. Dad bless.
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