Here Be Monsters

Shoppingspree Clark showed up on the side of the road outside the “Friendliest Town in Texas” with nothing more than a sketchpad and the burnt-out ruin of the RV he’d just bought.

Content Note: Explicit Content

Coleman, Texas’ self-claimed title is true because it used to be on a billboard above the highway. And the people that live there are diverse, troubled, religious, unusual...and friendly.

This episode contains many adult themes, including suicide, prejudice, and racism. There are also unbleeped swear words and racial slurs. Use discretion.

This episode was originally released by Shoppingspree Clark in June 2013.

Most of the music on this show comes from Shoppingspree himself. His moniker, Crunchy Person, has some good albums up on Bandcamp.

Music from: Javelin ||| Seagull Invasion

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Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite likes it. However, it also makes him visually match the mythical underground people he spent three years studying on the Danish island of Bornholm.

Bornholm folklore sometimes references “De Underjordiske”, a kind of people that live under the many ancient burial mounds that spot the landscape. Lars sometimes calls the people “subterraneans”, “pixies” or “underearthlings”. They’re known as a militant group, fiercely defending themselves, their homes in the mounds, and the island. But not an unthankful group either, rewarding humans for kindness or bravery.

It’s worth clarifying that Lars is no “troll hunter” (as the press often gleefully mistakes him to be), nor is he in the business of saying whether reclusive, sometimes-red-hatted people are real or legend. He is, however, in the business of collecting those legends and learning what they can teach us about us. And also what the legends can tell us about the archaeological significance of a Batlic Island that’s been conquered so many times that history’s forgotten who actually made those mounds in the first place.

Pursuing legends is difficult though, as Lars attests to in this episode of Here Be Monsters. He tells producer Jeff Emtman stories of both the underearthings and the stories of the skepticism he faced when he pointed the anthropological lens on the place where he grew up. He says, “That’s why there was so much talk about this project. Had it been an anthropological study of shamans in Siberia, or something in the Amazon, then there would have been then public expectation that, ‘of course people there have spirits and stuff like that.’...But when it’s about what happens in your own back garden, then I think that’s where it gets more controversial...there’s certainly magic in distance.”

Lars is an anthropologist and the author of Tales in an Underground Landscape, a dissertation he wrote while pursuing a PhD at University of Copenhagen.

Many thanks to producer Rikke Houd, who connected Jeff to Lars and has interviewed him about De Underjordiske for the BBC show Short Cuts.

Producer: Jeff Emtman

Editor: Bethany Denton

Music: Serocell, The Black Spot

Photos: Jeff Emtman

There’s an office in every church of Scientology dedicated to the founder. It’s a full reconstruction: desks, chairs, books and memorabilia. The church says these offices are traditional, a way of honoring the memory of L. Ron Hubbard, who died back in 1986.

L. Ron Hubbard’s office in Copenhagen, Denmark sits on a busy street. There’s a big window that allows passersby to speculate on its utility.

Elisabeth Pedersen heard a rumor that the office was more than traditional. She heard that it might be needed by the author upon his alleged reincarnation and return to earth.

Sussing out the veracity of this claim is difficult, because Hubbard and his successor David Miscavige choose to keep much of Scientology’s scripture out of the public’s reach. And therefore, many of the Church of Scientology’s core beliefs must be sifted either through church officials, court documents, or the religion's detractors.

One of those detractors is Tony Ortega, who’s been writing on Scientology since the 1990’s. He thinks Elisabeth’s rumor is a garbled understanding of a belief that might be held in an secretive wing of Scientology known as the Church of Spiritual Technology. The CST is the group that holds and protects the copyrights to Hubbard’s body of work. Tony says a defector from the CST told him about preparations being made for the return of L. Ron Hubbard. His source later denied this.

When a religion has scriptural gatekeepers, how can you know if a rumor’s been debunked? A friendly person at the church’s info center pointed out that the internet is full of misinformation about scientology and suggested that listeners of this podcast consult Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination for factual information about the religion and its beliefs. They also suggested Freedom Magazine. Scientology’s press officers were contacted several times in the months before release, but never responded.

Jeff Emtman produced this episode with help from Bethany Denton. This episode’s title was inspired by TV Trope’s article on Ascended Fanfic.

Music: Serocell, The Black Spot

Max Turnquist advises against wearing shorts while dumpster diving for used lab equipment. Almost every day, Max visits a university parking garage, where there are several small mountains of discarded equipment, some of it quite rare.

Content Note:
Language

It’s where he found his ion pump, and a lot of his rack-mounted monitoring gear and power supplies. He’s building a small nuclear fusion reactor from scratch in his bedroom, and he’s doing it on the cheap.

Viable fusion power has long been a dream of scientists. Once a fusion reaction starts, its only waste products are helium, water, and relatively small amounts of neutron radiation. The fuel for these reactors is often Deuterium (aka. “heavy hydrogen), a common isotope of hydrogen found naturally in seawater. Compared to nuclear fission (the nuclear tech we currently use), fusion seems almost too good to be true—nearly free energy with few downsides.

But there are a number of obstacles in the way. Getting atoms close enough to fuse takes massive amounts of force and heat. In the fusion reactors made by nature (stars), fusion happens because of the ridiculous amounts of gravity that create the high heat needed for this reaction. But here on earth, where sun-like gravity isn’t an option, scientists like Max have to rely on trickier methods.

Max thinks that physicists are intuitive scientists. They observe something many times and gain an inherent knowledge of the universe. He says that the biggest laws that govern the physics are often quite simple, elegant. Max found himself drawn to one of the archimedean solids, and followed his hunch.

His proof of concept reactor has a metal cage in the shape of a truncated icosahedron, a couple inches wide. In this shape, Max suspends particles in a cage of other particles. This shouldn’t be possible, based on Earnshaw’s Theorem, which in layman's terms, means that it’s really hard to keep the particle in the middle from squirting out the sides. But Max’s shape, along with a constantly changing voltage, suspends things in a Goldilocks-type way. He calls this “stably unstable”.

His first proof of concept worked. Now he’s on his second. He says he’s almost ready to do a major fusion test, where he’ll drag his 300 pound reactor out to rural Maine, bury it in the ground and stand a safe distance away (to avoid the neutron radiation). And if it works, he’ll be on to solving the next problem, which is how to actually harvest the power it generates.

Max doesn’t think the solution is a single step away. There are still many hurdles to overcome before fusion replaces the dirty and inefficient power we use today. And maybe those hurdles are too many, maybe it’s a fool’s errand. But he’s hopeful that fusion can save at least part of the world. 

A couple more links for you:

Socrates, Plato’s cave and the “known unknowns”

Fluctuations in the Reindeer Population on St. Matthew’s Island

Carl Jung’s Red Book

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Serocell, Lucky Dragons

Correction: In the episode, we misstate the natural abundance of Deuterium. The correct abundance is .015%. We regret the error.