podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 I know I just did a You're Wrong About episode last week, but they did a really good one this week too. "The Cottingley Fairies" with Chelsey Weber-Smith is about my all-time favourite prank/hoax, that time two little girls accidentally convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that they had taken photos of fairies.

If you don't know this story, you should just listen to the whole episode because it's an adorable story and you'll like it. If you do know the story, you should listen to it anyway because I can hear 1000 people tell this story and it's always fun to hear. There was actually a detail that they included that I didn't know about (the real reason why the girls didn't reveal the hoax until they were quite old) that kind of makes the story even more heartwarming.

It's charming, it's wholesome, you get Sherlock Holmes, theosophy, and the history of photography in the same episode, and it's a great palette cleanser for the kinds of things I normally post about (and that they normally cover on the show).

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Omg. Two of my favorite podcast hosts! One of my favorite weird historical anecdotes! I will have to give it a listen.

(Do you also listen to Chelsey Weber-Smith's American Hysteria?)

[sabotabby]

No but it sounds up my alley!

[ioplokon]

ACD is such a weirdo. Like, the most painfully heterosexual man in Britain and also like one of those hippie new age racists.

[sabotabby]

I have such a hard time envisioning him as a heterosexual. I mean obviously he had sex with a woman but it's weird to me.

[ioplokon]

Ah, see to me he's like, so straight that the possibility of gay people just never occurs to him.

[greylock]

that time two little girls accidentally convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that they had taken photos of fairies.

Accidentally?
I suspect I know the images, not checking.



Arthur Conan Doyle was (and I have not read Holmes): A fucking weirdo.

[sabotabby]

They're great images.

You've not read Holmes? You should!

[greylock]

I have not (except the Revenche one?).
I have read a lot of his other stuff (Challenger etc).

Crime fiction isn't my thing, and I feel like Holmes is too familiar.

I will pick up a collection at the right price, but his whackadoodle spiritualism does put me off,

[sabotabby]

Spiritualism isn't really a thing in the Holmes stories IIRC (it's been awhile). That's one of the things that makes him interesting to me—he is most known for a character who is Pure Rationality and yet he himself believed in some utter batshit things. And he saw no contradiction.

[greylock]

Yeah. I've wishlisted the Complete Holmes (will never read it).
The Challenger stories are wild.
I've always been fascinated by that era Spiritualism, and his debunking, and his NEED TO BELIEVE.

The Challenger stories are wild. So wild.
I started reading them because I love lost world/ERB stories, my god, was his imagination better than Holmes suggested.

Same with Dickens. I don't care for Big Dickens (*titter*), and I suffered Hard Times (also Titter), but The Signalman is one of my favourite ghost stories.

[conuly]

The Cottingley Fairies look so fake to us now, but I guess back then people had lower standards?

[sabotabby]

Photography was still pretty new.

[greylock]

There's at least 1-2 doccos and movies about it.
And maybe a Torchwood episode.

I once went looking for little folk. LSD was involved.