🎧 Episode 5 — When Humans Get Confident and Reality Gets Creative

In this episode of The Oddities Department, we open six case files that prove one uncomfortable truth: humans are very confident… and very often wrong.

We start in 18th-century France, where people feared potatoes so deeply they would rather starve than eat them, until a pharmacist staged one of history’s earliest PR campaigns and changed a nation’s diet forever.

From there, we step into the private world of Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, a royal woman whose belief that her body was made of glass went unquestioned, not because it was true, but because no one was allowed to challenge it.

We then walk the long corridors of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a place built with hope that collapsed under overcrowding, outdated medicine, and the dangerous idea that silence meant success.

Next, we meet Timothy Dexter, a loud, illiterate man who failed upward so aggressively that luck became a personality trait—and history mistook chaos for brilliance.

The episode turns darker with the Atacama “Alien,” a tiny skeleton mislabeled as extraterrestrial until science revealed a far harder truth: the remains belonged to a human child, and the real mystery was how quickly dignity was sacrificed for a better story.

We close underground with naked mole rats, nearly ageless, cancer-resistant, pain-ignoring mammals that break almost every biological rule we assume applies to us.

Episode 5 is about confidence, belief, and the consequences of deciding we’re right before we’re careful.

Welcome back to The Oddities Department.
Stay curious. Stay weird. And don’t take anything at face value.

🗂️ EPISODE 4 — When Will We Ever Learn?

In Episode 4 of The Oddities Department, we explore what happens when humans encounter something strange, dangerous, or misunderstood and confidently make it worse.

This episode spans centuries, continents, oceans, and outer space, all tied together by a familiar thread: human audacity.

We begin with the Black Orlov Diamond, a gemstone rumored to carry a trail of tragedy and suspicious deaths through its ownership history. Curse or coincidence, the vibes are undeniably bad.

From there, we head to the Arctic with the bowhead whale and the harpoon, a real-world case involving a whale discovered with a 19th-century explosive harpoon embedded in its body, having survived and healed around the wound for more than a century — a quiet reminder that nature plays the long game.

Next, we examine the India Cobra Problem, where a colonial-era bounty program meant to reduce venomous snakes accidentally encouraged people to breed them instead, making the situation far worse.

Then we leave Earth with Project MOOSE, a Cold War–era NASA contingency plan that seriously considered having astronauts eject from spacecraft and reenter the atmosphere alone, wrapped in a personal heat shield. No steering. No guarantees.

We also meet Tycho Brahe, the brilliant and deeply eccentric 16th-century astronomer who lost his nose in a duel over math, built the world’s first research institute, and kept a psychic court dwarf and a pet elk — all while laying the groundwork for modern astronomy.

We close with octopus wrestling, the strange mid-20th-century practice of humans deciding to physically grapple octopuses, unintentionally revealing just how intelligent and strategic these animals truly are.

It’s an episode about endurance, ego, unintended consequences, and the human impulse to throw the last punch...even when no one asked for a fight.

In this episode of The Oddities Department, Gavin and Suzi crack open another drawer in the archives and wander straight into the wonderfully weird corners of history, biology, coincidence, and human incompetence.

We kick things off with a parasite that hijacks snails and turns their eyeballs into psychedelic “eat me” billboards for birds.
Then we head to 1915 South Carolina, where Essie Dunbar sat up in her own coffin and sent an entire funeral sprinting for their lives.
From there, we dive into the case of the “Jim Twins” — two strangers living parallel lives so identical it feels like the universe copy-pasted a man by mistake.
Gavin then unpacks the Halifax Explosion, one of the most devastating man-made blasts before the atomic age.
And finally: Oregon. A whale. Dynamite. And a decision so catastrophically ill-advised it became legend.

It’s an episode full of biological chaos, historical mayhem, uncanny coincidences, and government choices that absolutely should’ve gone through another meeting.

If you love strange science, impossible-seeming stories, dark humor, and those “wait… WHAT?” moments, this one’s for you.

Stay curious. Stay weird. And welcome to The Oddities Department.