As we break through the summer months, we start again with an audio only show. Personnally, I am tired of watching mouths flopping around. Take us on your commute, while you scrub the dishes, or as you watch the world burn from your lawn chair.
Here are the ten things we discussed that occured on the many days that were July 29th:
1. Charles & Diana’s Royal Wedding (1981)
Nearly a billion people tuned in to watch a 32-year-old prince marry a 20-year-old kindergarten aide in a dress with a 25-foot train, and somehow nobody in Buckingham Palace stopped to ask “should we maybe not do this.” It was the biggest fairy tale broadcast in television history, right up until it turned into the most expensive divorce in tabloid history. Buckle up for the wedding that launched a thousand commemorative plates and at least one Netflix series.
2. “The Fellowship of the Ring” Published (1954)
An Oxford professor with a pipe addiction and a deep grudge against industrialization unleashed a 400-page hobbit-walking-simulator on the British public and accidentally created the entire fantasy genre as we know it. No Tolkien, no Game of Thrones, no D&D, no forty-minute YouTube videos explaining elf genealogy. We’re talking about the book that turned “worldbuilding” into a personality trait.
3. Carl Lewis Wins His Fourth Straight Long Jump Gold (1996)
Twelve years. Four Olympics. Same event, same gold medal, same guy, basically defying the passage of time like some kind of track and field vampire. We’re diving into the career of a man who made “one more Olympics” sound less like a comeback and more like a threat to everyone else in the field.
4. USS Forrestal Fire (1967)
An accidentally launched rocket on a Navy carrier off Vietnam triggered a chain-reaction fire that killed 134 sailors in under an hour including a near-miss for a young pilot named John McCain, who was sitting in the jet right next to the explosion. It’s one of the deadliest peacetime-adjacent disasters in Navy history, and it’s got everything: bureaucratic failure, sheer bad luck, and a body count that changed naval safety protocol forever.
5. King Umberto I of Italy Assassinated (1900)
An Italian king gets shot by an anarchist with a grudge and a plan but the genuinely unhinged part is the eerie backstory involving a restaurant owner, a look-alike, and a series of coincidences so bizarre that even people who don’t believe in fate started raising an eyebrow. This one’s less “history lecture” and more “true crime episode that happens to have a monarchy in it.”
6. The Arc de Triomphe’s Secret Opening (1836)
Picture the biggest, gaudiest monument in Paris the kind of thing built specifically to make a statement quietly cracking open its doors to a grand total of eleven people because the king was too scared of getting assassinated to show up to his own party. It’s the world’s most anticlimactic ribbon-cutting, and we are absolutely here for the second-hand embarrassment.
7. NASA is Established (1958)
The Soviets launched a beach-ball-sized satellite into orbit and the entire United States collectively panicked hard enough to create a federal agency in response. That’s the origin story of NASA less “grand vision for humanity’s future among the stars” and more “we got embarrassed at the international science fair and now there’s a budget for it.”
8. The Spanish Armada is First Sighted (1588)
A king with main character energy sent 130 ships to invade England, and it all kicked off the moment English lookouts spotted the fleet off the Cornish coast. What follows is fireships, storms, and one of history’s great “it seemed like a good idea at the time” military disasters. Spoiler: England’s still there.
9. The IAEA is Established (1957)
In the middle of a Cold War arms race where every country was racing to build bigger and scarier bombs, the world collectively decided someone should probably keep an eye on all this nuclear material. Enter the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear hall monitor, born from equal parts optimism and existential dread.
10. US Congress Apologizes for Slavery (2008)
143 years after the 13th Amendment, the House of Representatives formally said sorry for slavery and Jim Crow no reparations attached, no legal weight, just words. It’s a genuinely fascinating one to dig into: what does an apology like this actually do, who was satisfied by it, and who called it exactly what it was a symbolic gesture with an asterisk the size of Texas.