Actually Happening

Bonjour from France! 3/5 of your AH crew are in Marseilles this week. But this episode has nothing to do with that. Image credits: 1, 2.

This Week: – Anna has some big news – Anthony Weiner’s cat looks bored – Attila the Hun – Crowdfunding Lady Liberty – The sea that disappeared and the island that was never there to begin with – James Joyce...

You can’t kill a guy when he’s already dead, but that’s not going to stop us trying! Quotable: “For a question about posthumous execution, this took a dark turn.”

This week! — A scandalous round of Good Advice — Viking while intoxicated — Wedding bands of Bitcoin — A Zerg rush on Jeopardy! — Preliminary results from the world’s longest-running experiment — Emus cause problems on two continents —...

The original fanboys, or how secret societies turned into insurance companies (really!). Also, “secret society promoter” was a job back then. For a Not Actually Happening, this one has a lot of weird actual facts.

Actually Happening: a series of 1s and 0s that add up to a lot of nonsense about history. This week: Historic events unlikely to recur Jimmy Carter attacked by swimming rabbit Elian Gonzales falls through a sinkhole into the Land...

The Loch Ness Monster is not real. Sorry. But big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell IS.

So yeah, this episode is late. Really late. Uh… that was quite a week last week. We should be back on schedule now. Anyway, enjoy the usual quality discussion of the rise of the sentient internet, the first speaker of...

Because in this celebration of springtime stir-craziness, the biggest April Fools joke is April Fools Day itself. Also: how many terrible salad dressing puns can we come up with? How many different religious hats can we stack on top of...

This week we talk about fake fossils, fairweather friends, and far-too-credulous academics.

This week we celebrate the Ides of March with the suggestion to replace the national anthem with “Sweet Caroline.” Also: what to do if you’re an interim senator, what really happens in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, why the...

This week it’s all about fake epics, fake things about epics, and solid snake. For some reason.

This week Aaron Burr gets mispronounced, Russian peasants stop sleeping in their own ovens, and Steven has all the anxiety dreams at once.

This week we take on the first papal resignation in almost 600 years, by using a Google+ Hangout to do out breaking news coverage. The audio is kinda ropey, but we got an actual expert! Renaissance historian Ada Palmer joined...

This week we put pasties on the Woman of Willendorf, send Robocop to Florence, and take Oliver Wendell Holmes’ lunch money.

Because sometimes the best way to learn about language is to make up new words. (Also, thanks for bearing with us through the bandwidth overage! Hoping it won’t happen again. Rather nice that it seems like we can blame it...

This week we examine possible ends of the world, what Ben Franklin really wanted from the French, sentimental novels, and the striking contrasts between the modern era and the times we’re living through today.

We’re back from our holiday break with some spurious attempts at etymology by the ancient Greeks! Also Steven is leaking bits.

It’s our last holiday special, and our last episode of the year. So enjoy a handful of facts about the first (or last?) holiday of the year, and we’ll see you in January!

No, pointless trivia is the reason for the season! Another fine holiday special in which we discuss the great myth of the holiday season: the War on Christmas. Image source: Kevin Dooley on Flickr