Internationally Bestselling Quirky Children's Books; Adventurous Heroes Doing Good
This week on the podcast, we’re all about the creepy, disturbing, weird, strange things that have happened to you.
Creepy stories are …. fun? Especially when they aren’t about you. So this podcast, we’ll be sharing some of our own creepy stories, some listeners’ creepy stories and some from that magical land called REDDIT. And we’ll be talking a tiny bit about the science which makes some people seem creepy.
Hey, Welcome to LOVING THE STRANGE, where we celebrate the weird and embrace the heck out of it.
This week, in honor of Shaun Farrar, our own Florida man, we are talking about Florida men.
In ancient times, so back in 2013, Florida man became a meme because there were just so many weird and bizarre news articles (mostly police beats) about Florida men doing weird and criminal and often dumb things.
Both CNN and the Miami News Times claim that Florida men aren’t that naughty or bizarre compared to their equivalents in other states, but it’s just because the freedom of information laws in that state make it pretty easy to peruse police beat.
The Columbia Journalism Review says that Florida Man is “one of journalism’s darkest and most lucrative cottage industries”, because “stories tend to stand as exemplars of the mythical hyper-weirdness of the Sunshine State, but more often simply document the travails of the drug-addicted, mentally ill, and homeless.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Man
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7bmp8a/weird-florida-news-america-florida-man
https://nypost.com/article/crazy-florida-man-headlines-that-made-the-meme/
Today on Loving the Strange, Carrie is sick, so Emily is filling in with Shaun as they talk about people being lying sillies on social media.
https://www.boredpanda.com/liars-caught-lying-exposed-social-media/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/18-times-people-lied-on-social-media-so-hard-its-hilarious-425210/
Shaun is one of those guys who likes learning about inventions and always dreams of making an idea into a reality.
Carrie? Not so much.
From mousetrap pistols to selfie toasters, we’ll be exploring LIVE, the weirdness of this world.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/642634/weirdest-inventions-2000s
https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/20-weirdest-inventions-ever
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2241075/Proof-old-fashioned-vibrating-belt-machines-actually-good–dont-lose-weight.html
https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/137775-20-crazy-inventions-you-won-t-believe-what-you-re-about-to-see
On this week’s podcast it’s like we’re channeling our inner toker and talking about all the strange things to think about when you think about strange things.
RESOURCES
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/50-weird-thought
https://bestlifeonline.com/weird-amazing-facts/
I just want to let everyone know that INCHWORMS (The Dude Series Book 2) is out and having a good time as Dude competes for a full scholarship at a prestigious Southern college and getting into a bit of trouble.
Here’s what it’s about:
A fascinating must-read suspense from New York Times bestseller Carrie Jones.
A new chance visiting a small Southern college.
A potential love interest for a broken girl obsessed with psychology.
A damaged group of co-eds.
A drowning that’s no accident.
A threat that seems to have no end.
And just like that Jessica Goodfeather aka Dude’s trip away from her claustrophobic life in Maine to try to get an amazing scholarship to her dream school has suddenly turned deadly. Again.
After his best friend Norah was almost abducted, Cole Nicholaus has spent most of his childhood homeschooled, lonely and pining for Norah to move from best friend to girl friend status. When birds follow him around or he levitates the dishes, he thinks nothing of it—until a reporter appears and pushes him into making a choice: stay safe at home or help save a kidnapped kid.
Cole and Norah quickly end up trying to not just save a kid, but an entire town from a curse that has devastating roots and implications for how exactly Cole came to be the saint that he is.
Can Cole stop evil from hurting him and Norah again? And maybe even get together? Only the saints know.
From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the NEED series, Saint is a book about dealing with the consequences that make us who we are and being brave enough to admit who we love and what we need.
BUY NOW! 🙂 I made a smiley face there so you don’t feel like I’m too desperate.
This week on the podcast, we discuss the theories of Bigfoot
That’s the first question.
A Smithsonian Magazine article says,
“1958 footprints transformed the myth into a media sensation. The tracks were planted near Bluff Creek in Northern California by a man named Ray Wallace—but his prank was not revealed until his death in 2002, when his children said it had all been “just a joke.””
“Giant footprints puzzle residents,” a headline in the Humboldt Times announced in 1958 and since then, there’s been a growing cultural obsession with the possibility of a large bipedal furry creature roaming around.
When the famous Patterson-Gimlin tapes happened in the late 1960s, people became even more excited especially since it was filmed in the same area as the alleged Wallace hoax.
For some cryptozoologists, the problem is that there are so many hoaxes that even believers like Maine’s Loren Coleman, founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland say, “Technology has ruined the old cryptozoology.”
Ben Crair writes for the Smithsonian,
“Some people see these cryptohominids as symbols of pure freedom, living by instinct and foiling every effort to pin them down. To search for Bigfoot in the forest is to taste that freedom. On the trail, you become extra-attuned to nature: the smell of scat, the sounds of breaking branches, the curious impressions in the dirt. As long as there are wild places in America, Bigfoot remains a possibility that, to its most ardent proponents, cannot be disproved.”
And that might be true, but the feelings/thoughts behind Bigfoot are changing in the United States and Canada and much of that change is coming from a YouTube channel howtohunt, where the host, a backwoods hunter and guide, shares emails from listeners who have seen/heard/believe in Bigfoot.
A lot of those stories are about Bigfoot being nefarious. He’s not some chill guy that you want to hang out with in Harry and the Hendersons or a slightly annoyed and bullied sasquatch in Jack Link’s commercials. Instead, Bigfoot is potentially part of a much bigger conspiracy that might involve nuclear scientists and aliens, not someone to cuddle.
That juxtaposition isn’t new.
In a Popular Mechanics article, Matt Blitz writes,
“In California, there are century-old pictographs drawn by the Yokuts that appear to show a family of giant creatures with long, shaggy hair. Called “Mayak datat” by the tribe, the image bears a resemblance to the commonly held vision of Bigfoot.
“Some tribes really love Bigfoot, they have a great relationship with him,” says Kathy Moskowitz Strain, author of the book Giants, Cannibals & Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture and archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “To other tribes though, like the Miwoks, he’s an absolute ogre, a monster, and something best left alone.”
So even the most elementary questions—Is Bigfoot real or not? Is Bigfoot good or not?—are inconclusive.
But for Shaun, as we discussed on the podcast, there are three main thoughts.
Bigfoot is a hominid—an ancient branch of the tree, related to us, but not us.
Bigfoot is an alien or an alien pet—people link Bigfoot to UFOs, orbs, and portals.
Bigfoot is a spiritual creature—not of this dimension or beyond it. Some think he/she/they are a minion of the devil.
What do you think?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-so-many-people-still-believe-in-bigfoot-180970045/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a23622082/bigfoot-history/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/48870/11-crazy-bigfoot-conspiracy-theories
https://www.hcn.org/articles/essays-even-if-bigfoot-isnt-real-we-still-need-him
https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/06/ufos-and-bigfoot-two-local-enigmas-get-another-moment-sun
https://wakingbear.org/is-bigfoot-an-alien-2/
https://www.masslive.com/news/worcester/2015/10/is_bigfoot_an_extraterrestrial.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
https://www.foxnews.com/science/bigfoot-is-part-human-dna-study-claims
Parents. We all have some. Some of us are actual parents Sometimes parents are amazing. Sometimes? Not so much. But a lot of parents (amazing or not) do a lot of weird things. So, that’s what we’re looking at the strange things parents do.
https://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/g18660316/weird-things-american-parents-do/
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/news/a51564/weird-things-parents-did-growing-up/
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!
It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
Welcome to Loving The Strange.
Psychic dreams. Dreams that foretell the future. Sleep disorder or something more? Some people think of it as a glitch in the matrix. As Dr. David Ryback wrote in 1986, “Future Memory as Holographic Process: A Scientific Model For Psychic Dreams,”
“Psychic phenomena are only byproducts of the simultaneous-everywhere matrix. Individual brains are bits of the greater hologram. They have access under certain circumstances to all the information in the total cybernetic system. . . . “
And we sort of talked about that a little? Mostly Shaun took us off topic because Carrie swore; Shaun reveled in being “the talent” and we ended up talking about body odor for a long time before circling back to dreams.
Shaun halfway outed Carrie about her serial killer dreams and Carrie gave a couple examples from her past.
Stanley Krippner wrote,
Dreams and visions are, in a sense, experiences occupying two opposing sides of a spectrum. According to Wikipedia the visionary state is achieved via meditation, drugs, lucid dreams, daydreams, or art. For as long as human beings have kept records of their experiences, they have described extraordinary occurrences: reveries in which they appeared to receive the thoughts of another person, dreams in which they seemed to become aware of faraway events, rituals in which future happenings were supposedly predicted, and mental processes that were said to produce direct action on distant physical objects.
These purported occurrences may have been instances of phenomena that contemporary parapsychologists call telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Collectively, they are referred to as “psi” or reported interactions between organisms and their environment in which information exchange or influence has occurred that cannot be explained through mainstream science’s understanding of sensory-motor channels. They are regarded as anomalous because they appear to occur beyond the constraints of time, space, and energy. The noted Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a skeptical treatise on anomalous dreams entitled, “On Divination.” In his treatise, he pointed out that: (Stanley Krippner)
https://corrosion-doctors.org/Dreaming%20is%20Personal/Psychic.htm
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1986.tb00445.x
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/dreaming-overview
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!
It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
This week’s episode is called THE BEAUTY OF NOT FITTING IN. And one of the big aspects of understanding that is understand what it is to feel belonging.
According to harleytherapy.com, a counseling site from the UK.
“Belonging is defined as feeling part of a group, whether that is a family, a set of friends, or a workplace.”
They quote psychologist Abraham Maslow, who worked on human motivation and created a ‘the Hierarchy of Needs’ models, saying that he “saw ‘love and belonging’ as so important he placed them third only to our basic ‘physiological needs’ like food and shelter, and ‘safety needs’ like employment and good health.””
So feeling like you belong is important, but it’s also a way a lot of us feel and there’s a certain freedom and beauty in not belonging.
Over on heartstories, writer Crystal Gronto says
“Feeling like you don’t fit in with the crowd teaches you to see and appreciate differences in people. It teaches you empathy and compassion for others who are on the outside. It gives you eyes to see things that the crowd, can so easily miss.”
Tiny Buddha’s Anne Bechard writes:
“Everybody tries to fit in because they desperately want to feel at home wherever they are. But fitting in will never get you home. Fitting in is about trying to adapt to a world that’s not your own. You don’t belong there.
“Belonging is about inhabiting the world as the real you. And the hard reality is that you’ll never fit in where you don’t belong. Here’s what it actually takes to truly belong where you’re meant to be—even if you don’t seem to fit in anywhere.”
Writer Marianne Cantwell has made a life work out of telling people that ‘weirdness is your edge,’ and ‘your hidden advantage.’
We look at people with a million followers and have perfect hair and smiles and speaking styles, but those people often didn’t start like that or felt like they belonged or felt comfortable who and where they were.
She said often, “they were the different ones” who didn’t fit in. She looked to her own identity as an empathetic, very sensitive person, who didn’t fit in the business world, which was a bit more straightlaced. And once she adapted and adopted that, she began to be successful.
Over on the https://www.learning-mind.com/dont-fit-in/ it talks a bit about the good things that matter about not fitting in.
They write,
“It sometimes takes great courage to stop and think about this path and decide what elements we truly choose for our own lives. If we define accomplishment as having these things, we limit what success can be for us. Perhaps success for you is having an afternoon each week to paint, or hike in nature. Or maybe it is having a great circle of friends who really ‘get’ you and where you truly fit in.”
“Much of our focus on outward signs of success such as making money or shopping might come from an underlying fear that our lives are meaningless. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor, said that ‘When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.’”
So, ask yourself, what is meaningful? Does this thing that I’m doing right now mean something to me?
We grow up in families usually and those family’s praise some things and others? Not so much. One family might think competitive sports are the bomb. Another family might not. Even if your own family you could have those divisions. Those systems of attention and reward push all certain ways, so it’s good sometimes to step back and think, “Holy crap. Am I only a writer because of this thing that happened to me in second grade or because my mom praised it a lot?”
Do I play softball because my mom did? Do I art because the only thing my dad praised me for was that?
As they say on learning-mind.com,
“And countless studies have shown that materialism doesn’t make us happy anyway. I’m not saying that having a steady job or buying nice things is wrong, I’m simply suggesting that you question everything and act upon your own desires rather than society’s expectations.
“When you choose to do the things that serve you, rather than politicians, big businesses, and even family and friends, you will being to live a more authentic life and discover a deep sense of belonging that can never be found by merely fitting in.
That feeling can come from abusive relationships, medical issues, and trauma, but sometimes it comes from a lack of confidence or belief that who you really are is unworthy, which is why we’re going to talk about some awesome stories from Buzzfeed compilation by Allie Hayes about dumb things people do even when their smart.
Look, we all have moments of dumb and weird. It’s better to just embrace that stuff and be the person you were meant to be, the person you are, and be proud and joyful that there are things about you that make you beautiful and unique and so shiny.
OTHER LINKS MENTIONED
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alliehayes/dumbest-thing-smart-people-have-done-reddit
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!
It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
On BE BRAVE FRIDAYS, we share other people’s stories (unedited) to build a community of bravery and inspiration.
Please let us know if you want to share your story with us and we’ll read it here and post it on our social media and website.
This life is too short to not be brave. We can do this together.
This week’s Be Brave Story is from the wonderful Sheri Boggs!
Sheri, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
You are so brave and so wonderful.
xo Shaun and Carrie
I have a story of bravery to share. It isn’t big, bold physical bravery but rather small, mild bravery in which my foe WAS MY OWN MIND.
I took violin for a few years as a kid and started taking adult violin lessons in my late 40s. I was not great and probably would have given up a long time ago if not for my teacher, (let’s call her Ms.X), who is hilarious and reminds me of Candace Bergen. Half the time my lessons consisted of us ranting about politics or her telling me some marvelously gossipy story about when she played with our local symphony.
A few months before the pandemic we decided I was ready to join the New Horizons Orchestra. New Horizons is an international organization with orchestras in cities all over the United States. Anyone is welcome, regardless of experience or skill, and their motto is “Your Best Is Good Enough.” My first time there, however, I realized I would need significantly more than my best. Everyone seemed to be a music teacher, a retired symphony member, or someone who practices for three hours a day. I stared in bewilderment at the sheet music (a medley of tunes from Chicago) and struggled to keep up. My bow was barely able to land on the right string much less hit the right note.
Needless to say, when everything shut down I was relieved not to have to go back and be so noticeably behind everyone else. I also quit taking violin lessons, falling into a Covid-related funk and reasoning that Ms. X would only want to deal with Zoom for her most promising, high school and college-aged students. I didn’t touch my violin for a full 15 months.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Ms.X emailed me to see how I was doing and to let me know New Horizons was starting up again. I wrote back that everyone had been super nice but I’d felt embarrassed the few times I went, I never had time to practice, and I wasn’t planning to go back. She wrote back that she would “entreat me to reconsider,” claiming that, “some of those people have no talent whatsoever and I would know because I taught some of them.” She assured me that New Horizons is about the joy of playing and that I was already way ahead of some of them, even if it didn’t feel like it.
So, much to my own surprise, I went to my first practice this week! I was again completely lost in the sheet music and unsure what key we were even playing in but it felt good to be there. Everyone was so welcoming and if anyone heard me scratching away at the wrong string with my bow, they didn’t say anything. I came home, practiced, figured out the key, watched videos of other people playing the pieces, and practiced some more. I plan to go back next week.
The takeaway for me is how, when I’m anxious, I try to make my world smaller and talk myself out of things where I have to experience being awful at something, but what actually helps me is to keep pushing outside of my comfort zone, and letting my world get bigger. I had fun, seeing a few familiar faces and occasionally hearing my violin blend in with the violins all around me.
Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments can be HUGE or small, but we want you to share them with us so we can share them with the world. You can be anonymous if you aren’t brave enough to use your name. It’s totally chill.
Want to be part of the team? Send us a quick (or long) email and we’ll read it here and on our YouTube channel.
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
Email us at carriejonesbooks@gmail.com
Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!
It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
