Doomed To Repeat It

Episode 13, in which Leila discovers: - That when your revolutionary motto is "Revive the [Chinese government], exterminate the foreigners," calling it a "rebellion" might be a biiiit rich - That she has yet another German to add to her kick-in-the-shin-via-time-machine list And in which Tristan: -  Gives serious consideration to changing the name of the podcast to "the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Co-Hosts"

  Leila tries to impersonate Joseph Stalin, and winds up doing a pretty good German vampire. Tristan warns Leila to never, ever watch the nuclear war docudrama, "Threads". We also discuss all the times we were almost vaporized without realizing it. Fun! Episode 12, in which Leila discovers: - That it's really German vampires who pronounce "the" as "zee", and not, as she had hoped, Joseph Stalin - That hackneyed jokes about Soviet paranoia are a half decent way of understanding the Great Purge And in which Tristan is forced to admit: - That it's a lot easier to scoff at the failed Soviet science of Lysenkoism than it is to know one single thing about Gregor Mendel. He's the one who made plants have sex on...charts? 

Episode 11, in which Leila discovers: - That the history was inside of her all along, as she does a bang-up job of narrating the story of Louis Riel and his various rebellia acts of resistance - That the name Arthur was a bit dorky long before PBS ever got its aardvark paws on it And in which Tristan reminds us: - That while it is, of course, perfectly acceptable to jump down your friend's throat for mangling a quotation, it is considered impolite to then deliver the quote correctly yourself

Episode 10, in which Leila discovers: - That it might please the eternal pessimist Lawrence Oates to know that 103 years later he is still making people very sad - How Britain got so big while being (as she astutely and repeatedly points out) so very small And in which Tristan realizes: - That he will never, ever get Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett properly segregated in his mind, so why even bother? - That reading the name "Alfred Thayer Mahan" dozens of times can still leave a person woefully unprepared to say it

Episode 9, in which Leila discovers: - That almost everything she knew about Cleopatra was made up, but that there's still a pretty interesting person buried underneath - That so long as Tristan can compare everything to the Romans, we might just make it out of Japan in one piece And in which Tristan misspeaks: - More times than he can bear to rehash here. Which one bothered you the most? Let us know at doomed.pod@gmail.com

  Episode 8, in which Leila discovers: - How to kill untold thousands of people for your own glory, gain, and amusement, and be remembered as one of history's greatest heroes (Hint: be Alexander the Great and conquer west to east) - How to kill untold thousands of people for your own glory, gain, and amusement, and be remembered as one of history's greatest villains (Hint: be Attila the Hun and conquer east to west) And in which Tristan: - Might have made it seem like he considered the portrayal of hoplite warfare in 300 to be in any way accurate. All he meant was that the movie put something resembling a hoplon and doru in each Spartan's hands. Nothing more!  - When he wasn't aggressively sucking wind into the microphone, strained the phrase "nailed it" to its very breaking point  

Episode 7, in which Leila discovers: - That - holy St. Francis! - for once her stereotypical snippet of knowledge of a historical figure is actually pretty accurate - How to sum up 3000 years of Chinese history in the span of one French folk ditty - That Tristan did not, does not, and likely will never have a good handle on the Hittites And in which Tristan makes Leila choose: - Whether she wants questions answered fast or answered well. He then goes on to do neither. 

  Episode 6, in which Leila discovers: - That anything, even the den of all corruption and iniquity, sounds nice in a Jamaican accent - That one flavour of slave-owning, woman-hating, violent racists is vastly preferable to the other - That you can never tell who your real friends are until you take time to stop and count the stab wounds And in which Tristan: - Said "Nineveh" when he really meant "Nimrud" - Swung and missed twice on the correct pronunciation of Leonidas. Let this stand as a testament to his eternal mislacedaemoniopathy

  Episode 5, in which Leila discovers: - That if you've brought a Gatling gun to a knife fight, then you just might be a redcoat - That Tetris is Russian, the Light Brigade charged, Florence Nightengale'd, and the Crimean War happened - That the Hundred Years' War, while still awful, was too good to be true And in which Tristan realizes too late: - That there are other adjectives in the English language besides "massive" - sorry about that - That nobody really calls it the Crimea. It's either just Crimea, or the Crimean Peninsula - That there absolutely was a Nine Years' War, it's just that I normally think of it as the War of the Grand Alliance, so it didn't come to mind. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it

Episode 4, in which Leila discovers: - What it's all about, man - Who participated in the Crusades...provided they have some connection to Robin Hood - Where to have the best shot at meeting God - Why the Crusades definitely didn't, probably didn't, and maybe did happen And in which Tristan displays ongoing difficulty with: - The fact that God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac, rather than telling Isaac to kill his son Someguy. Allegedly. - The fact that Phillip II, who is not a Louis at all, was the King of France during the Third Crusade.

Episode 3, in which Leila discovers: - The ballad of Marco Polo and the rusty cello - What Stonehenge definitely wasn’t - How convicts + time = Australia - The terrifying power of parrot eggs - When (and, to a far lesser extent, why) guns went boom And in which Tristan displays tremendous ignorance of: - Sinbads, real and fictional - Science But not of: - Kafka. We know he isn’t Russian, we were just trying to think of a more nearby penal colony. Yeesh.

Episode 2, in which Leila discovers: - The subtle differences between Nostradamus and Nosferatu - That a war by any other name would probably still smell terrible - Why The Emperor's New Groove would have been (any) Tupac's favourite Disney movie - The importance of always leaving a note And in which Tristan fails to satisfy: - Leila's somewhat creepy fixation with "bloodlines"  

Episode 1, in which Leila discovers: - For the hundredth time, who Charlemagne was - That King John was an underrated magma carver - Why those pesky Saxons are always in the last place you look - That if the French didn't win on the Plains of Abraham, then it must have been the Brit...ish? - That she has permission to forget the Alamo entirely - How to win the battle and lose the war And in which Tristan screws up: - Refreshingly little, until the very last second