エピソード

  • Sea Devil Sinks SS Hawaii Maru

    Sea Devil Sinks SS Hawaii Maru
    2025/12/02
    There are stories from the Pacific War that settle into the mind with a kind of heavy clarity. They do not shout. They do not demand. They simply sit there and remind us that the ocean has a long memory. Today we are stepping into one of those stories, the night when USS Sea Devil went hunting in the East China Sea and crossed paths with a former passenger liner that had become something far more tragic. Hawaii Maru began her life carrying travelers who dressed for dinner. By the winter of 1944 she was carrying soldiers, gasoline, ammunition, and the burden of a war that was already slipping away from Japan. What happened when Sea Devil found her was swift, violent, and final. It was also a moment that reveals the strange mix of skill, fear, and consequence that shaped submarine warfare.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    6 分
  • The Natural

    The Natural
    2025/12/02
    Baseball tells stories that do not always stay on the field. Some of them travel across oceans, through stadiums filled with cheering crowds, and into the harsh silence of wartime. Today’s story is one of those. It begins with a seventeen year old pitcher who faced down Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig without a hint of fear, and it ends on a dark stretch of ocean where a transport ship never reached its destination. Eiji Sawamura lived a life shaped by talent, pride, and a world sliding toward conflict. His right arm carried the hopes of a nation, first on the pitcher’s mound and later on the battlefield. His rise, fall, and legacy reveal a Japan that was discovering professional baseball at the same time it was marching toward war. This episode looks at the extraordinary career and tragic death of the pitcher Japan still calls its lost ace.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分
  • The Worst Poetry in the Galaxy

    The Worst Poetry in the Galaxy
    2025/12/01
    Julia Ann Moore was the kind of poet who never set out to make people laugh, yet somehow managed to become a national sensation because her sincerity outpaced her technique. Born in rural Michigan with only a few years of schooling, she poured her heart into poems meant to comfort grieving families. Instead, her wandering rhythms and accidental humor turned her into a legend of literary misfires. Critics smiled, readers chuckled, and a clever publisher made sure the entire country knew her as the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Even Mark Twain took notice and modeled one of his most memorable comic characters on her style. This episode looks at the strange and very human story of a woman who tried her best to write poetry, stumbled in unforgettable ways, and somehow earned a place in American cultural history. Her work may be flawed, but her sincerity still echoes across the years.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分
  • WTF - Wicked

    WTF - Wicked
    2025/11/30
    Every now and then an episode comes along that captures the strange mood of the moment. It is the kind of morning when Friar Rod is drinking coffee that tastes like an IPA and Rabbi Dave is trying to decide if he is excited, depressed, or simply resigned to the state of the universe. That is where this episode begins. Rod has returned from Hawaii with a cold that behaves like an uninvited houseguest. Dave has survived a Thanksgiving that ended at a casino. Both hosts step into the show with the tired honesty of two men who know that life rarely behaves itself and rarely asks permission before making things weird. The world beyond their microphones is not much better. News of the Washington DC National Guard shooting hangs heavily over the conversation. The two of them refuse to swallow the simple explanations that the rest of the country seems eager to use. They ask harder questions about motive, ideology, and the way rage becomes a habit that people forget to question. Their discussion drifts into history, myth, and the uncomfortable truth that people repeat the same patterns because it feels easier than learning from them. Then the episode takes a turn toward the absurd. A tourist in England is arrested for a photo taken at an American gun range. The story raises concerns about speech, fear, and the quiet spread of rules that no one remembers agreeing to. After that the conversation moves to Wicked, both as a musical and as a cultural phenomenon. Rod and Dave explore the uneasy trend of turning villains into heroes and heroes into hollow symbols. It is funny, sharp, curious, and occasionally uncomfortable. In other words, it is exactly what listeners expect from What The Frock.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 時間 5 分
  • Remember November

    Remember November
    2025/11/30
    November has always behaved like a month with an old soul, the sort of calendar neighbor who sits on the porch as the leaves finish falling and tells you quietly what you already know. There is more year behind us than ahead. The light is thinning. The animals have figured this out without any fuss, but people are slower on the uptake. We insist on taking stock, on telling ourselves we are ready for what comes next, even when we are not. November has always been the place where reckoning and resolve meet. The Romans sensed it. Medieval farmers sensed it. The twentieth century all but shouted it. You live long enough and you begin to see that November is not simply a matter of thirty days. It is a way of thinking.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分
  • Patrol Reports - Bonefish Strikes

    Patrol Reports - Bonefish Strikes
    2025/11/29
    The story of USS Bonefish on November twenty ninth, nineteen forty three is the kind of moment that captures the strange rhythm of submarine warfare. Long stretches of waiting and watching suddenly turn into a burst of violence that decides everything in a few minutes. Bonefish had been working her way through the Flores Sea when a thin smear of smoke on the horizon pulled the crew straight into the hunt. What followed was a disciplined stalk, a clean attack, and a hard escape under the weight of depth charges. This introduction sets the stage for the attack itself. It was a morning that began like any other, filled with routine checks and quiet tension, but it quickly became a textbook example of how a trained crew, a steady captain, and a little luck could change the course of a day. It was the silent service at its sharpest.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分
  • Astrochimp

    Astrochimp
    2025/11/29
    There are stories in the early Space Race that sit in the shadows, waiting for someone to stop and look at them with a little patience. This is one of those stories. Before John Glenn became a national hero, before America finally proved it could put a human being into orbit, a small and serious chimpanzee named Enos stepped into a cramped Mercury capsule and took the gamble first. His flight on November 29, 1961 was supposed to be a clean rehearsal for the big human moment. Instead it turned into a hard lesson about the limits of early technology and the grit of a living passenger who never understood the stakes but carried them anyway. Today we walk back through that mission and give Enos his rightful place in the long and complicated road that led the United States into orbit.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分
  • Reaching the Pacific

    Reaching the Pacific
    2025/11/28
    Here is a **150 word podcast introduction**, following all your rules: no em dash marks, proper paragraphs, warm and human centered Dave Does History tone. --- There is a point on the map where the world once seemed to split open, and the men who found it were not looking for a peaceful view. They were hungry, exhausted, and nearly out of patience when they sailed into a narrow cut in the coast of South America in October of 1520. They had spent more than a year chasing a rumor, and now the water twisted ahead of them like a riddle carved into the earth. The Strait of Magellan was not a gift. It was a test, shaped by wind, stone, and despair, and it took everything those sailors had left to thread their way through it. On today’s episode we follow them into that cold, silent corridor. It is a story of determination, fear, stubborn leadership, and the moment when a hidden doorway finally revealed the true size of the planet.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    4 分