Step into a tour of the delightful and absurd: Mark Twain’s frog tale meets the real-life rules of small-town America. At the Calaveras County Fair frogs leap for glory, but a blunt public-health line separates sport from supper — if a frog dies mid-jump it cannot be eaten and must be disposed of, a pragmatic and strangely moving rule to prevent disease.

Then we pivot to civic theater: Chico’s symbolic ban on building or storing nuclear weapons—complete with a token fine—reveals how municipalities use laws to assert local values even when federal authority looms larger. Along the way we debunk and decode myths, from the likely-apocryphal ban on women driving in housecoats to modern protections for driving rights and hot-button policies on clotheslines and rooftop solar in HOAs.

We zip across the West — Colorado’s permits to make it snow, rules about couches on porches — and return to a moral throughline: care for wildlife, community identity, and the small, earnest regulations that say what a place values. Protect the frog, save the planet, and please don’t bring your warhead to the farmer’s market.

August 1835. A penny paper prints a breathless scientific report and, overnight, the moon blooms with forests, oceans, and winged humanoids. Listeners gather in public squares to hear the tale read aloud; theologians and citizens debate souls and science while the nation wrestles with a new, electrifying media age.

This episode follows the Green Moon hoax from its breathless headlines to the ashes of trust it left behind, tracing how borrowed authority, vivid detail, and a hunger for sensational news made fiction feel like fact. We meet the real figures tangled in the story, the shaky science that should have warned readers, and the paper that may have been joking — or testing how far confidence could carry a lie.

In short, it’s a story about curiosity, credulity, and the fragile power of authority — and a reminder that scrutiny, not swagger, makes science reliable.

This podcast is a work of historical interpretation. While we strive for accuracy, some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate. Thank you for listening.

When a passerby insists on pronouncing the state one way, a single resolution from the 1880s stands between history and habit. This episode opens with that small-but-stubborn decision — a deliberate choice to honor French spelling and Quapaw heritage that turned pronunciation into law.

From there we chase the folklore: bans on blue light bulbs and teachers punished for bobbed hair. Those stories smell like the kind of municipal overreach that thrived in the early 20th century — real in places, exaggerated in the telling. The narrative follows the trail from rumor to record, separating theatrical claims from likely local ordinances.

Finally, the story lands at the most prosaic truth: Arkansas does regulate what you sell at the roadside stand. Permits, safe handling and honest labeling make for less glamorous but far more enforceable rules. Arkansas, say it right, read the sign, and wash your melons.