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Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of

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Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is

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Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,

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Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

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Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

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Speaker 1: of Curiosities. The books that make the news really do

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Speaker 1: so because of their prose or even how well they sell.

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Speaker 1: Usually it's because they stir a controversy. To Kill a

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Speaker 1: Mocking Bird by Harper Lee has been on countless reading

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Speaker 1: lists in middle schools and high schools across the United States.

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Speaker 1: Set in ninety six, it follows the story of a

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Speaker 1: small town lawyer defending the innocence of a black man

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Speaker 1: falsely accused of a heinous crime, and since its publication

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Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty, it's found itself on another kind of

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Speaker 1: list in some schools, namely the Banned book list. Books

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Speaker 1: are banned for a variety of reasons. They might be

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Speaker 1: due to their subject matter or the author's personal beliefs.

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Speaker 1: Regardless of the reason, those titles not only become prohibited,

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Speaker 1: they also become coveted, because who doesn't want to read

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Speaker 1: a book that's been deemed forbidden right well, the Puritans, apparently.

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Speaker 1: Thomas Morton was a lawyer from Devon, England, who had

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Speaker 1: endured a fairly conservative upbringing. His family were members of

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Speaker 1: the landed gentry and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle paid for

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Speaker 1: by the people renting their lands. Yet despite his traditionalist childhood,

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Speaker 1: Morton grew up more progressive over time. During his years

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Speaker 1: studying law. In the fifteen nineties, he fell in with

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Speaker 1: the libertine crowd, shunning the trends of the time by

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Speaker 1: enjoying a life of fun and partying. He set sail

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Speaker 1: from Massachusetts in sixteen twenty two, where he was taken

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Speaker 1: aback by the Puritans and their well puritanical beliefs. As

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Speaker 1: a result, he returned to England in sixteen twenty three

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Speaker 1: to prepare for a more productive visit the following year.

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Speaker 1: When Morton came back to Massachusetts in sixteen twenty four,

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Speaker 1: it was as part owner of the Wallaston Company. He

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Speaker 1: founded a new settlement called Merrymount on land given to

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Speaker 1: him by the native Algonquins, and, unlike the Puritans, who

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Speaker 1: saw them as savages to be controlled or killed, Morton

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Speaker 1: got along well with his indigenous neighbors. He even regarded

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Speaker 1: them as more civilized and humanitarian than those of his

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Speaker 1: countrymen in Plymouth, who had shunned the more free thinking

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Speaker 1: ways that Morton held. In fact, the colony didn't just

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Speaker 1: dislike Morton, they went to war with him. Puritan militia's

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Speaker 1: broke up his pagan festivals and spread rumors about the

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Speaker 1: debaucherous things going on in his town. In reality, much

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Speaker 1: of the backlash was due to how quickly Merry Mounts

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Speaker 1: was growing. Many of their business ventures, like fur trading

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Speaker 1: and farming were taking off, and Plymouth just couldn't compete.

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Speaker 1: Morton was also trading guns with the Algonquins, who had

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Speaker 1: already been marked as enemies by the Puritans. Soon enough,

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Speaker 1: Plymouth's commander, a guy named Miles Standish, used his armed

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Speaker 1: militia to take control of Merrymounts and then arrested Morton

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Speaker 1: and the blasphemous act that had done him in the

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Speaker 1: merrymount May Day celebration. May Day had started as an

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Speaker 1: ancient festival celebrated on the first of May with singing, dancing,

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Speaker 1: and delicious food, but the Puritans of the Plymouth Colony

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Speaker 1: only saw it as a heathen's paradise. For his indiscretion,

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Speaker 1: Morton was tried and exiled to the Isle of Shoals,

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Speaker 1: a small cluster of deserted islands between Maine and New Hampshire.

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Speaker 1: But don't worry, Morton survived with the help of the

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Speaker 1: native people's who brought him food from the mainland. When

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Speaker 1: he eventually made it back to Merrymount, the Puritans had

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Speaker 1: reduced it to a shadow of its former self. This

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Speaker 1: time he was banished to England, but once there he

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Speaker 1: found a new way to get revenge that he craved.

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Speaker 1: He sued the colony, and because England had already been

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Speaker 1: at odds with the Puritans, King Charles used Morton's case

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Speaker 1: as the perfect excuse to formally revoke Plymouth's charter. Next,

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Speaker 1: Morton decided to parlay his success with the lawsuit into

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Speaker 1: a brand new endeavor. He wrote a series of books

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Speaker 1: about his experiences in Massachusetts called New English Canaan, and

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Speaker 1: the books took aim at the men behind the Plymouth Colony.

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Speaker 1: Their real names were replaced with unflattering nicknames. Of course,

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Speaker 1: Miles Standish was referred to as Captain Shrimp, while Massachusetts

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Speaker 1: Bay Governor John Endicott was called Captain Littleworth. Within the

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Speaker 1: pages of Morton's New English Canaan, he insulted their beliefs

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Speaker 1: and policies, and suggested the best approach to the New

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Speaker 1: World was integrating the colonies with the native tribes, the

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Speaker 1: way Marymount had done. Unsurprisingly, Plymouth's governor, William Bradford hated

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Speaker 1: the books. He went to great lengths to keep anyone

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Speaker 1: else from reading them, which is why New English Canaan

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Speaker 1: is widely considered to be the first book band in America.

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Speaker 1: Although the English government destroyed the first edition of the

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Speaker 1: book soon after its publication, a few copies did survive,

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Speaker 1: and so did Morton's legacy. His exploits were immortalized works

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Speaker 1: by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Vincent Bennett, and Philip Roth. All

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Speaker 1: those headaches and all that trouble only resulted in a

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Speaker 1: legacy that has lived on for four hundred years. And

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Speaker 1: all they had to do to keep it from happening

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Speaker 1: was to let the man do the one thing he wanted,

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Speaker 1: the fight for his right two party. Most of us

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Speaker 1: have experienced a bad day now and then maybe a

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Speaker 1: stretch of bad luck here or there, or even a

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Speaker 1: rare major setback, the loss of a job, a car

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Speaker 1: accident on the way to work. You know the drill.

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Speaker 1: But some people have experienced even worse blunders that alter

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Speaker 1: their life forever, or don't just cost the company money

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Speaker 1: but cost it everything. And at the bottom of that

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Speaker 1: deep well of failure is one particular story from a

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Speaker 1: few decades ago, and it's sure to make you feel

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Speaker 1: better about your own current circumstances. When Leon Viatore and

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Speaker 1: his son Timmy went fishing on November twenty one of

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, they assumed that everything would go well. Maybe

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Speaker 1: they'd catch something or maybe they wouldn't, but their lives

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Speaker 1: would never really be in danger, so they set out

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Speaker 1: in their boat to see what could happen. Their fishing

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Speaker 1: spot was a small freshwater lake about fifteen miles south

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Speaker 1: of Lafayette in Louisiana, known as Lake Panure. It wasn't massive,

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Speaker 1: maybe ten ft deep, but it was a lovely location,

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Speaker 1: and it even had its own small island, Jefferson Island,

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Speaker 1: where visitors can find the rip van Winkle live oak gardens.

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Speaker 1: But it wasn't all beautiful. From their seats in the boat,

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Speaker 1: Leon and Timmy could also see an oil rig. It

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Speaker 1: turns out that, in a search for more natural resources

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Speaker 1: to take advantage of oil giant Texaco had hired a

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Speaker 1: local company to do a test drill right in the

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Speaker 1: middle of the lake. So our intrepid fisherman steered away,

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Speaker 1: giving the oil rig some distance in hopes that the

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Speaker 1: fish would follow. But that's when something went wrong. Now,

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Speaker 1: typically an oil rig will drill down until their target

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Speaker 1: is reached valuable, precious oil, and we can all imagine

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Speaker 1: those little geysers of black liquid shooting up from the ground,

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Speaker 1: signaling success. But at about feet the oil crew felt

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Speaker 1: something different. It was as if the drill had broken free,

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Speaker 1: which might have signaled a bad day for them, But

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Speaker 1: it was about to get worse because not only did

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Speaker 1: they not see that's tell tale geyser of oil that

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Speaker 1: they were after, but the water around the drill shaft

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Speaker 1: began to move. In fact, it almost looked as if

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Speaker 1: it were swirling, and within a matter of minutes, that

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Speaker 1: swirling motion looked an awful lot like a bathtub that's

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Speaker 1: had the drain plug pulled, which is exactly what had

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Speaker 1: happened because their drill had cut through the lake bed

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Speaker 1: a thousand feet of rock and then straight into an

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Speaker 1: active salt mine that they didn't know was there. And

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Speaker 1: the moment the hole was formed, the entire decided that

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Speaker 1: it wanted to go down it. What happened next was

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Speaker 1: something out of a Michael Bay disaster movie. All two

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Speaker 1: point five billion gallons of water in the lake surged

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Speaker 1: into the hole, creating a massive vortex that pulled anything

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Speaker 1: around it down with it. A tug boat that was

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Speaker 1: present at the oil rig was sucked down and disappeared,

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Speaker 1: and then one of the heavy duty barges. In fact,

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Speaker 1: before it was all over, all eleven barges that were present,

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Speaker 1: we're gone. And it wasn't just boats that were at risk.

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Speaker 1: The water actually began to erode and pull away chunks

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Speaker 1: of the land around it. At least sixty five acres

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Speaker 1: of land were dissolved and pulled into the hole, including

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Speaker 1: much of the live oak gardens. And as all of

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Speaker 1: it drained downward, the water level fell so low that

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Speaker 1: something else happened. You see, there's a canal that connects

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Speaker 1: the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, so that water

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Speaker 1: could flow out into the ocean if needed. But now

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Speaker 1: that canal had begun to run north, sending water from

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Speaker 1: the Gulf into the lake and the salt mine below it,

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Speaker 1: and in the process it created a massive one fifty

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Speaker 1: foot waterfall, the largest on record in Louisiana. Thankfully, all

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Speaker 1: fifty five men working in the salt mine were able

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Speaker 1: to evacuate, and no one lost their lives that day,

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Speaker 1: and once the mind filled up, the lake eventually returned

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Speaker 1: to whatever the new normal was for it. Even our

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Speaker 1: friends the fishermen, managed to survive, riding their little boats

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Speaker 1: all the way to the muddy bottom before being able

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Speaker 1: to climb out and walk to safety. We've all had

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Speaker 1: bad days, but when you consider a story like this,

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Speaker 1: or someone drilled a hole in the world and made

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Speaker 1: an entire lake disappear, well, it's hard to feel like

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Speaker 1: a total failure. Fun probably not, but curious you better

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Speaker 1: believe it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of

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Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,

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Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast

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Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey

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Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award

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Speaker 1: winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series,

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Speaker 1: and television show and you can learn all about it

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Speaker 1: over at the world of Lore dot com. And until

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Speaker 1: next time, stay curious. Yeah,