The Best Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Episodes

My favourite podcast of all time is Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. Jimmy Akin is a Catholic apologist and a polymath. In this series, he talks about various "mysteries" with Dom Bettinnelli, his genial co-host.

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is very much in the tradition of TV shows such as Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of.. (although it's considerably less sensationalized than that one), as well as the Ripley's Believe It Or Not franchise. I've loved that sort of thing all my life. (My favourite example was a kid's book called The Giant Book of Fantastic Facts.)

The show is from a Catholic perspective, and some of the topics are of special interest to Catholics (like Marian apparitions), but mostly they are of general interest. In each episode, Jimmy examines the mystery "from the twin perspectives of faith and reason".

I'm usually a latecomer to TV shows and podcasts, but this one is an exception. I've followed it from the very first episode, having already been a fan of Jimmy Akin.

One of the things I like about the podcast is how comparatively seriously they take it all. There are plenty of jokes and moments of light relief, and some of the episodes are humorous in nature, but for the most part the tone is endearingly earnest, rather than hilarious or tongue-in-cheek. Each mystery is unfolded in a methodical and even somewhat academic manner.

I haven't listened to every episode, or even anything close to it. I generally skip the UFO episodes, of which there are many. (I find UFO stories boring and corny, and don't believe any of them.) I'm not keen on the parapsychology episodes, either.

My favourite episodes are those which introduce me to a mystery I'd never even heard about before, or which analyze a mystery which is somehow one of a kind. 

So, without further ado (I love that phrase, here are my favourites:

https://sqpn.com/2019/05/fatima/

Well-trodden ground for most Catholics, but it's so interesting and astonishing, it never ceases to be of interest. And it's fun to hear a well-known mystery get the Mysterious World treatment.

 https://sqpn.com/2019/06/the-voynich-manuscript/

A strange manuscript, which came to light in modern times but whose vellum been carbon-dated to the fourteen century. Written in a language (or code) that nobody has been able to decipher. Truly a unique mystery.

https://sqpn.com/2019/07/joseph-smith-mormon-prophet/

I've been fascinated with Mormonism from my twenties. Jimmy and Dom are always kind and respectful, but Mormonism's founder doesn't come out well from this examination.

https://sqpn.com/2019/08/the-betz-sphere/

A small steel sphere which came to public knowledge in the seventies, and supposedly had many strange properties. I'm very sceptical about this one, but I'd never heard about it, and it's interesting. 

https://sqpn.com/2019/10/numbers-stations/

Mysterious radio stations where numbers are read about at repeated intervals. Sometimes includes a call signal. There's not much mystery about these. They undoubtedly exist, and everybody knows their purpose: to transmit coded messages to intelligence agents. But they're still extremely creepy and fascinating. A new one has been started recently, broadcasting to Iran.  

https://sqpn.com/2020/04/david-koresh-waco-siege-branch-davidians-texas-apocalypse/

I knew next to nothing about David Koresh, even though I remember the story being in the news all those years back. And I find cults interesting. The sequel episode, in which the disastrous raid on the Branch Davidian complex is described, is also interesting.

https://sqpn.com/2020/08/ruby-ridge/

Not really a "mystery", per se, but a compelling story about another disastrous raid. I'd never heard about it before.

https://sqpn.com/2021/08/the-exodus-did-it-happen/

I'm a fairly sceptical guy. I've always found the story of the Exodus kind of hard to swallow and wondered if it's to be taken as literal truth. This episode provides some surprising evidence in its favour.

https://sqpn.com/2021/11/d-b-cooper-the-hijacker-who-got-away/

Ah, D.B. Cooper. Who doesn't love this one? The hijacker of a commercial flight who managed to parachute away from the plane with a lot of money, although he probably didn't survive the jump. But nobody knows for sure!

https://sqpn.com/2022/02/our-lady-of-kibeho-marian-apparition

I'm fascinated by Marian apparitions and I knew very little about this one.

https://sqpn.com/2022/04/the-green-children-of-woolpit/

This is about as singular and one-off as it gets. A medieval English legend about literal green-skinned children who appeared out of nowhere. So many incidental details about the story give it a certain plausibility.

https://sqpn.com/2023/03/joshua-abraham-norton-first-american-emperor-emperor-norton/

This is one of the "funny" episodes, and it is absolutely charming. About an eccentric who proclaimed himself an Emperor and was indulged by many people.

https://sqpn.com/2023/05/the-amazing-story-of-iron-mike-malloy-michael-malloy-mike-the-durable-murder-trust/

Another funny episode, about a syndicate who decided to kill a drinking buddy (and Irishman) for insurance money. However, he seemed impossible to kill. Not really that funny, I suppose, since they did kill him and went to the hot chair.

https://sqpn.com/2023/11/our-lady-of-zeitoun-egyptian-apparition-coptic-church/

Jimmy Akin has named this the most persuasive of Marian apparitions and it's hard to argue with that. It was filmed!

https://sqpn.com/2024/09/the-zodiac-killer-crimes/

The show tries to avoid too many true crime episodes, which is laudable. I'd never really paid much attention to the Zodiac Killer until I listened to this episode, then I was fascinated by the subject for a while. It also got me to watch the 2007 movie Zodiac, which can hardly be praised too highly.

https://sqpn.com/2024/11/investigating-medjugorje/

I've never paid that much attention to Medjugorje. I've always been a sceptic. Jimmy and Dom devote three episodes to the subject, and....well, I came away more sceptical than ever. But interesting stuff, for sure.

https://sqpn.com/2024/12/the-man-from-taured/

An absolutely fascinating story of a man from an apparently non-existent state, who was detained by Japanese police in 1960. I'd never heard of this before.

https://sqpn.com/2025/04/jack-the-ripper/

I've never been particularly interested in Saucy Jack, but this is a good distillation of the head-spinning number of theories that have proliferated down the decades. They did several episodes on this one.

https://sqpn.com/2025/10/the-tennessee-prophet-john-hendrix/

A man who seems to have prophesied the building of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project. Absolutely captivating.

https://sqpn.com/2025/12/the-amazing-sea-monkeys/

Unless it's false memory syndrome, I'm pretty sure I can remember encountering advertisements for these critters, which were first marketed in 1962. One of my colleagues was actually given some as a gift, when he was a kid. He thought they were lame, although apparently they have their own fandom.

The guy who came up with the idea is interesting for other reasons, which are quite shocking.

So what are you waiting for? Go and listen to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World!

Polybius

Have you ever heard the urban legend of Polybius? Here is a perfectly adequate summary from Wikipedia:

Polybius is an urban legend about a mysterious arcade video game. According to the legend, the game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon in 1981. The gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night terrors, and hallucinations. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as so addictive that players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black who were said to record data on the players before removing all the arcade machines.

Polybius is probably my favourite spooky urban legend-- despite the fact that it's a manufactured urban legend. That is, it seems to have been started by an online article in 1998. (Although, tantalizingly, it does draw on various rumours about video arcades back in the eighties.)

Here are some the reasons I find the story so spooky:

1) The strangeness of the name Polybius. It's not the sort of name you'd associate with a nineties video arcade game. (Admittedly, I don't know much about nineties video games.) It's the name of an ancient Roman historian. I seem to recall that the choice of name might have been a nod to something Polybius wrote about mass hysteria, though I can't remember where I read that. I find this oddly sinister.

2) The fact that the game's "cabinet" was said to be a plain black cabinet, and that the game itself was "abstract and geometric". I also find this oddly sinister.

3) The understatement of the story. Although the above summary mentions players of the game dying and going mad, most of the accounts I read-- or perhaps this is just the version I preferred to remember-- didn't go so far. Instead they mentioned that the game was addictive, and that it gave people nightmares, hallucinations, and insomnia. This is somehow much creepier, in my view.

4) The fact that the scary element in this story is the opposite of everything that is traditionally scary. Video arcades are public, busy, modern, and high-tech (for the time). Spooky legends tend more towards deserted, abandoned, dark places. Why this should make the story scarier, and not just more original-- I'm not quite so sure of that. (The obvious answer is to say: because it suggests that dark forces can strike us anywhere, even in mundane and modern settings. But I don't think that's it, somehow.)

5) The lack of any final climax, pay-off, or "reveal".

So, do you find the story scary?

I think I'll have much more to say on the subject of why I find particular stories scary, and why I seek out particular stories. It's one of those topics where I want to write about it to form my own thoughts, as well as to communicate them. 

An Incidental Query

Would a world full of idealists be a better world, or a worse one?

It's not a rhetorical question. I'm interested in what people think.

Loves and Hates From Twenty Years Ago

Going through my twenty-year old blog, I was interested to find this list of loves and hates. I've changed my mind on many of them, while with others I feel exactly the same today.

First, I listed the hate. Comments from Present Me in italics.

1) Travel bores. No change.

2) Travel-writers/writing. No change.

3) People who dilly-dally in queues. No change.

4) People who walk slowly in front of you in a narrow passage-way. No change.

5) Sideways (movie). I was too hard on this. It wasn't a bad movie, I just found its cult irritating.

6) Shrek (movie). I can't even remember why I put this on the list.

7) People using “oh” when they mean “zero” or “nought”. No change.

8) Bob Dylan. I'm not sure why I put Bob Dylan down. Probably, again, because of his cult. I don't know a lot of his songs even today, but the ones I know, I like. And he seems like a good guy.

9) Republicans/Unionists. I've completely changed my mind about this. If republican means "res publica" (the common good), I consider myself a republican, and even an Irish republican-- despite my fondness for monarchy. As for the unionists, I've come to greatly admire them for their loyalty to their heritage. Basically, in our socially atomised and banalised society, I tend to admire anyone who cares about heritage or national loyalty.

10) Robert de Niro. I don't have strong feelings about him now and wonder why I put him on the list.

11) Jack Nicholson. I've come to like him a lot.

12) Sneering, mean-spirited humour, no matter how funny. Prime example: The Simpsons. I still hold by the principle, although I would no longer accuse the Simpsons of this.

13) Anti-semitism posing as liberalism. I still hate anti-semitism, but I've also become wary of accusing anyone of prejudice-- it's such an easy charge to make, and such promiscuous accusations are the bread and butter of political correctness/woke.

14) Most of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. I no longer feel so strongly about this, and I wonder why I ever felt strongly enough to put it on the list.

15) Parents who let their children run in the supermarket. I've changed my mind about this. I still find it irritating, but childhood obesity has become such a problem that I can't find it in my heart to complain about children running.

16) Anti-Englishness. I've become a lot more tolerant of this. i'm an anglophile all the way through, but national prejudices make the world more interesting-- if they don't got too far.

17) Church-bashing. Well, I still hate this, though I might be indulgent in particular cases. This was written when I was an agnostic.

18) People who exaggerate their Dublin accents to sound more street-wise/tough/working-class. I've become more tolerant of this. Insofar as it adds to local distinctiveness, it's good.

19) People who pull you up for saying “tomorrow” when, for example, you refer to Wednesday afternoon as tomorrow at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. I would find this to be an amusing quirk today.

20) Confrontational people. I still feel this way-- mostly-- but sometimes confrontation is admirable.

21) Studied bohemianism. Again, I would find this more endearing than annoying today-- anything that adds to the colour of life.

22) Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, New Historicism etc. I've come to think that postmodernism has something going for and is, to some extent, a genuine description of a cultural and social phenomenon. The rest is all nonsense. Mostly endearing nonsense, but post-colonialism feeds into the "sacred victim" and "oppressor-oppressed" menatality that has wreacked havoic in our world.

23) Lotteries. I still feel the same way.

25) Cars. I've completely changed my mind on this one, and I've come to see the romance of cars.

26) The servility of dogs, in contrast to the dignity of cats. Honestly, this baffles me. I like both dogs and cats, and loyalty is probably the virtue I admire the most. This must have been a temporary hang-up.

I followed this up with a list of things I loved. Again, I add comments in italics.

1) Poetry of W.B. Yeats. No change.

2) Poetry of Philip Larkin. No change.

3) Quentin Tarantino movies. No change, although I didn't like Django Unchained, and I haven't loved his later works as much as I did everything up to Kill Bill.

4) The cinema in general. No change.

5) Snow. No change.

6) Horror movies/books. No change.

7) The students in UCD. No change.

8) Spaghetti Bolognese. No change, although it's been overtaken by steak and chips as my favourite meal.

9) Winter and Autumn, esp. October. No change.

10) Train stations. No change.

11) The English language. No change.

12) Englishness in general. No change.

13) Jewish culture in general. No change, although I'm less confident I have any real knowledge of it.

14) Led Zeppelin. No change.

15) The Victorian Era. No change.

16) The King James Bible. No change.

17) The sea. Who doesn't love the sea? But I admit I sometimes find it dispiriting, in certain circumstances. I've lived five minutes from the sea for the last few years.

18) Evocative phrases like “The cold light of day”, “All human life is there”, “Softly-falling snow” and many, many others. No change. Although I've come to realize that getting overly excited about this doesn't get a good reaction in some social situations.

19) Darkness. No change.

20) Billboards, especially glowing billboards on a lonely night. No change.

21) Tea. No change, although to be honest I drink coffee more.

22) Puns, especially excruciatingly bad ones. No change. 

23) Silence and quiet. I'm surprised to see this here. Who doesn't love a bit of silence and quiet now and then? But personally, I much prefer a good bit of noise and activity around me.

Favourite Movie Scenes #6: Neo Meets the Architect from "The Matrix Reloaded"

I'm not going to say much about this one. I liked The Matrix Reloaded a lot more than most other people did. However, I enjoy this scene as a sort of stand-alone short movie.

The reason I like it is because it feels archetypal. Perhaps it's my imagination projecting backwards, but I think I've harboured a lifelong scenario of meeting an immensely wise old man, who is not God and not necessarily benevolent, in some kind of normally inaccessible place, a place that seems unreal or hyperreal or something like that.

I think this archetype is also evoked by other scenes in movies, books, and television. For instance, the last scene in the first series of Squid Game, when the protagonist meets the evil genius behind it all. (I regret watching Squid Game, which I find sickening in retrospect. I only watched one season.) And then there are the final scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monolith might serve the role of the wise old man. And then there's the premise of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, where the protagonist's whole purpose is to reach the top of the Dark Tower which is the nexus of the universe. However, I never got to the end of that series.

(I've never cared much about acting. But, insofar as I care about acting, it's to strongly dislike over-acting. So Keanu Reeves is my kind of actor, and I wish all actors and actresses were similarly "wooden".)

Favourite Poems: "A Portrait in the Guards" by Laurence Whistler

Laurence Whistler is hardly a household name. He's not even primarily remembered as a poet, but a glass engraver. And yet he wrote two of my favourite poems: this, and "A Form of Epitaph".

I encountered this poem in my teens and have never forgotten it. Although the whole thing is good, it's the fourth and penultimate verse that, in my view, lifts it to the level of the sublime.

In my teens and twenties, I had the idea that great poetry expressed something that was on the verge of being inexpressible. I still think this is an important form of poetic greatness, though not the only one. "Snow" by Louis MacNeice is another example of this.

Note that Whistler uses "very" twice within the same two lines. The idea that one should always avoid such repetition (in verse or prose) seems quite misguided to me.

Aside from that incomparable verse, though, I think the poem captures something very real about drawing and painting: that you only really see something when you draw it. The hush of a drawing session in the Art class-room is a unique atmosphere, a unique state of mind.

A Portrait in the Guards

So these two faced each other there,
The artist and his model. Both
In uniform. Years back. In training.
Not combatant yet. But both aware
Of what the word meant. Not complaining,
But, inwardly, how loth.

They talked of this, perhaps. Each knew
The other, or himself, might be
Unlucky. But each knew this true
Of anyone at all. And so
There was no thrill in it. A knee
Jigged to the hit-tune of some show.

Each scrutinized the other frankly,
As only painter and sitter do:
Objectively and at leisure. Face
That must not, please, relax too blankly
Into repose. And face that threw
Glances, the brush being poised in space.

So both, it may be, had the sense
Of seeing suddenly very plain
A very obvious thing: the immense
Thereness of someone else: a man
Once only, since the world began.
Never before, and never again.

It could be, while a cigarette
Hung grey, each recognized the other
As valid utterly and brother.
It should be so. Because, of all
Who in that mess-tent shortly met,
These would be first to fall.

Why I Dislike Anti-Capitalism

During my self-imposed Lenten blog moratorium, I've had a lot of thoughts. This is one of them: I really dislike the whole concept of "anti-capitalism."

It's not because I'm especially a cheerleader for capitalism. But what is capitalism, anyway? I think a lot of the problem is that nobody really agrees what "capitalism" is. 

But it's more than that. I think it's a very bad thing that so many people blame all social ills on something called capitalism. The implication is that those problems can only really be solved when capitalism is abolished. And, until then...

Of course, capitalism is never going to be abolished, and the only developed societies in modern history that seriously tried to abolish capitalism were notoriously awful.

But even aside from that...

I've noticed that, whenever I argue with Irish people from a conservative perspective, they might acknowledge that the conservative has identified real problems, but they tend to put those down to "capitalism".

For instance, the housing crisis in Ireland is caused by capitalism, rather than the more obvious cause that their secular religion, or fear of social censure, won't allow them to blame.

But it can be anything else. If you complain about the loss of innocence in childhood, for instance, this will be put down to advertising and commodification and so on. There is literally nothing that you couldn't blame on capitalism with a bit of imagination.

Similarly, when I point out to progressive Irish people that they are now the establishment-- that they completely agree with the government, media, entertainment industry, and corporate elite on all the hot-button social topics-- they'll almost invariably say: "How can I be pro-establishment? I'm anti-capitalist!"

As though the establishment cares about that, or as though anybody cares about that.

There is nothing at all radical about being anti-capitalist, because everybody at heart knows that it's purely theatrical. Capitalism isn't going to be abolished and nobody really expects it to be.

It was the acknowledgement of this fundamental truth that led the left-wing to concentrate on identity politics from the sixties or seventies onwards.

Is this to say that there can be no economic reforms? Of course not. There can be and there have been.

But the basic model of all prosperous societies is going to remain capitalism in some form or other, and pretending otherwise seems like pure self-indulgence to me. And worse, since it prevents concentrating on real problems and real possibilities.