The Eséka Train Disaster of 2016 | Episode 109

We've described some pretty fairly awful commutes on this show before. On today's very special "return-to-Africa" episode, all people wanted to do was get to work, but the weather got bad to the point where the road said "you shall not pass, your life is in danger". The train took a look at all this and said, "hold my beer”.

On today’s episode: you will learn how the location of today’s story sounds toasty and hot to the uninitiated, but is actually one of the wettest places on earth; we will describe a claustrophobic and unenviable situation somewhere between the roller-skating in the back of the truck stunt from Jackass combined with the trash compactor scene from Star Wars; and I will actually say that no one choo choo chooses to be in today’s kind of disaster, which I only call out early to ask for your forgiveness.

And if you were listening on Patreon: you would learn about the US military’s ambitions to turn its enemies into bee-coated, gay, diarrhea fanatics, and how they inspired Mikkos Cassadine’s aims of destroying the world in the 1980s; we’ll visit a place so rainy that you will have no choice but to assume I’m lying; and we’ll walk through a list of all the different, awful things that can happen to your spine.
Also, at the end of this episode, I’m going to announce the results of a naming contest we held for our hungry gorilla friend, and I will share the story behind it, which, fair warning, is extremely emotional.

People describe travel by rail as a romantic way to see the landscape. Well, I don’t know so much about that, but in this very special and intimate episode, a lot of people were brought closer together.

I wanted to shout out Joyce Mokou Kontcheu (ask how to pronounce) who sent me my very first fan mail from Africa! That’s a big deal for me. This was one of those rare occasions where a starter disaster perfectly sets the stage for a much worse secondary disaster. I call it a cascading infrastructure failure. She called it a careless disaster that could have been avoided with a little common sense. She truly hoped I would cover it, so yes, of course I did. Merci, Joyce.

And I didn’t have time to record a quick thing for our June Birthdays, so I wanted to shout out Charles Jewell and Kerry Ann Borthwick for another year around spinning around the sun in an otherwise cold and indifferent universe, wishing them a little birthday cheer, and thanks again to Hydra Corvi again for helping me with a little research on this one.

From here we’re back in my hometown just long enough to make a little fun of the World Cup before jetting off to beautiful Corsica to watch the beautiful game and have a high statical chance of getting very, very hurt. Spoiler, in the safety segment, I’m going to tell you what to do if not-only are you impaled on a pole, but suspended above the ground by it like a bug pinned to a wall. Good stuff.

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