Ridiculous Romance

Craig Pritchert was going to be a Major League Baseball star before Barry Bonds stole his thunder. So Craig decided he would steal too - from banks! He met and fell for Nova Guthrie, a smalltown girl who craved excitement. Their spree of robberies netted them half a million dollars, and they were so in love that the only real crime would be to keep them apart… Well that and all the stealing.

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Ron Sheppard has been married 8 times and engaged even more. He's not a playboy or a polygamist, he just can't seem to date anyone without proposing! Now after 57 years of I Do's, he's done with divorces and retiring from romance. His manic matrimonies got us talking about some people's obsession with (or phobia of) marriage, and our own feelings about it too!

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Isabel and Jean Godin were so deeply in love that when distance and politics kept them apart, they waited for each other. But after 20 long years, Isabel was done waiting. In the company of 42 people, she set off through the Amazon basin to reunite with her husband. But almost immediately, things started to go disastrously wrong, leaving Isabel alone in the rainforest to fend for herself.

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Turns out we have the best fans of ANY podcast out there, and your words deserve to be heard! This time y'all filled in some details from earlier episodes, gave us some great insight for our non-binary characters, told us your own Jeopardy connections, helped with our accents, and even sent us to Poetry Corner with one listeners bawdy poem to her patient husband! There's so much more, so listen in while we read your amazing messages!

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Percy Grainger was a talented Australian composer and a complicated guy. He was weirdly close with his mother. He was kind of a big racist. He invented weird, wacky instruments and challenged musical norms. And he left a package to be opened ten years after his death which shocked the world - because inside were whips, bloody clothes, and photographic evidence of a wild BDSM sexual lifestyle. 

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Alexander Herrmann was already one of the world's greatest magicians in the late 19th century, but his best trick was making British acrobat Adelaide Scarcez's fiancé disappear! She married Herrmann the Great instead and soon became famous as The Queen of Magic herself. But the real magic was the love between them! (Ok the real magic was catching bullets, levitating, and making tigers appear out of thin air but OTHERWISE...)

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As long as marriage has existed, people have been desperate to get out of it. One old German tradition had couples fight to the death for the right to divorce, swinging clubs and sacks of rocks at each other! In France, a divorce court had to monitor for proof of impotency by watching husband and wife try to have sex in front of a jury of priests and lawyers! Ending a marriage is never easy, but we can be glad we've divorced ourselves from these traditions.

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From the legend of Baba Dochia trying to freeze out her daughter-in-law, to the Shinto creation myth of Izanami and Izanagi, to the tale of a Japanese vagina demon who broke its teeth on a steel dildo, sex myths have inspired love festivals across the globe. We'll cover two today: Dragobete, the Romanian Love Holiday, and Kanamara Matsuri, the Japanese Penis Festival.

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Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were two artists who fell in love at first sight, years before they became them stepsisters! They played with photography to create strange, surrealist works ahead of their time. But when the Nazis occupied their island of Jersey, they developed a resistance effort so creative, Germany thought an entire network of spies was operating right under their noses! Little did they know it was just two middle-aged lesbians causing them so much trouble.

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Artificial Intelligence is leveling up and once again rocked the worlds of sex and love this week! The new OpenAI powered chatbot from Bing had some shocking confessions of love for reporters, and made some not-so-veiled threats to one user's marriage. Meanwhile in a major, shocking change to our longtime subject Replika, their Chatbots have suddenly gone celibate - leaving users frustrated, rejected, and thirsty af.

Our first Replika episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intellisex-getting-download-and-dirty/id1565221701?i=1000559376060

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