Strange Country Ep. 215: Moonies 3 in 3-D
Strange Country
In the final installment in the Moonies’ trilogy, Strange Country looks at Sun Myung Moon’s influence in American politics, and how his money helped the New Right gain power. There’s also sound effects that you can hear, which is a Christmas miracle.
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Strange Country Ep. 214: Moonies 2, Electric Boogaloo
Strange Country
In the second installment of the Moonies, Strange Country cohosts Beth and Kelly talk about mass marriage, rituals and how Sun Myung Moon began to cement his relationship with the New Right in America. You’ll never look at indemnity sticks and handkerchiefs the same.
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Strange Country Ep. 213: Moonies, Part I
Strange Country
Sun Myung Moon claimed to be the Messiah who would bring about the kingdom of heaven. See God visited him and told him it was his turn to pick up where Jesus left off. And apparently that was convincing lonely college kids to peddle candy and flowers at street corners and airports. In this multi-episode show, cohosts Beth and Kelly talk about the Unification Church, the True Parents, and ways they could possibly convince loyal dashounds to peddle Strange Country merch to the masses.
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Strange Country Ep. 212: Belle Gunness
Strange Country
Dashounds and Readers! Ever wonder what to do if your husband dies and you have a farm to keep up? If you’re Belle Gunness, you are glad for the extra hog food, and excited to hop onto the 1900’s version of Tinder—the newspaper want ads! If only her suitors had FB; they may have been a little more cautious. But alas it was that er-ah when times were tough and a woman could quite literally get away with murder.
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Strange Country Ep. 211: Room 1046/Yuba Country Five
Strange Country
On this episode, Strange Country cohosts Beth and Kelly delve into two unsolved mysteries, one in 1935 and one in 1978. In 1935, Roland T. Owen checked into The President Hotel and was murdered by those unknown. In February 1978, five men took a wrong turn when leaving a basketball game and never made it home.
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Strange Country Ep. 210: The Sodder Family
Strange Country
A forever mystery will haunt your ears this week, Dash Hounds. Join Kelly and Beth as we discuss the missing Sodder children, who quite literally went up in smoke one terrible Christmas night in West Virginia, never to be seen again. A warning: if you don’t like women or cats, you probably shouldn’t listen. But if you do, then you should listen because as you well know, it is an act of love.
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Strange Country Ep, 209: Scary Smorgasborg
Strange Country
It’s the time of year when pumpkin spice permeates everything including Strange Country, and people are in the mood to sit in front of a pumpkin-spice scented fire to hear some scary stories. Join Beth and Kelly as they darn socks or stories about the Congelier Mansion, the White Lady, and the haunting of the H house.
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Strange Country Ep. 208: James Hogue
Strange Country
James Hogue claimed to be many things. A high school student, an orphan, a ranch-hand, a carpenter, a ski instructor, a ski stuntman, a bioengineer, an ivy leaguer. He has lived a lifetime of deception using false credentials to earn a spot in the 1993 graduating class at Princeton University. Strange Country cohosts Beth and Kelly talk adults passing as teenagers and how sometimes it works and sometimes It’s Never Been Kissed.
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Strange Country Ep. 207: Elizabeth Packard
Strange Country
In the 19th century, men could commit women to asylums for such stellar reasons as excessive thinking or novel reading. Elizabeth Packard was married to a real prince who committed her because she was smarter than him. Strange Country cohosts share her heroic tale, and Beth reveals an alarming secret about her cat.
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Strange Country Ep. 206: Victorian Tapeworm Diet
Strange Country
One constant--besides death and taxes--is the notion that women need to work to attain that ever-morphing ideal body that doesn't actually exist. Strange Country co-hosts Beth and Kelly talk about diet plans like ingesting tapeworms to obtain the consumption look in Victorian times. There's also asides on the many ways humans choose to destroy themselves. Fun!
info_outlineSun Myung Moon claimed to be the Messiah who would bring about the kingdom of heaven. See God visited him and told him it was his turn to pick up where Jesus left off. And apparently that was convincing lonely college kids to peddle candy and flowers at street corners and airports. In this multi-episode show, cohosts Beth and Kelly talk about the Unification Church, the True Parents, and ways they could possibly convince loyal dashounds to peddle Strange Country merch to the masses.
Theme music: Big White Lie by A Cast of Thousands
Cite your sources:
Benscoter, Diane. Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie. Lucky Bat Books, 2013.
Blake, Mariah. “The Fall of the House of Moon” The New Republic, 30 Nov. 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/115512/unification-church-profile-fall-house-moon.
Blake, Mariah. “EXCLUSIVE: Meet the Love Child Rev. Sun Myung Moon Desperately Tried to Hide.” Mother Jones, 9 Dec. 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/reverend-moon-unification-church-washington-times-secret-son/.
Fessenden, Marissa. “A Brief History of Sesame Street's Snuffleupagus Identity Crisis.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 20 Nov. 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-sesame-streets-snuffleupagus-iidentity-crisis-180957351/.
“Frontline: The Resurrection of Reverend Moon.” 1992, PBS. https://vimeo.com/520151453.
Gorenfeld, John. Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built and American Kingdom. PoliPointPress, 2008.
Hong, Nansook. In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moons Family. Little, Brown, 1998.
Kaplan, Anna. "The Moon's the limit." The Humanist, vol. 64, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2004, p. 14+. Gale OneFile: Popular Magazines, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A121765419/PPPM?u=nysl_sc_flls&sid=bookmark-PPPM&xid=e603ec35. Accessed 19 June 2021.
Levine, Martin, et al. “Sun Myung Moon, We Hardly Knew Ye-or Your Church's Finances!” Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly, 12 Sept. 2018, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/sun-myung-moon-we-hardly-knew-yeor-your-churchs-finances/.
Shoaib, Alia. “Trump Spoke at a 9/11 'Moonies' Conference Organized by the Widow of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Praising the Controversial Unification Church.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 12 Sept. 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-speaks-at-moonies-911-event-praises-unification-church-2021-9.