Citation Needed - Pied Piper and the Children's Crusade

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

The legend dates back to the Middle Ages. The earliest references describe a piper, dressed in multicoloured ("pied") clothing, who was a rat catcher hired by the town to lure rats away[1] with his magic pipe. When the citizens refused to pay for this service as promised, he retaliated by using his instrument's magical power on their children, leading them away as he had the rats. This version of the story spread as folklore and has appeared in the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, and Robert Browning, among others. The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.[2]

Hey moms, looking for some lighthearted guidance on this crazy journey we call parenting? Join me, Sabrina Kohlberg. And me, Andi Mitchell, for Pop Culture Moms. Where each week we talk about what we're watching. And examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way. Come laugh, learn, and grow with us as we look for the best tips. And maybe a few what not to do's from our favorite fictional moms. From Good Morning America and ABC Audio,

pop culture moms, find it wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Good Morning America Show Theme"] Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be leading the merry dance tonight, but I'll need some red cheek cherubs to follow me there. First up, two men who everyone pictures when you read that riddle about the one guard always lying and the other one telling the truth, Tom and Cecil.

I'm not not always telling untrue lies. Yeah, and I don't do either. I just leave your text on red. So that's true. And also joining us tonight, a man who isn't going to text your rats back no matter what you're paying him heat and right.

No idea what that means. What the words you said mean. Before we begin tonight, leaving you on red. Nice. Two out of three. There we go. Rough start. Before we begin tonight, I want to take a red. Nice. Nice. Two out of three. There we go. Rough start.

Before we begin tonight, I want to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you, we definitely have resorted to murdering vermin and children by now. But with your dollars, you've saved lives. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Cecil, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today today? We're gonna be talking about the Pied Piper and the Children's Crusade

Huh and Tom this feels like an unexpected Essay topic from you. I'm guessing the moral is the danger of the newfangled fleet. Don't fall for big woodwind Eli It's a trap. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So tell us, Tom, what was the Pied Piper and the Children's Crusade? All right. Well, you know, listen, I get the feeling that, you know, perhaps, perhaps certain curmudgeons on this show don't appreciate my introductory naval gazing, my OK, pensive moments of public self-reflection that really serve as opening emotional salvos to help bring the audience some psychosocial context

to these seemingly randomly selected topics. You know what? Navel gazing about navel gazing is peak navel gazing, Tom. Thank you. Pudos. I want the cast here to know I hear you gazing. Thank you. Kudos. Thank you. I want the cast here to know, I hear you. Oh, you're not done. I hear you, I do. See, so despite my personal feelings.

Thomas and Innie. Like deep Innie, so much. We're Innie buddies. Not that deep, bro, come on. No, shallow Innie. It's shallow Innie. I can put a triple shot of tequila in there. No problem.

That's what Tom says right before he has sex, by the way, shallow. Just like that. Despite my personal feelings that a story about the pied piper, a metaphor long used to describe someone who leads others into destruction through charisma and false promises has perhaps in this fraught moment, real salience, some BOO! KILL A KID!

Some resonance and connection to the times that we're facing. I have to admit, yes, I am tempted to spend this moment reflecting on this notion. Maybe take some time together as a cast and share space and recognize together the gravity of this metaphor consider our role in the fate of our collective futures, but I Won't do any of that. I won't instead. I'll just go right to the point Should we should we give the audience some time to do that? You guys want to pause the podcast for a minute I am getting getting right to the point with no long winded or belabored personal preamble because clearly that is what everybody wants.

Just opening up your pod player and sticking it right in. And I am your huckleberry. Who? I wasn't sure how I felt about Cecil's comment on Tom's rambled about rambling. One thing I knew for sure. We were best friends. Our story, I found love in the world. Find a longer Wikipedia article next time don't put this fucking filler in there.

I will play for time. How dare you sir. How dare you sir. Our story begins in the... Do you know two is the only even front? The only one. What? That's a fun. That's fun. Think about that.

Our story today begins in the dirt covered mud times of the 13th century. And I know I said I just jump right into the Pied Piper story. And of course I will and without digression. But I've referred in the past to the medieval times as the mud times. Three, five, eight, 13, those, yeah, no, they're all odd. And I have also commented before on how everyone used to fucking stink in the mud times.

And we've gotten emails that the people of the past were not in fact all stinky despair farmers working in the toil fields. And that they too valued not smelling like sweaty gym bags full of baby diapers. And I, I want the audience to know I was right. And you, you were wrong. Anti-perseperant was not invented until 1903. Regular bathing was not a cultural norm

until the mid 19th century. And no amount of perfumes or oils is gonna cover any of that up. So we are starting today in the mud times when everyone's stunk like unwashed crotches spritzed with rosemary oil. And I want you to know, yes, every day it fucking stank. Who in our audience was advocating for smelly medieval peasants?

Like, is Connor McCloud a listener? What's happening? Yeah, who was it? Like, the proud descendants of the Muddy McMutterson clan are big listeners to the show? We got shit for that? Now, the Pied Piper legend, which has become a part of lore, be appearing in Grimm's tales, the tales of Browning and Goath,

began in 1284 in the town of Hamlin. This town, like pretty much all of Europe in the mud times, was made entirely out of rats, like just lots of rats. The buildings had load-bearing rats holding up most of the infrastructure. And rats carry not only pizza down the flights of stairs in New York, but they also carry diseases. And so the mayor of Hamlin needed to find a solution to the rat problem.

And presumably the usual cadre of local rat catchers just were not up to the task. Enter the piper. Very literally. He just, he just sort of appears and he's pied by the way, not because he has pie, but because he was dressed in multicolored clothes and I guess that's what pied used to mean. Anyway, this multicolored guy just shows up out of nowhere and he's like, you know, nice town.

Lots of rats though. I can help. Rats are kind of my thing. Okay, now it feels like you're gonna fuck the rats rats. Now it feels like a rat pucker scenario. You just showed up and said that. And so the mayor, the mayor agrees to hire the fancily dressed random musician and to pay him 1000 guilders. I don't know how much money that is, but let's just assume

that that's a lot of guilders. I would imagine. I mean, any amount is a lot to pay the random guy who shows up magically in fucking Ratville with a resume and says, loud jacket, rats are kind of my thing, and end of resume. That's it, it's a lot of no what.

Don't pay that guy anything. So the Piper, he plays as Pipe, and then here's some of the details from some of the various stories begin to deviate. In some of the stories, only the rats can hear the Piper piping. And in some versions, the Piper song is heard by everyone, but it doesn't really matter because in all the versions, whatever the Piper played was definitely the rats jam. Because they immediately all crawled and scurried out of their various crevices and congregated behind the pied piper who played and danced

and went through all the streets of Hamlin calling out the rats until behind the piper was like a fucking vermin river, which worked out fine because the piper then led the rats all to the Vesa river where they all drowned. Oh, and you know, the guy in the middle of his yearly river bath had the worst day as a result. Okay. So I'm cleaning off like a year of mud. It's just caked on. You know how caked it is and it's getting good and sexual. You know how that goes. You wouldn't believe who fucking shows up. It's the weirdest thing.

Now the drowning rats thing, it makes no sense. Did the piper walk into the river? If the rats were following him, why would they just like, then waltz past him into the river? He juked Tom. He was playing and he juked. It's a sidestep. Like also very importantly, rats can swim.

They swim really, really well. Actually, they can hold their breath for about three minutes and they can swim more than a half a mile in a single stretch, which is half the swim of an iron man. So unless the Pied Piper was piping and swimming and they were also like at just a really wide part of the river, the rats wouldn't all just jump into the river and fucking die for some reason, but they did. And all versions of the story seem to agree on this, even though that is really very stupid.

Okay. So the rats all swim out right fucking next to me in the wide part of the river where I'm doing my sexual mud cake thing, ruin my whole day. Maybe played Dido's. I want to thank you. Cause that does it for me. Like if there's ever a handgun when that starts playing at the grocery store, four man show, four man show so fast. So the Pied... Just me? So the Pied Piper, flush with his success at having played all the rats into the river,

went back to the mayor for his guilders, but the mayor, Eric Adams had already paid his brother that money, so it was a wash, if you will. The mayor probably figured that now that the town was permanently rat free, he was himself free to renege on the deal. And for good measure, he even suggested that, you know, maybe the Pied Piper actually brought all those rats to Hamlin in the first place as like a ploy to grift the town out of a bunch of their hard earned guilders. And the Piper is now not just pied, but pissed.

He told the mayor he had a year to come up with the bank or there would be hell to. Wow. I know children's fairy tales aren't known for their realism, but why would you piss off a guy who? Just demonstrated magic. Yeah, it's like right away Fuck you man with powers over life and death Those rats are crisis actors I'm those two things about you one you're dressed fancy. Two, you have the ability to make things die.

Fuck you. You. That's like Alex Jones knowing that the people of Newtown are actual wizards for the entire time he was doing all that shit. He may have accused them of being actual wizards at this point Heath, you gotta be careful. So a year later to the day.

Were they? On St. John and Paul's day, the Pied Piper popped back around looking for his guilders. But there were no guilders to be had. The Piper was not to be denied however, and this time, dressed in Hunter's green, a detail that appears over and over, but doesn't seem to matter,

starts again playing, they make a big deal out of it, starts again to play his pipe. Now this time, a new kind of vermin gathered behind the piper and the town's children, all 130 of them began to follow the piper at his tune while all the adults were in church. In church without their kids, I guess they were just godless

and unsupervised in the streets. Man, I feel like you could have at least tamed the rats, you know what I mean? Like why? Or get rid of those. The Piper led the kids out of town and up to a cave and none of the kids were ever seen again. And the only way anyone knows what happened is that supposedly there were three kids left behind.

One kid who had a bum leg couldn't follow along behind the Piper. Another kid was deaf, immune to the Piper's siren song. And the third kid was blind and couldn't follow either. So the remaining kids told the adults what had happened. What? No, they didn't. None of those kids actually saw anything. It doesn't make any sense at all.

So yeah, obviously nobody really knows for sure what happened. Some versions of the story say that the Piper led the kids to a quote, beautiful land. Well, other versions suggest some place called Copenberg mountain and others to Transylvania. In other versions, he led the kids into the rat graveyard. That is the Vesa river. And in other versions of villagers quite literally paid the

Piper and got the kids back least believable. One out all the ones you mentioned. I'm sure that's the least believable one. No one really knows because you know, movable type wouldn't exist for almost 200 more years and almost no one was literate anyway. And all of history at this point was just a really involved game of telephone. But there is a street in Hamlin called and it's in German. It's a thousand letters long bungalow and straws, but that's wrong.

That's not even close. No, it's you miss like the whole middle part. That's fucking nonsense. So on this street in Hamlin, bunkoland or whatever, it's this. You miss like the whole middle part. I don't. That's fucking nonsense. So on this street in Hamlin, Bunko land or whatever, it is believed to be the last place where the kids were seen. And to this day, there is no music or dancing allowed on that street. What? Okay.

Just turning back, I think I agree with Cecil about the, you know, raising the money. That was like an awkward town meeting. Because you know, some of those like libertarian parents that were missing their kids, but they were still like, okay, but tax. That's that. There's gotta be a corporate solution. Maybe one of us starts a company called kids back. So you might rightly wonder, how do we know this story?

Someone made it up. And the answer, Eli, is there was a stained glass window. Nice. That's proof. Yeah, probably. Also, maybe, maybe not at all. Because we don't have... What are you, Donald Trump giving a speech about Iran?

Do you have a concept of a... I have concept of a concepts of a piper? Like that explains all the rats though. Because we don't have the window. What we have are written accounts from the 14th and the 17th century that suggest that there was a window. Right. Told this story.

And someone read those accounts and they did remake the window based on the accounts. The window is widely believed to have been created as a way to remember the event of 1284 and the disappearance of all those kids. And I should note that there are no contemporary accounts, except maybe there might have been a window. That's it. Oh, also all the details about the rats only appeared in accounts of the story beginning in 1559. Okay, so a really bad parenting thing clearly happened and then somebody in the staff was like, all right guys, we need to lie like super hard on a window or else.

You know? It's actually worse than that. Someone read about someone else making a window and he was like, all right, what do we want to lock in on our windows? Jesus is Lord, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Someone else killed all those kids 300 years ago. That was definitely someone else.

All right. So maybe it didn't happen then maybe no such event. It didn't actually occur. Except, except there are other non window based reasons to believe that something like this might've happened. There is a magic rat pen fruit. I don't think there are Tom. I know no and isn't really the rule.

I'm a stand there are Tom. I know no and isn't really the rule Well, but you haven't heard about the chorus book then from the 14th century and the chorus book is Reported to have contained an eyewitness account of the event. Oh, there is also a 15 We know those are always true. Yeah, this is a story about a story So that sentence is like nine steps away from my witness. You can't say I witnessed like that. There is also a 15th century manuscript, which I love this one, which gives an account of the same incident was written in 1370 by a monk who swears that he read a report about this in an even older book.

So what he did is he wrote about how he read about it. Sure. So did anybody write about how he swore to them that he wrote about reading about the writing of the window of the window? I feel like this is super compelling. Interesting. This story also appears in an inscription on a super crazy old house in an unpronounceable German town.

It appears again inscribed into another just Fantastically old house. It's also inscribed onto the town gates and just like a bunch of other place pretty much Germany is lousy with people etching this story just into their houses and shit Okay, like look I know we're being hasty but guys four people told the same story about Jesus 60 to 80 years after his death So this has to be real everybody has to be All right Well while we keep our heads on a swivel for German people talking about how Jews got taken away by six million rats in the 40s We're gonna explain the concept of multiple people lying to Tom, and while we do, we'll

take a quick break for a little apropos of nothing. No money? Show those villagers a thing or two. Okay children, follow me right now to a land of fun and candy. Let's go! Hooray! Come up, hooray! Excuse me, Mr. Paper, sir? Uh-huh, yeah, what's up?

Do you mind taking my hand? I'm blind, you see? Oh, I'm kind of doing like a flute thing. Can one of the other kids maybe... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wow, problematic. Sorry, sir. Did you need help?

Okay, yeah, a lot of questions today. Would you mean, would you mind slowing down for me leg? I mean, sure. Yeah. How like, OK, how slow do you need me to be? So, so slow, sir. So slow. What? Tim is asking him to slow down, Larry, but he doesn't want to.

Oh, man. It's just the adults are going to be done with church soon. I'll see how it is. We give crippled children are good enough to know what you want. The what? No, I I would love to lower you to your deaths extra. Actually, I just everybody, especially you. I got it. We just got to keep moving is what I'm saying.

Oh, so we're not not nobody said burden. You you'd said burden just now. I would happily kill all children everywhere equal. Equality is no equity, sir. What? Okay, you know what? I'm gonna come get you guys on the next trip, huh? Just for you three, huh?

Special trip. Well, no, no, no. You separate us out. Exactly. We want an integrated murder experience. Okay. Right. Oh, okay.

What about this? Uh, why don't you guys stay here and tell the adults what happened? You guys are going to be like, you know, my warners super important job. Warners. And also, also here's 30 bucks. How about that? 30 bucks? Right? Yeah. 10 for each of you. Okay. So we're good. Just, just keep the window chill. Okay. Yeah on kids. What? He gave me and Larry 20 bucks! Nice! Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why Cox offers a range of high-speed internet plans that fit any budget.

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that can be overwhelming. What if you had someone to talk through the options of the next steps with? Someone who wants to see your business succeed while giving you peace of mind. That's why the bankers at Merchants Bank are here. Ready with exceptional service every step of the way. Let's dream together. Visit MerchantsBank.com to get started. Merchants Bank is a proud member FDIC. All right, so historians, they see all this shit. We're just going to jump right back in dry like that. Eli's not going to say anything to get us back in. And we're back.

When we left off, Tom was pretty sure this story was true. Tell us more, Tom. All right, so historians, historians see all this shit carved into other shit. And they generally conclude that, yeah, probably something happened. And I guess that that's kind of how history works. A bunch of stuff kind of aggregates and people who like reading dusty shit, go to conferences and argue about how bad everyone smelled, and then they decide what the truth is.

So assuming that something happened to all these kids, the next question is, well what? One theory is that there was some kind of natural cause explanation, such as disease or starvation, and that the Pied Piper, they was just really a symbol for death. But if that was true, the disease would have just killed only the kids. Or like, all the town parents just simultaneously were like, ah, food's in pretty short supply. Maybe we all agree to stop feeding our kids and maybe scrawl some shit about a piper onto a flagpole and then pretend we're sad. Also, we're eating the kids, right? Everybody agrees.

We're gonna like, oh no, only after they die. But we're gonna, right? That's like vegan. Exactly. It's a bunch of veal. Now other natural cause options include all the kids drowning in the river. Jesus Christ.

Somehow. Or a landslide that again just only land slid onto the kids. Other interpretations suggest that the piper was a pagan who lured all the kids into the forest and they joined a heretic sect for a bit of fun of ritual pagan dancing and then a sinkhole gobbled them all up because that's what happens to the heathens. Okay, you know what's not great is this exact story. Same one about Hillary Clinton.

That one caught on. Just repackaged the Pied Piper, the Satanic Panic, the QAnon. It's the same thing. You're right. So some guy who wrote a whole book about this nonsense claims a bunch of old books and other shit suggest that people from the area pretty regularly sold their kids to what they're calling a recruiter. And yeah,

Wiki doesn't say what the recruiter was or what they wanted with all these kids that they were buying up. And I did not look that up. Yeah. Cause it could be for something cruel and dangerous like the NCAA. Now then there is this gem guys. Let me know if this one seems more plausible. The people of Hamlin were known to have settled. It's so not the people of Hamlin were known to have settled parts of Transylvania. So in a book called the land beyond the forest, It is supposed that quote, popular tradition has averred the Germans who about that time made their appearance in Transylvania to be none other than the lost children of Hamel,

who having performed their long journey by subterranean passages, reissued to the light of day through the opening of a cavern in the Northeast of Transylvania. You know, now that I think about it, Transylvania sounds like non-binary heaven. Ooh. Ha ha ha ha. So I don't know if that, did that persuade you guys? Where are we at on the persuasion?

Still pretty good. Strongly persuaded. Do you have a window you could share with us? Ha ha ha ha. I'm listening. All right, so- Perhaps a manuscript, maybe? Ha ha ha. All right. So perhaps a manuscript maybe. Let me see if we could find one. Yeah.

And an in. Scrawl this over their fireplace in their house. Tom, a one-eared minstrel with a song that rhymes with children. Did you perhaps find a bunch of rat corpses in a river? Did you kill one of your kids? And this is your sort of Iceman cometh way of telling us about it. So then there are just a bunch of theories that are boring, but which suggests that the lost children of Hamlin emigrated to various parts of Europe, other than only Transylvania

through underground caverns, most of which have old names and don't exist anymore. I didn't want to look any of that up. It was boring. They offer up various theories and linguistic evidences for this idea. But again, how would all of the town's children emigrate suddenly and simultaneously and without their parents? And then they just set up shop in like Poland or whatever. That's anybody's guess. Yeah, people ate the kids.

Stop theorizing. It's not. This is like OJ pledging to like catch the killer. Still at large. Now, other theories suggest that all the town's children succumb to psychogenic illness, and they all dance themselves to death in a dancing mania. We actually did an episode about dancing manias, but if you missed that one, it's just pretty much TikTok.

Go back and listen. There's some evidence that in 1237 there was a mass dancing hysteria event that did occur in which a large group of kids traveled about 12 miles from one town in Germany to another leaping and dancing about the whole way. Okay, no one is going to believe our kids just danced themselves to death for no reason, okay? We have to say there was a guy who could fucking bop on the flute and zap herself. People will get it because the flute bops so hard. It's like three years old, That instrument. He was a Jew.

Yes. Definitely. Definitely a Jew on a jazz flautist Jew. Yes. A still other theory suggests the children of Hamlin. Jew's hotel. Good for you. Cheers.

A still other theory suggests the children of Hamelin all pieced out to join a new Children's Crusade, the original having taken place possibly in 1212, which is interesting too because again it's really hard to know things, like to really know them from 800 plus years ago before people had indoor plumbing and smelled just terrible. Because we've all heard of the Children's Crusade and maybe it happened, but actually maybe it didn't. The story of the Children's Crusade is that sometime around 1212, a boy begins preaching. This happens in Germany or perhaps France.

It could be either one. Anyway, Jesus tells this kid that he needed to go convert a bunch of Muslims, but not by the usual way of killing them, but by preaching to them. The boy gains a huge following because he's able to perform miracles and religious nuts are really into that kind of thing. I mean if he can actually perform miracles, I feel like everyone's into it, right? I feel like everyone's into it, right? Tom? So like, you know. Well, listen, anyway, this pint-sized preacher gathers up about 30,000 kids.

They all head south toward the Mediterranean Sea, where they're just sure that the sea is going to part for them so they can cross it, all of Moses, and stroll their way over to Jerusalem. Okay, so a bunch of different towns ate all the kids and eventually like met each other and they're like wait You guys did a big lie about like a hippie Jewish guy with a flute Okay, let's get our big story straight we should all like big window Now the sea does not in fact part Huh? Now the sea does not in fact part. Also, even if it didn't, wouldn't it just be miles and miles of like an endless

morass of mud and gross worms and other shit you'd have to slog through? It just didn't even seem helpful. Anyway, now there's 30,000 unsupervised kids just staring at the ocean and wondering what's next. And what's next is the kids are loaded onto boats sent to Tunisia and sold into slavery, or maybe they die in shipwrecks, could go either way. Or maybe something different happens. Maybe instead it was some kid named Nicholas from Germany.

He leads a group of kids across the Alps and into Italy in 1212 before splitting into two groups. And maybe about two thirds of them die or go home because kids are just fucking quitters and picky eaters and What are they small and weak? Anyway about seven thousand of them survive and they arrive in Genoa and they head to the harbor and they try to like fucking Open sesame the ocean and that doesn't work because of course it doesn't work Oh, we should have made him do a pond or something on the way. I told you guys. I should have made him do a pond.

And then some of the kids get pissed because there's just like a trail of dead kid breadcrumbs now across the Alps and the ocean didn't open up and reveal a yellow brick road and other kids settled down to wait for the ocean to open figuring they just got the date wrong or something. And the Genoese authorities in this version, they're so impressed with how pious these kids are. They offer them all citizenship and the kids agree to become Genoese. And Nicholas and a few loyalists,

they make their way to some boats and then probably they get to the Holy land. What is it? Italy is weird. How, how are a group of kids are like, yeah, let me rent out your charter boat to get to the Holy land. What is it? Italy is weird. How, how are a group of kids are like, yeah, let me rent out your charter boat to get to the Holy. What happened there? Well, and then they meet the Pope. And after all this, the Pope just tells the kids to go home. Nicholas dies on the way back home and the townspeople who had lost all their

kids, either the Alps or the Genoese, they hang Nick's father out of revenge. Okay. Or, or possibly there was a 12 year old French kid named Stefan, who was going around telling everyone he had a letter from Jesus for the King of France to read. Why are multiple countries trying to claim this story? It's terrifying. So the secret Jesus letter was a really compelling story to idiots. And kids are stupid.

So 30,000 of them supposedly gather about Stefan. And in this tale, they're also like all X-Men in the making, and they claim they all have special magic Jesus presence, as well as the ability to do miracles. Okay. Now this is a comic I would read, right? They're shooting loaves out of their hands at Magneto. I mean, it writes itself, right? So now there's Stefan and 30,000 miracle mutants and the king is like, Hey,

everyone should just go the fuck home. This, this makes no sense. But Stefan takes up residence in an Abbey as a preacher, and then he takes again to the road to spread his message of his secret Jesus letters. And he has a promise to take his tail to Jerusalem and there he's going to convert a bunch of Muslims. Just a lot of the 30,000 that Stefan originally attracted began to fall away, but he still retained a good retainer of thousands of kids that traveled to Marseille where they become beggars because they ran out of Lunchables. Pardon me, sir.

Spare any over-processed pork products for me? And then, then they were all loaded out of ships, taken to Tunisia, sold in a slavery or died in a shipwreck. And maybe one or both of those stories happened. Perhaps the lost children of Hamlin were a part of that story or a second children's crusade or possibly none of any of this happened. Honestly, it is pretty much impossible to know for sure

without just like a lot of windows to tell these stories. What's really important for everyone to take away from this story is that window or no, we can be really sure these people just smelled terrible. Jesus Christ. All right, Tom. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Everybody really smelled.

That's true. I was very, they help with the smell. All right. It's a really important takeaway for you. And are you ready for the quiz? Absolutely. All right, Tom. So as we all know, lots of great musical adaptations about missing children.

Which one is the best? A, Lindbergh babes and toys. Jesus Christ. B, Diddle around the roof. Diddle around the roof. Lay missing. The story of Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean.

Benetet Ray. There it is! Amazing. Fantastic. Amazing. Lay missing. That's great. That's great, that's it.

That's the answer. Oh no, I'm sorry, it was actually B. Didler on the... Oh damn it. Failed on the first one, all right. All right, we talked about in-person recruiting of children, Tom. What's the best site to recruit children of royal bloodlines online? A. Majestie Bay. B. Coronetzi. C. Lordship recruiter. Or D. Inbreed. Inbreed breed indeed it is in breed all right Tom what's the best

name for your miracle performing superhero team okay hey the sideways X-man this Avengers what's happening scab scab scab that's anyone following this? Yeah. That scavengers? Team Tyvens. OK, that one's solid. Team Tyvens is solid. Nicely done. Don't give him. No, that one's good. Chew Mutants.

That one's not good. Chew Mutants is not good. Team Tyvens is pretty good. I will have to grant that begrudgingly. All right. Well, that's right. So Heath, you win. I stumped him.

I win. OK, next week, let's hear from Cecil. Alright, well, for Tom, Cecil, Noah, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnik. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to our other podcasts in the places where we put them. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a big window donation, get before the show shenanigans and bonus episodes over at patreon.com forward slash citation pod, or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

Hey moms, looking for some lighthearted guidance on this crazy journey we call parenting? Join me, Sabrina Kohlberg. And me, Andy Mitchell for Pop Culture Moms. Where each week we talk about what we're watching. And examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way. Come laugh, learn, and grow with us, as we look for the best tips. And maybe a few what not to do's from our favorite fictional moms.

From Good Morning America and ABC Audio. Pop Culture Moms. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.