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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”

The creator of Claire Danes drama My So-Called Life on why it has endured

Bad news, everyone: the Amazon seller who sold Pete a durian for us to try today had to cancel the order due to “supply chain issues.” More news as we get it.

That leaves Pete, Luke and Jim with plenty of time to tuck into some other breaking news: Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane’s debuts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Plus, Arsenal sign Italian defending dreamboat Riccardo Calafiori, Conor Gallagher might be about to buy an interrailing ticket to Madrid and Steve Bruce eyes up the next season of Death in Paradise. Plus, which footballer would make the best medieval blacksmith?

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.

6 min read

1934: An important year in Oxford’s history?

This blog post was written and researched by Peter Cann.

Peter Cann is the author of Little Edens, a play performed at MOX in 2023.

Want to write your own Oxford-inspired post? Sign up as a volunteer blogger.

Last year the Museum of Oxford hosted a production of a play, Little Edens. It was about a rent strike that took place in Florence Park, East Oxford, in 1934. It was a bitter dispute involving more than 500 tenants complaining about the conditions of the new estate and rents.  It drew support from all quarters of the city, including Oxford University. The builder of the estate, a Tory councillor, evicted tenants who refused to pay their rent.

I am the author of the play and live on the estate. In researching and writing it I realised that change was in the air at that time. Britain was suffering from the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Millions were out of work in the industrial areas of the country, especially South Wales, Tyneside and Scotland. But there was work here in Oxford, at the new Morris car factory and the Pressed Steel factory next door that made the body parts for the cars. Thousands of unemployed workers made their way south, or east in the case of South Wales. Some walked and died in the attempt.

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

Need some good old-fashioned espionage sorting out, but don’t have access to a drone or a two-way mirror? Pete Donaldson is now available for hire!

He’s joined by Luke and Jim in a suspicious room full of cameras and microphones to talk about pre-season happenings and fresh outcry about the possibility of Premier League matches overseas. Meanwhile, there are fishcake protests in Norway and – at long last – a proper punch in a football match. Plus, you won't find a better durian-based fact on any other podcast than this one today. Guaranteed. So come join us!

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: patreon.com/footballramble.

Welcome to Today in Books, our round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest stories from the last week.

The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century is Moving Units

I have gotten emails from booksellers and librarians (and regular book buyers and borrowers too) that The New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century list is bringing people into stores and libraries in a significant way. And I have seen quite a few social posts like this one that make me think this isn’t just a BR-audience effect. 

Well, now I have some data for you to back these reports up. According to Circana, the top 10 books on the list saw an average sales boost of 113% last week. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald saw a sales boost of more than 600%, likely as it was one of the most under-known books at the top of the list. Pretty impressive.

Kamala Harris Book Sales Soaring

A 60,000% increase in book sales means (at least) two things are true: enormous surge in interest and a low starting point. If Harris were selling 1000 copies a week, say, before Biden dropped out and she became the presumptive nominee, a 600x increase (60,000%) would mean 600,000 unit sales per week after. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that is not the rate she is selling at—probably something more like 100-200 copies a week before the surge. (Remember, most books don’t sell that many copies, especially ones that have been out for a while). 

The God of the Woods is the Book of the Summer

Yesterday, Erica wrote about the cluster of high-profile book clubs have picked Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods as one of their summer selections, and after reading it last week, I can see why. It is zippy, creepy, smart, with a real sense of place. A compelling cast of characters and enough red herrings to keep even the most experienced plot queens round out what is a total summer read package. And Hollywood has been paying attention, as The God of the Woods (and one her previous novels have been picked up for adaptation. Get on board and welcome to the woods. Hope you brought comfy shoes…and an alibi.

Here are the Book Riot pieces that resonated most with readers this week. Catch up (or reread) whatever catches your eye:

Books By and About Vice President Kamala Harris for Readers of All Ages

In 2021, Kamala Harris made history as our first Black and South Asian American Vice President. Prior to that, she was also the second Black woman (and first South Asian American) elected to the Senate. She’s now running for President. Harris is a reader and is the author of several books. Her favorite books have been covered previously here at Book Riot. They include Native Son by Richard Wright and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. The Kamala Harris books below give readers of all ages the opportunity to learn more about our Vice President.

Assemble a Crew: 8 “One Last Heist” Mystery and Thriller Books

While these books all contain the trope for one last heist they’re all different from each other and should hit many kinds of readers’ tastes. There’s a graphic novel with three generations of a family, a YA novel with a heist competition, a getaway driver pulling off a perfectly planned heist, a socialite and her drag queen crew, a romance/crime novel starring a con artist, a teen pulling off a heist to save her dad, a space heist novel with a species existence at stake, and a thriller with a past and present heist with a ticking clock!

The Best Book Club Book of the Summer

As the writer for our In the Club newsletter, which focuses on all things book clubs, I stay knee-deep in some book club shenanigans. And this summer, there seems to be one book in particular that’s making the book club rounds. 

Now, a little overlap in book choice among the online book clubs I follow is not necessarily unheard of—last year’s Book Club It Girls were Yellowface and Chain-Gang All-Stars—but this instance seems to be a little more than those, especially since this one book in particular is the book club selection for several book clubs at the same time.