Napoleon Bonanerds, amirite?

Basically a followup to the last post. I'm in a bunch of art classes this semester, and it's keeping me very busy outside of class doing artsy types of things. Artsy things can be very time consuming, so to entertain myself, I listen to podcasts. One of my favorite podcasts ever is called "My History Can Beat Up Your Politics", and this guy basically just sits around for an hour talking about the history of American politics. If I drank, it would be something I could get drunk to.

Today, the host namedropped another history podcast called "Napoleon 101." Napoleon: Total War immediately came to mind, and I checked it out. The podcast has been going on for three years. There are 53 episodes. Each one is an hour or longer. I become disappointed in my pathetic life when I spend 53 hours on a single video game. These guys have done that talking about Napoleon Bonaparte.

Yes, it's interesting as all hell, but it's just a little funny to me how seriously these guys take it. Their lives simply revolve around Napoleon - one guy's a history professor, and the other's an author (he wrote Napoleon For Dummies, he's serious). They spent about ten minutes going off on how "NAPOLEON DIDN'T REALLY WALK AROUND WITH HIS HAND IN HIS JACKET ALL THE TIME, GOD!" and "HE WASN'T SHORT, HE WAS AVERAGE HEIGHT FOR HIS TIME, GOD!"

Also, apparently there's a raging debate among historians on whether Napoleon was ultimately a force for good in the world, or a force for evil. Both of these guys fucking love Napoleon (I guess it just takes that kind of person to create 53 podcasts about Napoleon) so it's good that I'm getting both sides of the debate here and everything. They argue that the "warmonger" thing is unjustified, because it was always other countries who would declare war on France. They apparently viewed the progressive French Republic as dangerous, so they wanted to bring them back to the traditional order of monarchical Europe. "AND NAPOLEON COULDN'T BE A WARMONGER, BECAUSE HE NEVER BROKE A SINGLE PEACE TREATY, GOD!" I hope in 20 years, I'm sitting in my mom's basement making podcasts about history.

The episodes are arranged chronologically; the first few episodes cover Napoleon's early life and career, and they just branch off from there. I actually bought a book on Napoleon a few months ago. One of the reviews there complains that the author is pretty anti-Napoleon, so maybe I'll read it for some balance. But it is sitting on my bookshelf collecting dust because it is a fucking tome, and it scares me a lot and make me cry. Reading's for nerds and homos anyway. Maybe I'll just settle for listening to a history podcast while I paint, which is a thousand times less nerdy.