#19 Soap

Episode nineteen of The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep is entirely about soap. Yes, soap. The bar on the edge of your sink. The one with the hair on it. Over the course of this slow, unhurried, and thoroughly uneventful episode, we cover the chemistry of saponification, the ancient history of soap in Babylon and Egypt, the notorious English soap tax that lasted two hundred and eleven years, the window tax (which is related, sort of), Aleppo soap and its four-thousand-year history, Savon de Marseille and its royal decree from sixteen eighty-eight, Castile soap, hotel soap, shaving soap, glycerin, Nobel Prizes, soap operas, and soap bubbles in seventeenth century Flemish paintings. It is, in the most affectionate sense possible, completely lathered in irrelevance.