Hello folks and welcome to the reoccurring phenomenon of ‘Francis Fridays’ where yours truly pontificates on something interesting. (Hopefully anyway.)

I’m kind of at the point of adding the corollary of my Friday posts also being known as “Francis’ Favorites” where I reach back into our ever expanding body of work for inspiration and reflection. Our 80th episode drops today, another Martin Masterpiece (a term I damn well know he’s going to steal now that I’ve coined it for him) so by all means, check it out.

I want to fire up the ‘way-back machine’ and give folks a peek into the point where – I think at least – we really came into our own here at Snakes and Otters. Our first six episodes were semi-experimental, we just went with our obvious stuff, but we hadn’t yet decided exactly where we wanted to go long term.

And then I read a book.

It was a biography of the French philosopher and rock star of the Renaissance, François-Marie Arouet , better known by his nom de plume of Voltaire. It was written by Ian Davidson and entitled simply Voltaire: A Life. I highly recommend it, it’s very readable.

And I was hooked.

The more I read, the more I realized that WOW this guy was the father of so much of what we modern Americans take as gospel today. Freedom of speech, religion, expression and the separation of Church and State. They’re are all him and he wrote tons of stuff about all of them, plus much, much more.

So I called Martin and said, “This guy Voltaire is fascinating! Did you know he’s the guy about this, and this and this and this?”

And so Martin said, cutting through the felgercarb brilliantly as usual, “Well, why don’t we do an episode about him?”

And I said, “Duh!” We actually ended up doing two by the time we were done.

The Voltaire episodes, while still a little rough at times as we were only beginning to learn how not to talk over each other, still to me stand at the beginning of us as Snakes and Otters finding our feet. The ‘eternal questions’ aspect of our show, our defining element if you will, began to come together with those episodes. Suddenly all of our inspirations began to expand exponentially.

All because of a short little guy from Eighteenth Century France who just wouldn’t shut up. (Seriously.)

Check out these episodes below, either for the first time or as a redux. (A little French there. How apropos. Aw heck, did it again!)