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99% Invisible

One Man is An Island

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.827.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2014

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A few years ago, reporter Sean Cole was working on a radio story and needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes. Sean was living in Boston at the time, so he did a Google search for “Busta Rhymes” and “Boston” to see … Continue reading →

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:05.7

So there was this moment in my life when I needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes for the radio.

0:10.8

And this is friend of the show, Sean Cole. And so I tried calling his people, which got me pretty much nowhere. So I then tried googling

0:19.7

um, buster rhymes and Boston, which is where I was living at the time because I figured he maybe is coming on tour and I could ambush him backstage or something.

0:27.0

And one of the first results I got was a map, like on Google Maps, of a little pond in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts,

0:37.0

which is this little town outside of Boston, and in the pond was this teeny speck of land labeled Busta Rhymes Island.

0:48.4

What?

0:51.4

Yeah. What? Needless to say, I was a little confused.

0:57.0

I mean, you,

0:58.0

I mean, you have to understand, like, Shrewsbury is like the least likely I mean first of all

1:06.2

for there to be a bus to rhymes island anywhere is pretty unlikely but but Shrewsbury

1:09.7

is like this bedroom community for Worcester.

1:13.2

It's not even, it's like the most exciting thing to do there on a Saturday night is go to

1:16.7

Chili's after like shopping at lumber liquidators.

1:21.9

And I was like, is this for real? And then underneath the link for the map was another link to this short little kind of blurb in the Boston Globe with the headline,

1:33.8

Buster Rimes Island is for real.

1:36.0

And they interviewed.

1:40.5

What did they interview Buster Rimes?

1:43.0

They interviewed this guy named Kevin O'Brien who lives in a house overlooking the pond,

1:48.0

it's mill pond is the name of it, and who this is still true lists his phone number as the number to call if you want to contact the island.

1:58.0

So he's the guy who named the island.

2:00.0

He's the one named the island.

...

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