Endless Thread - Snacktime: To Joust Is No Jest

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Ever heard of horse repossession? How about equine semen fraud? On this week’s Snacktime, Ben tells Amory about the still-very-much-alive sport of jousting and how it relates to a pretty wild story about a Redditor’s ex and a snowy white steed.

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undeniably peak me. Okay. And it allows me to talk to my dream guest. At Nikki Forteales, I run the International Jousting Association for the U.S., which is a club for jousting, from the Boston area, so in New England. Born and raised. Have you ever jousted before, Ben? Oh, man.

Dreams deferred, man. Dreams deferred. In your next life. You'll quit it with this. We're past life. Podcasting crap. Yeah, probably past life. So, Amory, something that happens a lot in the summer and fall and involves jousting?

Renaissance fairs. Correct. Ding, ding. But Nikki, she doesn't do the theatrical jousting stuff. She is competitive with jousting. She is not a theatrical jaster. But she's been doing this kind of historical combat for a long time. And I actually started in stick fighting.

You sign a waiver, everybody's an adult, you put helmets on, and you get to bash each other in the head with, you know, sticks, and it's okay. Everybody's healthy, everybody's fine, and, you know, you don't go to jail. I have a desk job, so martial arts is a big, big stress reliever for me. Yeah, you've got to get your wax in, right? Wow. She sounds like a true badass. I'm this person, like, in my dreams, you know? Yeah, so you also dream of.

of jousting. Clearly, we're both dreaming about jousting. Yeah, I'm a jousting, stick-fighting martial artist in my dreams. Nikki is a true expert, like she's a history nerd when it comes to jousting. She's a horse person, and again, competitive, not theatrical jouster. She is the real deal. When it comes to jousting depictions in modern film, are you more of like a jabber one? Or The Jabberwocky person, or are you a first night person? Or what's your favorite jousting depiction in a movie? You know what?

Heath Ledger in a Knight's Tale. A Knight's Tale, yeah. It was fun because it brought up the spirit of jousting community. You know, they're kind of rock stars and they're there to entertain. And they're, you know, so that musical theme, not the love story. and not the back and force of the bad guy, but the whole excitement of the joust. Emery, what is your favorite knight or jousting modern film depiction?

I have a guess, but what is yours? Do you have one? Gosh, the only one that I even remember right now is first night. I am Arthur of Camelot, and I command you now all to fight. I thought that you were going to say those weird dog knights from the movie Labyrinth. They're pretty jousty. They're jousty, but they're minimal. There's so much else to love in that movie, Ben. I can't believe that you would even have registered.

I mean, but again, this is Peak Ben. So, like, me, like, you might have, like, been into David Bowie, etc. You're talking about Sir Didamus. Before this day, never have I met my match in battle. Yet this noble knight has fought me to. That was a good thought. I see where you were going with that. Yeah.

But when I say joust to Amory, like what do you see in your mind's eye other than, of course, the movie labyrinth? Like, how would you define joust? Two people, hopefully in a heavy amount of armor, charging each other on horses and trying to, are they trying to like impale each other with their large pointy long things or are they just trying to knock each other off the other person's horse? The large pointy long thing is called the lance. Okay. And, you know, they're trying to knock each other off the horse. But again, it sort of, it really depends.

And again, for the deep kind of history of jousting or the idea of jousting, we should go back to Nikki. It was very diverse in medieval times. It actually started out with team on team where you had maybe your met at arms, maybe you had a duke that was sponsoring you because you were really good at jousting. And really they would, you know, get on either side of the village or field and just have big melee. Some melee is lasting for days. And that's where you had the ransoms too because some of the wealthier people had, you know, you get kidnapped. and ransomed, and they'd have to give up some booty.

William Marshall, kind of a famous during medieval times, he actually made a living off of melee. Whoa. I learned two things there. One, they used to have group on group, quote unquote, jousting, right? Where they're, like, fighting each other. But also that, like, people literally made a living holding other people for ransom as part of the fight. Yeah.

Like, rich people would get involved for someone. sport or whatever, and then, like, other knights would, like, hold them for ransom after they knocked them down and slapped them around or whatever. Meleys for days. Meleys for days. But jousting was, at least at the outset, like, can you imagine the purpose for jousting, Amory? I thought it was just kind of entertainment, kind of like the old gladiator business, but, uh, no. So I had a theory, which I put to Nikki, and I was kind of right.

It's basically a way to stay in fighting shape. Yeah, so it evolved, right? So it was definitely called to arms. It was definitely like training for war. Like the team-on-team type of jousting that I mentioned, eventually the church outlawed because they were losing too many good fighters. People could die in some of these exercises. And what we know today for jousting, which is like one-on-one,

where you're in a lane. Sometimes there's a wall in between you. You know, for a while there, that was like the boring type of jousting. We should say, though, like, Nikki is incredibly impressive. Like, she is a legit jousting expert. You basically have to get a license to joust. Hmm. And part of the training is you have to hit,

you are riding on a horse, full tilt, in armor that may weigh up to 100 pounds. You have to take a large, large, maybe well-balanced, but large lance, very long piece of wood, and you have to hit a six-inch target. That sounds heavy and inconvenient and too hot. Difficult. And hard, yes. Really difficult, right? But the reason that I got in touch with Nikki is because of this story that,

apparently was a story that was kind of like well-known, at least in part of the jousting community, which it turns out is kind of small. So jousts community is a few hundred people in the U.S. I'd say maybe 350, which is still a lot of people, but there are different niches, right, where you know everybody in a particular group. The story that involves jousting blew up on Twitter the other day. It developed a hashtag. A hashtag was Horsegate.

It involves something called Horse Repo. You know what Repo is, right? Like repossession? Yeah. Okay. And I asked Nikki about horse repossession. She doesn't know a ton about that.

But there's also another element to this story. What about Black Market horse semen fraud? Sorry. I don't mean to laugh about that, but I mean, you got to laugh. I laughed. It's not in my jurisdiction. Yeah, I've never heard of that. But that's crazy.

There's so many bad jokes I could think of right now. Goa. Just give me one. No, I just, no, no. All right, Amory, are you ready to hear about horse repo and black market horse semen fraud? I thought you'd never ask, Ben. More on that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

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Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made. at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. All right, Amory, as we were discussing horse repo and black market horse semen fraud. This comes from a Twitter user whose ID on Twitter is at Why Not Dancing. And her tweet just says, I'm so glad to be divorced. Hashtag horse gate.

Okay. Go on. Why not dancing? Dancing. So this actually came from a subreddit. So she found this story on Reddit and tweeted about it. It's from a subreddit community called R slash Crazy X. Oh, boy.

So I'm just going to read it to you, all right? Okay. So my ex-husband, will call him A, left me for another woman, B, a few years ago. B was an apprentice, quote, Squire, unquote, with a very well-known jousting company with a Renaissance festival. Apparently, A and B went to a horse breeder trainer, C, who specializes in jousting horses, and bought a jousting-trained pedigree,

Andalusian stallion with a snowy white coat. Because B was associated with such a prestigious jousting company, and A is a real smooth talker, they somehow convinced C to sell the horse on a payment plan rather than full payment up front. C would retain the breeding papers until the horse would be paid off, naturally. Cue the pandemic. A and B stopped making payments on the horse.

C did not have their contact information except for her phone number. They refused to answer and couldn't read B's handwriting well enough to Google her name. More time passed. The horse breeder begins to really panic about the horse's welfare, trying to Google based on anything she knew about A and B. and the horse breeder eventually turned up A's old address, the man's old address, the ex-husband's old address, across the country, which is my address.

So the person telling this story gets Googled by the horse breeder who has been not receiving payments from the ex-husband and the squire he ran off with. Happens to be on the same block as the horse breeder's friend's house. Again, it all sort of involves our local Renaissance festival, according to the original poster here. The jousting circuit is small and everybody knows everybody, this person says.

So the horse breeder called their friend who lives on the same street, fills her friend in. Her friend gets in touch with the woman telling the story and was like, girl, is this your ex? Crazy times. I passed along the contact info I had from the divorce paperwork to the horse breeder to try to help her repo her horse. That's how I learned horse repo is the thing. More time passes.

The ex-husband and the squire, the female squire, are dodging creditors like it's a new Olympic sport. The horse breeder is going crazy trying to serve them papers to sue to get her horse back. She's wondering whether flying to the city of residence to try and serve the ex-husband papers when he comes to pick up, you know, the last of his possessions from his ex-wife might work. There's like all this crazy intrigue and cloak and dougar stuff. Then the horse breeder gets contacted by angry mayor owners, mayor owners, right, with new baby. Foles without papers.

You know that like that part in the Big Labowski when like, you know, Walter is talking about the dog and he's like, this dog has fucking papers? First of all, dude, you don't have an access. Secondly, this is a fucking show dog with fucking papers. You can't board it. It gets upset. I've heard you say that quote, but I've never seen the Big Lebowski. Oh, my God.

Anyway. Anyway. Mm-hmm. Horses have papers. They do. They got papers. They got breeding papers, lineage papers, apparently. And the kicker here is that the ex-husband and the, you know, the husband stealing squire, shall we say, started selling stud services on their stolen horse, or at least the horse that they didn't, you know, fully pay off.

Promising breeding papers they didn't have taking cash up front when the mayor owners demanded bloodline papers for the foals. just sent them straight back to the original horse breeder. And that's how I learned that black market horse semen fraud is a thing. Where is the horse in question? Is this horse okay? So it's kind of a long story, Amory, but eventually the horse was found. It was returned to its original owner. And the horse is expected to make a full recovery with lots of, quote, love and care. Oh.

So. Okay. What do you think? I think horse people are even more wild than I thought. Yeah. I mean, I knew Renfair people were kind of wild, but like, jouster is, yeah. Can you just imagine? Like, you know, when if a couple that you're friends with gets divorced and, you know, there's the kind of,

do I have to take a side? Can I still just be friends with both of them? Then something like this comes along. Throw a horse in the mix. You throw a horse in the mix and suddenly your allegiance becomes a little bit easier to... Yeah, you pick neither side. You picked the horse, right? I mean, I'm with the horse all the way.

I can't say anything about the X that just gets to. to relish in the fact that like, see, I told you, you guys, I told you guys, he's crazy. Right. Among the ex-husband, the ex-wife, and the squire, the female squire, and the horse, you have no horse in this race except the horse. I just have the horse. I would say that everyone else in this story, Ben, is a little bit unstable. You know what I mean? Oh! Oh my God.

Wow. I can't wait for my dad to hear that one. That was the final straw. That was the final straw. Amra, I did ask Nikki what she thought of this story. And I think she and we agree. Let me just say that any amount of neglect with a horse is just not tolerated. There's no excuse for it.

But, you know, I read a couple that's, you know, divorced, right? Yeah. I mean, I got into jousting with my ex-husband. And one of my favorite stories is the story of when we got to joust after our divorce. I think every divorce couple should be able to joust each other by law. It's really catharting. Who stayed on the horse after that? Oh, we both did. It was a good time. And the crowd, the crowd was so into it because, you know, everybody is reflecting on their divorce. And it was a good time. Who won? You know what? I think we both won because neither one got it. Come on. I'm pretty sure I won't. I was going to say that sounds like the statement of either somebody who's like incredibly generous or somebody who lost. So I'm glad it was just that you're incredibly generous. That's good. Do you believe the story or is there part of the story that it feels

like some of it might be made up? Like based on your knowledge and understanding of the jousting world and the horse world. Well, I mean, I believe during COVID, somebody had a tough time. A lot of crews just, you know, all their jobs were canceled. That's their livelihood. I mean, competitive worlds,

most of us have a full-time job outside of jousting. You don't make money in competitive jousting. But for people who do the theatrical stuff, they perform at these run fairs, that, you know, it's their livelihood. And when they were all canceled during, you know, the pandemic, it just pulled a rug out from underneath them. So I can definitely see, you know, loss of income. I saw, you know, there are many people who had fundraisers and GoFundMe's to help

them pay for feeding their horses during the pandemic. So it doesn't surprise me that somebody landed on hard times. Emery, of all the industries that you thought of as hurting during the pandemic, did you ever think of the jousting industry? I did not. think of the jousting industry. And man, now I will. Whenever hard times hit next, I'll say, think of the jousters. Yeah. And in the meantime, be safe, but go to your local rent fare. You know what I'm saying? Buy yourself a headdress, you know, or like a turkey leg, right? A turkey leg, yeah, or a candied apple or a small dagger, you know. And if you do happen to, you know, watch, you know, watch the festivities. If you see an Andalusian with a snowy white coat,

you know, they've finally come home. Run free, mighty steed. And a big thanks to Nikki also for talking to us. I appreciate the time and the interest and I hope whatever happened. It turned out okay for everybody. Especially the horse. Especially the horse. That's it. That's the story that we had to tell you this week. Amory, was it worth it? Worth it. For sure. Thank you, Ben. Yeah, of course. We'll be back in touch soon. Don't worry. We're still in the lab. We're making good things. We're excited to unveil them for you. And, uh, yeah, stay in touch. Yehaw. Oh, wrong horse reference. Charge. Giddy up. I don't know. What is it? Who knows?

Thank you.