No Such Thing As A Fish - 215: No Such Thing As A Chihuahua Dog Sled Team

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

Live from Dublin, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the monumental conception of Victor Hugo, when North Korea is the safest place to be, and why you should bring 600 pairs of shoes to a dog sled race.

Hey guys, just before we begin this week's show, we have a little announcement to make which is that we have something for you to look at. That's a bit disgusting, aren't you? Well, I wouldn't say so. It's inappropriate. No, it's a wonderful kind of behind-the-scenes video of life on tour. Oh, you're talking about a documentary behind the gills. Yeah, behind the gills, exactly. So why aren't you wearing any trousers? We don't have time to get into that now and at the point is we've released this thing and it's our tour, isn't it? We filmed loads of stuff for it, loads of behind-the-scenes interviews and videos of us backstage getting ready. Yeah, it was super fun. We had a great

time on tour and we just filmed some of the chats we had, some interviews where you can learn some deep dark secrets from our pasts. Childhood photos, that kind of thing. Yeah. So it's been available in the UK for a little while, so hopefully all you guys have got it. But if you haven't, then get it now. But the big news is it's now available in America. So if you go to Amazon, if you go to Google Play, if you go to iTunes, you'll be able to get hold of it now. That's true. Or you can just go to qi.com slash gills where you'll find all the links. Okay, where are my trousers? On with the show.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week live from Devlin. My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Huntsman Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact this week is that every competitor at the world's longest dog sled race brings about 600 spare pairs of shoes with them. And they're for the dogs.

This is amazing. So this is the I've Dittarod race, which happens in Alaska every year. It's very long. It's roughly 1000 miles through Alaska. And yeah, the dogs have to wear shoes. And so by the rules of the game, they actually have to bring eight extra shoes on the sled with them. So at any one time, there have to be eight pairs of dog shoes on the sled. I was going to say, Anna, a pair of dog shoes is that four shoes or two shoes? I didn't know how to word this. So it's a pair is for the front pair. And then you have a second pair for the back pair, the way I see it. But it basically have different foot sizes on the front sets to the back sets. They can do. Yeah, sometimes they do. Yeah. So if you're buying if you're

buying your dog shoes, then number one, you're insane. But number two, you have to you have to get both sides measured. What's the biggest difference between the back? There's some dogs with tiny, tiny front paws and a massive back paws. That would be good. Like a penny farthing, but in dog form. Like a kangaroo on all fours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I believe not. And facts get in the way of another way is pleasing bit of whimsy. I'd say I didn't actually look that much into the size range of the dog's shoes. I will say that the mushers are the guys that we're calling the mushers or mushers. Mush. So these are the due to riding the sled. This is the guy's riding the sled or the woman

who's riding the sled. They usually make the dog shoes themselves. So I guess they can tailor into each dog's foot size. And like I say, in the rules per dog, you have to have eight extra shoes on board the sled. And so yeah, they usually bring over a thousand pairs of shoes, like 13, 1400 shoes. And then the dogs have to drag the weight of those shoes as well, don't they? I guess. Yeah. Yeah. They do kind of change them like that though on. So you know in Formula One, you have pit stops where you can only get filled out with petrol. But that's what happens. You have your pit stops on the sled race where you go and you have to change your dog shoes. The guys at the side, they bring in 16 trees for the dog to piss against.

Some drivers, mushers rather, they bring 3000 little booties. Because you've got 16 dogs pulling each sled. I think that's right. That's 64 feet. Yeah. Yeah. What happens? Do they lose their shoe on the run or do they wear through? Why do they need to change so much? It gets worn through. Because so the reason they have shoes, it's not because of the cold or anything, dogs feet are very good at managing the cold. So it's totally covered in ice and snow. But the reason they need it is for the kind of lumps and bumps and the grit and the sharp bits of ice that might get stuck in their paws. And so that wears away at the shoes. And just, you know, they're running pretty hardcore. That's cool. I read a really cool

thing about the because this is a big event that happens annually. And it brings people from all over the planet to come and compete. And in 2010, the event saw its first ever Jamaican team entering it. Yeah. Yeah. He's, yeah, he's called Mushon Mon. That's what he calls himself. And he, yeah, he's, he's been competing for years. That's a nickname, isn't it? Yeah. No, it's his, he calls himself. That's his nickname. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Because I thought there was one guy called Newton Marshall. That's him. That's him. So do you know the amazing thing about Newton Marshall? No. It's such a cool story. So basically in 2014, there was another sleder called Scott Janssen,

and he came off his sled and he was really, really badly injured. But he was off the track and he didn't know if anyone was going to find him. And Newton Marshall came by on his sled and he noticed that this sled had been overturned and that someone was really badly injured. Like, he'd been seriously concussed, he'd broken his ankle. And so he went and he saved in this guy called Newton Marshall went and he raised the alarm and he sort of made him a little bed in the snow and they waited for him to be saved. And he was rescued. He was fine. So that was what Newton Marshall did. But the bizarre thing about this is that two years earlier in the same race, Scott Janssen's dog had collapsed and he'd had to revive him with mouth to snout resuscitation.

So he'd been as good as dead for five minutes. And Scott Janssen is a funeral home director. So he said, I know what dead looks like. That dog was dead. But he gave him mouth to snout. And the bizarre thing about this is that the dog was called Marshall. So he saved a Marshall. What are you suggesting? I genuinely don't know. I think what I'm clearly suggesting what's clearly happened is the dog Marshall has been reincarnated in the person Marshall, who's then come to save him as a thank you for saving the dog. But only if the dog had subsequently died. I know. The human will be, you know, a one year old. He wouldn't be. We don't know all the answers. Also, I find it a bit weird that just because he works at a funeral home, this guy,

that he should be good at mouth to mouth resuscitation. And people brought in and he's like, we can still save him. Give me five minutes. My favorite, my favorite musher is a guy called John Suter. And he thought, you know what, all these guys are doing it wrong with these Huskies. I'm going to do it with poodles. And so he got some poodles to carry his sled or to pull his sled along. He got them. He brought them up with Huskies. So they kind of learned what to do with the Huskies. But unfortunately, they all got frozen feet. Because the Huskies have got special padding, haven't they? And now it's banned and you have to have only certain types of dog that you're allowed. It used to be that

you can have any dog you wanted. But surely there weren't many winners from the Chihuahua team. So do you know what the IDF Rod is based on? It's based on an event which happened in 1925 called the Great Race of Mercy. And this was a real crisis. So there was a town in Nome, which had an epidemic of ditheria. And it was beginning. And it was, you know, people were starting to die. A few people had already died. And the nearest anti-toxin was a thousand miles away. In 1925, there were only three planes in the whole of Alaska. And they were elderly, unreliable biplanes. So they couldn't be guaranteed to get there. So they went with dogs. And there were hero dogs and hero mushers who got the anti-toxin

a thousand miles to the town of Nome. And the guy who approved this, the governor of Alaska who approved this, his name was Scott Bone. So there's a coincidence. I'm not saying he was a reincarnated dog. And they afterwards, the lead dog, Balto, he became a celebrity. He was as famous as Rintin Tin or Lassie or all these other celebrity dogs of the 1920s. And the mayor of Los Angeles awarded Balto a bone shaped key to the city. I've got a couple of favorites, favorite races. So this is so this is two people, a guy called Dallas and a guy called Mitch, their father and son. And they seem to have this ongoing rivalry. So in 2012, Dallas CV became the youngest winner. He was 25 years old and he won it. In 2013, his father became the oldest ever winner.

This went on. So Dallas kept on winning it year after year. In 2016, he broke the record for the fastest time it's ever been done. So he did it in eight days and 11 hours. And in 2017, the following year, his dad broke the record again in eight days and three hours. And actually that year, the son Dallas's dogs turned out to be doped. Now they were they were weirdly, they were doped with tramadol, which everyone agreed would not be of any benefit at all. Surely they'd get a nice night's sleep at the end of the day. But yeah, I should say his father was not a suspect for doping his son's dogs or anything. But he this year, he decided he didn't want to do it, right? Because he got,

they said that basically he doped his dogs. He said, I definitely didn't do it. Someone else must have done it. And he wasn't happy about it. And now he's kind of pulled out. Is that why he didn't do it? I believe so. And it was done so much slower this year. It was like nine days something. It was rubbish. Yeah. But actually, I should just say a lot of people, a lot of people don't like the dog sledding, don't they? They think it's kind of cruel. Because a lot of the dogs get sick, some of them die. We all die. How do you like to pull a sled? Well, the old guy, you might as well just pull a fucking sled.

I'm just saying life is hard. It's a lot harder if you're pulling a sled. Good point. Sorry. Yeah. Well, the other thing is, there's lots of things that can happen. I mean, they do die. One of the worst things they get is, um, scrotal and penile frostbite. Wow. Yeah. No, no, I'd like to announce I'm pulling out of the next year. And then I thought I would check to see if humans can get frostbite on the penises. That's why you went to Iceland. Not why mum shopped there.

Well, apparently, according to the internet, the classic account of humans getting frostbite on their genitals is from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1977. And there was a doctor called Melvin Hershkovitz and he went running in very cold weather and he got that. And it's notable. The paper is notable because at once he writes about what happened and at one stage his wife comes home and finds him standing legs apart in the bedroom, nude below the waist, holding the tip of his penis in his right hand and turning the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine. Um, I was just looking up weird dog competitions and there's a there's a magazine called veterinary practice news and it has an annual x-ray competition awarded to dogs who've eaten the weirdest things.

And so recently one of the winners was Lola, a seven kilo tortoise who'd eaten a turtle pendant. But I think it's our dogs. Are they? No, sorry. It was just pet. It was just pet. Um, but my favorite one was the Rottweiler. I want to see one pulling the sled. My favorite one of these winners was the Rottweiler who had swallowed her owner's wrist watch but the alarm was still on telling her when to take her insulin so she had to listen to the dog to find another way to take her pedals. All right, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that 3000 feet up a mountain in France is a block of sandstone commemorating the exact spot where the author

Victor Hugo's parents conceived him. Yeah, it's uh, this was revealed that that was the spot where it happened in a letter written by his dad who bragged about it a lot. It was at the top of this mountain called Mount Donon in France and he made it to the top and it was years later. This wasn't done in his lifetime but years later a museum curator thought I've got to commemorate this and brought a sandstone and it's there to this day. It was kind of a prank wasn't it by the guy from the museum in the 60s was it? I think it was like a practical joke in the 1960s but did you know that Victor Hugo denied that that was where it happened because he was kind of ashamed of this mountain being a mountain that wasn't super famous not everyone knew about it so whenever he retold

the story of when he was conceived as we all do he made lots of little changes so there'd been a Celtic temple on Mount Donon and he changed that to a Roman temple of love and he changed the mountain range to the Alps because everyone's heard of the Alps and he made it Mont Blanc because that's 3,000 feet taller and so his version he was a storyteller that was what he did yeah you're running the risk of frostbite to the scrotum if you try to conceive of that altitude he was he did he told a lot of stories obviously mainly limbo yeah fine fine he claimed that he and his wife Adele had sex nine times on their wedding night and the telegraph

wrote that apparently she lost her taste for intercourse after that first night and I'm not surprised well he was a sex addict wasn't he yes he was he was constantly going to brothels he almost had a sort of like breakfast sex and then lunchtime sex and dinner sex there was almost a menu on a day-to-day basis with Victor Hugo to the point of that he was so popular amongst the brothels of Paris that when he died the brothels of Paris closed down for the day so that everyone working there could come to the funeral procession to pay tribute I read one account and I'm not sure this can be true um but the the prostitutes of Paris draped their vaginas in black crepe paper that's according to a guy called Edmund Goncourt who was there at the time

wow how did he know he can't have tested them all but what happened was when he died everyone thought he was going to die and then he kind of stuck around for a few weeks and so people came to Paris expecting for him to die and they were going to celebrate his life but it went so long more and more and more people came and in the end there were a crowd of two million people at his funeral which was more than the normal population of Paris wow it was rammed and everyone because he was like a famous you know sex addict or whatever and you know he was a partier everyone just got drunk everyone had sex there was the story that

always happens that people say that nine months later there were loads of babies born so people were saying that you know during the funeral everyone was just having sex everywhere there was a parade at his funeral and it took six hours for it to get to the end and there were delegations of different professions there so there were veterans civil servants writers animal lovers schoolchildren suffragettes sorry can we go back what who's was animal lover a formal profession who's paying for that but apparently the suffragettes got really annoyed because they were behind the gymnasts in the department stores they said we deserve better than this wow but it was it was um just

after uh his 79th birthday so he had an 80th birthday party on his 79th birthday as he was entering his 80th year and for that one half a million people just walked past his house as he sat outside waving at them yeah and then the next day because that was his apartment in Paris they changed the street name from where he was living so it got changed to become Avenue Victor Hugo so his remaining days he lived on the street named after him and he he would say that he would we wanted all the future mail that came to him to be addressed to mr victor in his avenue Paris and that would make it to him he said he wanted a paupers burial a paupers funeral and he obviously had the complete opposite but i'm not totally convinced he wants it there's one biography

of him which kind of seems to suggest that he's obviously famous for being a proponent of you know helping out the poor and the miserable is all about the awful conditions people lived in but he really liked people to know it so for instance apparently he liked people to ask him why he was wearing his coat inside out because then he'd say to them i just wear it inside out rather than buying a new one and then i can give that money to the poor and he really he really liked to invite this kind of thing i know right apparently according to this person he actually left in his will what the biography describes as an exiguous sum a very small amount in his will to the poor because he knew how rumors work and he knew that that would become an enormous amount

within a short amount of time so he was so famous when he was living in Guernsey that um admirers would save the pebbles that he walked upon when he was walking across the beach wow so he would they were like he's still on that one i'll take that wow yeah apparently i mean it doesn't sound very true does it is it from did he tell us that or it's hard to tell isn't it he was kind of he was paid in a very unusual way for Les Mis because he he said i think to his publisher his publisher said how much do you want and he made him a quite a high offer and he said no that's not enough and he said i think he said i'd like to be paid more than anyone else has ever been paid to write a book i'll give some to the poor but the publisher didn't have the money to pay it was i think the

equivalent of about three million pounds which is a huge amount of money and the publisher didn't have that money so he had to borrow all of that from a bank so it was kind of a private finance initiative novel basically and then the publisher just borrowed in the assumption that it would pay off and it did yeah it was huge wasn't it when it was published people turned up with wheelbarrows to buy copies of it what how big was it it is a big boy and wheelbarrows at the time were very small but what happened is you would go in if you were a worker and you could get some time off and you could afford to get the book and you could queue up and get there in time with your wheelbarrow then you could sell it to your friends and you could make a massive profit on it was like

ticket town thing kind of thing yeah wow yeah he was quite arrogant though wasn't he like i say he wanted to be paid all the money in the world and he used to he was it was a party animal so he apparently used to have 30 guests rounded in every single night right up until he was 80 when he died um but he then did at these big dinner parties used to spend the whole time talking about how great he was he would say there is only one classical writer in this country one do you hear me i am the only one i know the french language better than anyone else alive and then sorry i just asked if you wanted red or white why and then he'd catalog all like bullsack and racine and all the other great writers and

explain why they were not as good as he was there was one time when he wouldn't talk about himself in these parties and that was when he did his party trick which was putting a whole orange into his mouth and then thrusting as many pieces of sugar as possible into his cheeks and then scrunching it all up swallowing two liquor glasses of kish and then opening his mouth and saying i've just eaten it all wow so that was his trick he could eat an orange and a load of sugar really quickly and people still talk about his novels we're gonna have to move on very shortly um the guy who wrote the the lyrics for the musical of Les Mis he was a guy called James Fenton he wrote the first lyrics lots of people had to go out the lyrics but when he was given the book and told

hey why don't you have a look at the lyrics for this turning this novel into lyrics he was on a three month trip looking for headhunters in Borneo and it was a really heavy book and he said that he spent three months in a canoe reading Les Mis and every time he finished a chapter he threw it to the crocodiles so he could save a bit of weight in the canoe that's very cool he did you know he trended on twitter in 2014 for a kind of related reason so he trended on twitter and not in a good way it turned out the BBC reported this that he was suddenly Victor Hugo was receiving all these death threats on twitter and he was being called lots of stuff he was called the son of a prostitute his daughter was called a big bitch and

it turned out what happened was um one of his poems had been set in a french baccalaureate exam and they were so annoyed about it because it's so natural that all the students got online afterwards like they got him trending isn't that i think you know you've made it when you're getting death threats on twitter 200 years okay it's time to move on to fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week is in the event of a zombie apocalypse only one country will survive and that country is north korea really yeah um so this is a study by some mathematicians in brazil uh and they've kind of done a model of what's going to happen and

it's going to be like a straight fight between human and zombie and the zombie's always going to win but if you get a human with a gun like in the army then the human might win and they've worked out that what you're going to need is 47 soldiers per 1000 capital in order to survive and there's only one country with that many people and that is north korea and they have also the advantage of being completely separate from everyone else so it's going to be difficult for the zombies to get in uh the borders are very you know guarded and stuff like that so if the zombies come that's was the best place to go right uh in all of the circumstances i don't bother i was reading on my assumption is as if you were killed by a zombie it would be through

your brains being eaten and you being attacked according to max brooks max brooks is an author who wrote the zombie survival guide he wrote the movie world war z of the book rather world war z which was made into the brad pit movie um so he studied in a very serious way what he thought would be the way that you would be most likely to die in a zombie apocalypse and his main reason for anyone's death is that you would die from explosive diarrhea and it's because water would become so scarce that you would be forced to drink from puddles puddles are very dangerous to get water from you can see why they don't make most of the zombie films about the whole explosive diarrhea problem issue yeah i wouldn't want to i did look up uh because there are so many

zombie films and they're quite cheap to make obviously because all you needed is some willing extras with a load of you know makeup on and um a load of them are quite low quality but i went through a list of all the zombie films i could find online i just wanted to share a few of the titles because they're great um so i mean there are your classic things like boy eats girl very clever um there's uh erotic nights of the living dead there's flights of the living dead which is a plane based zombie film my favorite one i like the explosive diarrhea one um shites of the living dead i've got a third one it's not as good as that it's called poultry geist night of the chicken dead i had a tiny little nugget about the world war z movie by the way that was made which is just

a cool bit of trivia which is that um one of the actors in the movie was peter kapaldi and peter kapaldi was cast as a world health organization doctor so he was a who doctor and what it was is that the filmmakers had inside knowledge that he was going to be announced as the doctor this was before dr who and uh so it's a subtle look easter egg yeah oh and none of us guessed based on that we should have known there's starrings in the face um people are scientists and people at universities are always kind of writing analyses of what happens in the zombie apocalypse and it happens really in a lot of places and i think it's kind of a way of engaging people we're making something sound fun when actually it's a paper about statistical uh projections that can be fun

and uh which for a lot of people is fun but one one example of this was the university of otawa a few years ago published a paper with an equation in it explaining how fast we'd have to deal with the zombie apocalypse so the papers called when zombies attack mathematical modeling of an outbreak of zombie infection and one of the papers authors the professor in charge was called robert j smith question mark and it turns out that the guy who wrote this paper has put a question mark on the end of his name and i looked him up and if you go to his academic page on the website at the university he says yeah that's not a typo i really do have a question mark on the end of my name do you have any idea what it's like to live with such an incredibly common name that you'll

never ever show up on google i had to do something how do you think he pronounces it is it robert smith or smith definitely or he might just say question mark at the end maybe yeah but he then also says i did go to his page i saw this as well he then follows up by saying how do you stick out on google he then goes actually you still don't stick out on google when you put your question mark so it hasn't really worked i like the other one who he wanted to stick out against who is robert smith i've got a bit of good news in the zombie world to come good we're gonna win it's gonna be fine it's gonna be absolutely fine we're gonna win within about a week guys okay there's someone booed like there's an article by a scientist called david mr jevsky and he said that nature would

destroy zombies before they could destroy us so obviously all animals will be packing away at them they're dead they're not very fast with the reactions but the main thing is microorganisms would go to town on them bacteria fungi molds insects flesh eating beetles you made it cocky for you to say we're gonna win in that situation allies in the microorganism world will join us in a coalition of the live that's really good point that's such good logic they can decompose a rabbit right down to the bones in a week so if they'll have a they'll go to town on these things missy efsky he did say that in his kind of world animals can't get the same disease that humans were getting do you know i mean so the animals can't become zombies in his kind of idea if the animals can become zombies

as well then it's a whole different ballgame sure if you're getting attacked by zombie microorganisms that is not a great movie either i must admit but there's someone else who's published advice on how to escape zombies how to survive a zombie attack is the cdc the center for disease control in america and this was obviously kind of a pr thing to try and get people actually onto their website so they learned how to survive genuine crises but um it's quite funny because if you could do go to the site now they've got a zombie preparedness page a zombie preparedness blog they've got a zombie preparedness booklet for educators that they will send send out but they don't really conceal their true purpose very well so the tips they give are things like stock up on

water food and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp bracket or in the case of a natural disaster it will buy you some time to get to an evacuation shelter or until utility lines are restored close brackets it's always like you know first aid supplies in case that horrible zombie bites you also will come in handy in a tornado or a hurricane one other thing that might help us if the zombies attack to win is the reverse zombie tick okay this is an animal um a little tick and if it bites you it makes you allergic to meat and so the idea is what we might do is kind of work out what makes that happen and then we can inject it into the zombies make them allergic to eating us and then we're saved but just because

the zombies got hives doesn't mean that you will not learn a zombie yeah hey do you guys know that zombies make an appearance in amazon's terms and services conditions you know that when you go and you sign that massive yeah 26 000 words yeah we all read it well then you oh well then this won't be a surprise but someone did read the whole thing and they discovered that there's a passage uh in it which reads however so it just comes into this however this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that cause human corpses to reanimate

and seek to consume living human flesh blood brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization that's in amazon's actual terms that's very funny conditions yeah is that it feels like they're testing us to check we're reading them exactly and as the news of the last two months has taught us nobody has read any of them yeah we need to move on shortly there is uh just on on animal zombie sort of uh parasites parasites and the way they spread there is a fly called apocryphalus borealis and it lays eggs inside bumblebees and the amazing thing is that the infected bee then stops working and it starts acting like a moth it starts being flying around lights and this kind of thing while the um while the parasite is preparing to burst

out basically but that means that there are zombies very cool it's a very forgiving audience tonight okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that the 1930s actor george arliss once booked himself into the left luggage office at charring cross as a parcel in order to escape people who wanted his autograph very good i'd never heard of this guy before but he was very famous at the time and he wrote in his memoir that he was being chased by by people who were desperate for his autograph and so he said with presence of mind worthy of a great general i thought of the left luggage office it was just behind me close to the platform i turned to the man in charge and demanded the right to book myself in as a parcel i paid my two pence and the

man took me over the counter and i was saved he took him over the counter it's amazing what you could get for two pence in those days um he was uh i hadn't heard of him either and he was uh he was very famous in his time he was the first british actor to ever win an academy award for a leading actor yes he won it as well for playing benjamin disraeli the british prime minister and he um then won it again a few years later for playing benjamin disraeli he played the same role and got given it twice he was the first person to do that reprising a role and getting it a second time and was that one was silent wasn't it and then the other one was a talky yeah that's right yeah and he also uh victor hugelly uh was very egotistical as well um he was had to he had to do a court

appearance once uh he was called to a just a court hearing and get to give a testament and um he called himself the world's greatest living actor uh and to explain his statement he said you see i'm on the oath so he was a real kind of dick um i really like victor hugelly there was one one other instance of his egotism that i read about was in a film called the man who played god which was about a concert pianist who then fell on hard times but he stuck to the script totally except there was one bit of the script where the line was um someone came up to the pianist after the show and congratulated him on the performance and the line was so glad you liked it and he changed it to so glad you liked me and someone's just gone through the script in

the film and gone oh he changed that didn't he wow man and so on autograph hunting and autograph collectors i didn't know this there is a magazine called autograph collector which is all about collecting autographs how to do it how to get different people um and various tactics and things like that and they do a lot on the history of autograph collecting too because some people sell them obviously some people collect loads and loads of them at the same time yeah and they described one incident in 1934 when the australian cricket team came to england and in those days they had to get the ship to england to play the ashes and so on and the junior batsman Arthur Chippinfield had to spend almost the entire journey on the steamship forging on bats and on sheets of paper

the signatures of the rest of the team who couldn't be asked to sign it's a paper luckily that was the last time the australian team did anything fraudulent and we will be touring australia in may so tickets they weren't available but some have now come available it's really odd wow and there was a autograph hunter a quite a famous one in his in his little area he was called Tommy Scullion he was an irish grocery driver and he and his family are in tonight he devoted his whole life to getting to getting autographs he had more than 40 000 in total wow he had Picasso he had Franco he had Charles Manson he had the great wins oh so he wasn't discriminating in the whole good v evil metric

i'll be honest there's not much good in this list um but he left a will in the end he died quite recently he left a will and he bequeathed his collection to the village museum uh unfortunately in his hometown there was no village museum so they auctioned it instead oh they have these people have been around so much longer than i imagined autograph hunters so they were particularly prevalent in the late 19th century early 20th century and they were thought of as a total scourge so if you look back in old newspapers from the early 1900s um they're they're written about in such an awful way there was an article in new york times in 1901 that said autograph hunters excel in ways that are dark and tricks that are vain mark twain hated them mark twain had a letter

pre-printed that explained his refusal when people wrote to him for an autograph and the letter explained that if he answered all these requests he wouldn't have time to get anything else done and also the asking for an autograph is asking for a sample of his writing and he's a writer so you're asking for a sample of his own work and he said uh it wouldn't be fair to ask a doctor for one of his corpses to remember him by would it what what a stupid analogy corpses are not the work that doctors produce well some very bad doctors i just made this uh feel free to try the mouth to mouth the mouth to mouth will i work uh two more things about your statement uh firstly sometimes artists can help people with their art there was a i read that moats art used

to when he was walking the streets if he came across someone who was homeless asking him for money there's one instance that's recorded where he didn't have anything on him but he was so quick at writing music that he got a paper and pen composed a new piece gave it to the person and said there's a music publisher that will give you money for this so take this there that's point number one point number two is that um that's amazing moats art yeah moats art dubious yes someone's shouting out dubious but um no the other thing is that um so you said that mark twain said this sent them this letter saying i'm not gonna sign you a signature steve martin the comedian actor he does the same thing but in a positive way so he doesn't do signatures either what he does

is if you meet steve martin he gives you a card a business card that's pre-signed and on it is written the words this certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm polite intelligent and funny that's great and that's what he gives everyone who meets him and last year there was a collection of beetles autographs which sold for two thousand pounds even though three of them were fake okay and the reason they sold for two thousand pounds is that the they were all done by john lennon oh cool because in the early days sometimes they weren't all there or any one of those who were just fake it yeah that's cool so he was doing a prank at the time presumably but well he kind of got them almost all right he got georgian wringer bang on

but he didn't really bother with paul even in the early days the signs were there i went on to ebay to look for the most expensive autographs at the moment the most expensive one when i checked which was a day ago was 351 493 pounds and 85 pence and it was looks like you're going to guess andy is it alive or dead uh dead male or female male hand cock him with the eighth no god uh go go god no god you've tried the two biggies georgialists you're just not going to guess oh okay who is it actually i think he's dead Hugh hefner yes he died last year 350 000 yeah yeah so he's like Hugh hefner i know i know it's a number one edition of playboy with his signature um but that is 351 000 um bob dillon signed hand

written lyrics to like a rolling stone only 140 597 pounds and 54 it's still a lot of money guys don't be too outraged but a fifth a fifth the price of the uh Hugh hefner one for 70 000 you can get the apollo 11 space flown us flag signed by all three astronauts on the apollo 11 all right that actually we could share between us we've been in a tenor each we can do it and then we'll have to have an incredibly complicated time share and the lowest prices 75p an east ender signed photo of simon williams who plays hugo in east enders he's actually got an exclamation mark over actually i never heard we ages ago when our vinyl came out we went we we went to a record shop and did a signing at a record shop and we did a few signatures on on ones that they hence

sold that they were going to keep online in their store so we we checked if they were still in stock online they were um the the unsigned unsigned vinyl was 19 pounds 99 the signed vinyl was 20 pounds we are worth between us one penny wow just on the on the astronauts apollo 11 thing one of the things that was a contingency for the families of the apollo 11 space mission was that neil armstrong buzz aldrin and michael collins signed a lot of signatures to give to their family so that if they didn't make it back the families could sell the signatures to make money to keep the family um yeah going okay it

was a they signed hundreds of signatures going if we don't make it back sell these and this will help my family continue yeah um steven king that's that's very sad all right it's not sad they were okay he's only one take for 30 years he's only on apollo 10 the next one's really good it is one of the few where the sequels get better and better and we're gonna have to wrap up shortly there's one amazing story about autographs that Stephen King tells I was watching him give a talk on stage about this thing that happened when he was 26 years old and he'd never been recognized and asked for an autograph before it was in his early days and he was in a restaurant and he was really sick he was really ill he had some kind of

horrible stomach bug and so he had to be really close to the bathrooms at all times and at one point he had to rush to the bathrooms and he went in and I don't know what kind of weird restaurant this was but there were no doors on the bathroom on the toilet stalls um so he just had to have his stomach complaint in full view of the rest of the bathroom and so he went in and he sort of explosively shat all into this toilet it's on me it's on me tell tell sign and he did this and he's feeling terrible he was saying he was on this toilet the door opening things can't get any worse and there was a toilet attendant in there who he said was about 108 years old and while he was in the middle of this awful experience the toilet attendant came up to him

with a pallet paper and a pen and said aren't you Stephen King come have your autograph please mate so Stephen King gave his first requested autograph on the loo while having diarrhea very cool thank you okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter james at james harkin and chasinski you can email podcast at qo.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing we have a facebook group as well no such thing as a fish or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com we have everything up there

from our tour dates upcoming from uh the book the link to our book that you can buy we've also got a link to our new tape that we've just released and we're about to give one away it's the only one we have here in arland and you guys sent in your fact at the beginning of the show we've picked our favorite fact so the winner is going to get this so uh andy i believe you've picked the fact yes the winning fact tonight is from kiran dowling are you in great where's the fact is the fact is that adult Hitler's brother alwa used to work at the shellborn hotel in dublin where he was known where he was known as paddy hitler