No Such Thing As A Fish - 225: No Such Thing As An Interesting Riddle

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

Live from the Sydney Opera House, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss BBC stock orgies, being buried with a chicken and why you might cycle the Olympic marathon.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Sydney Opera House! My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter 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, Andy. My fact is that the BBC has sound effects, including in-disposed chicken, more or less normal chicken, standard orgy, and comedy orgy.

Now, it would be very remiss if we went to play for you some of these tonight. Have you got the clips? I've got clips all right, so yeah, they've got a sound off archive of 16,000 effects, and so here's in-disposed chicken. How often are the BBC playing out sitcoms where enter in-disposed chicken? In-disposed to do what? I don't know, it's sounding pretty distressed, though. So there's also, no, we've got standard orgy here, just as a bass line.

I think I can hear a few chickens in there. Oh yeah, there's definitely a cock and vell somewhere. And here, because I know we all want to hear it, is comedy orgy. The BBC, ladies and gentlemen, and the amazing thing is, they've made this open to the public, this whole archive, 16,000 effects, and you can download them, and for non-commercial reasons you can use them. And it's a fantastic archive, it's got such funny stuff. Just on those orgy clips, the legend at the BBC is that they were recorded by a studio

manager in the 1970s, who are... That sounds about right, not the BBC. And it was colleagues during their lunch breaks, he'd say, come on, you have to make some orgy sounds during your lunch break. Is that right? Supposedly so, yeah. God, lunch breaks are more fun in the olden days. It's very cool though, so these are all now free to use for anyone, hence the reason we're

allowed to do that, right here, right now. I think you asked for special permission. I did ask for special permission, yeah. In case we had wanted to use thirsty budgerigars in shed, or two Siamese cats, one coughing occasionally. And if you want to play a fight sound effect, they've got three people brawling, they've got six people brawling, and if those aren't enough, you can do 36 people brawling. Wow.

Yeah, I spent a long time reading this list. They have riot in Belfast, don't they? Riot in Belfast with breaking glass, rubber bullets, distant cries and chants. And then they also have riot in Belfast, more subdued. We're going to go for another take on the riot, guys. Could you just keep it down a bit this time, please? They're so specific, though. They've got Belgian post office brackets busy, I think, which is...

If you want a French post office brackets busy, do you think that's a disaster? Are you like, if I only got the Belgian one, there's nothing we can do. It's a really weird mix of things that were recorded specially, like, for example, comedy orgy, or things that are recording history. So they've got an air raid on Battersea from 1940 during the Battle of Britain. That, obviously, is not going to happen again. You're not going to have a comedy air raid on Battersea, are you? Badoing.

It's amazing, isn't it, when you look into the stories behind where sounds come from. They were at lunch break, and they would come and do a comedy orgy. So there's that famous one, I think it's quite famous, that in Jurassic Park, the sound of the loss of raptors barking, that sort of, was turtles having sex. I don't know if you know that, but you can see footage, and there's a lot of it online, of turtles having sex, which I highly recommend. And as they're going at it, there's this kind of noise. And that's genuinely what they sampled for the...

Oh, how did that turtle get on stage? Where is it? I didn't even do it right, it's such a lovely tone. I think you've got to be in the mood, you know? But so, the T-Rex is in Jurassic Park. When you see a T-Rex, it's a mixture of a bunch of different animal sounds. So, the voice itself, for the breathing, they use the sound of a whale. They use lion's alligators and tigers for the low frequency of the roaring that was going on. But for the heavy breathing, the sort of, of the T-Rex, that's a koala.

No, an Aussie, yeah, made it into Jurassic Park. An Aussie legend. This was so weird today, by the way, so I was thinking about this fact, and the fact I needed to do some research for it on the walk to the Sydney Opera House. And I was thinking about Foley Artists. So, this is obviously about Foley Artists, and it's Jack Foley, the guy who kind of invented sound effects and made a lot of sound effects from our films. And I walked past a street called Foley Street.

As I was thinking about Foley Artists, isn't that insane? That's just a personal story. And what a story. What a story. That was such a, I didn't do my homework, but woe do I have an excuse. I was doing some reading on Foley. No, he used to, so he is the sound of the walk of a lot of your favourite actors, if you're born in the 1940s actually.

He's the sound of the walks of Laurence Olivier, of James Cagley, of Marlon Brando, because he used to watch these people walk, because you couldn't get the sounds recorded, sort of live, because the cameras weren't recording that close up. And he would watch them really carefully and imitate their walks, and then the sound of his feet hitting the ground were that. And they still do that today in nature documentaries a lot. So actually, while I was on this walk, I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible Podcast,

and very good show. And there was a guy interviewed, Richard Hinton, who does the sound effects for animals in a lot of nature documentaries. And he says, for walking animals, you always use your hands, because you have much more control over your hands. And so if you're a lion, then you sort of do it quite lightly, and then if you're an elephant, you're a turtle having sex. Yeah, it's still in the hands.

So speaking of walking, Orson Welles, he wanted a specific sound of people walking on sand, so he had an entire truckload of sand dumped onto the studio floor for people to walk on. Unfortunately, it just dampened it, you couldn't hear anything. And they used to get amazing things that they were asked, so they were asked to do the sounds of snowflakes falling on snow, or the sound of a nude woman sitting on a marble bench. What was that necessary? It's all in the hands.

This is amazing. Bacon sizzling in a pan sounds identical to rain falling. Wow. No, you don't think it does, but I did a video on the internet, and I was tricked two times out of four, which is exactly no better than average. It's incredible. You think you know it and you don't. Really? Yeah. I mean, we're full of anecdotes tonight, aren't we?

Do you know the big boulder in Indiana Jones, the one that rolls after India at the beginning of the first film? The noise of that is a Honda Civic set in neutral going down a gravel road on a very slight slope. But it works. It's amazing. How are yours going to be tricked? In our fight club, all of the punches are the smacking of slabs of meat with pig's feet. But David Fincher thought that this sounded exactly right, but he was another one who took it really seriously.

In fact, in one of the things in fight club, he asked a stuntman to fall down the stairs 12 times for one scene, and then he used the first take. Did he know after the first take that he was using the first take and the other 11 were just for fun? I paid for an hour. We're going to have to move on fairly soonish to the next fact. All my research is about orgies.

Move us on. Okay, on the Wikipedia for orgies, they have a section on Roman orgies, and apparently this did happen. It was an ecstatic form of worship that some cults had. Sounds alright, actually. It involved drinking wine. It doesn't seem to be much sex involved in fairness. It was involved drinking wine and dancing. Oh, it sounds okay.

As well as eating raw meat, which is not quite as good, and self-castration, which is much less good. Of course, the self-castration does provide fodder for the raw meat, so it's sort of two birds, one stone, isn't it? Alright, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinsky. My fact this week is that in the first Olympic marathon in 1896, the same stopwatch was used at the start and finish line, so it had to be carried from one to the other ahead of the runners by bicycle.

That's very cool. So this is the first model of Olympics, obviously, in Greece, and yeah, it was held by a judge, but to stopwatch it was started by this judge who clicked it, shoved it in the hand of a bicycle, and the cyclist had to ride along in foul weather. It was really awful weather that day, and the road was very rough, and then cycled really fast to the finish line

so that the same stopwatch could be there. Also presumably cycled without accidentally pressing any of the buttons on the stopwatch during the process of cycling. But you could just have given it to the guy in front, and said, if anyone overtakes you, should we just self-track it over? Yeah. Like kind of a relay for each other. That's a great idea.

I was thinking you could do it by car, but then obviously not back then, and actually probably not now, certainly at the London Marathon, because the average speed in central London at the moment for cars is 7.6 miles an hour, whereas the average speed for runners in the marathon is 12 miles an hour. In fairness, the London Marathon is on a Sunday, so the traffic won't be so bad, but bad news, they close all the roads because the marathon's on. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. This was obviously the first modern Olympics. It was very exciting. This marathon was emulating the great marathon of history that they wanted to do. Of history. Of history. You could at least narrow it down to the country. Not Australia.

So, but what was very exciting about it, I think particularly for the room that we're in, is that entering that Olympics that year, there was an Australian team, and it was the very first Olympics, yeah, consisted of one person. He was a guy called Edwin Flack, and he actually ran in this marathon,

was quite far at the front at one point, but then he unfortunately had never run that far before, and got... While he was doing really well, he suddenly got really delirious, collapsed down, and one of the spectators came up to help him, got him up, and then Edwin Flack punched him. The first, yeah, punching of a spectator by an Aussie,

or any country. Sorry, just on Edwin Flack, he was one of, I think there were 17 people running, and 13 were Greek, and he was one of the remainder that were foreigners, and none of them knew how to long distance run, and so they all started out ahead, and all the Greeks had had lots of practice,

and so they all started out behind, and they all thought they were winning, and when Flack started winning, I think he overtook a French guy, and again the cyclist was crucial, because the cyclist cycled to the finish line, to the big stadium, and said, the Aussie's winning, the Aussie's winning, and then they were all devastated,

because they were all Greeks, and that's what they thought, because there was no way of relaying this information, there was no cyclist there, who'd already pedalled the stopwatch up to the front line, so yeah, they really thought he was going to win. The guy who was eventually won by a Greek, and so the main medical check for this race, was being tapped on the knee by a doctor,

and then given two beers, that was it, so everyone was a couple of beers in by the time they started, then, so the guy who eventually won... This explains why the Australian did so well. The guy who eventually won halfway through, he bumped into his stepfather, who was waiting along the route at a little inn,

who gave him some wine, and then he was getting really tired, this guy, and he asked someone who was accompanying him for water, he said, please, have you got any water, so he was given cognac instead. So he finished the race completely half-cut, he was...

I think he spat out the cognac, in disgust. So the next Olympics, which was in 1900, the course markings were so poor in the marathon, that confused athletes could be seen running randomly through the streets of central Paris. And the absolutely worst thing about it,

for me, is that the winner was a guy called Michel Theatro of France, but in second place was a guy called Emile Champion, and in third place was Ernst Fast. Wow. So sad. Yeah. It was really Teatro's responsibility

to give that game away, wasn't it? It probably changes name. To winner or something. Well, in 1904, the marathon competitor who finished ninth, he should have done better, but he was chased a mile off course by dogs. Was that 1904? In that same race, there was a Cuban postman

called Andarin Carvajal, and he arrived at the last minute, and he'd lost all of his money in New Orleans, so he had to hitchhike to St. Louis, and he'd hardly eaten anything, so he stopped off on an orchard on route to have a snack on some apples, which turned out to be rotten.

And so, despite having strong stomach cramps throughout the whole of the race, he ended up finishing fourth. Wow. I like this. This is many years later. There was a marathon runner called Kanakuri, who started the marathon and then he went missing,

and no one ever saw him again. What? Yeah. They just lost Kanakuri. He was so fast. He was missing, and then it turned out that what happened is is that he lost consciousness, and he was rescued by a family on the side of the track.

They brought him back to a house. He regained consciousness later and was nursed to health, but was so embarrassed about it, he didn't tell anyone. And so, he was listed as missing by Swedish authorities for over 50 years. Before he finally admitted that that's what happened,

that he had done it. He should have just sneaked back into the end of one of the marathons they were doing. Well, well, he did. You're not going to tell me he did that. He went back on the 55th anniversary of the 1912 games to finish the race, and he holds the longest ever official marathon time

of 54 years, eight months, six days, five hours, 32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds. APPLAUSE I've got a fact about a marathon, which I don't know if you guys have heard of. This is called the Barclay Marathon. This is the toughest marathon.

Have you guys done it? Has anyone competed? No. No, exactly. Exactly. You think you're tough enough. Oh, my goodness, guys. OK, get this. It's in Tennessee. You have to do five 20-mile loops

all over a mountain, OK? And you have to finish within 60 hours. So it's very hard. You have to do the equivalent of running up and down Mount Everest twice. It only costs $1.60 to enter. LAUGHTER Thousands of people have entered since it was started.

Four... Sorry. And a T-shirt? So... You have to play well. Organise or whatever, please. Yes, I... You absolutely bang on, but it's more efficient if I do it.

LAUGHTER But you're right. No, you're right. You're right. The guy who set it up, he requests that you bring him T-shirts, because he doesn't like shopping for clothes. So it might be socks or T-shirts, whatever. You have to get in. You have to email a secret email address

on the right minute, at the right day, an essay titled, Why I should be allowed to run in the Barclay. There's no path, so they leave 13 books trailed around the course. And as you go around, you have to take a page from each book to finish each loop. You have to sign a disclaimer saying,

if I'm stupid enough to attempt the Barclay, I deserve to be held responsible for any result of that attempt, be it financial, physical, mental, or anything else. You don't get a medal, by the way, if you finish. LAUGHTER What do you get? Do you get a T-shirt? It started in 1986.

Nobody finished it until 1995. Wow. So, just back on timers, in the 2012 Olympics in London, they invented a timer which could measure accuracy to a millionth of a second. But no one really figured out what to do with it.

LAUGHTER Because, obviously, that is such a small amount of time. In that amount of time, Usain Bolt can travel 0.000001 meters, which is about the size of a bacteria. LAUGHTER Yeah, so, more accurate timing devices

are useless at Olympics. And this is a serious problem. People keep having ties, because you only measure them to one-hundredth of a second. And after that, it's kind of unfair. So, I think there have been a lot of ties in the swimming since 1984, because in 1972,

there was a tie when they measured it to one-hundredth of a second. And one guy beat the other by two-thousandths of a second, which is much, much faster than the blink of an eye. And the thickness of coat on the swimming pool could easily, massively override that

by a long, long way. And so, they realised it was completely unfair. So, they just have loads of ties these days. In 2012, there was one where it went down to a coin toss or a run-off. And then one of them just seeded into the other. A run-off in the swimming? That was a sprinting race.

Just a freeze. Could you let your fingernails grow enough until you would win that race? Yeah, that's a really good idea. If your fingers were 50 metres long, you could just go... I bet you'd have bigger problems, wouldn't you? OK, it is time

for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that in first century Denmark, if you were really rich, you were buried with a chicken. If you were really, really rich, you were buried with a goose.

Wow. OK. So, this is the thing that happened. Basically, it was the Romans who had started to get up to that in Scandinavia, and goosees were extremely rare. I think we said geese, just FYI. Yeah. And I'm the editor of this podcast,

and... and geese were really rare. And also, geese, they represented the goddess Juno, and they found that not only have these people who are buried with chicken and geese, they're obviously kind of

of high status, because they have loads of other Roman goods as well. Yeah, that's the thing that happened. That's very cool. Just wondering. You said that some people were buried with a chicken. Do we have any idea what it might sound like if the chicken was, say, indisposed before...

I have a feeling we're going to... Thought I might... I'll be buried with things. Oh, yeah. There are ancient Peruvian shark fisherman graves which have been excavated recently, and it turns out that they were buried with extra legs.

What? Sorry? Are we sure that they just didn't have extra legs? I suppose we're not 100% sure. They had extra legs buried with them, so two extra legs were left in one grave. I'm pretty sure this guy... Has anyone

guessed why that might have been the case? I guess they were. I think they were the legs of, I suppose, other Peruvian shark fisherman who hadn't had quite as long and happier career as the main guys in the grave. There are a lot of legless torsos buried nearby.

I don't think we've found any yet. Again, this is research in its early stages, so... I really like that. In America, the incidences of corpses being stolen for scientific purposes from graveyards during the U.S. Civil War times by quite a lot.

Someone invented a coffin torpedo. The coffin torpedo was, if you were digging a grave, it would blow up, basically, from the inside of the coffin when you were trying to steal the body and kill the person who was trying to steal you.

What? There was one that was put on top of the coffin as well, so it didn't harm the actual interior of the coffin as well, and that was a big thing. They used to do things like put cages on top of graves to make sure that no one could steal. There was also, and this sounds really weird

to me, the graveyards used to, at one point, have at the bottom of the... so you have the tombstone, and right at the bottom there would be a shotgun just pointed up. And if anyone came and you might just be visiting, so I don't know how...

how it worked, but you'd be killed, and... Yeah, that is harsh. You might just want to say one last goodbye. Although, if it's a family grave, just plop them in, I guess. So that would go down extremely badly in Madagascar,

where they have a tradition of disinterring the dead every few years. So this is this, I think, really cool Madagascar tradition. It's in the Fama di Hanna people, and it's called The Turning of Bones. It happens every five to seven years.

And you go to where your ancestors are buried, or where your grandma's buried, and you dig them up, and you can change their clothes because they've been wearing the same clothes for ages. And you then walk them around the village, should have given them a tour of the village. Not between your shoulders, pretending they're still fine.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you do. You walk around and you go, oh, look, there's a co-op there. It didn't used to be there, that kind of thing. They... You won't remember that. They dance with them. So they dance around the graveyard with them, the cemetery. They hold the bodies above their heads,

and then they spray them with perfume, and they bathe them in wine. And they often rearrange the bodies into more human shapes when sometimes time has taken its toll. And they just have... It's a really fun banquet, really, with the dead. If you're into that kind of thing. LAUGHTER

So in China, it is illegal to be buried with a picture of a super girl. A super girl? I will come to that. Thank you. LAUGHTER So I think people mostly probably know that in China,

they do this thing where they have, like, paper offerings. So they might pop bits of fake money in your tomb or whatever, and it's, like, things that you loved in life or whatever. I mean, that would be so annoying in the afterlife if you got to the counter and you wanted to buy all your stuff for the afterlife, and they were like, this is all fake, sir.

I'm sorry. Yeah, but... If you're a fan of playing Monopoly in the afterlife, that stuff will be very handy. That's true. You can't bring your own fake money to a Monopoly board. LAUGHTER You can't be at all. I've got a new currency I'd just like to pop in.

Rules, mate. I want a lot of games with that extra stack. The Murray Millions. I'll take everything. So as well as they do have this kind of money, but they banned the price of folga offerings. So that's such things as luxury villas,

sedan cars, Viagra you're not allowed to, and then simulated models of Supergirls. And that is based on the hit TV contest, Mongolian cow-yogurt Supergirl. LAUGHTER Please don't give away the ending of the latest series,

because I'm only halfway through. I've actually heard of Supergirl. Now that I think about it, that was the TV show. It's kind of like X Factor where it's all about singing. Yeah, and I think they said this is what I read in a newspaper, but I've not double checked to verify it. And it was a big British tabloid.

It said that in China, so many people voted for the winner of the first series of Supergirl, that if you took all those votes and applied it to every other voting that has happened on planet Earth, it is the biggest collection of single votes

for one thing that the Earth has ever witnessed. More than any election, more than anything else. Because they don't really have elections there. Dan, how dare you? LAUGHTER The elections in China are free and fair, and extremely concentrated on a single result.

Sorry, just on China quickly as well. Not so much burials, but funerals. Just very recently, the Chinese Ministry of Culture have announced that they're planning to eliminate strippers from going to funerals. And this is a custom that happens in China and Taiwan, whereby

they like to make it a big party. And again, go online, you can see this. And dignitaries will have this. It will be girls on the top of cars, pole dancing and stripping. It's a big thing. In some cases, there will be 50 car processions, all of which will have a pole dancing

stripper on top of it. Yeah, and they're trying to get that out. Although you should specify that strippers are not allowed to go to funerals. It's not like if your job happens to be a stripper, but your mum dies, you're not allowed to attend a funeral. You're not supposed to strip at it.

You just can't take your clothes off, yeah. Yeah. But that's the thing that genuinely happens. What's the purpose of it? It's just a celebration thing, and I think they tied it in with... With the fake money, where you put it in the... I was looking at animals being buried. Because pets being buried

is more and more of a talked about and written about thing and pets, cemeteries and stuff. And people really want to be buried with their pets now. And there are actually a couple of really bizarre cases where people who are dying request that their pets be put down so that they can be buried together. What? Yeah. Yeah. An American.

And his Yorkshire Terrier. Look it up. So... It's very weird, but there's this debate in the US. So in New York, for instance, you are now allowed to bury animal remains in human cemeteries with the human, but only if they're buried at the same time.

So you're not allowed to sort of just have a pet funeral. But... Yeah, it's a big deal. That's amazing, because I remember reading somewhere ages ago that their first pet cemeteries were open in Paris, I think at the turn of the century, because they explicitly

made it illegal to throw dead animals into the river. And so they were like, well now we need something else to do with them. When will the cult of health and safety let go of poor innocent Parisians? Well, Frederick the Great of Prussia wanted to be buried with his dogs, because he was obsessed

with them. And the court said you should be buried next to your wife and father in the royal cemetery. And so he was. They disobeyed his wishes. That was in 17... in the 1780s. And in the 1990s, they respected

his wishes and buried him with his greyhounds instead. So that's quite happy. I'm sure that... Yeah. You know Bella Lugosi, who played Dracula? Yeah. He was buried in his Dracula cape. Cool. Yeah. Which would be a hell of a shock,

wouldn't it, if you were digging him up, you know. But there was a report in 1930, a few years before he died, saying he hopes to escape the shackles of the role. And clearly he did not. It's quite sad, actually. Yeah.

That's bad. That sounds like it was an argument with his wife and father there. He had a guest book at his funeral, which I rather like. I think that's a cool thing to have. Yeah. Okay. I found a really odd thing, which is King Richard III is buried in a casket

that was made by his great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand-nephew. Yeah. Great. So he was... I should add, I wasn't sure how many greats it was, so I kept going, and you can edit

in the relevant amount. I'm going to put so many in. And you're just going to sound like you're having a stroke or something. Wow. The podcast is two and a half hours long this week. How would all that could be? Is that so hard to occur? Is that someone

enough great to get it to the present day? And this is when he was reburied? He was, remember, King Richard III was found underneath a car park. In fact, it was in our very first episode, one of the headline facts that we mentioned, and they had to prove who he was using the DNA via

a living relative, and there was one guy called Michael Ibsen, who they were able to track it down. I've met him. Really nice guy. He was... They used his DNA, they proved it, and he happened to be a carpenter, and so he said can I make the coffin that he's going to be reburied in. Wow, that's really nice.

Although, of course, after a certain distance, we are genuinely all related to certain people, so it's about at the Genghis Khan level, we are all directly descended from them, and he's not far from that, so it's not very, we're probably all his great great great great great.

So are you telling me I'm Genghis Khan's great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great

great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great

great great great great great great great great great great great great here's the riddle my mother abandoned me I was found by a man who cut off my head, scooped out my heart and gave me something to drink then I began speaking

what am I okay, so anyone? it's going to be something to do with burials are you a goose? are you a chicken? I'm a goose are you a foie gras? I'm not foie gras, I'm a quill pen

okay my mother abandoned me I was found by a man who cut off my head scooped out my heart and gave me something to drink then I began speaking it's very clever I'm not surprised your buddy doesn't speak to you anymore don't invite him over for Christmas honey

he's going to do his fucking riddles again it's going to be I think we found the answer tonight why do riddles go out in the 16th century? why did its mother abandon it? because the mother is the goose that gave it up when the man plucked the feather out

right, okay, it's the feather not the goose yeah, it's the quill pen yeah, sorry still room for a few hundred more greats where that bit was we need to move on very shortly I've got one last thing actually

which I quite like there is a company should you, because when you're buried you can decide either you go in a coffin or you have many other options cremation and so on there's a company that actually will take the ashes of someone

and they will grind them and heat them down to a sort of diamond which they then put in a ring so the only option that you can get and their tagline is diamonds and grandma are forever so you want that I mean, I guess if you're proposing to someone

you could say my granny would have wanted you to have this ring it was her don't you mean it was hers? no okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show and that is my fact

my fact this week is that before magician P.T. Selbit invented the famous sawing a woman in half illusion his big trick was called the mighty cheese which saw him daring members of the audience onto the stage

to try and push over his massive block of cheese this is the guy who became a legend that was his initial trick good trick? so what it was is he would walk on stage and he would have a giant wheel of cheese and it was

red and it was covered in wax so it was like a big baby bell basically that he had and he would say who would dare come onto stage and push over my cheese who has the might? and it was a great illusion because inside this big block of cheese

there was a sort of gyroscope thing to actually do it so I guess like all magic it was every time you tried to push it or pull it it would kind of jerk off in another direction and throw you to the ground and he had a couple of stooges who would kind of deliberately fall over

and he would always find the strongest looking people in the audience and then try and make fun of them about how weak they were and then get them to try and do it and maybe throw them everywhere it sounds awesome to me it sounds like the cut in the lady in half is fine but apparently it was not at all awesome

no one liked it and he sold it to people and they kept reporting back going I've lost all my audiences I don't know why I thought pushing over a cheese would be interesting but did we say who this guy was? P.T. Selbit

he was born Percy Thomas Tibbles but he took the name Selbit by reversing his surname and subtracting one of the B's that was quite cool the famous modern now magicians they tried the same trick they did a version of it on stage

and they got a mixed martial arts fighter to try and wrestle the cheese and because it is a trick cheese he failed after he failed the martial arts fighter said I'm going to go home and cry now I can't beat a cheese

this thing of selling tricks though I didn't quite realise this was a thing even amongst the great legends Selbit himself had a big argument with Houdini at the time because Houdini said that he'd stolen his walking through the wall trick or no he said Houdini

had stolen his walking through the wall trick and Selbit said he'd actually bought the trick from another magician but they were just buying tricks from each other Houdini was buying tricks from people he wasn't coming up with anything and just to put P.T. Selbit in context this was a person who his name

has disappeared to the layman magic I'm going to make my name disappear we can all perform that kind of trick in the long term I think after tonight's show we might have done that but yeah he was a hugely important

interesting guy so the big cheese was sort of a minor bit of his career the sewing of a woman in half absolutely revolutionised is still used to this day to the standard that he did it he effectively introduced the magician's assistant when he had his assistant Betty I think her name was

come and do the sewing in half for the first time that revolutionised it's still going today he did a trick in front of Arthur Conan Doyle which convinced Arthur Conan Doyle of the spirit world spirit was a massive thing to Arthur Conan Doyle believed in the afterlife and fairies and so on

and that was P.T. Selbit yeah so he was he always believed in the spirit world he was the most gullible man we've ever researched he did a donkey who told him the spirit world was a thing but yeah he did show him his relations didn't he his dead relations

did he dig them up and carry them around this is your great great and then Selbit struggled didn't he after to kind of do anything after the sewing the lady in half his later tricks were known as destroying a girl

stretching a lady and crushing a woman so he really had a type one of the things he did to promote the show was to have stage hands pour buckets of blood into the gutters outside the theatre and it was all

so 1920s-ish 1910s and 20s it was all kind of due to anxiety over suffragettes women's liberation and he once invited Christabel Pankhurst to be sewn in half on stage for £20 a week she said no

just the thing you said down of inventing the magician's assistant it was kind of only made possible by the change of women's fashion because before that you had very bulky clothes you had a lot of petticoats it would have been very hard to fit the woman

into the box in the first place because of what she was wearing and even then she was wearing so many courses that it's unlikely you could sew her in half even if you wanted to and then it was like I guess flapper fashion was it like flapper fashion comes in and suddenly people fit in the box

although I do have bad news for you Andy what? I don't think that they were actually sewing the woman in half don't spoiler it for me I've got tickets to the circus next week do you know that in Queensland Australia

that you're not allowed to own pet rabbits there's obviously huge problems with rabbits in other countries but in Queensland you're not allowed to own it unless you're a magician yeah there's a magician called Mr Brit

there's only 34 magicians in Queensland who are permitted to have this this thing where they're allowed a rabbit and Mr Brit is one, the rabbit's called Mr Fluffy bum and Mr Fluffy bum is one of the only privately owned rabbits in Queensland I have a fact about pulling rabbits out of hats

which is the guy who, it's pretty vague who actually invented pulling a rabbit out of a hat I don't think it was a magician called Louis Comte who was I think a French magician he did so in 1814 but I believe the first time he did it sources are pretty few on this the first time he did it

he also simultaneously pulled his infant son out of the hat what? what was he holding the rabbit? I don't think he was holding the rabbit he said what have we got in here, ooh we've got a rabbit and a baby it's weird that the rabbit one stuck around

do you not think? I think it's more it's more impressive to pull a baby out of a hat I think it's more impressive but it's harder to get a baby that's why it's more impressive oh yeah it's something like that yeah do you know the original pulling a rabbit out of a hat

I think is pulling an omelette out of a hat I was looking for this because it's very controversial what it is and most people say we definitely know that the 1840s is the first time we pulled a rabbit out of a hat collectively but I did find something in the Leeds Intelligencer in 1823

it was this court case it was a report for court case a man was suing a magician for the cost of a new hat because he said that he spoke to the magician and the magician has said if you imitate me and break an egg into your hat then you'll get an omelette out of it just imitate my movements exactly

and so he'd upturned his top hat as of the magician and the magician had broken an egg into his hat flipped it up and an omelette comes straight out of it flipped it up and he got his entire suit covered in raw egg that's a bit of an asshole's trick, isn't it that's pretty bad

it's like, right, if you do exactly what I do I'm going to saw this lady in half you saw your wife in half guys we're going to have to wrap up shortly I've got a fact about magic tricks going wrong do you remember when Secret of Roy who did the magic with the tigers Roy, Roy Horne

of Secret of Roy but he was grabbed by the throat by a tiger in 2003 now the good news is he made a great recovery and doctors said he would never walk or talk again he absolutely did, he made a fantastic recovery but I didn't know the story that they have agreed on for the version of events which is this

both Roy and Secret insisted that the tiger had sensed that Horne was having a stroke and was dragging him to safety where could the tiger go that it would think would be safe and now 74 said I will forever believe it was his concern for my safety and well-being that caused him to act

as he did that's amazing just one little thing on magic words so the magic word expelliarmus is from Harry Potter I think, isn't it according to the Oxford English dictionary it comes from the Latin

expellare meaning to drive or force out and armour which means weapon but unfortunately armour was also a euphemism for penis so Harry Potter is probably saying something like, penis begun does that mean the first line of Virgil's Aeneid

is I sing of penis and the man I think a lot more people got the Harry Potter reference sorry starting to get why your mum is not interested oh come on mate okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening

if you would 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 account andy james james harkin or you can go to our group account

which is at no such thing or you can go to our facebook page no such thing as a fish or a website no such thing as a fish dot com to put no such thing as a fish on the internet you'll find us we will be back again next week with another episode guys thank you so much good night

you