No Such Thing As A Fish - 226: No Such Thing As A Turtle Painting The Ceiling

Episode Date: July 20, 2018

Live from Auckland, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss painting pants on portraits, why Moscow's politicians don't kiss each other, and how often men really think about sex.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Auckland. My name is Dan Shriver, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact is that in 2004, Moscow's politicians were told to stop kissing each other because it took up valuable time, it could be spent having more meetings.

I just really got one laugh before the end of the fact that. You're going to love this evening if you're... Yeah, this is true. This was, I think it was first reported in the British press in the Telegraph, 2004, basically Moscow politicians were kind of sick of being mocked by the media for the big Soviet-era style bear hug they would do in the three kisses, very enthusiastic kisses, the kissing ceremony they would call it, so a word was passed down through local government circles that they had to stop kissing each other because it was time-wasting, it just took up so much

time that if you walked into a meeting with 20 other politicians in there, everyone had to do three ostentatious kisses and a massive bear hug to each other, and by that point the meeting was adjourned. So it's banned officially from the meetings? People were told within regional government that they shouldn't be doing it. But there is, I didn't know this, a thing called the Socialist Fraternal Kiss, which is a secret kiss that you can only give or receive if you're a communist leader. Wow!

Is that right? Yeah, so it's... Not many of them left, is there? No, no, Kissing Club is getting smaller and smaller every year. So you do, as you said Anna, there's three kisses on alternate cheeks, or if you're really close on the lips, and there's also the Socialist Fraternal Embrace, which is three deep hugs without kissing. Three hugs?

Yeah. You hug and then you push away, and then you swing back in again. Yeah, it's like the hokey-cokey, but with hugs. Wow. That's so ambitious. It's really gone in and out of fashion in Russia though, since sort of pre-Soviet times even, and yeah, I read a really good article which was in the Washington Post in 1994, obviously a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it was a journalist saying

how devastated he was that the Socialist Fraternal Kiss seemed to be coming back into fashion. He said, we were so thrilled when the Soviet Union collapsed because even though a lot of things about it split opinion, it brought about one change that everyone could agree on. We could share that no longer would our breakfast be upset by photos of commie bigwigs nuzzling each other's five o'clock shadows and smacking each other on the lips. And then it came right back into fashion.

I guess it's gone in and out of fashion everywhere, hasn't it really, like kissing and greetings? Because it used to be that if you ever had a contract in England or France, for instance, you would have to kiss to make the contract real. Right. And that was at least till the 13th or 14th century, and they reckoned the reason they don't do it anymore was that by the 18th century, people's mouths were no longer vile, stinking, diseased and stained. And so it meant that actually a kiss became more eroticized.

Oh. Yeah. So before that, if you kissed someone on the lips, it was a real kind of... It was a burden. Yeah, a burden. Exactly. Wow. It meant you really wanted to do the contract.

But it was banned, though, in various places since early medieval times. And so in 1439, Henry VI of England banned kissing, and it was thought that it spread plague, which is actually quite well done on them, given they had no understanding of germs and would have for another half millennium. But he banned kissing. It was banned in Naples, and this was because, particularly in England, kissing was a huge deal until then, so it was thought that spread the plague. But foreign journalists would come to England, and they loved it.

So there was Erasmus, not the Erasmus, but another Erasmus around that time, visited England and just said, I'm so thrilled and surprised that female hostesses at every single party just come up to me and snog me full on the lips. Really? They just said the word snog, c'mon. Yeah. I pour the guy the other Erasmus, not the main Erasmus. He must have spent his whole career going, hi, I'm Erasmus.

No, actually, there are two of us. The one about Henry VI, it was Parliament who asked him to do this because of the plague, wasn't it? And the reason was that knights would always kiss the king on the mouth whenever they did him a service. What service, James? I don't know what doing him a service is in this context. Kissing babies?

Politicians kissing babies? This is a long established thing, but I think it was first established by President Andrew Jackson, so he once got handed in the reports at the time a dirty baby to kiss, and he didn't want to sort of thought it was a bit of a gross baby. But you're not kissing the bit that gets dirty, are you? You're not, no. But it was a sort of grubby child, and he handed it over to the war minister and said, he didn't kiss him.

Yeah. Well, did you know who they kissed before they kissed babies? No. Feet's a sister, no, that can't be. It's not just the thing before babies. It was wives. So in the 18th century and before that, politicians, when they were canvassing, would kiss people's wives, and this is because it was openly understood, even though women couldn't vote.

They had huge influence over the men in their lives, and so politicians used to suck up to women, like almost literally, more than they did to men, and it was a thing. If you go through old book sources, they're constantly canvassing by kissing women, and in fact- So is Donald Trump just being old fashioned, isn't he? Yeah. It's just tradition. He's respecting the English aristocracy.

There was a candidate for Norfolk, for a Norfolk borough in 1758, who apparently was expelled from the party when he kissed all his voters' wives and slipped a golden guinea into the mouth of each one while doing so. Wow, that's pretty creepy. That's a good trick, though. That's extraordinary. Very clever. Very clever.

A guinea. Choke on that. You wouldn't be expecting that. It's a big coin. That's a big coin, have you? Yeah. Just, I have a few things that are banned in Russia. Okay.

Oh, yeah. Everything. No. Free speech. No. Actually, so there is a thing at the moment. You must have seen it in the news, maybe. I don't know.

But the Roskomnazor is the federal service for monitoring mass communications, okay? And so there is an app called Telegram. It's a bit like WhatsApp, and what you do is you send messages to each other, but it's encrypted, and they refuse to give the government the encryption software, and so no one can read the messages, and they've tried to close it down, and they closed it down by blocking IP addresses. In doing so, they blocked and crashed MasterCard, Google, Amazon, Volvo, Nintendo, Spotify, and their own website, and they've not managed to stop anyone from using Telegram at all.

Is all of the election fiddling rumors, it's just them trying to sort out their own messaging service and accidentally crashing elections around the world? I've got a couple of things on meetings, just ways you can, actually, I've got one more thing on kissing, which I think I want to say to you, which is about animal kissing. Oh, yeah, so not many animals kiss, very, very rare, apart from bonobos, you know, bonobos, so bonobos will suck each other's tongues for 12 minutes straight. Wow. That would get my vote, I'll tell you that.

You can probably get a few thousand pounds in your mouth. Keep the guineas coming, come on. Hey, I read a thing about kissing, which is now, if you're a criminal, don't kiss someone at the scene of the crime before you leave, because you can get caught for it. I mean, who is actually doing that, though? What bank robber says, put everything in the bag and give us a kiss. This happened in Paris, basically. Of course it was Paris.

Of course it was. He was overcome with the romance of the city. So, check this out, what happened was, in this case, there was a hold up with this lady who worked for a bank, and they were really bad to her. They did tricks to her that made her fear for her life, and so one of the bank robbers was so worried that they'd gone a bit too far with the trauma that he kissed her to sort of calm her nerves, like that would help. So he gave her a kiss, and they went off, and she freed herself, and she called the

police, and they took a swab from the inside of her cheek, and they managed to pick up some of the DNA that he'd left inside there from the kiss, and they found him, and he got arrested. Wow. Yeah. Sorry. What was the source that said he kissed her to calm her nerves? I think if he's leaving enough DNA in her mouth, that's almost a bonobo kiss, isn't

it? I would take that as aggressive, although the bonobo kiss would not be allowed in Hollywood for a very long period of time, because kisses in Hollywood were only allowed to last three seconds, less than three seconds. So it was so strict on kissing. This was from the 1920s onwards, basically it was the Hollywood Code, because to prevent like salaciousness and immorality getting into Hollywood, sorry, started in the early 1930s, and it said that, because it could only be three seconds, they had to be essential to

the plot, otherwise they weren't allowed, and you had to kiss with at least two feet on the floor. So if there were four... At least two feet. Yeah. At least three. You can have three. Hang on, a kiss takes two people, so there are four feet involved.

Okay. So at least two of the couple's feet, but it did mean that when you see a woman lying on a sofa in a 1940s film and snogging a man who rigidly says standing up for the process, that's because he's not allowed to get onto the sofa with her. Wow. But you could both be hopping. That would be fine. Oh yeah.

As long as you're not both off the ground at the same time. Ditto, trampolines. So we're going to have to move on to our next fact, surely. I genuinely did have a thing about meetings, which is a way to keep a meeting short. This has genuinely been tried to save time in meetings. So it's by the co-founder of Flickr, the app. Her name was Catarina Fake, which I think is her real name. But she used to insist that everyone would drink a pint of water before a meeting, and

the meeting would last until someone had to go to the loo. Ah, that's a really clever idea. Yeah. That's amazing. That's great. And we're using that principle tonight. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the Northern Island Assembly building was camouflaged during

World War II by covering it in cow manure. So cool. Yeah, so this is the thing that happened. It's Stormont, it's called, and they painted it with a mixture of cow manure and bitumen. And the problem was it was a really, really white building, and they thought that the Nazis would be able to see it really easily, and so they thought if we cover it in shit, it will look like the rest of Belfast. Wow.

Wow. Do you know, James, I really enjoyed our show in Belfast there in the air, and I'm just sad that it's never ever going to happen again. Not bizarre how much support that got in Auckland, New Zealand. Yeah, but actually they spent seven years scrubbing it after the war, and it's still slightly off-white. Yeah, it was meant to wash right off, right? That's why they used that specific material, but yeah, it's failed, so it's got a hint

of poo all over it still. Wow. People did try some really extravagant things to disguise buildings in the water, didn't they? So Boeing's plant number two, which was the American plant that made most of their bombers I think during the Second World War, was disguised as an entire town. It's so cool, so it made 300 bombers a month. It was totally crucial to the war effort, but on top of this factory they had fake streets

and fake trees and fake cars and houses, but because it was only meant to be disguised from above, everything was weirdly distorted from below, so all the houses were four foot tall, so they were like shoulder height houses. It's like Hobbit Town down the road, isn't it? You feel like Hobbit Town. They were designed by a Hollywood set designer who was used to doing that stuff for tricks in films, and trees were made of chicken wire covered in feathers, and then there were weird little clues, like the streets in this place were called things like synthetic street on

the street signs. Wow, you have to get pretty close in an aeroplane to be able to read that. Yeah, and also they had leaves that were chicken feathers that were painted green. Yeah. Why didn't they just use leaves? Yeah, fair play. I'll tell you why. It's because they did.

No, there's no good reason. The reason is that, as Anna said, this is in Hollywood, and what the government did is they spoke to the Disney Studios Universal Warner, and all of them got so excited they sent in all of their best set people, and they just took it too far, and they were sending real people in day to day to act out as if they were living there, and they would move the cars so that it looked like things were different. They had to go and take down their washing. This was in a different one, because there were a few, one in California, sort of actors

or people in the military had to go and take their washing down off the fake washing line, their fake washing off the fake line, just in case a plane flew overhead, which it didn't ever. If the towns were tiny, though, because they were smaller, they were to a smaller scale, wouldn't it have looked like there were giants along the West Coast of America? That's scary. That's very scary. Yeah, don't mess with them, they're huge.

We're disguising things in the war, so there was also a thing called Operation Bertram, which was in Britain, Mainland Britain, and it was using fake equipment and fake munitions to trick the Germans into thinking that things were elsewhere when they weren't, but get this, one tactic that was used was to hide real artillery under fake trucks, and also to hide real artillery under structures which looked like badly camouflaged dummy structures, so they would fly over and think, oh, they've really botched disguising that, you know, making a stupid fake bit of artillery there, so that's all fake artillery, great, with real artillery underneath it.

Wow. I'm so confused. Oh, that's the idea, Jane. That's amazing. That's a risky game. It's risky. Do you know they actually had, I didn't realise this at the time, they had a camouflage school in South Kensington, so it was a place where they sent all of their most sort of camouflage,

the designers who sort of manufactured all of these things that we're talking about, a lot of the British ones would go and they would come up with their ideas there and they would road test them there, number of the ideas that came out of there and manufactured out of there, they had a thing where if you were in a trench in the war, it'd be very dangerous obviously if snipers were shooting at the trench, so what they did was they manufactured lots of paper mache heads and they put them on a stick, so they would lift up from the trenches just a stick with a head on it, a soldier's head and if that got shot they would know that the snipers were active and ready, so that was one of the things that

they manufactured. Yeah, pretty cool. Why didn't they always do that? Why did anyone die in the trenches? I suppose you could have given every soldier an extra fake head on top of their head and really all like, you know, one of those costumes where it looks like you're riding an emu. No, because in that case the head is always the person's head, isn't it? I guess so, so I guess it would be a massive emu costume which you're in, which they're

not shooting at. Well you could do it, you know when you have like children trying to get into a movie and they're on each other's shoulders and a massive overcoat because then they'd also think you were giants. What a shame pantomime directors didn't also direct the First World War. So a use of dung in the Second World War, when the German army were in North Africa a lot of the soldiers suffered from dysentery and what they thought they'd do is they'd look at, the locals didn't seem to suffer so they thought they'd look at the locals

and they saw the locals would follow a camel and scoop up its dung and eat it, okay. So the Germans thought, well we might as well try it, you know, might as well, right? And it turns out it works and that's because there is beneficial bacteria in this camel poo. And for that reason these camel dung things were really good luck for the Germans. They found them to be really, really good luck and so whenever they saw them in the tanks they would drive over them and so what did the British do? We just put explosives in them and so every time they went over a camel dung they got

blown up and so then they thought okay we're not going to do that anymore but we still need the good luck so what they would do is they'd go over ones which had tire tracks in them and so what did the British do? They made ones with tire tracks in them and put explosives in them. Those dastardly brits, there's always one step ahead. Dung in war, other uses of dung in war, Vietnam war, the soldiers had I think which was a dog poo transmitter so it was the T 1150... Is that a transmit dog poo?

No, sorry. It's a fake radio, it's a dirty Fido sort of plastic poo which is actually a radio transmitter and it can be used as a homie weekend. That's great but they're going to notice if you hold that next to your mouth and speak into it. They'll probably think you're a hangover from the North African campaign in the Second World War just giving it a go. That reminds me there was an interview in the Indian Express quite recently with a guy

called Shankar Lau and he's part of a group that's trying to promote traditional methods in India and he says that he applies fresh cow dung to the front and back of his mobile phone every day and he says that that is going to protect him from harmful radioactive emissions. He says in the interview if cow dung can treat cancer why can't it save us from phones microwaves? I think there is a flaw in that argument isn't there? Although they have considered using human dung in space, we never call it dung I know, but human poo in space so the Mars mission that was planned in 2013 which has come to

nothing and they've sort of hidden that fact but they plan to use human poo on the outside of the spacecraft in order to protect it from radiation. Is that right? Yeah. And in 2017 there was a study that was done looking into whether human feces would be useful protecting from outer space radiation and it turns out it will and more importantly it will even when it's been dehydrated because you know how in space you obviously need to reuse all the liquids that you can in order to drink them so you can drain the liquid

out of your own poo and drink that and you're still able to use the dried poo to protect you from radiation. Well this is wonderful news. It's a win-win. But it's not just on the outside isn't it the idea is that they would as they were going to Mars any new poo that they made would you smear it on the inside? It's only new poo. It's only new poo.

Exactly so you don't pre-smudges. I understand that but it's going on the outside right not the inside. But how are you going outside? Every time you have a poo you've got to go outside and smear it on your wall because it's protecting from it. I'd rather live in a home which had poo smeared all over the outside than all over the inside. Colin Picky. This is why you'd never pass the NASA training.

What would you choose? Sorry. Right poo outside or poo within? Pooh inside. Pooh inside. You're hurtling towards Mars. I'm going to go outside into the vacuum of the universe just so that I can put my little stool on the side.

No. I just mean... Do you know how long it takes to put on the outfit alone? They don't call it an outfit. I just mean socially. I would rather my neighbours thought I lived in a horrible house but I live in a nice house. We should go on. Please.

All right. It's also poo based I'm afraid but this is quite cool. There is a plant which pretends to be an antelope poo in order to propagate itself. So it's the resty ad plant and it produces seeds and they're quite big seeds and they look exactly like antelope droppings and this tricks dung beetles into rolling them to a new home. Really? No.

How weird is that? A free ride. Yeah. Basically. Well there's... So a lot of insects keep their own feces to use. Poober. Poober.

Sorry. That's like a poober. It's like a what? What? If you say that in a sentence I can edit it in. What? It's like they invented poober. It's like poober.

Poober. It's a poo. Poober. So there are insects that keep their own poo to use as a weapon which is good recycling. There are quite a few of them actually. There's the tortoise beetle and it mounts its poo on its back so when it defecates then it puts its poo on its back and that's a shield and it can also repurpose that shield to use as a sword in a fight if it's attacked and it's not a shark.

It's funny. It's funny. It's a poo sword. It's a poo sword. It's a poo sword and its offspring have what scientists seem to be calling a fecal thatch which is basically the roof of your home they make our feces. Now the roof, the inside and the outside, I thought the roof was safe. Would you rather have it on the top of the roof or the inside of the roof?

We need to move on a sec but finish this, Anna. That's it. They'll have a fecal thatch. They have a thatch made of poo. They weave it together. They weave it like a thatch though. It's called thatch for a reason. They sort of sew their poo together, their poo strands and that's a protective thatch.

So when the larvae are attacked, the tortoise beetle larvae, then they can't penetrate the poo. It's weird though because the swords are made out of poo but also the protection is made out of poo. Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting. This is why they're not running the show on this planet frankly.

Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is that according to the best available study, men think about sex between once a day and 388 times a day. So what you're saying is the best available study is not very good. Well, all there's a load of variation. So this is more a fact about study design. Strap in guys. In case you thought it was about sex, it's not.

So there are lots of myths and things on the internet about how often men think about sex. One thing says every seven seconds, that's a really old and debunked thing and that would be 7,000 times a day which is huge. So there was a recent study by Ohio State University which gave people, gave men a clicker with three buttons and they were food, sex and sleep and it just said click each of the relevant buttons whenever you think about this thing. So they did that and one man clicked the sex button one time in a day and another man in

the study clicked 388 times which is every... He might have been aroused by clickers. That's a very good point. I think he misunderstood and thought it was, which one of these do you want to order? It's like you have a menu. Hiya, I think my clicker's broken, I've pressed the sex order a number of times, it's not shown up. Yeah.

But the people who did this study, what they wanted to do was they wrote about it and they said that what they don't want is for people to report it as men think about sex on average 19 times a day because that's what they found, the average was 19 times. But they thought that if people reported it like that then people would be saying I think about it too much, I think about it not enough and people would get anxious about that and think they're unusual and so they're really keen for people to say men think about sex between one and 388 to show that all of these things are quite normal. That's what I said, that's what I said.

Yeah. I'm thanking you. Well thank God we didn't mention the thing that they didn't want to know in James. The other thing is this was of men under the age of 25, this was college students and they said that they really want to do it of adults over the age of 25 but it was hard to obtain that sample because most of the participants did not follow through with a tele-counter because they had no real incentive to do so. Oh.

Yeah, they just couldn't be asked, they were like oh yeah whatever. They pressed it once, they realised it wasn't working as a menu thing. So there are other ways of solving this problem because in that study you don't know if people are clicking accurately or if a thought passes through their head too quickly to register or if having a clicker as you said makes them more aware of their thoughts. So there was a German study which did a different thing, it was a phone survey and they would text people on the phones and they would ask seven times a day and they would just say what have you been thinking about in the last half hour?

And that found that, so that's a slightly better way of doing it perhaps because you're not relying on self-reporting and you're just checking in with people and that one found that until 5pm men think about sex less frequently than they do about coffee and that checking email was in first place almost constantly and sex only became a big thing at the end of the day and even then sleep beat it. That is my experience of sex as well. It always wins in the end sleep but is I guess the only thing that really is illuminating in these studies a lot is that men have needs based thoughts don't they?

So always men think about food, sex and sleep more often than women do and it's not clear why but that does seem to be the case. So I think in this study it was thinking about food, men every thirty-eight minutes, women every sixty-two, sleep, women thought about it every seventy-two, men every thirty-three. So women have so much more thinking time to use up. Is that the take home thing there? My take home is honestly how did the patriarchy ever get above water? You guys are wasting so much time.

There's a thing about how many thoughts you have a day, no one knows that. People quote wildly different numbers because some people say it's seventy thousand a day which is about fifty thoughts every minute and I just, I know this is an anecdote but I do not have fifty thoughts a minute. I do agree with that. In your case. Thank you. Do you know what questions do you do to your thinking?

It's happening now, whatever it is. You think it would encourage you to think creatively because you're trying to come up with an answer? No. No. So this is a good point. It stops you from thinking about anything else. It engages your brain.

Your brain effectively goes whoo and shuts down to focus on this one thing that's about to come at you. But that's good, right? That's exactly what you want from a question. It depends what the question is, doesn't it? If the question is would you rather have poo on the outside of your house or the inside? Then there's probably better things to think about. Hundred percent.

According to a 2013 study men think about football at least once a minute. I mean that, again, I don't want to be a Debbie Downer on that but I haven't thought about football for about at least a month and even then it was bloody football's on again. That was according to a study by the English FA. So on thinking, I've been thinking about thinking and it's very hard to find out about experiments about thought online because if you Google that you just get thought experiments which is a different thing. However, there is a thing about whether animals think and what they think if they think.

Obviously they do think. But if you search for do animals think, the first suggested Google result, the first one is do animals think humans are cute? I think that some of them do, don't they? Maybe, but number four is do animals think cars are animals and there's so much thought devoted to this online. What's the answer? Well, it's not conclusive.

Because they've got four wheels which could be light legs. Yeah, exactly. They're big. So there was an account written on Reddit which I just wanted to share. So there's a guy who wrote on Reddit, he said, once rescued a hungry cat from a fishing spot it was deadly scared of being in the car and couldn't stay still. It was a hazard for me to drive back with it in the cabin so it left me no choice but to put it in the trunk.

To my surprise, travelling at 70 miles an hour, the cat managed to hit the child escape handle and jump out. I believe the cat thought the car was some sort of big whale and got swallowed, then pooped out, travelling 70 miles per hour. Wow, this wasn't a scientist writing this, was it? I don't think so. Where has a cat ever seen a whale? Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1565, Pope Pius IV commissioned artist Daniela del Volterra to add to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco by painting underwear on all the naked people. Presumably it was nice underwear and not sort of grubby y-fronts. Well, it was, yeah, underwear of the time so the underwear was more loincloth-y and yeah, sort of little sheets that would come over and nicely positioned in the wind over a buttock kind of thing. This is because it was seen as very controversial that you had this beautiful fresco with all these penises basically hanging out on them and they wanted to get rid of that and this

particular artist, Daniela del Volterra, was a disciple of Michelangelo who painted the Sistine Chapel. He studied under him. He was a very good friend of his and so he was given this task to go and sort of just cover up all the nudity. So, Daniela del Volterra guy, do you think when people ask him what he did, he said, I'm a panter and they'd say, do you mean a painter? And he'd say, no.

I don't think so. Yeah, it's unlikely, yeah. Because he was Italian and the joke wouldn't work in that language. Yeah, it doesn't, let's be honest, it doesn't really work in this language. But he did get a nickname which still is attached to his name to this day, which is il braghettone and that means the breaches maker. And it was an embarrassing thing really in the history of art that he had to do it. I've heard arguments that he did it because he was actually trying to save the Sistine

Chapel from total destruction, so he was doing it to save his friends. Really? Yeah. Okay, because you said he was a disciple and I thought that he's a massive traitor. No, because, sorry, just what happened was they had the Council of Trent just afterwards and there was a new law which said you're not allowed any of these kind of images in churches anymore and anyone that exists have to be destroyed. And he managed to put this on just in time so they didn't destroy it.

Okay. Yeah. It said that the Holy Synod ordains that no one be allowed to place or cause to be placed any unusual image in any place or church, however exempted, accept that image that have been approved by the bishop. So you weren't allowed to put anything in your church that wasn't approved. And this, a few years later, there was a guy called Paolo Veranese and he was brought in front of the Inquisition because he'd painted the Last Supper with a load of drunken Germans

in the background. It's not his fault they turned up. Unusual. Unusual image. Like, I think the Council of Trent still holds that you're not allowed unusual images in your church. Maybe. That's so weird.

Unusual isn't even erotic or salacious. It's like Elizabeth eating Harrison Ford or something. I love Andy's idea of those guys just turning up and even being forced to paint it. I love the idea that all future Last Supper paintings had a bouncer at the end who was there. Sorry, mate. Can't come in. So Michelangelo's David was another victim of what is called the fig leaf campaign by

the church and by the authorities in Florence, which is all about covering up genitals, basically. So nude statuary, statutory, nude statues were a new thing. So there's an idea which says that Donatello's David in 1440 was the first naked statue since Roman times. And that there just weren't any in all the dark ages because it had fallen out of favor as an ideal. Whereas in Roman and Greek times it wasn't ideal as a nude hero and it wasn't a shameful thing.

But the fig leaf campaign was all about covering things up. And so Michelangelo's David got either a bronze fig leaf, reports vary, or a miniskirt soon after being unveiled because it was seen as being rude. Really? Yeah. It's just on Michelangelo's David it's very easy to look back and think, God, how weird and prudish whether they didn't appreciate it. But in 2012 the most expensive exhibition that had ever been put on in the Beijing Museum

was put on and it involved Michelangelo's David Apollo. And when it was reported on CCTV, on Chinese TV, all the genitals were blurred out. So the statue's genitals were blurred out. Wow, really? So we're still screwing that up. There was a paper that was published about the reasoning because if you look at Michelangelo's David everything is in fantastic proportion although he's fantastic. He does have quite a small penis, doesn't he?

Yes, and that's very well-proportant, James. Click, how many? Unclick that click immediately. Yeah, so what they were looking at, they were doing this study and they noticed a few things that were intentionally changed in size. So for example, he has a big right hand, for example. And that's because the suggestion is when he... You're not allowed to do your own jokes.

It just looks like a small penis because his right hand is so freakishly big, alright? It happens, it happens. Andy had hand extensions years ago. He's regretted it ever since. But yeah, so the suggestion is, because that was a tribute to the fact that he took down Goliath. And so they looked at the penis size and said the reason that it's so small, their conclusion is he's about to fight a giant. His genitals have contracted in fear.

Yeah, he's petrified, they've gone inside. That's not what happens, is it? That's... Yeah, have you ever fought a giant? Yeah. It's a different excuse, isn't it? I'm sorry, darling, it's very cold. I'm sorry, darling, I just fought a giant.

And I won, high-five. It was a thing, though, covering up paintings in the Renaissance and beyond. And so there was... A Renaissance fresco was discovered recently under a false ceiling in Valencia. And it had been covered up for about 500 years. And it was discovered when a pigeon suddenly flew out of a hole in the roof. So some builders were redoing the roof, a kind of baroque roof that they thought was real baroque.

And a pigeon flew through a hole and they looked up through that hole and they realized it was a fake baroque roof. And there was a huge fresco underneath that had been covered up, not because it was obscene or anything, just because it was rotting in about the 1600s. And it turned out that builders had been asked to cover this thing up to protect it. But what we discovered a few years ago when we revealed this big fresco was that the 1700s workmen who had to break it up

had flicked plaster globules at each other, so they'd had a game. So all the sort of targets on the fresco, like the eyes and the mouth of the angels, had big globules of plaster on them, because they'd been throwing plaster at each other. And one of the angels' wings had a cock and bulls drawn on it. 1674, people were drawing cock and bulls on angels' wings. Wow.

Wow. You know, there's a rumor that all the... Because a lot of genitals were chipped off statues. Yes. And that was the thing during the fig leaf campaign, which lasted decades, but there is a rumor that there is a draw in the Vatican still full of all the removed penises.

Really? No way. Well, I can't stress the word rumor enough. I mean... But it would make sense, because you would... You would keep them. In case you needed them, basically. Not really use them for building or...

No, they're not useful for anything else, but sometimes, you know, politics may change. And the great re-penacing might happen. Can I quickly add, as well, just on our guy Voltaire, I'm definitely saying that wrong, but he didn't get to complete it all, so he only did a number of them,

and then he passed away and it was carried on by other artists. Yeah. Yeah, so he didn't... He's not responsible for all the underwear. He did the ones at the top, didn't he, when he was on scaffolding, and then they had to remove all the scaffolding because they had to get a new pope or something.

Yes. The new pope, he died and so someone else had to do the other ones. Does anyone know if they've been removed, the underpants that were painted on? No, they haven't. This is a very interesting thing. So the Vatican restored a lot of these frescoes and paintings in the ceiling

between 1980 and 1994, and a lot of the censorship has still remained. Yeah, I think some of them have been removed. Some of them have been removed, but they could have obviously revealed all the genitals and they've only revealed some. And they used to, when they were restoring, in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel a number of times,

the last judgement, sorry, is it's really called. And what they used to do back in the day with restoration is they would dad little bits of bread and clean it with tiny bits of bread. Oh, really? Yeah, and these days they use cotton buds and so on. I've heard that still some restoration people

use bread as a... It's a good way of cleaning a painting. Because they used to use bread as erasers, didn't they, before we had rubbers, then you'd use a rolled-up bit of bread as an eraser. Yeah, so a lot of people think Michelangelo painted while lying down on his back. I think there's a movie where he did that.

But actually, he was painting kind of standing upright, kind of cricking his neck backwards and reaching upwards with his arm and painting like that. And it was unbelievably painful for him. And he wrote a poem to his friend about what happened. And he said,

Wow. Wow. And I read this, and I don't know if this can be true. But it says, someone called Condivi, who was around just afterwards, said that he had a bizarre form of eye strain, which meant whenever he had to read a letter,

he had to hold it at arm's length above his head. No. Where he was holding the paintbrush. No. Where he was holding the paintbrush. No. Where he was holding the paintbrush. No, really.

Apparently, God. He also painted, because it's nine panels and it tells a lot of stories from the Bible, he painted it in reverse. He started at the end and went back because he wanted to get so good at painting that by the time he got to God, he wanted to be an actor.

He didn't want to do a crappy God at the front and then a killer Noah's Ark at the end. He wanted... Wow. I want to say that he was made to paint the city in chapel, Michelangelo, this is, as punishment and it was thought that it would be a huge failure.

And so Raphael, the other turtle, who is well known, suggested that he be the one to paint the city in chapel ceiling because it was thought to be impossible

and also because Michelangelo did not really do paintings, he did sculptures and he was made to do it and Raphael was so happy and the reason he was happy was because Michelangelo had a falling out with Raphael's friend, Leonardo, surname Da Vinci

and so it was a big turtle in finding things. Do you think the reason he didn't do it on his back is because he won't be able to get back up again? LAUGHTER So was Donatello in this on that? As with every other piece of history that involves the three other turtles,

Donatello was not involved. Because he was long dead, sadly. But the interesting thing about Raphael and how it backfired was that Raphael snuck in to see the Sistine Chapel mid-creation so Michelangelo said cover it up with canvas so no one can see it until it's fully done

and Raphael snuck in and had a look and he was so devastated by how good it was that he returned to his picture of the Prophet Isaiah and completely destroyed it, scratched it off the wall and repainted the whole thing because he realised Michelangelo was so good. You know he got a really bad review

when he first released the Sistine Chapel. He released the Sistine Chapel. LAUGHTER Some critics loved it, but other critics really did not like it. So this is the writing from a critic who called Pietro Aratino again,

bad pronunciation, but he wrote and he was specifically about the lewdness and the nudity and the genuine spectacle out of both the lack of decorum in the martyrs and the virgins and the gesture of the man grabbed by his genitals that even in a brothel, these eyes would shut so as not to see it.

And that was a... Two stars. Two stars. And no one at the time really pointing out that Aratino, who wrote this, was a very famous writer of pornography, so this is someone. Yeah, coming from... And so Michelangelo didn't respond to it,

he was better than that and he didn't give any sort of reaction to it, but then he got a second bit of criticism much later, and this was by someone who was the master of ceremonies for the Pope. So he was very close to the Pope and he took a jab at Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, and so Michelangelo then included him in the Sistine Chapel.

He took his likeness and he had a snake wrapping around him, which meant he was definitely going to hell, and then the top of the snake was here, the bottom of the snake came through his legs and was biting his balls. Yeah. That was a very harsh response to a critic's review of your show. We're going to have to wrap up very shortly.

Anything before we do? I can tell you that there was a pub in Shepperton in the UK called The Hovel, and in the ladies' toilets there was a statue of a naked man with a fig leaf on it. The fig leaf was hinged and when you lifted it, a small sign read, a red light just flashed on and the buzzer sounded in the bar. Yeah.

Amazing. Okay, that is 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 accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Chazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. You can also go to our Facebook page. No such thing as a fish or a website. No such thing as a fish dot com. We have everything there. Episodes, tickets, book links, everything.

Go there. Everything is up there. Guys, thank you so much for being here tonight. We'd love to meet you also. Please come say hi. We're going to be out there in the foyer. That's it. We'll be back again next week. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Thank you.