No Such Thing As A Fish - 281: No Such Thing As A Chatty Cow

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Live from Amsterdam, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss how to clean warship guns, the anti-Valentine's march, and interviewing a cow.

I Have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here We go starting with you Chasinski. My fact this week is that there was a Disneyland in England 569 years before there was one in America Yeah, what it must have been very bad It's just a slide just a field overrun with mice It was a field so you're half right this is from a book a new book called a new dictionary of English field names Which is set to be sounds like a hell of a read

Welcome to Anna Toshinski's book club Membership one This sounds great and the telegraph actually did a review of it this obscure book and basically it's this guy He's gone back and trace 45,000 field names from various things like old tithe records and things like that He's called Paul Cavill and he's warning that he's single ladies I Now they're playing the field I'm not having this because I'm a huge fan of Paul's

He's he's warned that these field names could be dying out. No one seems to be naming their fields anymore. Can you believe it? Call the Avengers And yet they used to so it's really important thing I'm actually surprised farmers don't still name their fields because the reason you do it is if you've got to say like Oh, if you're like, you know, where's the collie? I left him in, you know That field that's like three along five up. It's much easier to say. Oh, I left him in Disneyland and So this one was called Disneyland because it was in this was in 1386 He found the record as in the record was in 1386. He hasn't been writing the book for that long

And it was the Disney family and they were called that because they were originally from a place called a dissey me in France And so that was why it was called that I guess had one field But yeah, they all used to be named what there is there are still quite a lot of fields Which do have names so there is a UK field named database with over 200,000 fields And do you know what the most popular name is? What big field? I Saw people online

So on Twitter, they were sort of it was asked does anyone know of field names that might not be logged or just is there one near you? And a lot of people responded my favorite one was from a guy called Tim who said we have a first humpy and a second humpy So named as they're both humpy and one is in front of the other There was there was Sodom Sodom field and Gamora close those field names That's quite creative. Yeah, they did seem to be quite creative sometimes they had Well, they had ketchup piece in Northamptonshire and that actually was a mushroom field because ketchup the original ketchup was made of Mushrooms so the first ever ketchup was made in 1727 out of mushrooms

That's ketchup please there was apparently there was a field called please your honor and this was in Essex It's thought apparently to be the place where the Lord of the Manor arranged to meet local girls You don't want to think too much about No connection there And actually for the locals it was useful to know these names right because if you had a field with the word Dicor sitch in it that meant that you knew that there was water in it So you knew it was wet and buggy and if you if it was called yes your honor or whatever you need Need to leave it alone on Friday night

Remember you knew something about these fields before you went there. Yeah. Yeah, like if they were a weird shape There was you got things like footed stocking and ladies gown tail if they were shaped like what those things Could you get in trouble if you sold your field with a misleading name if I had a tiny field and I called it big field Where could I be sold for miss selling? No, I think only the biggest idiot purchaser is gonna spy a field off you without coming and checking it out Not even asking for the measurements May it's called big field. I'm not telling you anymore What was the book called the book is called a new dictionary of English field names because there is a

There's a new one because there is a book called English field names a dictionary Which is a previous book of English field names And that is by a man called John Field No way And it's not just a list of names in his own family That is amazing we need to move on to our next fact very soon. Oh my goodness Yeah, we should do some Disneyland stuff. I guess yeah or some Disney stuff so between

1993 and 2010 Miramax was owned by Disney which means technically these occur at these are Disney films pulp fiction Bridget Jones's diary scream gangs of New York and Mansfield Park Disneyland actually has a special kind of invisible green Resign isn't I don't think you can be invisible and green. Can you? Well, can you well No, not really But it's it's it was designed to conceal the less glam bits because obviously the park needs to have you know unsexy stuff like

Like bins and fences and things and it's not it's not part of the cool Disney fantasy is it so so the designers came up with a Particularly kind of green which you don't really notice and they call it no see him green because you can't really see it Well, I don't know what happens if you're looking for a bin in Disneyland. It must be quite Irritating So there's a thing about fields, which is that they have all not all There's a thing about fields Which is that a lot of them have changed shape in the last 40 years So they've gone from like ladies gown to undone stocking or exactly. Yeah, well, they've got they've gone from rectangular to circular

If you look at the farms in America from above they are circular all the fields are circular circles No No, no the aliens. It's not the aliens are here. No, we know what it is It's it's it's circular fields because it's better for irrigation So it's more effective way you can have a well almost in the middle of the field, you know Yeah, you have one of these kind of squirting fountains that goes in a circle. Yeah, so it only hits Yeah, it's really efficient and we know the guy who invented it

But it's creating a massive problem because it's sucking up all America's water because it's so good That means that farmers then plant more intensively and they grow crops which require more water because they've got this more efficient system So there's a think of the Ogallala aquifer, which is under the Great Plains in America It's a huge underwater pond basically Which covers a hundred and seventy four thousand square miles One pond at for a given value of pond And it's being it's being it's being emptied really rapidly and it's gonna take hundreds of thousands of years of range or a place it So there's a problem

So they shouldn't have been so good basically. Yeah, because they are good farmers the Americans So they're the world's number one exporter of food by value, which is kind of unsurprisingly a big country Do you guys know what number two is? Is it Belgium It's Denmark Denmark it must be Denmark They're number three the broad Dutch can't grow a thing though. It's embarrassing. I know it is it is the Netherlands How are you so good at farming so the number by amount the world number two exporter of food by value and they have 270 times smaller land mass than the US and like apparently they've just been all these incredible farming innovations over the last sort of 20 years

So there are greenhouses that are like up to a hundred and seventy five acres big one greenhouse I think all the greenhouses in the Netherlands take up the size of Manhattan or a bit bigger than Manhattan and yeah Wow, so here we were making fun of that field book and yet everyone in the audience is like give me a copy It's amazing the Netherlands is so good at farming there is now a black market in cow poo It's because there's loads of there the Netherlands as a country produces 76 billion kilos of manure every year Okay, and who's buying it? Well, you're only legally allowed to produce a certain amount because it it's you know quite a pollutive stuff If not if it's not treated right, but there is manure fraud where people trade it secretly or they spread it on their land at night

To avoid being spotted They could fertilize it, but you're not allowed enough too much of it. Oh really any poo smugglers in tonight That does sound like a you've miss a person I She sounds like quite a cute name for your baby or something do you call your baby that I feel like you could who smuggler It's called your baby a poo smuggler. That's what they're doing all the time, isn't it? Smuggling food yeah, and they're in the bottom That's what you swung all things

What's this then sir It is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that every year in Japan There is an annual anti Valentine March held by a group known as the Revolutionary Alliance of unpopular men Are they recruiting I don't think they'd let you in on the other So yeah, this is an annual thing that happens in Japan these men are sick of what they say is romantic capitalism and of course they're single and They they go on street marches to sort of say this is too much and it's currently being led by a guy called

Takayuki Akimoto And he he likes to have placards and he likes to take to the streets They only do it once a year, but obviously they like to have anything that has groups of people together to be protested against So Christmas is a big thing as well. So they they protest an annual Christmas march But unfortunately in 2018 they couldn't get the permit for the park They wanted to do it in so they had to do it indoors in a room instead, so no one Really saw that one and they had to clear all the video games out of the way I mean apparently there aren't many of them are there. No, it's a handful. It's double figures. Yes. Yeah, I hope it's double figures

Yeah, it's quite controversial in Japan, isn't it the whole Valentine's Day thing people have really gone off it And it's because this is something we've briefly mentioned before but actually the 14th of February in places like Japan career Thailand is just a day when women are supposed to give presents to men and then Exactly a month later men are supposed to give presents to women But it apparently it's really an obligation and so women are getting really pissed off because they feel like on the 14th of February They have to give chocolates for instance to all of their male colleagues And so women are saying, you know, I'm spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds every year on colleagues I don't know or like just giving them chocolates

And then on the 14th of March the men have to do it three or two times more so they have to spend even more It sounds like it's got kind of out of control Yeah, but I think, you know, it's not that bad for especially for countries that export vast amounts of flowers But there's this whole vocabulary of the chocolate so this is called Geary Choco or Obligation chocolate basically Obligation chocolate. Nothing says I love you like obligation chocolate And there's also Hanmei, which is chocolate for your true love And there are now Tomo Choco, which is friend chocolates and

The best kind Giko Choco, which is chocolate given to yourself as an act of self-love It's quite nice and apparently when you say self-love you just mean I just mean No funny business It's on the card when you get your chocolates you sense yourself. All right, no funny business man You know in China, they also have a group that is like the Alliance of Unpopular Men in In Japan they have single people who try to pull pranks on Valentine Day in order to stop people having a good night So there was one case in 2004 where a group of single people in Shanghai Purchased every single odd numbered seat for a cinema

Hahaha That is strong. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, so yeah, it was a movie called love story Beijing love story Yeah, and the 17th and 18th centuries the Valentine's was slightly different for some places in Europe You would choose your Valentine by drawing lots In a village So basically it would be Valentine's Day and everyone would write down their names and they put it in a big hat And then you pick one out and that would be your Valentine and some people said that then the courtship was obliged to last until the following Valentine's Day, whoa

You don't you don't want to get old John the poos mugler do you? Actually, this is a bit like how Romans did it so Romans basically had invented the origin of Valentine's Day Which was around that February time and that was sort of morphed into Valentine's Day by a pope a few centuries later But yeah, what they did was first of all the men sacrificed a goat and a dog And then they got the hides of the animals they'd sacrificed and they chased after women whipping them and Then the and the women wanted it. They queued up to be whipped as they believed it made them fertile But after all that happened that everyone was naked and then You've buried the lead on this story

I thought you'd assume it's ancient Rome And then everyone picked names from a jar just like that and the name that you picked from a jar was the person you were paired up with To do sexy stuff with for the duration of the festival and that was their Valentine's and it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun There's another old English Technique for Valentine's Day, which was your Valentine would be the first person you laid eyes on on the day Okay, so this led to some people hiding below the windows And then as soon as they woke up just going surprise And that's actually mentioned in Hamlet

Yeah, I feel you says tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day all in the morning be time And I am made at your window to be your Valentine Wow That's so cool. Yeah Valentine cards, okay So there was a tradition in the 19th century as well as sending nice cards of sending horrible Valentine's to people they were called vinegar Valentine's and They were there were specific cards for all kinds of things

So there were cards where you could say the recipient was drunk or ugly or stuck up all kinds of stuff There were specific cards for grossers being rude about them saying you've cheated me on my groceries Which doesn't feel strictly relevant to Valentine's Day, but it's just a good opportunity There was one with a picture of the man in the moon saying this is the only man who smiles on you And they were sent without postage paid so you had to pay to receive it I They were more popular apparently by the 1880s They were more popular and better selling than actual Valentine's cards

It said nice stuff and they're so weird if you look them up There's one that's a coiled snake with the head of this gentleman wearing a top hat and it just says beware the snake in the grass And there's another which has they they had these really good rhymes quite often So there's one whose rhyme is you're as vulgar a cat as I'd wish to meet and what's more you're devoured by pride and conceit But I fancy before very long you'll find out that everyone thinks you're an ignorant lout Imagine that on Valentine's Day Well, at least it's something Roses are red violets are blue tell the police all the John smuggles poo

Very creepy Feel like old John is now more important to this podcast than I am Here's a kind of fun thing that you can do on Valentine's Day There's a French inventor who has invented to make part of the experience of the day when you're in a couple Even better. It's a flatulence pill So it's designed so that you have it at the beginning of the date and if you need to go and have a fart You don't need to leave the table as I do Usually about this type of the podcast that you do guys

They bring my mic stupid move Sorry, so what what effect does it have it? It's such a farting. No, no, it's sense your fart So it makes it so it comes out smelling gingery or rose like or violet We need to move on to our next act in a second In 2015 Seattle Aquarium had a Valentine's event Oh, in fact, they have this every year where you can watch octopuses have sex But the one in 2015 they had to cancel in fact due to cannibalism concerns Because they were worried that their male octopus called Kong was too big for his partner and that he was going to eat her

When that happens when one person is just a bit bigger than the other and they accidentally eat their partner She moved on to our next fact it is time for fact number three and that is James Okay, my fact this week is that during World War two the guns of the ship the HMS Queen Elizabeth Were cleaned by wrapping a priest in a large cloth and pulling him through the barrels like a human pipe cleaner It does not sound very true does it? But this is true and this was so I read this first of all in a book which is called a field guide, but it's not about field It's called a field guide to the English clergy by Fergus Butler Gailey and it's about a guy called Lancelot Fleming and this guy was pretty amazing He was a priest and he was a priest in the in the services during the war

But there's loads of amazing things about him He met his first wife after a massive drinking binge Where he picked up and put on a motorbike helmet and then saw her in the street and said to her I'm a space Bishop Three years later she married him People weren't even going into space at this point were they? No, he was a man ahead of his time. Wow But they did know that space existed. Yes. Oh, I guess they assumed you'd need to wear a helmet there I guess so

Did he volunteer himself for the you know cannon cleaning? Yes, he did. He was a very slight man So it was only for the small cannons It was up Yeah, so I looked at Wikipedia to see what the cannons were on the HMS Queen Elizabeth and they had 16 since six inch guns two three inch guns and four five centimeter guns, and I don't think it was those ones He could have cleaned them a bit I Don't think of writing in I know that's the diameter not the leg

Anyway, so but They also had some 15 inch guns which you could just about squeezing if you had really thin shoulders and that 21 inch Topido tubes, so I think it might have been one of those Chaplains in the army just very quickly the modern-day chaplain in the US army is flame-resistant Okay, what do you mean by that so this is from Mary Roach's book grunt And she points out the man of cloth has various different cloths that he can wear when he's going into say a tank Or if he's just out where there's combat

So if if he's if he's sort of just traveling with a field of artillery He'll have us who have his cloths, which will be moderately flame retardant insect repellent as well And 25% Kevlar if he's in a tank mission. He's like really fire resistant. It's a really strong fire resistant But that's too expensive for day-to-day use so and then when he's back at just the camp He's just wearing normal clothes, but yeah, he's got three different outfits for not catching on fire. Yeah Fetch the asbestos priest And he also he doesn't carry any weapons, but he does have an assistant with him at all times who has a gun

So that's the that's the protection and they do they have all these things that they have like they have Portable confessionals should they need to have a quick confessional out in the field They have containers that are turned into chapels and they have extended shelf life communion wafers Very cool. No one likes a stale communion wave So I was trying to find out about more priests and there was someone called Hugh Barrett Leonard Who was a British clergyman who had a title which was extraordinary confessor? Which I think is a proper title, but he really pushed it So once when a woman asked to hear confession outside a church, he just held up a tennis racket between them

I Telegraph ran his obituary and it said that although he mostly had confessions in his room. He was prepared to do so behind a hedge Such a tradition of weird clergy in the UK, don't we? Yeah, there was a guy called the Reverend Edward Drax free and his congregation tried to get him out of the priesthood because he was Repeatedly drunk and he was stealing lead from the church roof And to stop them from getting rid of him he decided to lock himself in this study with his favorite maid a brace of pistols And a stack of French pornography That's a real slam on the maid I think

Defended there's another guy from the 1800s called Reverend Robert Hawker And he was both a priest and a mermaid that was That was the thing he really wanted to be so he made a wig out of seaweed And then he was naked apart from oil skin around his legs and he rode out to a rock Which was called Bude Harbor and he sat on it and he just would sing And then go home and you know go to church when wasn't didn't Didn't his sort of mermaid rain end or merman rain end when he went out and he did this as a prank for the locals and Everyone was looking at him through the eye glasses

They had at the time and then he overheard one of Phillip bigger Burley a farmer's go right I'm gonna go and get my gun. We got to shoot him down And he's up to underwater and never tried the prank again Some stuff on maybe cannons or guns. Yeah, that's what the facts about so The cannon kind of came into Europe in the 16th century Before that they used trebuchets which was where they flung stuff along and a lot people like them because of their phallicism For obvious reasons so at the siege of Mirandola the pope at the time Pope Julius was quoted as saying now. We'll see whose bowls are bigger mine or Louise

And and they also thought because they were so Fallik in shape They thought that if you could make them excited it would stop them from working and so at the siege Honestly, what? Yeah At the siege of Chekyank in 1861 to 1862 Typing rebels had prostitutes take off their trousers and mooned the forces in the hope that it would cause the cannon to miss fire or burst Honestly, it's history that feels like a flimsy excuse by the typing rebels

Wow, well some ships guns have things called Tampions which comes from exactly the same route as tampons Okay, and these are basically plugs for the guns and it's to stop the guns insides rusting when they're not being used and They used to be an old method of doing it, which is really cool to stop rust They would just put a cannonball inside the barrel and then slosh a load of olive oil inside And so then when the ship's bumping up and down the cannonball rolls the olive oil up and down the barrel and it doesn't rust I read about a It's not a cannon. It's a it's a gun type

It's and it but it wasn't shooting bullets This is a thing that would shoot into the air a bunch of mines that would be attached to parachutes So mines like you would get in the ground and the idea is that this was to stop ships from being attacked by planes So the planes would come the parachutes would latch onto the planes Tangle up swing the mines into the plane and explode the plane. So that was the idea. It's an incredible idea The problem was is they kept launching these into the sky and the airplanes could see them and they knew it was coming So they could get out of the way So it never got them and what actually they didn't really count on is there's a lot of wind out there and

Very often the wind would blow the mines on the parachutes right back to the boat that launched them Yeah, and they suffered more British deaths from that than they did It was in I believe it was in the second world war But we can edit that out The torpedoes so you could have torpedoes and ships and they've just invented a new torpedo that can fire humans So this is I believe even though I haven't seen it It's in you only live twice James Bond gets in a torpedo gun and gets fired through it I read on the internet that may be true or maybe not true

But apparently there's this new thing where you can get in a little kind of torpedo shape thing with you and your mate And it will fire you off and it helps you to get closer to the enemy It's over a range of ten It says ten nm, which I don't think is nanometers Nautical miles It is you ten nautical miles nautical miles. Yeah, how do you survive the landing? Well, you're in the water the whole way Torpedo, but these some of the earliest torpedoes were

But some of the earliest torpedoes were underwater ones and they were Some of the earliest torpedoes will ride a ride the ball Oh, yeah, in fact some of the very first ones had two man crews where you get on it and motor yourself along and then you would Leave the torpedo there next to the enemy ship and then hopefully sail around and back Yeah, I got one last thing which is on religion and boats Bringing the two things in together and this is from this year two students from Christchurch Academy in Jacksonville, which is in Florida they were swept out to sea and It was two of them

Then they thought they were gonna be lost for if they were gonna die out there And they spent their whole time praying to God to be saved And they finally were saved by a passing boat and that boat was called amen Of course that Oh Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy my fact is that between 1910 and 1912 the Washington Post frequently tried to interview the president's pet cow And was she just very coy didn't give me she was very chatty according to the reporters of the Washington Post

So this was a specific cow She was owned by President William Taft who was president at the time She was actually the last cow ever to graze freely on the White House lawn. Her name was Pauline Wayne Which is a weird name for a cow But she they ran over 20 stories about her in this short two-year period so one of them the reporter from the post asked her if she was milked without her consent and It reported that to each query modest Pauline returned from her soft brown eyes a glance bespeaking reproach and indignation Which is to say in bovine he did not it's very hashtag me move

She was very famous she was very famous cow you could buy souvenir milk from Pauline Wayne She was and she used to go on tour. Didn't she? Yeah, she got in fact got lost at one point, right? So she would go on tour around the country and so her milk could be sold at agricultural fairs and stuff And once she was accidentally put on a standard cattle car with the masses instead with the masses of cows instead of her usual like private luxury cow coach and she was taken to the slaughter I think she was just she was missing for two days and there was panic across the land and she was just saved This was in 1911. I think someone just spotted her in time and said that looks like the president's cow How do you tell the difference between the president's cow and a non-president's cow?

She kept on singing the styles and stripes When she first came to the White House She was actually a president from Wisconsin senator to taft and when she first arrived She was pregnant and the president offered the calf to a local farmer because he couldn't look after them both and the Washington Times Said that Pauline has not been consulted But as a government employee, she is subject to the executive mandate It just feels like in 1910 11 and 12 there just wasn't that much going on Well, we don't really hear much about taft do we because no who was it was what?

Theodore Roosevelt before him and yeah, I was not someone after him who were quite famous and he just doesn't really come up much He's mostly famous for being very fat, isn't he? He's the fastest ever president right? He is although we're not quite sure about Trump But Trump is definitely in the top two. I think yeah, yeah He's mostly known for a myth, isn't he which is he was said to have been stuck in his bathtub He went for a bath and he couldn't get back out again, but it's a complete lie But that's one thing that a lot of people will say oh William Taft the guy stuck in the bath Yeah, he wasn't that famous like

Theodore Roosevelt was really famous and one of the ways that he got he carried on being famous is he named the teddy bear Or it was named after him The teddy from Teddy Roosevelt comes from the teddy bear and when Theodore Roosevelt left office toy manufacturers Still needed to sell toys and so they came up with something called a Billy possum Which was named after Taft And we all have one of those today How awful for your pet cow to have been more famous than you as the president And she wasn't his first cow was she he had another one in who died in 1910?

I think and she was called mooly wooly and She died because she so he loved them so much She used to keep them stable with the horses and so she shared the horses food and she died after eating too many oats She'd never been told the oats were for horses Apparently and even if they had told her she wouldn't understand It's a very human tragedy This is a I I think this is true that the you know the name Fido for a dog

Yes, sort of archetypal dog name this comes from Abraham Lincoln's dog Fido Which I did what did he get the name from do you know I don't know where he got it from I guess I mean it looks like Latin. I trust yeah But Lincoln's dog Fido was also assassinated A few months after president Lincoln was assassinated. No way way by a dog Yeah by a dog it was at a dog theater That crux I'm afraid I don't know who assassinated it, but it was a deliberate assassination

Yeah, I feel like using the word assassination to describe Fido's death trivializes the death of Abraham Lincoln No, I think we need to elevate Fido's death Just on pet cows. There's one quite famous cow Emily the cow This is a cow who's very well known in the 90s. So in 1995 She was off to the slaughter in Massachusetts and she escaped so the workmen at the sort house were having lunch I believe and she leapt over a gate and fled and the workers saw her and chased after her couldn't catch her and she Wounded the state for 40 days and the police were sent out with instructions to kill on site And they couldn't catch her and she foraged in people's backyards and stuff

And it's thought that people sort of helped her by leaving out bits of grass in their back Maybe Where do they leave the grass on the lawn I Can't speak wondering around going I can't find any grass anyone I can't see the grass for the grass She's maybe was made of invisible green So she spent 40 days and 40 nights effectively wandering in the wilderness. Yes, she was the Jesus of the cow She was seen once running with a herd of deer and

She told me a miracle a holy miracles go on She eluded capture. Well, and she ended up in an abbey. So there you go So there was wait, are you sure she didn't end up in an abattoir because that just sounds More likely No, there was a place called peace abbey, which was an interfaith movement who saw the story went to the abattoir and bought her for a dollar She's still on the run at this point and then they went to try and find her and they caught her and she lived with them for a further eight years happily and She ended up being a bridesmaid in two wedding

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 said in the course of this Podcast so you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland Andy at old John the pooh smuggling James I said do you say that no one's You'll just have to keep in the pooh smuggling bit now. I'm really gonna cut that out For the next 20 episodes Who is the mysterious old John the pooh smuggler he sounds like Andrew Hunter Murray

James at James Harkins And Chazinsky you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, well you can go to our group account Which is that no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish calm We have everything up there from our previous episodes upcoming tour dates bits of merchandise. Thank you so much Amsterdam That was awesome. We'll see you again. Good night