No Such Thing As A Fish - 282: No Such Thing As A Bored Shrew

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Live from Copenhagen, Dan, James, Andrew and Anna discuss Bjorn Borg's karate-tennis instructor, singing teachers for canaries, and what happens when a shrew gets brain-freeze.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Copenhagen! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Czciński, Andrew Huntsomurry and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order, here we go! Starting with my fact, my fact this week is that when 11-time Grand Slam tennis champion Beyond Borg came out of retirement, he returned using a wooden racket and was coached by a 79-year-old karate expert from Wales.

Three years later he retired once again having failed to win a single match. This fact was told to me by a friend of ours, the singer of our theme tune, Ash Gardner of MPRES, he had found this out and it's absolutely true, it was a huge comeback. He for some bizarre reason didn't get a tennis coach, he found this 79-year-old karate expert called Ron Thatcher. Yeah, he was called Ron Thatcher but he preferred to be known as Tia Honsey and Borg called him the Professor and this guy, Ron Thatcher, he would always be accompanied by two ballerinas. Always!

He had a massive hearing aid and he would always wear white and he always sat 15 feet away from Borg while he was playing, watching him through binoculars. Was he qualified in any way to be a tennis coach? He was like a life coach to a lot of people in Hollywood at the time and Borg of course, when he did retire he kind of went into a bit of a playboy lifestyle, didn't he? So he was 26 when he retired and then he came back age 34 and people said at the time that the wooden racket thing, they said it was like showing up in a rug with a musket, just such a controversial decision to make but he was determined that the old ways were the

best. Because yeah, that was the old way and then they went to graphite rackets and so he thought let me bring back this, I mean basically it looked like he was doing a karate kud movie wasn't it? He was using the old ways, he had a karate expert, yeah. It is odd to watch because you can watch that, one of the first matches that he was spectacularly lost when he came back and it's just, it's a lot slower, it's like watching a sort of a five year old tap it back over the net and then a professional tennis player smash it

in their face. Yeah, the first game was in the Monte Carlo Open wasn't it and he lost in straight sets to a guy called Arezi who then lost in the next round to Ivan Isavich, who lost in the next round to Steve, who lost in the next round to Pripic, who lost in the next round to Becca, who then got to the final in the next game and lost to Sir Guy Bregari. So you could definitely argue that Borg was by far the worst player in the whole game. But he was one of the greats, I mean it's worth saying for anyone who follows tennis now or is just aware of famous tennis names like Djokovic and Federer, Borg was, he was

huge. Well him and McEnroe and their rivalry is the great rivalry that is alongside Nadal and Federer really and their big game in 1981, the last big game that Bjorn Borg really played in the US Open was Seminole and that was also the last time that two players really used wooden rackets. So the two of them were two of the very last people on tour to use the wooden rackets. Everyone was doing the modern stuff by this time. But he was very upset by it wasn't he?

So he lost to McEnroe, Wimbledon in 1981 and then at the US Open final two months later and he was so upset that he, and this is like unheard of, he just fled the court. So the moment he lost that game he ran off a court, he disappeared and there was panic and there was particularly panic because there had been death threats against him called in to the courts a few hours earlier. So all the staff were like where the fuck has he gone? A, he needs to be here to accept his silver trophy and B, is he dead? Follow that car and the man in the white suit and the ballerinas.

Their rivalry was actually made into a Hollywood movie not too long ago which was called Borg vs McEnroe. What a brilliantly weird name. They renamed the movie for Nordic countries so it went from Borg vs McEnroe to Borg. Oh wow. That's brilliant. No interest in McEnroe, so good. I was trying to find out about why tennis players have so many rackets, you know, because

you see them they turn up a court with a huge number of rackets and you think they wouldn't need that many. So I started googling why do tennis players have and the options that it fills in automatically, the first one is so many rackets, second one is skinny arms, okay, yeah, some of them do, sure, big thighs is the third one, why do they have big thighs? Big calves is the next one, fifth one, shoes. Why do they have shoes? Why do they have shoes?

Right. And what's the answer? I don't know. You didn't read it? What kind of researcher are you? That's amazing. Well, I mean, Borg had a good reason for taking loads of rackets on tour and that's that he just snapped the strings constantly because he had a mad racket stringing thing.

So his rackets were strung at enormous pressure, at 80 pounds of pressure, which was very tight. So that just means they used to snap constantly. He once went through 60 rackets during one French open game. What? 60. It's disruptive to the game. That would put you off. But he wasn't a smasher, was he?

He didn't smash his own racket. No, no, no, far too boring for that. No, it's just because they're too tightly, tightly strung, but he had this coach that's called Lenard Bergellin, which I'm sure I've mispronounced, apologies, but Lenard Bergellin was totally devoted to him. So he'd sleep in a room with all of Borg's rackets so that he could be woken up whenever one of them snapped. Because if one of them snapped, you had to leap out of bed and cut all the other strings

so that you didn't warp the frame. And so he said, like many times on tour, he'd just spend his whole night, you know, waking up, jumping out of bed, quickly cutting all the strings of a racket, going back to bed. That's amazing. Some more stuff on Bad Tennis. Yeah, yeah. It was a game in Florida in 2002 on Amelia Island. It was between Ann Kramer and Jennifer Hopkins.

It was a first round match and there were 29 double faults in the game. But then they realized the reason was that the groundsmen had put the box in the wrong place and made it three feet shorter than it was supposed to be. That's incredible. Wow. Surely tennis players can adjust to where a line is. That's their thing, right? Yeah.

So I suppose they all started at the start these faults. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also you wouldn't adjust because you think it can't be possible that this tennis court is at randomly three feet shorter. It can't be that they've made this three feet shorter. I must have just over hit it. I'll try again.

Yeah. I've got a fact about tennis balls. So to get to Wimbledon, the ingredients that go into a tennis ball cumulatively travel 50,000 miles. Okay. Wow. So what's the big killer there? Well, the clay comes from South Carolina, the silica comes from Greece, the zinc oxide

comes from Thailand. All these things make their way to the Philippines. The wool has to go from New Zealand to Gloucestershire in England and then back to the Philippines. Well, they just hit it back over there, it just comes back over here. And then other ingredients are bought and the tins are shipped from Indonesia and then the whole thing has to go over to Wimbledon. 50,000 miles. I have some, a couple of other eccentric tennis players who are interested in that.

These guys are from the real tennis days. So it was before modern tennis. There was a real great eccentric Frenchman called Labé, it was his nickname. And he was, he always played completely topless, but he had a red ribbon around his head and a red ribbon around his belly. He once played with a shoe horn, you know, that used to take your shoes off and won against someone else. He once played with, for a bet, he played with a man riding on his back and he won.

Did the man, did the man also have a racket? No. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That would be better. That would have been great. And he also once played with a donkey fastened to him. And again, the donkey didn't have a racket there either.

Wait, I mean, so he was standing beside the donkey. He was tied to a donkey. And he still won? He still won. Who was he playing? Was he playing babies? I don't know who he was playing. And there was another guy called Charles de la Hay who played in full military uniform

with his racket and his right hand and a musket and fixed bayonet in his left. See I would deliberately lose to him. Yeah. And there was another guy called Raymond Masson who would play anyone who challenged him but promised to jump in and out of a barrel between every shot. A barrel? A barrel. So he had a barrel there.

He'd play a shot, jump in the barrel, jump out and then play the next shot. These are all from a book about those strangest tennis matches in history by Peter Seddon, I should say. And these were in ye olden days, right? Yeah, mid to late 19th century. Wow. That is incredible. There was the best tennis player in Britain at the turn of the 20th century.

One of the best, again a real tennis player, was a guy called Eustace Miles. And so he won an Olympic medal in 1908, he was also a squash champion, he was amazing. And then he also became the leading health fad promoter and he sort of popularized vegetarianism. So he set up the biggest vegetarian restaurant in London. All the suffragettes used to go there because they loved vegetarianism, overlap there. So he had this restaurant, but what I like about this restaurant is that he was convinced that uric acid was really bad for your health, this was a fad in 1908 or whatever. And so the first, you know these days when you have V for vegetarian next to an item

on a menu, the first instance of that was in his restaurant and it was FU, which meant free from uric acid. Based on tennis players and food, in 2012 there was an article that came out that said that Djokovic had bought the entire world supply of donkey cheese. Donkey cheese. All the donkey cheese in my world. How much donkey cheese is being made? It's quite big in Serbia, he's Serbian, yeah he's Serbian.

Yeah it's quite big with donkey cheese in Serbia, I think it's called pool or pool or something like that. Yeah that's it. And he has a restaurant chain and he wanted to have this brilliant, this cheese is very expensive and it's made from donkeys, it takes 25 litres of fresh donkey milk. Hold on, sorry it's not made from donkeys is it? It takes 25 litres of fresh donkey milk to make a single kilogram of this cheese and so they produce a certain amount a year and Djokovic just went and bought it all up and

yeah. Who knew that donkeys and tennis players had such an interlinked history? I've got one last thing which was I was looking into Bjorn Borg's retirement and then obviously his return to the game but I thought okay what did Mac and Rhoad do when he retired, this big rivalry, where did he go? We all know what he does now, he's a commentator and he plays on the scene for the older generations but when he retired his plan was to become a musician, he thought he was going to be a massive musician, he spent years playing with a band and he pulled out of finishing

his first album so there was an album that was going to be recorded and released and there's not been many reviews that I could find other than a bartender of a bar that he played in who said he couldn't sing to save his life and one person who has heard the song was Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Oasis we're playing in America and after the show a very drunk and I think stone John Mac and Rhoad came up to them and said do you want to smoke some spliffs let's go back to where he was so they said yeah John Mac and Rhoad was amazing, not in that voice they would never tell like holy moly John Mac and Rhoad yes please so they went back to where he was and apparently so Liam Gallagher sings the

song that he played to them in a totally stone state and I don't know if it was Eric guitar or real guitar but the way Liam does it is doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo you cannot be serious doo doo doo doo doo doo doo you cannot be serious was it in or was it out that was his song and sorry you don't know when you listen to this you couldn't tell if it was air guitar or real guitar because I'm no musician but I feel like even I can distinguish between those two instruments look we need to move on to our next fact it is time for fact number two and that is Andy my fact is that shrews cope with winter by shrinking their own brains so I don't think anyone believes you yeah they do shrews common

shrews we're talking about that's the species right that's no way to talk about them when you say cope is it is it a sort of boredom thing or is it a survival boredom thing well cope sounds like interesting his life when you're a shrew you know they're not coping with the boredom of winter they cope with the cold of winter just cope is a you know I cope with you telling me things wow and it does shrink our brains why do they do this why do they do it well because it's cold as I think I mentioned so they this is a thing called the denil phenomenon it was discovered by a Polish scientist called August Denil in the 1940s they have you know they run very very hot shrews their heart goes at 1500 beats

per minute so they they are incredibly fast-lived animals and in winter they need a lot of food all the time but in winter it just helps them if they reduce their own body size yeah sorry like shrews most animals would kind of bulk up wouldn't they before winter and then kind of sleep but they can't do it because the metabolism is so high if they try to eat loads of stuff they would just burn it all off yeah so they shrink the on average they shrink by 17% and they're about also they're quite a lot brain they're 10% brain by mass which is most more than almost any other mammal and so their bones and their heart shrink by about 20% and it makes them stupider as well so scientists it's genuinely true scientists have done experiments

on them they they always do their exams in the summer like us don't they yeah they used shrews in spring caught in the spring in the summer and they put them in a box with some food in and they just went to the food then they tried on winter shrews with small brains and they just moved around aimlessly not moving towards the food no but it's because in winter they don't travel very far so they don't actually need spatial awareness in the winter so it saves it's safe time that's amazing that's incredible yeah they are they are very small shrews so a shrew is the smallest mammal the Etruscan shrew and it's tiny it's 1.8 grams the weight of a playing card and it's like it's like a tiny little well they're not rodents

actually I don't think are they but it's a tiny little mammal but and the Etruscan shrew actually its prey is cricket so its main prey is crickets and crickets defend themselves in this really cool way so they do like a karate kick so I think by the description that I read they sort of crouch to their head they're almost doing a headstand so they scrunch up their body and then they spring one of their back legs outwards like a karate kick to kick the shrew in the face and so as soon as the shrew interrupts a cricket it immediately recoils its face because otherwise it gets kicked wow they've actually been taught that karate move by a 79 year old tennis instructor from Wales yeah my favourite shrew is Thor's

hero shrew there was already a hero shrew but they found another one and they called him Thor's hero shrew and according to an article in Nature it can support the weight of a full grown man on its back yeah wow it doesn't sound true does it according to the article this is in 2013 it was in nature and it says it's the equivalent of a human holding up a space shuttle I would love to see someone a full grown man just moving slowly along the street oh has he got those wheelie shoes no he's got a shrew actually I have a favourite shrew oh do you yeah we all do the elephant shrew yeah elephant shrew so elephant shrews were named elephant shrews because they have these flexible noses which sort of resemble

an elephant looks a bit like an elephant but then wait a minute are they not they're not shrews are they well it turns out they did actual analysis on them discovered that they're not shrews they're not true shrews and actually genetically they're closer to an elephant than they are a shrew by weird coincidence yeah yeah so actually I don't have a favourite shrew you've got a favourite elephant yeah Anna favourite shrew favourite shrew I like a desert shrew so a desert shrew has defecation stations that's just a fun name apart from anything else I know I just like that they know how to rhyme um no they don't they haven't called them that we have but everyone poos in the same

place and it's away from where everything else happens so it doesn't sort of contaminate it and their feces is corkscrew shaped wow so they can open wine with their poo would you like to taste the white no I've got a favourite shrew I just got one for the shrew that we haven't talked about yet um which is the short tailed shrew and they have a really cool feeding mechanism so they like insects they like to eat insects and they eat them over the winter but they want to store them in their nest for weeks on end because sometimes they might run out so um what they do is they have toxic saliva and they bite an insect which then falls into a coma and gets paralyzed and

the shrew drags it back to its nest and it just keeps them there for weeks and weeks and every time one of its bits of food starts moving and waking up it wakes up and goes uh a shrew and then the shrew bites it again and just knocks it out again that's horrible wow that's your favourite shrew that's absolutely terrifying oh life is tough that is a horror film you've been abducted by a shrew and you're constantly part of the moment you think you're escaping you call it shrew's day um just on on winter survival tactics so a lot of animals have kind of amazing ways of surviving in the winter hedgehogs I didn't know they when they go into winter hibernation they reduce their heartbeats from 180 beats per minute to very low so sometimes sort of an average of maybe 10 to 20

to very low no an average of 10 to 20 but they can go down to two beats a minute whoa impressive right and also the red-eared slider turtle which is the most common turtle pet really I think it doesn't hibernate it does I think called brumating which is like hibernating but occasionally it wakes up to have a quick drink and then goes to sleep again but they survive under so they'll survive in water they go underwater and then it'll ice over and they'll survive under the ice without breathing at all so they can not breathe for weeks they just extract oxygen from the water with their bottoms with their cloacas and just suck it out um so our brains shrink human brain shrink um when you go past the age of 40 your brain shrinks at the rate of five percent per decade

I know I know you can tell the relative age of every one of these audience by where the loud noises came from if you saw me in the green room earlier on there was some food in the corner but I was just wandering around there had no idea where it was there's lots of stuff about whether we could be shrunk so there's a there are cool what do you mean all of us like as in our whole body no everybody in our whole body shrunk down yeah all of us whole body right so there's a dutch historian called arna Hendricks and he has a proposed that humans shrink themselves down to the size of chickens because we would consume only two percent of the food and drink that we do now yeah there was a movie about that wasn't the last year uh downsizing yes and um and it would

really work so this guy's better science it would work what would it do to our houses what would it do to our okay we didn't reach anything we don't we yeah fair point okay so that's a very extreme you probably have to have one normal sized human next to you at all times right yeah like bringing you things down from the top shelf we've got that that's babies wait does he say how we might do this shrinking um look I think it's more of a thought experiment at the moment but um other people are so someone else has proposed a similar thing even if let's say we all make ourselves just 15 centimeters how are we going to do it it doesn't matter just selective breeding I guess or no hang on um so wait what's what and then what's the great thing that happens we just consume much

less look even if we make ourselves just 15 centimeters shorter we can all just mutually do that okay you can all just agree we're just going to be shorter that would be men would have 23 percent less mass and women 25 percent less that could offset a lot of climate change we could save the planet by just being slightly shorter by chopping our heads off I feel like I've been duped now because Andy said yesterday oh I've looked into a bit of how we shrink ourselves stuff and so I spent a lot of time looking at whether honey I shrunk the kids was a feasible prospect and I went on a website called overthinkingit.com which is really good they debate at length whether this could happen apparently the theory

behind it and honey I shrunk the kids if you remember was that the idea is you reduce the electron cloud size of a person which basically means you reduce all the empty space between the atoms so you know we're mostly empty space but then this I know this is going to surprise you but this would not be realistic because then you've taken out all the empty space but you've got the same mass so you're a tiny person smaller than an ant with the same mass imagine an ant as heavy as an adult human and so you you definitely can't walk you can't talk your vocal cords don't work you're too small to absorb any of the molecules you need to absorb and actually so this is uh some you know nerds online speculating and they said they said you have very small electron orbitals so I

think the electrons are very close to the center of the atom so no bonds can properly form between atoms so denser atoms which you know the tiny people have will be replaced or diffused so that the kids would either evaporate or just naturally grow back to normal size so that's the realistic ending of that film okay it is time for fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week is that according to us intellectual property law you are not allowed to hold any copyrights if you are the holy spirit it's true but okay this doesn't affect anyone in this room I don't suppose no it's from the compendium of us copyright office practices chapter 300 which is online and I've read did you read all the preceding 299 chapters I did not and it says that the US copyright

office will not register works produced by nature animals or plants or anything created by divine or supernatural beings and then it gives specific examples such as a photograph taken by a monkey a mural painted by an elephant a piece of driftwood that has been shaped and smoothed by the ocean and an example this actually happened an application for a song naming the holy spirit as the author of the work so this is a genuine thing this someone has tried to do this and they said we're gonna have to make a law against that now right what's the problem it creates if you say I wrote this with the holy spirit I suppose the problem is who collects the royalties yeah yeah yeah I don't know I think they're just saying stop saying that the holy spirit wrote this song you obviously wrote

it I missed a mackin row I do love it though when a religious thing is treated as sort of a mundane real thing you know I read in 2011 a poll found that 52 percent of Americans approve of God's job performance wow it was a poll that was done how many percent did you say sorry 52 52 percent wow that's not much higher than Donald Trump's approval rating no no there was a thing about another copyright religious thing in 2003 US legal review magazine examined whether Jesus had any chance of holding copyright of his revelations and it concluded that if Jesus wished to claim copyright protection for himself for all his revelations he would be legally entitled to copyright protection so that's good that is good that's going to be huge news for Jesus he'll be enormously relieved

all right I'm coming back he just went up in a strop because people get nicking his ideas but is this at all based on that story a couple of years ago where a monkey took a photograph and it was the term that they couldn't claim yeah that's the reference of one of the examples yeah got it yeah because so that was a macaque wasn't it too the guy a photographer called David Slater left his camera in Indonesia and some macaques came up and found it really interesting and took hundreds of photos none of them in focus and then he I think wikimedia said that they could use them and refused to take them down he said but it belongs to the monkey and it doesn't so sorry but did you know so we always talk about how we kind of deal in facts so we often say you

can't copyright a fact so obviously anyone can use this in any way they like but um actually that's based on the idea that something that you can copyright has to be a creation something that you've created with your imagination that's original but there is a tweak to that in copyright law which says that you can also copyright something that's been achieved by sweat of the brow and it's called the sweat of the brow doctrine and this is just so this is basically about lists of facts so if you've gone out into the world and you've just collected lots of facts and put them in a list if you've sweated enough from your brow basically then you can kind of have a copyright as a reward for the hard work you've gone to wow so there we go we should go back

over all that's I don't know how sweaty you are yeah we can feel each other's foreheads after the show determine um so this is a weird thing so in the USA it work goes into the public domain once the author's been dead for 70 years um but you can fulfill of depictions of those things which have been copyrighted so Frankenstein the Frankenstein's monster yeah is out of copyright because Mary Shelley has been dead for a long time but Universal the the movie company they invented a look for him so if you describe him as having green skin and a flat head and bolt through his neck you're breaching copyright on their idea of what Frankenstein is like right okay yeah that's great the similar thing is the Tarzan call that is a trademark call I'm sorry I don't know that

cool how does it go yeah okay I might remember it I'm afraid you're in breach of copyright wow you only get half of it though didn't you well fortunately I did it in the voice of Liam Gallagher so they'll get it they're gonna get it you only get half there and it's a palindrome that call hasn't yeah if you turn it round it's exactly the same the other way around yeah but there's there's an actual description of what you are legally not allowed to do if you were making that call to make you legally in trouble um and so they they write it down so it's a 10-step call if you if you get it to that then you're going to get sued so it's one a semi-long sound in the chest register two short sound up an interval

of one octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound three a short sound down a major third from the preceding sound four a short sound up from major third from the preceding sound five a long sound down on one octave plus a major third from the preceding sound six a short sound up one octave from the preceding sound seven a short sound up major third from the preceding sound it goes on for 10 steps and I can't believe you gave up at seven I mean I just I just saw a spoiler alert in case no one's read the legal ramifications so there's some new copyright laws about to come in I think in the EU it's either just coming in it's about to come in uh it's going to force online companies to immediately take anything down as soon as you say that you've got a copyright

against it they don't have to check or anything as soon as you say it they're going to have to take it down so a lot of people online are a bit worried about it um it went through by just five votes but 10 MEPs admitted later that they've been confused and pressed the wrong button and it turns out and I didn't know this if an MEP presses the wrong button in a vote they're allowed to say afterwards and have the record amended saying I actually shouldn't voted for that but the law still has to stay as it was yeah I have to say I used to work for a politician who did that once on a flagship policy of the party that I worked for and he was the one deciding vote and he didn't understand how the system worked and he pressed the wrong button

it was awesome and that and that was Brexit so Mr T owns the copyright Mr and we're very honored tonight I can't believe he flew all the way over no Mr T owns the copyright to I pity the fool and he he makes money from that catchphrase and sells it but he does not own the copyright to the name Mr T because that is owned by a company in Illinois which makes a foam t-shaped scrubber um just one other thing about copyright that I think is quite interesting is this I think is a new law came in in 2014 which is that you can mash up someone else's work to create something new without permission now so you know when you

get mashups like cassette boy online where um you know you take David Attenborough's voice and you put it over some other hilarious footage um you know what I'm talking about right um but you can you can reuse the copyright copyrighted material as long as it's for the purposes of parody caricature or pastiche and so if you do that and then you'll take into court then it's up to the judge to decide if it's funny enough so you've got to have a judge with a sense of humor that's extraordinary the craziest lawsuit I think I've ever seen um in terms of a trademark that continually sues people is you know the i heart new york t-shirt i heart ny that is owned by new york city and they were constantly suing people for doing parodies and knockoff self-fit because you would

think that that's just an open design that can be used in 2005 they had I think over 3000 lawsuits going to sue people yeah and then there was a coffee shop owner in new york who wrote I tattooed on his fingers I coffee cup ny and they sued him I mean it's it's stuff like this this is how crazy it gets and this is this has been reported so I have to say this with a caveat but the guy who actually designed it um who is a very famous designer in america he designed the dc logo as well he tried to do a commemorative version of september the 11th when it happened to reflect it and they told him he couldn't or he would be sued like that's how crazy you cannot be serious I is that a john mackin row that's john mackin row's catchphrase yeah that's going to cost us a lot of

money there okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is chizinski my fact this week is that in the 18th century you could hire a professional canary trainer to expand your canaries singing repertoire sometimes your canaries just not up to scratch you've got to get a private tutor in and this was the 18th century 18th century and 19th century canaries were an incredibly popular common pet across europe and I read this in a book called the animals companion which is a book that's just come out and they were super fashionable but they were fashionable because of their amazing song so if you got a canary that was a bit of a dud in the singing department then you could hire what was called a siffler if you were french and then they'd teach

them to sing as a human who would it's not another canary as a human yeah that'd be nice it was basically they had these really little um musical instruments didn't they and they had they were called bird flageolets and they're really really tiny little flutes and what you would do is you don't give the canary the instrument yeah do you no so what happens is you you get your canary it's just been born you wait for a little while and the soon as he starts to chirp then you realize that that is a male because it's only the males who chirp and then you take him away from all of his mates put him in a cage and cover it in a canvas so he doesn't have any other influence from anything else

and then you every day just go in and play a little and then he learns from that whereas he would have learned from another canary in the past yeah right they're very good learners the story goes that it was discovered sort of in the 17 early 1700s how brilliant they were when one canary started mimicking the sound of very distant church bells playing in the distance and another canary apparently that belonged to a tax collector started incorporating a clink sound into its songs for the clink of money falling into his sack of cash amazing no they're good they come from the canary islands canaries so that's when that where they were first imported from by the Spanish who had the canary islands and that's hence the name so the canary it's so

confusing the canary islands are named after canis dogs but then canaries the birds are named after the islands but the Spanish would only ever export the males so they could have a proper monopoly on them so they started exporting them in the early 15th century but you could never breed them or you couldn't for a long time yeah not so it was only the males who could sing so it's they were the only ones people wanted but it's such a good scam because if you only give males and no one else can get them right exactly but there are some rogue females got out there and they people managed to breed the Germans I think actually it was the Germans who undercut the Spanish trade because of their what it said like they were just very organized about it they found one female

and they were like right let's let's turn this into a good business and suddenly the Spanish sailors weren't doing so well there was apparently this I'm not sure this is true but in 1622 there was word that a Spanish vessel had been stranded on Elba the Italian island with a cargo of male and female canaries and they had escaped and people sailed specifically from Tuscany to Elba just to catch some canaries because they were worth their weight in gold yeah there used to be a hangover cure in ancient Rome did they yeah if you were really hung over you would you would have a deep fried canary and that can't be yummy deep fried yeah yeah okay it was the foundations of Scottish food but yeah no a deep fried canary would be what would help

it was thought that they could help lots of illnesses wasn't it like so the famously they were used in mines because they could tell when there was gas there because they would kind of faint before humans would but also the miners would use it to almost blot out if you had like an illness you would kind of know and the hope was that it would kind of suck out the illness I don't think it worked poor canaries it's worth a try I think those ones in the mines are so interesting do you know the last ones officially in British mines were in 1986 that's quite a recent tradition yeah and there was a device created in fact in 1896 which could revive them and it was a special canary cage and on top of it there's this big vial of oxygen and as soon as the canary

collapses and faints you say okay well it's not safe so we better get out but also let's just turn a little wheel and it releases the oxygen into the canaries cage and revives it cool isn't that sweet so did they keep the canary in the cage down there or you have to save the canary on your way up you have to pull it back up with you I guess you pull the canary back up and then you put it in the cage right yeah the canary was always in a cage when you went down there it's in a little case it's not loose in a mine that's a recipe for disaster yeah of course I don't I don't know if sweet is the right word for saying they save their lives they say that's that's a nice that's a it's better than the alternative yeah yeah you know if the canary dies you can no longer rub it on your

horrible body to cure your disease but you can still eat it deep pride oh yeah bad news the minus dangerous good news lunch they didn't have maybe the best lives when they were being sold so because canary training and canary selling was such big industry then it's they would literally make these tiny little cages which would just fit one canary and it was proper industry there were some places like in the hearts mountains in Germany in the late 18th century where you know that the whole industry was about breeding and selling canaries and children were especially good at making those cages because they're very intricate and they've got tiny little hands so they made these sweet little cages and they had not a nice life but if you were a canary bird

trainer then you were very worried about the spread of disease amongst your canaries because if they all died then your industry is gone and so apparently every few days you'd book a room a few rooms in an inn and you'd go in with all of your cages and you'd release the canaries into the few rooms while you scraped out the cages for a day and so if you're the innkeeper you're just aware that three of your rooms have just got a thousand canaries living in them I think you're aware when you try and clean it the next day aren't you really wow the region of a bird's brain which is responsible for song this is in songbirds it's four times bigger in males and females and also like a shrew it shrinks and grows with the year so when they're doing the breeding season

their brain will get bigger so that it can do the singing and then when they're not doing the breeding season it'll get smaller that's amazing that's really cool so you've got to pick the right time of year to go to a canary gig because the set is true the hit he doesn't remember the hit just wandering around bumping into stuff do you want to hear about the most famous British budgie ever uh no it's okay no no but we're gonna have to wrap up shortly he was called Sparky Williams and he was born in 1954 and according to obituary's I've read he spent six years working as a character actor um he was in TV ads he knew 550 words a disc with his voice on a 20 000 copies were made of it and he could do two voices he could do new castle and refined okay that is it that is all of

our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts I'm on ad Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our website no such thing as a fish.com we have everything up there from our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates to bits of merchandise and that's it thank you so much Copenhagen we'll see you again good night