No Such Thing As A Fish - 284: No Such Thing As Salty Yeti Bones

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Live from Paris, Dan, James, Andrew and Anna discuss odour-analysing t-shirts, New York under meteor attack, and self-pricking porcupines. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Paris! I am sitting here in the head of the industry, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphone to our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go! Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that North American porcupines sometimes fall out of trees and impale themselves on their own spikes. So it gets pushed into them? So they're already in them? That's what impaled means. Do they die? We all die, have they? I tip again, we're in Paris, I shouldn't have realized the philosophy would come earlier than we all would.

Well actually, not usually and the reason that we know about this for a few reasons but it's kind of a report that came out by a guy called Aldis Rose and his colleagues and they noticed that quills have antibiotics on them and they worked out that the reasons that they have antibiotics on them is because they do impale themselves quite often and it means that it won't kind of get infected and it won't kill them. It is weird that they spend so much time on trees and this is North American porcupines, isn't it? They absolutely love climbing trees. Yeah, actually a female porcupine is only interested in sex once a year and she signals that by climbing the tree, urinating and screaming. We've all tried it. But the males have urination as well in their mating so the males, they can sometimes make the females receptive to mating and the way they do that is urinating on them and they have special high velocity urine which can go six feet. So even if a female is on a completely different branch, the male can spray her and then she will sort of become fertile. I might have this wrong but is it true that there's a fight that happens between two males who are courting the one? So the urination thing as well as being an exciting thing for the mating ritual is also in the same way that a dog might pee on a fire hydrant to mark it as its territory.

It's a territory marking thing I think as well. That feels likely. Yeah, they're not really sure. They think it could be pheromones to attract them. But they do have this massive fight so lots of males can get involved because they're very solitary porcupines and they have this very narrow window of fertility, the females. And so they're on their own, middle of nowhere, they're something like, fuck I'm fertile, so they have to do this whole screaming weeing thing to just let urine into the air and hope the males smell it. So then a bunch of males flock to them and then they do have this huge fight. And so it's very normal if you see a male porcupine mating, he'll usually be doing it with a bunch of someone else's, some other porcupine's quills sticking out of it, covered in other men's quills. Yeah, not comfortable.

No. So female porcupines are pregnant or lactating for 11 months of the year and they can be pregnant for all of their lives. They've been pregnant for 20 to 30 years. So they basically spend their entire life pregnant or breastfeeding. Why are there not more porcupines then? They're just good at hiding from you. I think there aren't quite a lot. If you're in America I think you hear it quite a lot. So they have lots of quills. Actually they have spines all over their penis as well, the males. It's covered in what they call horny material. It's very clever. But the problem for humans is that they can stab us with their quills.

And there was a paper from 1955 which is all about being quilled by porcupines. And this is our friends at Improbable Research. So the guys who did the Ig Nobel Awards, which we've mentioned before. There was a paper in 1955 written by Albert R. Shagel and in it he wrote, Many hundreds of quills have penetrated various parts of the author's own body in numbers of one or two to as many as 40 at one time. On one occasion, 40 were driven into the forehead and the bridge of the nose by one stroke of a porcupine's tail. They're added, the penetration of porcupine quills into the human body is never a pleasant sensation. This last time, speak. I think you're trying it out. They have really interesting sex organs, don't they? Porcupines.

The males have really interesting sex organs. So they keep their testes inside them. They don't let their testes into their scrotal sac for most of the year. They're just sitting in their stomach somewhere, not their stomach, they're abdomen. Then they just plop them down into the scrotal sac once they're going to mate and they suck them back up again when they're not mating. They've got, as you said, their penis is spined, but also it's usually pointing backwards. So it's in sort of a sheath that points backwards towards them. So when they mate with the female, it flips out a pen knife. Oh wow, that's amazing.

Why don't they keep their testes inside? They'll probably be stabbing themselves otherwise the whole year round. That's probably just, yeah, protection. There was a politician from Florida called Bobby Bean. And he wanted to become a senator and he ran with the promise that he would make sex with porcupines legal. And how did he? He's now president. Did he win? No. No, he didn't win. Actually it wasn't quite as stupid as you might think.

His idea was to, he wanted to erase kind of useless laws that exist. So it currently is illegal explicitly to have sex with porcupines in Florida. And he's like, you know, they have a pen knife spiky penis. We're probably not going to do that. And the spiky on the outside, we probably don't need this law. And there was like other things, like there was a rule against men wearing strapless gowns that he wanted to get rid of as well. Strapless gowns. Well, how else are you going to seduce the porcupine?

They eat people's toilets sometimes. What? Porcupines. They do. They genuinely do. Well, okay, let's have some qualification here. So what they do, they love sodium. So it's salt, basically.

And they need one of it. They crave salt all the time. And some people in the territory still have outdoor wooden toilets. And a lot of the wood, you know, if your aim is poor, has urine soaked into it. Okay, so urine contains salt. And, you know, people, there are toilets which have been eaten away at by porcupines. So they don't eat the porcelain, but they do eat the surrounding wood. So they eat the hut.

Yeah, they do eat the hut. Yeah. So Boy Scouts, I think on Boy Scouts camps, they often say you'll go to the loo and you're surrounded by porcupines chewing through the hut, trying to access your urine. Sounds like a really frightening experience. But the salt love gets them into all sorts of trouble. So they chew through cars a lot. So cars are quite salty.

They're a bit tamed. They genuinely do. No, they don't. Coming from a toilet for you. You'll draw the line at cars. Very weird. They actually chew through cars mostly in winter. Can you guess why?

Salt on the roads. Salt on the roads. Did you read that? Oh, great stuff. And if you drive, it must be on the tyres when you're driving along. It gets on the tyres, flicks up onto the engine, and then they eat your engine out from the inside. Wow. Yeah.

Another thing that Dan, you might be interested in is Yeti bones. What? Jesus Christ. Am I in some kind of weird fever dream? So they eat toilets, they eat cars, and they eat Yetis. Yeah, we're just thinking how far we could push it. There's a theory that's prevalent among people who believe in the Sasquatch, which is the same as a Yeti, right?

No, I'll get it started. Absolutely not. It's like calling a hedgehog in a porky vine the same thing. It's not salty. I'm sorry to the Sasquatch and Yeti communities. So people who believe in the Sasquatch, people often say to them, why aren't there any bones? Why have we never found any bones?

And they say, well, it's obviously because they're very salty, and porky vines have eaten them. Yes. Yes, there's something you don't believe that. Yeah, that's a true fact that they believe in. It's true. And also, they say that in Canada, they don't actually put salt on the roads anymore, speaking of salt, because Bigfoot keeps eating it all.

So they think, we've got to stop. We're losing too much salt. Really? Yeah, we should probably move on. Anything before we do? Should we just talk about other tree climbers? Shall I just do one more thing on the podcast? Just really quickly, because it's about a French person.

And there was a 19th century French explorer called Jules Girard, who reported on a group of people called the Hatchichea. They were from Algeria. And all they ever did was smoke hashish and kill porky vines. I came here to smoke hashish and kill porky vines, and I've just finished my hashish. But now I'm quite sleepy. We do need to move on to our next fact.

Just really quickly, because you know that fish can climb trees. What? Yeah. Fish climb trees, and loads of different types of fish. So one of them is the mangrove killy fish in mangrove forests, and that exists in lots of America, Florida and Brazil. It lives in puddles, and then the puddles dry up. At which point, they actually climb up the nearest tree.

So it looks like a normal fish. Climbed its way up a tree, and then it climbs into a hole in the tree, an insect's made, or an actual hole in a tree, and it just waits it out in the hole until it rains again, and it can wait in a tree for months. So sometimes, you're just walking off the tree, and there's a fish halfway up. Weird, hanging out with a urinating porcupine.

It's very weird in the upper canopy. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that scientists are developing a t-shirt, which tells you when you smell. This is really cool. So, there is a British microchip maker, and the firm is called ARM, and they are working on putting AI devices in clothes, basically.

So, the idea is that you will have a microchip in your armpit, effectively, in your shirt, and it will inform you on a scale of one to five how bad your body odor is, and whether maybe it's time to have a shower, or change your clothes. But if you change your clothes, and you've lost a shirt that tells you, if you smell them,

and you change for another microchip t-shirt, yeah, it's going to be quite an expensive endeavor. Will the washing the clothes not make the microchip obsolete? This is the key problem that they are trying to overcome. It's making a microchip which will withstand repeated washing machines. So, you have no choice but to wear that one, and show it over and over again. And be permanently on number five.

Yes, actually, I'm not saying it's free of problems, but I do think it's a good idea. There is a way, actually, to make clothes clean themselves. You can put certain nanoparticles in clothes, and then they'll kind of clean themselves. Scientists are using this to make robotic trousers for old people. Okay, so old people have trouble walking, and they think if they can make these robotic trousers,

it will kind of help them to walk. Okay, that's a nice thing. Sounds dangerous to me, I've seen the wrong trousers, but go on. Well, the thing is, they've put these nanoparticles in, which means they don't have to be washed, so that's good for the electronics. But the problem is, all the old people they've given them to

said they would just wash them anyway. That's the hard thing to get around, isn't it? There will be, just while we're on the smart clothes thing, there will, perhaps one day soon, be underpants that you can use to control your home. This is really cool. This is not too far away. Don't you mean turning lights off and stuff?

I was once lying in bed, and I rolled up one of my socks, and threw it at a light switch and turned the lights off. My wife is not nearly as impressed as you guys. James has been trying to get the story into the podcast for five years. It is very impressive, a rolled up sock. And you were on the other side of the room. It wasn't like it was here.

Your socks must be rock hard. If only you had microchips in your socks to tell you, please wash me. So you won't be able to get underpants that control your home. I'm determined to tell you about this. It's basically more putting sensors in clothes. So you will have sensors which measure your heart rate, temperature, your body temperature,

or the temperature of your body inside your pants. The pressure, the hydration. What do you need that for? Well, here we go. So you could connect your thermostat in your house. You could link it up with your body temperature. And when you're at home, it could notice, oh, Dad's feeling...

Pants are a bit hot. I'll turn the heating down a little bit. And then you could think it's fair that we all have to live in a permanently cold house because Dad's got a hot clutch. Very clean. You know, you can buy a machine that folds your clothes for you. Well, there's... It was a Kickstarter, I think. It's called the Foldymate.

And I was watching a video. It says it's a massive machine. It's about as big as a person. It's not the size of a fridge. So I don't know where you're going to put it. Next to your fridge? Next to the fridge? You don't want to confuse them, though. No, it's true. Oh, no, it's Folder the Pasta.

No, I've eaten my pants. And that's how Fusilli was invented. Um, no, so you... I was watching a video of them doing it and then trying to advertise it like it's an unbelievably convenient thing. But you have to put your clothes in one by one and you have to attach them to these clips and you have to lay them down quite flat, like perfectly flat,

and then exactly the right arrangement for it to suck it in and then spend about 10 seconds folding it up and spit it out and then do the next one. So it probably quadruples the time it takes for your clothes to lay down. I've heard about this is actually quite an old invention. I think it's from 2006. And I don't think it's taken off, but it's a cool idea. It's a shirt that was designed by Australia's Commonwealth

Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. The idea is that the shirt has fibro-sensors inside it that means that it goes to a wireless transmitter when they're activated and what it's designed for is people who love to play air guitar. So as soon as an air guitar player goes in strums, there can be a brown noise. Surely that'll happen every time they make this movement. Yes.

And I'm not saying there's any particular times when you might be able to do that, but there might be some where you don't want to hear a big thro... Dan's been in his room a long time playing the guitar. Why is it so cold in there? So that exists. Well, this is slightly different, but Ford, I don't think we've mentioned this before. Ford, the car firm, has a robot bottom called the robot

and it's to test seats and cars and it mimics the action of a person getting into a car and they've just had a recent innovation in which is now the robot sweats. So because a car seats, you know, they have to last years and years and years, so it can get in and out of a car, the robot, 25,000 times in a few weeks and it bounces around and it sweats. And this is really good because it simulates a decade's use of the car, presumably by a naked, sweating person, just really to test it to the structure.

That's the thing, that's the very specific niche of driver that they're appealing to. My underpants and trousers are designed to stop any sweat from leaving them to get to a seat. They're the barriers, right? Well, not all of us have such high tech clothes. Some of my trousers have holes in the buttocks. It's stress sweat that comes out of your buttocks, isn't it? Well, we only relate two different types of sweat. One of them is, oh no, it's not stress sweat, sorry.

Anti-crime sweat is stress sweat and that comes out of your armpits. Yeah, the buttock sweat is fine. Well, I'm glad we cleared that one up. So this is on sweat and body of this fact. And we do have these two different kinds of sweat, so acrine or acrine is the one you get on, basically the one that's not your armpits and your crotch. And that actually comes from your blood.

So when your hands start sweating, for instance, they're actually bleeding in a way. It comes from blood plasma. And that's why it tastes quite salty, is because it's the electrolytes or the minerals and stuff in your blood. That's why porcupines are coming over and licking me the whole time. Absolutely. We need to move on to our next fact pretty soon. Yeah, I know it.

Cats and dogs have sweat on their paws, so they can get better traction on the floor. Is that why? Because you think it would make you slippy, wouldn't you? It increases the friction. If it's just a sticky level, you don't want kind of gushing, I don't think. There's something really wrong with my cat. Spraying water out of all four paws.

I also find it so weird that the smelly sweat, the bits that you excrete it from are your armpits and your groin, which kind of we know, and then the other two bits are your eyelids and your ear canal. So if you've got really spanking eyelids, then apply some dove. It'll be fine. Just on smells, I read that, since fact was about the smell, there was an anthropologist who was called Louis Leakey.

He was a very famous anthropologist. He was responsible for bringing people like Jane Goodall into research and making her name die in Fosse as well. He has a theory, or had a theory, which claimed that we survived as humans largely because of our body odor. We were too smelly to eat. He thinks that people or other animals would want to kill us at the time, you know, Neanderthals, but they'd go,

oh, jeez, mate, and then just not go near us. That's why we're here. Where's Neanderthals? They had those amazing clothes, didn't they? Those Neanderthals that would tell you when you were sweating. That's why I think that if we managed to get rid of the smell thing, then surely we're losing one of our weapons against being killed. Yes, suddenly the whole animal kingdom will be around us.

The only slight flaw is that quite a lot of deadly animals live in Asia, and a lot of people in Asia don't smell at all. So most Koreans, for instance, don't have their gene that makes their sweat smell at all, do they? So how have they avoided all the lions over the ages? It's time to move on, Dan. Okay, we need to move on to our next fact. Time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the best astrophysicist in the world

just failed to save New York from a fake asteroid. It's pretty scary stuff. This is a genuine simulation that a whole bunch of astrophysicists from all over the world do, and it happened a few weeks ago, it happens at a conference, so it's a conference called the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defense Conference, and every year they have this gathering where they're set a task where an asteroid is coming to the Earth and they have to work out how to deflect it, and they buggered it up and New York was destroyed. So it lasts for five days, but in the simulation, that's years and years,

so this year, a few weeks ago, they got this alert, a fake press release was sent out saying that a 100 to 300 meter wide asteroid had been detected out of 1% chance of striking the planet in 2027, and then as the days went by, they keep on getting updates saying, okay, it's now 100% chance, we're all going to die, sorted out, and what they eventually managed to do was nudge it off course, so I think it was going to hit Denver, and they nudged it off course, and it struck New York, and everybody knew.

Do you know one way that this is better than nuking an asteroid? This is one theory that if there's an asteroid on its way, we could do. Sorry, what's better than that? Well, this idea that I was about to send you. Oh, great. Yeah. I sent the census... It's a weird way of...

Look, come on, stop again. Basically, if an asteroid's on its way, one planet is to nudge it out of the way, one planet is to blow it up, but the best plan maybe is to just paint it on one side. Okay. So that would change the thermal properties of the asteroid, and it would mean that it moved in a different trajectory. And how do you suggest that we paint this asteroid? Well, the UN's Space Advisory Council ran a competition,

a move-in asteroid competition, and it awarded the first prize to an idea to make a giant paintball gun. Even if I was at the asteroid. That's amazing. You know the movie Armageddon? Yeah. So there's been some research recently done by some scientists where they did a simulation to see how well that would have worked if Bruce Willis had actually nuked it

like he does in the movie and it splits apart. And what they discovered in the simulation was that it would break apart like it does in the movie. Unfortunately, the gravity is so great that it would just be pulled back together as one solid asteroid and just wipe us out. That's how the movie should have ended. And this is a new discovery, isn't it? Yeah. Because last year when they ran the simulation,

and this really is the top people that NASA and all these other organizations have, last year when they ran it, they did save Tokyo from the asteroid by doing a nuclear explosion which blew it apart. But since then, yeah, they just go, well, they'll just suck themselves back together and keep coming at us. So there are all sorts of other weird ways of diverting asteroids. So I really like the mass driver way, which basically is the idea that it's quite slow working,

so you need to know that the asteroid was going to hit you in about 100 years' time. Oh, great. Yeah. You've got to pass the knowledge onto your grandchildren. But the idea basically is that you get onto the surface of the asteroid, you get some landing objects onto it, and they pick up rocks from the asteroid and they just throw them at the Earth,

and the motion of that pushes the asteroid away from the Earth. So it's kind of like, imagine if you're sitting on a swing, I guess, and you've got a tennis ball, and then if you throw the tennis ball away, you'll kind of go backwards on the swing, right? It's the opposite, even opposite reaction force. So if enough bits of rock are thrown at the Earth and the asteroid, it'll sort of slow it down.

But then if too many are thrown at us, then we die anyway from the things you've thrown at us. Yeah, you have to make sure they're not too big, those bits of rock. Yeah. Wow. And you need 100 years. You do need 100 years, yes.

I think previously, Dan said that the warning we would have is about one second. Well, you've not said that, but it's not true. Well, we know about loads. This is a really cool thing. So NASA currently knows about 795,000 asteroids. So can I just say, like, for instance, the Chelybinsk meteor, we didn't know about that at all until it landed.

So it might be that we have no seconds. Yeah. So I was wrong by one second. But this is an amazing thing. The problem is, it's really hard to keep track of them once you've spotted them. So scientists have lost more than 900 near-Earth asteroids. As in they were spotted once. We thought, oh, that's a bit worrying.

And then we don't know where they've gone. Wow, really? Yeah. So we saw them once. And because sometimes it takes 20 hours to confirm that what you're seeing is right. Sometimes the weather is bad, so you can't see it again from a ground-based observatory. So you just sort of say, oh, well, there.

See ya. Thing is crossed. Don't come back. We're going to have to move on to our final thanks, Jordan. Some things killed by asteroids might have been the dinosaurs. Okay. Again, I didn't really say that sentence very well, but I've been called the points for that.

Yeah. But there is one guy who doesn't think that. There's a guy called Professor Brian J. Ford, and he thinks that the dinosaurs actually died out because of a lack of sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes.

Dan, how's your crotch feeling? Getting any hotter? What is sex lake? It's exactly what it sounds like. Cool. So his theory is that because dinosaurs were so big, they wouldn't be able to have sex because they would just crush each other. And so the only way they could do it is by using the lakes to be buoyant in it.

Do you know what I mean? They normally have sex with lakes. Yeah. And he says that as the continents drifted, there were loads of shallow, there used to be loads of shallow lakes, and there weren't shallow lakes anymore, which is true. And so he thinks because of those lack of shallow lakes, all the dinosaurs died out.

I'm sure this would mean that all the fossils we find would be crushed dinosaurs underneath their crushing mate. Yeah, you're right. That's true. It's just a fairy. It's a great fairy. I love it. One thing about asteroid names.

Oh yeah. So asteroids, they used to be the near-Earth objects, and most of which are asteroids, had to be named after mythical creatures, but there have been loads and loads found since that was decided, I think, about 50 years ago. So it also used to be that they had to be named after things from mythology, but they couldn't have creation or underworld themes,

because there was other bits of space. So you have to really do your research into your mythical creature. Anyway, so these rules were kind of loosened because there are like tens of thousands of them that have names now. So I was looking at the massive list of asteroid names, and you have these really grand ones like Pallas and Juno and Achilles, and then you have Bill Smith and Sarah Jenkins, Donna Anderson, Brandy Peterson,

and I was looking for our names in them. So there are a lot of Annas. So there's an Anna, just Anna on her own, and then, like, you know, Anna walks it. That's the one that's going to get us, isn't it? fingers crossed, I'm waiting for her. There's also a James on his own, and a Daniel on his own, but there is no Andrew or Andy.

Great, thanks a lot. So, I think the next asteroid name, you should claim it. Or we can name a sex lake after you. Yes. That's how I'd like to be remembered. Time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that until the 1840s, there was no maximum size for a rugby team.

So, matches were sometimes played with up to 300 players on the bench at the same time. So was that 150 against 150, or 299 against 1? Yeah, but he's very good. We do have an example of it. So, the game of rugby was said to have been invented in a school called Rugby, hence where I get the saying from, in 1823.

There was a match played in 1839, where Rugby School House had 75 players, so that was their team, and they played a team that was called The Rest, and that was 225 people. That's amazing. Do we know anyone? I don't actually know who won, I couldn't find out.

I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but yeah. And it was obviously, it was a very chaotic game, as you can imagine. They hadn't really got any rules to begin with. Rules slowly kind of changed. It seems to be like basically a load of guys in a field just trying to get the ball from one end to the other, but with no rules, right?

It's just basically one big scrub. Strangling and throttling were outlawed in 1862. That's when I went right off the game. That's just health and safety gone mad in the end, isn't it? But this is, yeah, because these go back hundreds of years, don't they? It all comes from games which were called Folk Football. So there's one that's still played in England,

in Derbyshire, in Ashburn, where you keep playing until you score a goal, or until 10pm, whichever comes sooner, you just knock off. Because people would die quite often, and there are lots of records of people dying playing Rugby, partly because people used to carry knives in sheaths on their belts.

And so you might just run into someone else's knife by mistake. That happened. That's a foul. But this is the other thing. The game of rugby is problematic, because it lets people take revenge on each other, because there are no rules. So if you've got a village of people basically having a big fight, you could just say, oh, yeah, he ran under my knife.

Where is this? This is sort of 14th, 15th centuries. So this is the four proper rugby. Because there is one corner. I wonder if this is what you're talking about. Calcio Storico? Well, that's a very similar game. Yeah, yeah, I mean that, like what Andy's saying, it's a rugby game, but the idea is to play rugby,

but also just kick each other's ass really badly. You're allowed to punch, kick, headbutt, elbow, choking is permitted, there's no gloves allowed, to soften the punch. And the amazing thing, there would be deaths, and they would just carry on and so on. Because if the game was going a bit too slow, and they wanted the fans to sort of have a bit more

of a fast experience and get the game done, they'd just let some balls come in. Somebody just ran the balls, running around, attacking humans. I mean, it sounds incredible. Yeah, that's Italy, isn't it? Yes. Calcio, yeah. This presumably was recently.

No, no, this happens now. Yeah. You're allowed to do everything except kick people in the head. Yeah, and who's telling the balls not to do it? Well, even in rugby, kicking used to be, shin kicking specifically, used to be a massively part of the game. So this is one of the biggest controversies rugby ever saw,

was when they were drawing out the rules, it was like in the 1870s, and hacking was really part of rugby, which was basically really, really vigorously kicking someone else's shins. And some people wanted to outlaw it, and some people said, that's going to ruin the game, it's part of it.

But it was the case that like after a squammer broken up, everyone else had led the board to the other end of the pitch. They still have apparently, just you'd have two players left over, kicking each other in the shin really hard, at the other end of the pitch. So then people used to wear sharpened boots with spikes on them to really get that shin kick

as good as it can be. Wow, yeah. And then they would wear white trousers to show off the blood. This was a mark of, this is the English school system, and it's best, basically. Although actually, so,

and then rugby moved to France, and to other countries. And in the late 19th century in France, once we did have rules, rugby wasn't seen not so much as a team game, but more of an individual game. There was still a team, but you were trying to see how well you could do yourself.

And so it was like one athlete against the group, and you were trying to get around them. So basically players were reluctant to get dirty, reluctant to find themselves on the ground, and they thought it was less glamorous to get involved in scrums. And this only was challenged when France played England in 1906,

and found out that the English would not play by those rules at all. Actually, one of the objections to getting rid of the shin kicking was, I read, and look, I don't know what this means, and just don't shoot the messenger, but it, so this is hacking when it was going to be banned,

and the secretary of Black Heath FC said, we can't ban the practice of kicking each other in the shins, because it will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and bring over a lot of Frenchmen. One. You really, really know your audience so well. And so when it took off,

they eventually, and I think this was the 1870s give or take, Hull Football Club said, okay fine, we'll stop each other kicking in the shins with sharpened boots, but you're still allowed to trip up the man who's running. That was just a nice little innovation they thought they'd throw in.

Nice. Yeah. Oh, you know that rugby balls could kill you as well, could they? Yeah, but not the way you would think. Oh, I didn't have a thought in my head. Okay, so like they hit you in the head so hard that you died.

Brilliant, that's not the way that you would think. Good, okay, it's not that way. So rugby balls, the first person to make a uniform oval rugby ball was a guy called Richard Lindon, and his wife actually was involved in the manufacturing too, so what it was was you would have a pig's bladder,

and you had to blow that up and then surround it in leather. That's just how you made the ball. But Lindon's wife, Rebecca, was the one who did the actual blowing up, and she contracted a lung disease and she died from it because there was an unexpectedly,

you know, there was an infected bladder, and she had had 17 children for him as well, by him, you know, this is a very sad story. And so that determined him to make a rubber bladder. It basically prompted the innovation of... And he also invented the modern pump. Yes. He saw an ear syringe and he thought,

well, I could take that from an ear and put it to a football and then... Yeah, play to the ear. But who was looking after all those kids? Well, he was inventing these silly rugby ball-based things. That's my question. Look, I've read about rugby does not relate. Probably should do.

Just a tiny little nugget about how influential this little rugby school in England has been on global sporting. Outside of inventing rugby itself, there was a student there who was from Australia called Thomas Wills. He went back to Australia and he invented Aussie rules, which back in Australia is a huge sport.

It's not on global. In fact, they have... Australia have an all-star Aussie rules team that they announce every year, but because no one is good enough to play them, they've never played a match. So we've got this, like, super group who just get announced and they meet up,

but that's it. They should play the rest. Yeah. That's such a good point. So, rugby's known for having really hardcore players playing it, I guess, and I think... So, my favourite story here is Wayne Shelford, who was quite famous for being particularly hardcore.

He was captain of the All Blacks in the 80s. And he and one of his fan-in, or maybe that's him, I don't know, sounded like him based on what I'm about to tell you. This isn't going anywhere. So, he has come to the All Blacks very hard, but in one of his very first games, he was super young, a French...

he was playing France and a French boot ripped open his scrotum and left a testicle hanging free. Hanging free. Hanging free. He also had four teeth knocked out in the same incident, but he didn't want to leave the pitch. Anyone else has just been sucked up like a porcupine.

Also, that's a hell of a kick that gets your testicles out of your teeth. Unless they're kick-topped with such force, if they come into your manhood. I'm telling you, his testicles were that long. But he only just said in the video, quick sew it up, sew it up, sew it up right there and then, and he kept on playing.

What? Until, in fact, he was not unconscious later on. We're going to have to wrap up shortly. We're going to have to stitch the testicle and the podcast back into the scrotum of the microphone box. I thought that metaphor was never going to end. Anything else before we wrap up?

I just have my favourite rugby story, aside from the testicle ripping, maybe, is the story of the Dorchester Gladiators. I don't know if you know this one, so the Dorchester Gladiators were a team in the year 2000 and they were an amateur, over 40s, very unfit rugby team who just played amateur games for fun.

Then they thought they'd go to Romania for a big booze up and play some rugby over there. They were giving some toys to an orphanage, actually, to be fair. Anyway, they were in Romania and the Romanians got wind that there was a rugby team there and they were invited to play a game. They were more like playing a game

with the local Romanians in the local park. There had been some sort of mistranslation and so Romania thought that they were basically a national level team. And so when they turned up, they realised it was in their national stadium, it was being broadcast on television. There were thousands of spectators there

and they were playing against the Romanian national team. They did say, we did get a bit suspicious when they offered us a training session night before and we refused to do that as we do our pre-match, warm up in the bar. But I think before the match, the Romanians were all training and the Brits were looking at them and smoking on the sidelines.

The Romanians took pity and only beat them 60, 17 out of sympathy in the end. OK, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for that. APPLAUSE Thank you for coming back today. Thank you very much about the things that we have said

and what we have done so far. We appreciate it on our tour. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. APPLAUSE