No Such Thing As A Fish - 294: No Such Thing As A 15-Hour Working Week

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss hand-drawn stockings, raccoon-damaged temples, and the doomsday aircraft destroyed by a single bird. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi, everyone. Before we start this week's show, we want to tell you about the winners of this year's prestigious Heinz Oberhommer Award for Science Communication. That's exciting. Okay, who got it? Us! No! Yes! That is amazing. It's so cool. And what it means is that we get to go to Vienna, and we're going to record a podcast there, and it's going to be our 300th episode. And guess what? You can get tickets. That was the hammiest piece of acting I've ever seen at the start, by the way, guys. So that is indeed correct. If you are listening from Vienna or Austria, or if you fancy a trip

there on the 25th of November, then go to knowsuchthingasafish.com, and you'll see the link there to get tickets and see us perform our 300th episode. Is this an award I see before me? Oh, God. Oh, that was good. Now, pipe down on with the show. Who's not ready? I'm not ready, but carry on.

James is not ready. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Know Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Czazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Is it really? I thought it was one of you guys first. My fact this week is that the US Navy's Doomsday aircraft, which was designed to survive a

nuclear attack, was recently taken out by a single bird. OK, this was in the news. A few people might have seen it. The US Navy called it a class A mishap. That feels like something that would be in a PG Woodhouse novel. I tell you what, James, this is a class A mishap we've just had. It was the E6B Mercury. It's a Boeing 707, which supposedly if there is a nuclear bomb that goes off nearby, it's supposed to be OK. But actually, a bird got into its engine and it had to make an emergency stop. The engine had to be replaced and it cost them

about $2 million. Wow, that is a class A mishap. And so I was really curious about this plane because it's like the less fancy but tougher brother of Air Force One, basically. Yeah, although Air Force One is anything that the president's on, of course. But the particular Air Force One that we know about, yeah, it's a souped up version of this one. It's all nuclear command centers as opposed to nice beds and desks and cool press rooms and things like that. But I wonder, because I read this, I couldn't believe that it could survive a nuclear attack. And they say it can survive a nuclear attack. But I just wonder

how close it can be to a nuclear attack because if you dropped a nuclear bomb on it, it would blow up. Yeah, in many ways, you know, most of the people in the world could survive a nuclear attack depending on where the bomb is dropped. If a bomb is dropped on Australia, I reckon I'll be OK. They said they've got all sorts of, I read they had mesh to prevent radiation and other things. And also it's strong enough to survive the pulses of electromagnetic energy that come

from a nuclear bomb, presumably like you say, not if it lands on the nose. I do see what you mean by that. Maybe it's because it can only fly, I believe, for about 10 hours, 10 hours worth of fuel. So maybe it has to make a landing in an area that's been recently bombed and all this meshing and stuff means that you would survive on the inside and not be turned into radioactive spider. I lost my thread at the end there. You couldn't tell.

They are very cool. Yeah. Do we know what kind of bird it was? Was it at least a big bird? We don't know what kind of, it wasn't Big Bird from Sesame Street, if that's what you're thinking. Thank God. Famously can't fly.

We don't know what kind of bird it is, although they have lots of labs in America who can find this kind of thing out. They like to scrape bits of bird off aeroplanes, don't they, and work out what's. Yeah. Using the DNA, they'll do it. And you just send in, there's a thing called, if you have a bird strike on your planet, it's called snarge. Snarge.

So there's, yeah, that's right. And I wanted to know where this word came from. Did anyone find out? No. Okay. As far as I can see, it comes from the Smithsonian Institution's feather identification laboratory. And I think just the lab scientists have just called it snarge, and it feels like it might be an acronym or something, but I don't really know.

And when they first came up with it, one of the other words of phrases they used was bird-ick. Snarge is quite on a matter-pick. I don't imagine they just sort of thought, all this sound sort of tells you that it's gooey and. Bird gooey. Yeah. Maybe.

Snarge. Yeah. Snarge. And in this lab, they will test things and work out exactly what will happen when any bird hits any aircraft, and they have invented the bird avoidance model, or bam! Nice. Very cool. This isn't the only bird strike that hit a military plane this year with scary consequences.

Yeah, so earlier this year, an Air Force A-10 was flying through America over Florida, and it got hit by a bird as well, hit the engine. But as a result of being hit by the bird, something in the plane malfunctioned, and it ended up dropping three dummy rounds, basically three massive bombs, but they weren't charged over Florida, and landed in Florida, and I mean, it was just so lucky that they were fake bombs, because otherwise America would have just bombed its citizens. And then I read that story, and I think if you'd have gone up to it and started prodding it with a stick, you could have got injured.

Yes. There's one people not to go near it, right? Exactly. They were still slightly charged. Yeah, they're like, this is completely harmless, it's just a dummy bomb, but also please do not handle it under any circumstances. And I don't know if they've found them, so if you are in Florida, and you see, I think they're about 25 pounds, so they're quite, they're not huge, but you know, it's a spot

one. They've said where it is, roughly, they said that in the general vicinity of two kilometers west of Highway 129, at a particular location. But that's quite a big margin of error, I would say. Can we just say one more thing about these weird planes? So they're called the National Airborne Operations Centers, and these are the ones, I don't know if you guys remember, but we spoke, I mentioned them a while ago, and you guys did not believe the fact that I said, but these are the ones which have antennas, which are five miles

long. Oh, yes. Can you check that? Yeah. Like a long kite string, basically. It's like a tail. It's like the plane's tail. Except planes already have tails.

So... It's like a second tail. It's like a second tail. Yeah. And it's so it can communicate with submarines underwater. Because they need extremely long waves. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So the point of the plane is that they tie everything together. So they tie together the bombers, which have got nuclear weapons on them, they tie together the submarines, which have got nuclear warheads, and the ballistic missiles in their silos. They can communicate with all of those and basically coordinate a nuclear attack if America wants to make one. Yeah. Or if it's been attacked and they want to retaliate. What's amazing about these planes is that they have a crew basically on standby waiting

for doomsday. They're just there maintaining the plane while the other three are getting prepared for their next round. So they sort of swap spots as the ready plane. So you come on your new shift and you go, all right, Jeff, was it doomsday on your shift? Yeah. No, it wasn't doomsday on my shift. All right.

Yeah. See you in eight hours. One day. Yeah. Bird strikes, though, kind of a big problem or a big thing that, you know, aircraft designers have to address. And the first bird strike is cited as being Wilbur Wright of Wright Brothers fame. No way.

Yeah. And it was in 1905 and it really raises my problem with the term bird strike because it always gives too much agency to the birds. And so in this case, it was 1905, so it was only a couple of years after the first ever powered flight. And Wilbur Wright was poodling about in his plane and he wrote in his diary, I twice passed over the fences into this bloke's cornfield and I chased flocks of birds on two rounds and I managed to kill one in his engine, which then fell on top of the surface of the wing

and fell off when he did a sharp curve. So basically he chased and harassed lots of birds until he smashed into one and then he dumped it off his wing and that's not a bird striking you. No, it's a plane strike. It's a plane strike. Yeah. It should be called. Do you?

But then what if anything else hits the plane? It should be called bird receipt. Well, have you heard about the other kind of receipts that they have? They have frog receipts. They have turtle receipts. They have snake receipts. What? How high are those frogs jumping?

It's amazing, right? So according to these people who work at Smithsonian, they get, because things get carried up by the jet stream, often animals other than birds get hit by these planes and they quite recently got a rabbit that got hit by a plane. No. Yeah. So rabbit receipt. What?

Sorry. How does the rabbit get into the air? It's pulled up by the jet stream. By the jet stream. By, you know, a tornado or... It's going to be quite rare. It sounds unlikely, doesn't it, but this was actually in a Smithsonian. You guys believe this and you don't believe a plane could have a long antenna.

I'm just trying to explore this a bit. I think a lot of the animal sucks because they are not called bird strike actually by people in aviation. They're called animal sucks. They're not called animal sucks. They should be. They're called wildlife strikes because of the variety. But the other ones who aren't birds seem to be mostly on runways.

So in Florida, they have a bit of a crocodile problem where I think one crocodile did actually jump up and hit the wing of a plane. Don't think crocodiles can jump. They can jump. They can jump. It flipped itself up to the level of the plane, apparently. Wow. This is the thing that happens in Florida occasionally.

I mean, there was one, I know what you're saying, often on there, but this person who works at the Smithsonian Institution Feather Identification Laboratory said that they had a cat that was hit at high altitude. Wow. What? Such a shame. Only eight lives left for that portrait. Could have been on the back of a broomstick.

Could have been. Who knows? Who knows how it got there? On the early airstrikes thing, have you seen this amazing portrait of Eugene Gilbert, who was a French pilot? In 1911, he was flying from Paris to Madrid, so very early, exciting air race, and he was flying over the Pyrenees Mountains, and he got tangled up with an eagle that was a mother eagle which flew down and attacked him, basically, because she was very protective of her area,

and he started firing his pistol at it from inside the cockpit of this, what must have been a biplane, I think, not to wound, just to scare it off. Should have thrown a cat at it. But someone has painted a portrait of this happening, and it's an incredibly epic picture. Wow. That's amazing. We should say it's really, really rare as well. So I think the amazing stat is that since 1912, there have been 250 deaths from bird

strikes due to all flights ever, so it's incredibly unlikely, but obviously still it's quite important to avoid them, and the testing, have we mentioned the chicken gun before? I don't think we have. No. We are. Wow. There used to be experiments on plane engines in the testing phase where you would fire a bird from a gas cannon into the engine and see what happened, basically, and they've

now replaced it, boo, with a block of gelatin, which is the same density as, for example. Chicken's a bad example because they're flight lists, they're probably not going to end up in the engines, but as a goose. Easy to get though. Easy to pick up. Very true. And they used to put frozen ones in, didn't they, because, and one theory was that, well, there are a few reasons you might do that.

One might be because a frozen one would be basically as hard as a bird can be. You're not going to get a harder bird than a frozen chicken. But you might as well then just do it with a rock. You might as well. What is your frozen chicken? Well, one other reason is because they thought that if a bird was flying in and it was about to get hit, it might tense all of its muscles because it thought it was going to get hit, and that would be similar to a frozen chicken.

I believe that. That's exactly what you would do, isn't it? That's what I would do. Yeah. It is a stressful situation to be in. Yeah. You wouldn't relax and go floppy. Even if you knew that was what you're supposed to do to increase your chances of survival.

Apparently, these days, most of the testing is by computer simulation. That makes more sense. It does make more sense, but for me, it's not good enough. No. No, I want to be flying in a plane that's had a check-in fight at it. Do you know what it is that kills the plane? I would have thought it hits the engine, and then it snarges all up, and then it can't spin round.

It gets really hot and it sets on fire. Interesting. Can I just quickly say excellent use of snarge? I don't think snarge is a verb. Is it that? I don't think it's any kind of word. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Fair enough. Does it accidentally make one blade smash into another blade, and then that causes all the ... Basically, it bends one blade in the engine. What they're trying to do when they throw the chickens at it is make sure that the blades can withstand the chicken blow without bending, because as soon as one bends, then the engine stalls. The worst thing that can happen is if it hits, or if something hits one of the fan blades

in the engine, or if there's just a bit of wear and tear and they snap, which does happen every few years, and that's the main plane hazard that they're trying to test against, because if one fan blade snaps, then it turns into kind of shrapnel, so it's spinning around really, really fast. It's inside the engine, turns into shrapnel, then it flies through the engine, so it breaks the whole engine down. They have to do these ... Like most of the money goes into doing these crazy tests where they have these fans, so like picture sort of a ceiling fan, and each blade ...

Come on, Andy. You just remember last week's podcast at the Moulin Rouge. Yeah. You're not a plane spotter, you're just a plane fan spotter. Each blade costs about the same as like a luxury car, about 50 grand, so each fan is worth about $9 million, because they're really special shapes. They have to be an incredibly special light, but strong material, and then they have to throw stuff at them or explode them to see if they can still function with them exploded.

I've got a couple of land-based bird strikes, non-plane related, so do you know the Le Mans, the car race? I do. The town of Le Mans is twinned with Bolton. Is it? Yeah. That's cool. So, 1953, the winner was a guy called Duncan Hamilton, I believe his name was, and Duncan

Hamilton won it despite being absolutely pissed off his face. He was so drunk. He and his buddy had done a practice circuit before the race, and this is a bit confusing, but they had the same plates as another car that was on there, which apparently is illegal, and so they got disqualified from the race, so they thought, well, we're on holiday, let's just go to the bar. Got absolutely tanked, and then the guy who was the manager of the Jaguar team, who they raced for, called Lofty England ...

Wow. He took me the head of the Brexit party. He persuaded the organizers to let them both race, but they were completely smashed, but they did it anyway, and in between the pit stops, they were desperately trying to sober up Hamilton with coffee, so it sort of changed your wheels and give you a drink, and this is a 24-hour race, it's one of the most long, hard-enduring races, but halfway through the race, or not halfway, but along the race, a bird flew into his face at 130 miles an hour, but they think, because he was so wasted, he kind of shrugged off the pain of it and

managed to continue, and won. They won the race, despite being smashed in the face. That would take your face off. I know, right? It depends on the bird. If it was a wreck. Yeah. If it was an albatross.

Yeah. Big trouble. Well, I mean, there was a thing, Fabio, who is ... Who's Fabio? Fabio is a male model. He appears on romance books. He was in the ... I can't believe it's not butter ads. It's weird that you expected us to know that, but if I'd had to guess, I would have said

he was a male model. He's the male model. He's on, I think, something like 200 romance novels. Yeah. He looks like Conan the Barbarian, and he's got this huge, flowing blonde look. Huge, mane, the most beautiful ... Guys, guys, calm down. We know who you're talking about now.

He's a handsome guy. Yeah. He was known as the most beautiful man in the world. Anyway, he was opening a roller coaster, and so he was on the ride. He was going 73 miles an hour down the first drop when a 10-pound goose flew into his face. Oh, my God. I'd love it if the photo went off just at that moment. Oh, wow.

I mean, that's ... But there are photos of him, not of him being hit, but of him coming back in. Just spitting feathers out of his mouth. Yeah. His entire face is bloodied. He was on the roller coaster ride with a load of models and things like this, because it was a big PR launch of this roller coaster, and you just see the carriage coming back in.

The models all look traumatised. He's covered in blood. He's got a broken nose. Yeah. Do you not think it might have been a jealous fellow model who's just taken a goose out of the roller coaster? Well, his looks were in forever. No, of course not.

You guys. Ruin Fabio's looks. Beautiful man in the world. They were actually improved by the goose. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that when nylon stockings became rationed during World War II, department stores set up leg makeup bars where women could have stockings drawn onto their legs instead.

Very cool. Yeah, they would just go to the shop, and they would take hours at a time, and they would draw the hemline at the back of their leg, and they would put powders and so on. Would they paint the leg to look a slightly different colour, and then draw the line? Yeah. Like an old cup of tea for a little while until it stains. The leg is a big cup of tea. That's a nice idea.

You could put everyone in a jacuzzi, just sitting around the edges. Yeah. And then everyone could have a cup and just take some of the tea out. That would be lovely. Well, they did used to do it with gravy, I think, didn't they? And with coffee. Yeah. Because I think we, so it's sort of like women used to just paint the lines up themselves,

I think. Yes. They would have the salons specifically to do it for the wealthier. I suppose you don't get a wobbly line. But yeah, if you were doing it at home, you'd dip your leg in a sort of vat of gravy, or cocoa powder was another substitute. Amazing, considering a time of extreme rationing and deprivation that people just have vats of gravy lying around solely for their legs.

I know. Well, they had their priorities straight. I don't know. In those days, you probably would have to reuse the gravy, no? I'm sure you would. Yeah. Yeah. It's just make-up for the legs, isn't it?

Yeah. I'm not drawn with that. Nothing wrong with it. Make-up is just drawing another face on your face. So why not draw another leg on your leg? Exactly. It's brilliant. And it's because people were obsessed with nylon.

Yeah. I mean, it's so bizarre, the nylon craze, because basically, I think it was invented in about 35, and it owned all 34, and it only became commercially available in 37 or 38. And by the time the war hit, people were obsessed with it to the extent that as soon as it started being rationed, because it was needed for various wartime instruments, they went nuts, and they were desperate to show that they still sort of had nylon. There was this big black market where nylon went for sort of the equivalent of about $500 today.

You'd get a pair of nylon tights. Whoa. For just one? Yeah. Yeah. Did they get people like trying to steal your tights off you because they're so expensive, like an iPhone? Oh, probably.

It was so hard to steal tights because they are quite well adhered to the legs, aren't they? And you could be pulling them, pulling it. It turns out it's just gravy. But I think it's quite harsh, because like you said, it's a little bit of a shame. It's quite harsh, because like you say, everyone loved them. It was like the most amazing thing of its day. And like you say, everyone got it for a few years, and then it was taken away because of

the war. It's like as if we all had iPhones, and then they go after three years, you can't have iPhones anymore. Yeah. That would be harsh. It would. The world might be a better place. The first day of sales nationally in America was the 16th of May, 1940.

So the rest of the world was at war. America hadn't quite decided yet. The statistics vary, but some people say that four million pairs were sold in four days. That was true mania. But this is a bit like Telly, I think. Didn't Britain just get TV? And then the war happened, and they said, well, we're not going to do TV anymore for the next six years.

And then it started again in the late 40s and early 50s. It was none of those inventions which had been existing, but it was just backburner for the war. Yeah. And then post-war, when they were available again, there were nylon riots. Because they didn't have enough stock for the amount of people who wanted and were obsessed with them and had been waiting for them to come back. So in Pittsburgh, they had 40,000 people lining up over a mile, even though there was only

13,000 pairs available. So you can imagine the chaos when those shops opened the doors. Yeah. Police would have to be deployed quite a lot, I think. This was sort of 45 and 46. I think DuPont, the main company that made the tights or the stockings, they said they would make 360 million pairs as soon as the war ended within a year, and they could not live up to that at all.

People went nuts, got really excited. So there was, yeah, the 16 block queue where people started fighting. In Georgia, there were fist fights, and police had to be called to break them up. There was a mob in Chicago of 1,200 women who were outside a dress shop just bashing on the windows. Again, police had to be called. They weren't mad. They weren't hysterical.

I don't want to be stereotyping here, but they lost their shit, though. People were scared of nylon, partly because it had this weird process by which it was made. It was full of acid and stuff, and partly because there was just this huge ferrari about it, so there's a backlash. All these rumours went around about what it could do, so people thought it would give you cancer of the legs. They thought it mounted in hot water.

I don't know why you'd go in hot water wearing tights, but it was that. They feel like snakes when wet. People thought they were made from corpses because there was a thing called cadaverine which was gathered from corpses to make stuff, but they weren't. It was a rumour. Wait, so cadaverine didn't exist? I think it did exist. It was a chemical that you could get from rotting cadavers that comes from rotting cadavers.

I think that's a word that people used for human snarge, basically. The thing with this is it was a very smelly process. The industrial process was really smelly, so when journalists went there, they smelled how bad it was. I think actually one newspaper did say that this happened in a newspaper article, and everyone believed it when obviously it was true. That's great. I think there was one other report in a paper of a woman who was standing at a bus stop,

and the bus went past, and the exhaust fumes of the bus stripped the nylon off her legs completely, and all these rumours that the nylon would just fall off your legs. It was like a bevy hillside. I think people thought they might burn, did you say? Yeah, melt. Melt or melting on it is hot. It's basically a plastic, is it? It's polymer, so it makes sense that it would just melt onto you.

It actually could a bit. If it was too humid, the air would be too damp, then it could start melting down your legs. There is a problem with nylon and health today, which is nylon tea bags. They started coming in about 12 or 13 years ago. I found articles from a time saying, hey, great new nylon tea bags. A number of these boring paper tea bags, and they're silky, and they feel nice. It turns out they're plastic, obviously. Plastic's bad for you.

Plastic's bad. Is that most of the ones that I would get down the shop, so they like that or not really? A normal packet of tea, I think those are all paper, except sometimes they're sealed with a tiny blob of gut. Got it. But some coffee shops sell them in, and they look kind of weird and different. You mean the posh ones, where you get something that's posh and it feels like a bit like silk? Really posh ones are made of silk.

Wow. But if you can't run to a silk bag, someone will fob you off with a nylon one. They've been studied, so every single silky plastic tea bag releases 11.6 billion microplastics. These are very, very, very small. Jesus. 3 billion nanoplastics, and those are extremely tiny. Small and still. Yeah, but they are bad, so a scientist tried feeding them to water fleas, which are little

tiny lobstery animals, and they became very stressed, and the exoskeleton swelled up. So it wasn't good for them. But it means that what you're saying is in your cup of tea of posh, but not that posh tea, then you're getting it into your body. Basically, I mean, they're going to find this in years to come out. It's going to be, you know, when the Romans had lead in the pipes, and they all went crazy, and everyone knew it was because of the lead in the pipes. That's what it's going to be.

We're just eating plastic all the time. Aren't the bristles on toothbrushes plastic? I mean, nylon as well. Do you think this is going to be the explanation for Brexit and Donald Trump and all of that? It's actually just like, you know how we've discovered that the Salem witch crisis was people say it's caused by the ergo from the dodgy bread. It's going to be that we were just eating micro plastics. That's it.

Okay. I'm so glad about that because I hate those teabags. They make awful tea. I don't think they're very permeable. They're not permeable enough. That's exactly correct. Yeah. So pretentious places serve them, and you don't even taste any tea.

I read an article that said that when they were trying to come up with the name for nylon, there were over 400 options for what they wanted to go for. Yeah, and there's a few that we know of. The one was Clis, K-L-I-S, which is silk backwards because this was, yeah, a knock-out product. It was like instead of silk, wasn't it? That's why it was so big. Exactly. Yeah.

This was like the cheap replacement, the affordable replacement. Neuron was one, which is actually no run. Because the tights don't run. Because the tights don't run. Yeah. And then there was Dupero, and it's a shame it wasn't called that. Dupero, D-U-P-A-R-W-O-H. I think it's more like Dupero.

Oh, Dupero. Yeah. Like Dupero, like Winnie the Pooh Dupero. Okay, cool. Yeah. Sorry for announcing that round. Super Dupero. Super Dupero.

Okay. So that was an acronym. It stood for Dupont pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Yes. And Dupont was the manufacturer. Yeah. Yeah. We should say why they banned it.

Because the reason it was so amazing was that it was another material which replaced silk, basically. When the war, America imported, I think it was 80% of all the silk made in the world was imported. And 90% of that was from Japan. So obviously, when the USA and Japan were at war, big problem. And nylon was this incredible wonder substance which really contributed to the USA winning the war because it made better parachutes than silk parachutes.

Silk parachutes got moldy, the heart to fold, nylon's way better. And it was used for ropes and fuel tanks and shoelaces and mosquito nets and hammers. So just anything you could think of in the field that was fabric-y, nylon was the thing. Yeah. You know. Yeah. When we were told to hand in their tights, weren't they? It was sort of a patriotic war effort.

Can you turn tights back into, let's say, a fuel tank? Yeah. I believe they could because they were asked to do an amnesty. And I think that one of the slogans was a Boeing super fortress lands on enough nylon to make 4,000 pairs of stockings. Wow. So it made the tires. Right.

But they did ask people to hand in their stockings. So I think you could turn it into a rope quite easily. Yeah, true. Or if you're in the SAS, you could pull it over your head for the disguise. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Cut a pair of eye holes.

Yeah. Or if you're marching into Paris, saving Paris, you could go in disguise in the Moulin Rouge. A lot of callbacks to the previous episode. It's obvious as if I literally just edited it. James is trying to turn this into a long running storyline. After five years, we need some plot lines emerging. Yeah. We need a narrative.

Yeah. Okay. It is time for fact number three. And that is Chizunski. My fact this week is that more than 80% of Japan's temples have suffered from raccoon damage. And it's really sad because raccoons are not even native to Japan, obviously, but they've swarmed there the last few years and they're one of the main causes of damage to the temples.

So the advice to anyone out there who's thinking about getting a raccoon for a pet is don't. They will eat anything and they cause damage to anywhere they are. So in Japan, they've just climbed all around the temples and they want to find a nice little cozy nook to sleep in and they'll tear and eat and scratch through anything that stands in their way. Is it because people have got them as pets and then let them go or? It is indeed. So it's this weird story where there was a very, very popular show in the 70s in 1977

called Rascal the raccoon. And it was an animation. It was like an anime thing and people thought, oh, I want to get a pet raccoon. They obviously got the pets before they watched the end because the moral of the show and the book it's based on is that raccoons are terrible pets. You can't take care of them. And at the end they had to release it back into the wild. Anyway, people bought all these.

I think people were buying like 2000 a year being imported into Japan. And then they started eating people's houses. And so they released them. And they banned the imports, didn't they? Yeah, yeah. You can't do anymore. I read one source that said they were importing 1500 a month. Oh, wow.

Jesus. Which would be amazing. It's too many raccoons. It's too many. I mean, if you're a country which doesn't have any raccoons, then one is too many. You're right. You're absolutely right. And the author of this book is Sterling North.

Great name, Sterling North. It's like lofty England. He passed away a few years before this animation hit Japan. So he never got to see the true sort of success of his. He populated a country with an animal basically. We're saying it's not really a success. It's not a success story. It is if you're a raccoon.

And you want to travel. It's a huge win for raccoons. And we know that Sterling North was interested in raccoon success. Yeah, we don't know what you thought about Japan, do we? No. Because America is the only place where they're, you know, native. But they've sort of invaded Germany as well now and Europe. They haven't invaded.

It's not like. Well, I don't know because the European press call them Nazi raccoons. Did they? Yeah. I mean, if you look at any article in the last 10, 15 years from some of the more salacious press, I must say, they'll say, Nazi raccoons coming to the Netherlands or Nazi raccoons coming to France or something. And that's because there was a theory that the first ones were let into the wild by Herman

Goering. This is a massive rumor and apparently he didn't do it. They were let into the wild in Germany in 1934 to promote diversity of fauna. But Goering had nothing to do with it. The rumor has persisted and so we get all these articles saying Nazi. Well, at least we stamp that rumor out today. In America, I don't know if they were kept as pets because I guess they should be in the wild.

Hence the moral of the book. But one person who did keep a raccoon as a pet was the president of the United States in the White House, Calvin College. Yeah. He had a raccoon called Rebecca and Rebecca was meant to be eaten as part of a Thanksgiving dinner. But he kind of just took to Rebecca instead. Did they used to eat that instead of turkey?

Apparently. Did they? Well, they didn't. It came from a... Was it Mississippi? I think sent him the raccoon and I think Calvin looked at it and someone said, it is edible, mate. And he said, it's not edible to me.

Take that away from me. Why? Because, you know, he's claimed he was doing the decent thing. And yeah, then they sort of lofted her, didn't they? Yeah, proper pet. Like she had an engraved collar that she got for Christmas. Yeah. She was a good pet.

I believe that that Christmas when they gave her the engraved collar, the present that they got their son was a coat made of raccoon fur. Nice. That's a good warning to Rebecca to behave. It's very good, isn't it? Well, the collar from the raccoon was made from the wrist bone of that child. They are really clever. That's the amazing thing.

And I read an article saying that they, in the early 20th century, were used in a lot of lab experiments and that they could have been lab rats, basically, or they could have been the go-to for experimentation. But basically, they're too good. They're too clever. They escape. They chew through things. They start performing experiments on us.

Yeah. They get into the air vents and then just they were a nightmare. And it turns out that rats are a bit easier to control in the world. Yeah. They love hanging out with humans, don't they? They're one of the species that has really thrived from human, you know, building up urban environments. They work very well in cities.

They're like the American version of a fox, like an urban fox. I think they are. I think they're sort of like a better version, like a grade up from foxes. Because they've got hands. They've got bloody hands. Although not opposable thumbs, the only thing we've got over them, one thing, is opposable thumbs. And this has actually proved quite crucial in the U.S. where I'm sure there are lots

of listeners who have issues with raccoons breaking into your bins. And so they're like constantly trying to upgrade bins to make them inaccessible to raccoons. But because they're so smart, they keep on working out how to do it. And then they have made one apparently, which is clocked onto the fact they don't have an opposable thumb. So if you can do that. Is that in Toronto?

I think it might be. Because Toronto spent $31 million getting a good raccoon proof bin in 2015. They were so frustrated. And they were really hard. And the city's mayor wrote, we are ready, we are armed, and we are motivated to show that we cannot be defeated by these critters. Because they were being rolled out across the city. He tweeted, I love the smell of new raccoon resistant green bins in the morning.

And within a few days, raccoons had managed to make their way into a few of these sample ones. And beaten him. Yeah. There's actually an argument, I think that it's quite bad that we keep on trying to upgrade these bins because we're just making them cleverer now. We're in this terrible arms race with raccoons where the more we complexify the bins, the better they're getting.

I don't know what you're saying, but then actually we're getting better as well. So actually by them forcing us to get better, we're getting smarter. The raccoons are getting smarter. It's the rest of the animal kingdom that are losing out. Eventually it'll just be a massive battle between us and the raccoons. You were saying about how lots of towns really don't like them. There's an online factoid that says, if you take a raccoon head to the town hall of a town called Hanukkah, they'll give you $10.

And it says that all over the internet. When I read it, I emailed them and they said, no, this is absolutely rubbish. So if you do have a raccoon head, don't bother taking it to the town hall of Hanukkah. That's good. I think we've done a real public service. We've prevented people from decapitating more raccoons. Although actually with the battle that's coming up, we need to decapitate as many as possible.

You're so right. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. The fact is that the economist John Maynard Keynes once bought a priceless Cezanne painting and then hid it in a hedge. Very good. Yeah. Why? Did he hide it?

Well, it was a hedge fund. Brilliant. You see. He's an economist. You see. The end. That's action. So this is a fact from a podcast that's coming out very shortly, actually, and it's by friend

of the show. A few of us know him. Tim Harford, who is the undercover economist and has a new show that's called Cautionary Tales, and it's all about sort of mishaps, basically. Things that haven't gone to plan, fiascos, grade A mishaps, this kind of stuff. Oil tank is crashing, and I've seen a bit of it, and it's going to be an extremely good show. Oh, it sounds amazing.

I mean, it sounds like we're going to be stealing a lot from it. I mean, look at it. It hasn't even come out. We're already stealing from it. Borrowing. Borrowing. Sorry, legally borrowing. Backed back?

At the end? At the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, Tim sent me this fact, and it's about Keynes, or Keynes. Keynes. People say Keynes, but I've read Keynes online. I've read Keynes, but I think we should say Keynes. Otherwise, no one's going to know who we're talking about.

And it was in 1918, the First World War was grinding on. He was a bright young economist, and he realized that France's economy was very weak, too, and Britain was going to need to collect a massive amount of loan money. And he wanted to buy up artistic masterpieces on behalf of Britain. So then the British government wouldn't need to collect quite as much loan money. Britain would have a lot of new artworks. And also, he felt a bit embarrassed about working for the war effort, because he was quite a bohemian, he was quite a pacifist, and a lot of his friends had kind of ditched

him over his stance in the war. So he got Charles Holmes, who was the director of the National Gallery, on site, and he found a huge art auction that was happening in Paris. All of Degas' collection was being sold. They went to the auction, Holmes had shaved his moustache, so he wouldn't be recognized as the director of the National Gallery, just in case. And the auction was really quiet, because Paris was in the middle of being bombed by Germany at the time of the auction, so not many people turned up.

And Holmes bought over 20 masterwork paintings, and they had a sort of blank check from the government. They had 20,000 pounds, which is a huge amount. And Keynes bought himself a Cezanne, and they traveled back to England. He'd been traveling for 24 hours, and he was visiting his friends in their countryside home, and he was so knackered that he just chucked the suitcase in the hedge with his priceless Cezanne painting in it. And he walked into the house, and he said, there's a Cezanne in the hedge outside, if

you want to go and look. So I've been to this house. Have you? Yeah. It's called Charleston, and it's in Sussex, it's very near my in-laws. I went to it recently. It was part of the Bloomsbury Group house. So Virginia Woolf's sister is who lived there with her artistic friend slash lover and his

lover. It was a complicated situation. And the house is amazing. It's full of incredible art, like Walter Sickert's original stuff, which I studied because if you remember, there was a theory that he was Jack the Ripper, according to Patricia Cornwall. So I was looking close for any clues. Were there any clues? No.

No, it was just normal paintings. Probably because it's bullshit. Yeah. Probably because there's no truth to it. Right. I did it in any of the corners of the pictures. But no. Yeah.

So it's an amazing house. So I probably passed the hedge. So cool. I'm still a bit confused about why he didn't just bring the suitcase into the house and ask if he could leave it in the entrance hall or something. Whenever you come back from holiday and got all the way to your front door, I've gone, you know what? I can't be bothered to bring the bag this last bit.

I'm just going to throw it in the hedge. It feels like there's something missing from the account because it's all from him writing it and from his friends. I think maybe it might have been because he wanted to make an entrance and say, hey, it's me and I've got to price this bit of art in the hedge. It's not clear. You just thought everyone in the house would go, why have you been in the hedge, mate? Yeah.

Have you been in the hedge? They rushed out. I bet they did. Yeah, of course. Somebody did. Because they wanted to see it. And they gathered around it by moonlight. And it was...

It was quite nice. The reason he had bought it was because the National Gallery director had refused because it was Cezanne who I think was a post-impressionist and it was very avant-garde. And it was too avant-garde for the National Gallery to be buying. And home so. I'm not going to waste my money on this. It's too edgy. And Keynes was a bit more out there and he said, I'll buy it.

Well, yeah. He was out there for normal society, but then he feels like he was the straight-laced one of the Bloomsbury set. Like he was bridging a gap, I think, because he, you know, he had such a central role in that set of people who were just artists and creatives, which you don't picture Keynes being. And so he was there with Wolf and Sackville West and Ian Forster. And one thing that they were all very relaxed about, and I find this really interesting,

that society was really relaxed about, was the fact that he was bisexual. And for the first years of his sexual life, he was only had relationships with men. And I find that so bizarre because he came immediately after Oscar Wilde, who obviously, you know, we know what happened to him. And then immediately before Alan Turing. There was obviously this relaxation for this 30-year period. And so he was really promiscuous and he had this love triangle with Lytton Strachey, who was then became very jealous of him going out with someone else.

And it was Lytton Strachey who said things like, his common sense is enough to freeze a volcano, which you can really imagine. And he said he hated how he treats his love affairs statistically, which is kind of true. He kept to... Could we have a spreadsheet? He had an Excel spreadsheet, didn't he? He did. He wrote well.

Something full on spreadsheet. But he used to record the numbers in his diary, which, you know, if you were just a number in someone's diary, well, I'd be quite proud. It depends on the number, doesn't it? It must be registered. If it's a scoreboard, then great. There were high numbers. Yeah.

Didn't he have lots of codes or something for everything that they did? I haven't got this written down, but I think he would have sex with someone and then he would have like AS for anal sex or, you know, different things for different things. And then I think he would give people by their initials, but then if it was just a dalliance, it would be bloke in a hedge or, you know, whatever, it was like something... Bloke in a hedge. Apologised about throwing my suitcase onto him. But I think it was that it was like there would be no names, it would just be this person

in this situation. Yeah. It would be like Bellboy. Yeah. The lead of the National Gallery, the soldier of the baths, the French conscript, the lift boy at Vauxhall. Really? Yeah.

The lift boy at Vauxhall. Wow. And still no blue plaque at Vauxhall. Outrageous. He also revolutionised economics, which is incredible. And so he had only studied economics for eight weeks during his student days. He never sat an examiner. He studied classics and maths.

And then he only started properly going into it when he was offered a lectureship in economics age 25. And then he just turned up and started revolutionising the art. And then he almost went bankrupt three times in his life, despite being one of the greatest economists of history. Hey, it was the Great Depression. That was one of them. You can't blame him for that.

But what about the other two? I didn't know that. So the first one was when England went to the golden standard, as in peg the pound with the gold. And he gambled against that happening and lost a shit ton of money. And then he speculated against the war. He didn't think the war would happen, and he lost a shit ton of money on that. And then the Great Depression, which I think we can understand.

Actually, I mean, all of it, we can kind of understand, but he's a gambler. He got one thing really right, which was about the Treaty of Versailles. And he was present in Versailles as the representative for the treasury, financial rep. And in 1919, he was arguing these compensation payments that you're suggesting Germany makes, they are too high. And this is an insane impulse, and it will lead to disaster in the long run. And he was ignored. He was kind of kept out of the room, actually.

And so he was left to try and, you know, he and a couple of other reps were advising around the edges, saying, this may not work. And he failed, basically, because the impulse to punish Germany was very strong, but he was proved right. Him and Churchill. I feel like Churchill's are the same things. They were just outside the room bitching about a stupid Versailles. But they were laughing in their faces 20 years later.

One thing that he didn't get right was he said, oh, I don't think he's going to get right. As he said that by 2030, everyone in the Western world will be working a 15-hour work week. That was his prediction. If things go really badly wrong, we might be. He thought that only workaholics would be working more than that. And everyone else, progression would get so much that you could do that amount of work and you get paid enough that the rest of your time, you could be at leisure.

Because basically technology would have been able to do stuff for us. That was his idea. Yeah. But what he didn't realize is that as technology goes up, so does the number of people who have to work at that technology. Bloody robots actually just make more work for us. They do. People don't realize that.

Yeah. Not supposed to happen. But he did think that a very sensible thing, which was that the obsession with money that society has is insane. He thought it was like this crazy social pathology because why do you want money? What you want is leisure. What makes humans happy is leisure time. And so he thought what we should all be striving towards is that three hours work a day.

Yeah. Sounds like a good idea. It does. Fingers crossed. 2030 is still 10 years away. He had this weird thing, which is to go back to his personal life now we've covered the economics. So he had a really lovely marriage, as far as I can tell.

He married a ballerina called Lydia Lopakova or Lopakova. But he was very confused by this at first. He started falling in love with women and became a bit confused by that. The first woman he fell in love with, he said, I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male, I haven't been able to think of any suitable steps to take. Asked a man in hedge for his opinion. He is also stumped. Wow.

But he married this ballerina eventually and he took her on the honeymoon to, I think it was Sussex, but he had this honeymoon where he invited some other people. And one of the people he invited was Wittgenstein, the philosopher of Wittgenstein, who was not that much of a laugh to have a honeymoon with, actually, who sounds really unpleasant. Apparently he spent the whole six days making her feel like shit. She was a bit below a social class, maybe he wasn't intellectual. Yeah, like making her feel really stupid. And eventually she apparently made a remark about how beautiful a tree was.

And he said, what do you mean by that? You know, challenging her to explain herself and she just burst into tears. Well, I absolutely can't. When Keen's first saw his future wife at the ballet, I read, he described her as a rotten dancer with a stiff bottom. Wow. It's not very nice, is it? It's not very nice.

Although actually a stiff bottom. I don't know, that could be a nice thing, the stiff bottom. Yeah. It's not so often not when paired with rotten dancer. I have a couple of art things, just of hidden art. So a few years back, there was a guy who was watching a movie with his daughter. And in it, in the movie he was watching was Stuart Little. And in the movie, in the background, he noticed this painting that looked suspiciously similar

to a lost avant-garde painting that was from Hungary. So sorry, can I just say, Stuart Little isn't animated, is it? Stuart Little himself is animated, but the rest of it is got Hugh Laurie and it's, yeah. Yeah. So in the background of the house that Stuart lives in is this painting and he's going, I swear to God, I've seen that painting from somewhere before and he had a little black and white picture of it. It was 90 years old and it had been lost for nine decades.

And he got in contact with the production and he said, do you still have this painting? It took two years for them to get back and then eventually the lady who was in charge of the dressing for the house said, yeah, I found it at some market, I bought it for nothing and they've now established that this is the lost work of an artist called Robert Berenny. It took two years to reply to an email. It was a very successful film, Stuart Little, and they had a sequel to reply to, they had a sequel to make.

That makes me feel a lot better about my email response time. That is the main takeaway for me as well. Crazy. There was another incident in 2008 where a Norman Rockwell painting, really famous, but Norman Rockwell painting was found hidden behind a false wall and this was, it was worth $15.4 million. And the reason that happened was this weird story. So it was really famous because it had been on the cover of magazine in the 50s and it

was bought by a cartoonist called Don Tract, Jr. and he just bought it for $900 in 1960. And he sort of displayed it, people thought, for years afterwards people would come around, they'd be like, oh yeah, Don's got that great picture. And people were a bit confused because when they looked closely at the one he had, it didn't match up with the magazine cover. So a bit odd. Anyway, he died a few years ago, 2008 or 2007, and his sons went through his home. They discovered an entire false wall they'd had built and behind it was the real painting.

And he'd painted a copy of that to show to the public. And his son's theory about why he'd hidden the original is because he disliked his wife whom he then divorced so much that he was worried she would take it. Wow. So he did it. Oh my God, that's a lot to do, isn't it? That is a lot. That's incredible.

And in 1505, Leonardo did a fresco. We're just first naming Leonardo now, are we? Oh, sorry, Leonardo DiCaprio. Leonardo da Vinci made this fresco and it was in the grand meeting hall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. And then the Medici's came along and they decided, ah, I don't really like that, I want something else in that place. So they commissioned the architect Giorgio Vasari to renovate the room and to put something

else in its place, which means that we've lost that fresco. But we know that Vasari was a big fan of Leonardo and so we think that he probably wouldn't have destroyed it. And in that room, if you go there now, there are two words painted in the whole room and they are sert-sertrova, which means seek and you shall find. And we know that at another time, he has in another time put a fake wall in place to hide something that he didn't want to damage. So we think that somewhere in that room there might be Leonardo's lost fresco.

How hard is it to search a room? I guess if he's got art on the wall, he's painted his own fresco. Historical painting. Yeah. Just tear it down. Is that a game? Yeah, I guess Leonardo versus. Apparently, and I'm quoting this from the article I read it, it says, excavation has

been tangled for years in the famously convoluted Italian bureaucracy. It's actually the people who worked on Stuart Little who were in charge of this renovation. How many fake walls are going to help? These are going to be tiny rooms eventually. Yeah, you're right. I'm sure we used to be able to fit the dining room table in here. I've got a fact about war art and art being hidden in times of war. So the Second World War, I think we may have mentioned before that all the art in the National

Gallery was sent to a cave in Wales. And by the end of the war, it was the most high-tech cave in the world because they built a railway inside the cave to move all the art around. Really cool. And I just, I really like how it got there. So the pagings were sent in post office vans and Cadbury delivery trucks to avoid attracting attention to them. Oh, wow.

I can't think of anything I would be attracted to more than a Cadbury's van driving through my village. It's true. And you're right. Well, suddenly hundreds of Cadbury's delivery trucks are driving through. In the war when chocolate was rationed. Exactly. But there's one painting which gave them such problems.

So it's by Van Dyke and it's a portrait of Charles I, right? And it's a biggie. It's 12 feet by 9.5 feet and it's on a truck. So it's, I presume it was wrapped up. But there was a very, very tight bend in the road just before they get to the thing. So there's no other way of getting there. Very tight bend in the road. And at that same point, there's a railway bridge over the road.

And they calculated it would be possible to do it. But you'd have to pivot really, really carefully and they didn't want to take the risk. So the way they solved it was they took up the surface of the road. They dug, they just destroyed the surface of the road to get several more inches of clearance. Wow. I know. They just, because it was such an important piece of art.

And if you go there now, you can see at the point where the bridge is, the curb is really high above the road because the road is several inches higher. It's still there. It's still there. I'd love to know where that is. That's amazing. Which Van Dyke, Dick? Who are we talking about?

Van Dyke. Yes, Dick Van Dyke and Leonardo DiCaprio, the two famous Renaissance artists. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James.

At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Jizinski. You can email podcast at qi.com and get the reply within two years. Yeah. Or go to our group account at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got everything up there from upcoming tour dates to all of our previous episodes,

links to our new book. There's also a behind the scenes documentary, plenty of stuff up there. Check it out. But we'll see you again next week. Have a good one.