No Such Thing As A Fish - 295: No Such Thing As A 200m Baguette

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Live from Boston, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Bastard baguettes Saddam Hussein's campaign song, and the first ever criminal to be put in Boston's stocks. 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 Boston! My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chasinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go! Starting with fact number one and that is my fact number one. Dan, just before you start fact number one, we actually we played a little bit of the Stars and Stripes theme tune theme tune the Stars and Stripes as I believe you call it. Okay the national anthem. We actually got sent a fact before

the show on this subject by Gadget Gav who said that if in Boston if you start singing or playing the national anthem you have to then go on with it all the way to the end on paint of a hundred dollar fine. So if you wouldn't mind just... This is as far as I know the lyrics. Great theme tune though guys honestly. Okay it is time for fact number one and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first criminal in Boston to be sent to the stocks was the man who'd actually built the stocks and he was found guilty of overcharging for the building of those stocks. This is a wonderful fact. This was back in 1639 and it was a guy called Edward Palmer and it's exactly as the fact

is on the tin. It's a guy who did the labor and went to invoice. He invoiced for one pound, 13 shillings and seven pence and they thought that was unacceptable. So immediately once it was open he was the first person charged. He got fined five pounds as well didn't he? So he got fined three times more than he charged for them. And so he had to go and be put in stocks for it was an hour. So just a quick humiliation and then a serious amount of money to open it. At least he hadn't been charged to build you know a guillotine or something. Yes. He must have been grateful for that. Look did he make actual stocks or a pillory because there's been a lot of confusion about

this for 500 years. So there were stocks I believe there were stocks. There were stocks okay because a pillory was the one where I think you should get taught in primary school there what stocks are. Where you shove your arms through two holes and you shove your head through a hole like when you're taking those comical photos with cardboard cutouts and that was actually a pillory whereas stocks is more like you just had your ankles often like strapped to the ground or something didn't you? Yeah it's just you put your feet in. Or you just put your feet in yeah. And the idea is as well as being a humiliation the public will see what you look like so they walk past

and go that's a bad guy. But actually small boys would walk past and tickle the feet of people in the stocks. Oh really? That's pretty brave because the people in there are criminals. That's in your neighborhood. Yeah. That's true. And they're probably out in an hour. But the thing is is like it was for quite minor things usually the stocks. So in England for instance it would be for petty thieves, for unruly servants, for hedged terrors. Don't know what a hedged terror is. Gamblers, drunkards, ballad singers. Seems harsh. Yeah and any kind of travelling musicians. They were way harsh. I mean they were minor crimes but they were police quite heavily. So there is a great book called Curious Punishments of Bygone Days which

is published in the late 19th century and it's got all kinds of now hilarious stories of quite a repressive sounding time. So again in Boston there was a man called Captain Kemble who was a sailor and he got done for publicly kissing his wife on a Sunday after returning from three years at sea. No thank you. Now his punishment I think I've mistyped it. I have written punishment was three years in the stock. I think it was three hours. Imagine if he was in for three years and they came out and they kissed his wife and they're like sorry. Yeah because sometimes the things people threw at you in the stocks were even worse than having your feet tickled. Very confused that you think that was a bad thing to do is tickle the feet of someone passing by because often you

got dead animals thrown at you. Dead cat was a good one. In fact I think there was a quote from someone at the time who said if someone's in the stocks you walk past the marketplace of an evening and someone's in the stocks you think brilliant and a dead cat is a treat if you can spot one of them and a live cat an even greater treat. But that book is incredible actually. So there are a few other good tales of bygone punishments in this book written in 1886 and another one is about a it tells a man in Moscow actually in the 17th century who'd published a pamphlet about people's liberty said that people should be free and so he'd gotten a lot of job over saying that and so he was sentenced to three days of being tied to a scaffold and forced to literally eat his

words. So they got his pamphlet. It's actually very clever. They got his pamphlet and they tore it up and they fed it to him and there was an eyewitness account that said they'd serve in one page at a time and when it got to a stage where it looked like he might actually be incredibly ill they'd wait until the next day and then keep serving it up. So they didn't they didn't cook it at all or? It's actually a misconception you can get food poisoning from Royal Pamphlet. But thank goodness Russia is now a paragon of liberty. Also in Boston we were talking about Boston stuff in 1679 there was a Frenchman who was suspected of setting a fire in Boston and he was ordered to go to the pillory and have both his ears cut off

for suspected arson. That's amazing. But you have quite a there's quite a lot of history isn't there in Boston especially compared to the rest of America because Dan and I were walking through Cambridge yesterday and Dan pointed to a quite new looking building and he said you know what I can't believe that building was built in 1588 and I said no Dan that that is a street number of that house. I really I was suspicious I was like this this brickwork looks great. Yeah the next one was built in 1590 and 1592. Whipping, whipping was a thing just to to drag us back to the topic at hand. There was one this was obviously whipping was absolutely huge major league punishment very big back then. So in one case of whipping the man carrying it out was a

church official called the church beetle and he wasn't he wasn't doing a very good job of it. He was so light-handed that the sheriff who was watching the whipping the punishment take place grabbed the whip from him, whipped the offenders but not before he had whipped the beetle himself for being bad at whipping. That was an offence at the time. But I actually read about that story as well so what happened was the beetle was almost pretending to whip him and he had like some red ink in his hand and he kind of went like that and then he would smear the red ink so he looked like he'd been like whipped on the back when he hadn't really I think the guy might have paid him some money to do that and then like you say the constable then started whipping the beetle

but then a lady came and started beating up the constable. Four people attacking each other in awful violent conga. It's weird isn't it? I was looking into the police force here so this fact was 1639 and it was in 1630 that the sort of foundations of the first ever American police force came about so it was a night watch and so on and it was only in the 1800s 1833 that it sort of became officially Boston police but am I right saying police badges have 1630 written on them? We have no idea in this audience. Very low abiding audience. No one wants to admit to anything. No but so yeah so they had that and well that's a really fun fact about them. In 1903 the Boston police force got the first ever police car of anywhere in America but no one knew how to drive it

so they had to hire a chauffeur who would take them to all the crime spots. The whole transport system with the Boston police a couple years ago they added to their fleet an ice cream truck. It's a part of there's an ice cream truck but why? What for? They think it's sort of if they go around you know maybe if the criminal doesn't want to come out because they weren't sure. They're not leering criminals out with Mr Whippies that doesn't make any sense because you just have a queue of small child, small child, small child, massive criminal. And then presumably if someone in a policeman's hat and badge cat candidly trying to scoop some ice cream out. Holy ice cream. Freeze! I don't need your pity class.

We're gonna have to move on fairly soonish to our next fact. Just a thing about putting people in the stock specifically in in Boston and in New England they just got way more into it than the English have been so they brought it over from England when they came and then because they were puritan and everything they added a whole bunch of other crimes basically so in in Britain and in England then usually you went in the stock if you stole something but in Boston it really did tend to be that you'd if you blasphemed then you always got it if again if you publicly kissed your wife then you got it if you're an adultery you got it and we used to have that in in Britain you'd have a big A branded on you so sometimes you'd be in the stocks and if you've been found guilty

of adultery then you'd have a big A that was branded on you and you'd have to wear on your sort of shirt and you'd have to wear that A for say a year and then everyone knows you're an adulterer which I don't know if that's a punishment for certain a certain type of person but um that's what Alvin the chipmunk had on his yeah yeah he was a terrible husband he was a terrible terrible husband they don't they don't bring that storyline into it much but we know anyway the Americans added up all the other letters so they went through the alphabet so you got a B if you were blasphemous you got a D for drunkenness not allowed to be drunk ever you got an I for incest uh very bad not into that and they

sort of did wow they they completed the alphabet with all the various different crimes they must have struggled a bit with X and Z they had to get really Xenophobe zebra theft it is time for fact number two and that is Andy my fact is that five of the main types of french baguette are called flute ficelle viennese cementine and bastard so I like the way you said that half of the french actor and half not yeah this was from a great article in the financial times about the best baguette in Paris competition which is called le grand prix de la baguette really it's really called that and these are some of the these are just some of the types they have and um it's an amazing competition it's held at the national syndicat des boulangiers and there is so many

entries for the competition every year they get hundreds of entries over a thousand members of the public apply to judge because you get a kind of citizen judge on the panel and the winner it's mostly a prestige thing so you get four thousand euros you get a smallish cash prize but you also win the right to provide the president's baguettes for a year oh wow yeah okay it's very prestigious I don't think that that's quite a lot of pressure on the president I feel like Macron every day because it's every day isn't it you make your first forget at the morning and it gets immediately you know a police officer takes it with the chauffeur yeah exactly takes it to the palace and poor Emmanuel is probably going another fucking baguette oh god but do you think every morning he has to make

a shift oh my god there's your best forget yet I'm not sure they're that good either because I was reading that as I know fast me um I was reading that as part of this grand prix uh the first of hope you have to jump through is it has to be the correct um length and uh I think it's correct length and weight and there are 200 entrants and a hundred of them fail at the length and weight section it does feel like as a communication problem with the rules well they have to be exactly between 55 centimeters and 70 centimeters right yeah which is quite a large margin of error yeah and the weight has to be between 250 grams and 300 grams what impossible precision is this but like traditional french baguettes like in the 19th century they were like eight meters long

were they eight no eight feet long eight feet yeah but you would get them like they were bigger than the bigger than humans are definitely bigger than french humans certainly um in fairness to the french there's not many nationalities where everyone's tall of an eight fuck yeah i didn't know that we got at the french for being short I think you're thinking Napoleon aren't you yeah yeah and we've said before that Napoleon was above average height for a frenchman he was taller than Nelson yeah it didn't work on a number of levels did it um well speaking of Napoleon actually there is a theory which I

should just say at the very top is not true but it's like he was nine feet tall there is a theory that the baguette was invented by napoleon's bakers and they were invented so that soldiers could put them down their legs while marching and then whenever they got to wherever they were marching to then they could pull them out and eat them all right I have to say you've added an unnecessarily sexual dimension to this theory it's kind of like a baguette I've got a bit of a yeast infection down there hey this is a cool thing in um so in France baguette is not just used to refer to sticks of bread but for example like chopsticks are baguette uh chinoise chinoise sure um chinoise no but my

favorite one is that a wand is baguette magique and so in the harry potter books he's always pulling out his baguette magique which is which it does sound a bit napoleonic there's an expression in french to lead by the baguette and that is because a baguette is also a baton so it's like walking with a marching band you lead with your baguette uh it can be a ramrod it can be a type of diamond cut what's funny about ramrod buster it's an old it's an old war of independence a joke it's it's it's adapted to the word to a huge number of meanings given it's only been around for a century well it is a it is a much smaller language um than the english language it genuinely is smaller there are fewer words i'm not this is not just another napoleon apple are short the words

are short and the word precedes the the bread yes in fact it comes from the latin word baculum which meant staff and a baculum as some of you know is uh a penis bone in you know warruses and chimpanzees and lots of animals have penis bones i love the way that you said and a baculum is and that a few people in the audience went penis no like it's your catchphrase or something it's like a really weird pantomime i understand you don't have pantomimes here everybody doesn't make sense um there's another theory about where it came from where the word came from which is that it was invented just over a hundred years ago when the paris metro was being dug the paris underground

because apparently um workers were carrying big loaves of bread to work and they needed to bring knives with them to cut it and they used to keep getting into constant knife battles and so apparently the builders were tasked with finding a baker who could give them some bread that didn't require a knife and i don't know what kind of bathroom you can get into with a little button actually a bread knife could be quite dodgy couldn't if you get it on the serrated edge definitely but that's not to a frenchman they look enormous those knives yeah they this it is weird they were not named imprint until 1920 so it is there were there were sort of long breads before but um there is a load of uh

bread legislation in in France uh at the moment so in 1993 even as recently as that they passed a bread decree because they were worried about deterioration of quality of bread and so now you can get two very different kinds of loaf i say very different they are both stick french breads but um one of them is a baguette tradition francaise which is of the very you know a significant national historical one and you have to make that on the premises you can only use about three ingredients you know it's really precise you can't put extra additives or toppings or anything and the alternative is just a baguette did you explain why they're called bastards i didn't actually so

they they're they're mostly named after their shapes so the flute is thin the fissile is very thin uh the the bastard is fat so i think the idea is that it's kind of halfway between a long thick one and a short stubby one and so it's like two things cobbled together so it's like a bastard in that way and is that where we get you that bastard you've i don't i don't think it is to be investigated it's a shame that's not in the harry potter books harry pulled out his bastard there's some more bread legislation in france which is very weird and it changed recently actually so there was this widespread panic in 2015 four years ago because they dropped a law that has existed since 1790 which is basically when the government ruled that everyone across

france had to have access to baguettes at all times of the year every day day and night and so it required half of paris's bakeries to take holiday in august and the other half to take holiday in july to ensure that suddenly there wasn't a bit of a dearth of bakers and people couldn't get their bread in the morning and that has remained until 2015 so bakers are in this position where you know if 50 percent are already on holiday on the 2nd of july they're not allowed to take a holiday for a month and they were finally told these these laws were relaxed and they were finally told okay you can go on holiday when you like on the condition that you have to put up in your window i think you have to put up a sign saying where the nearest baker is that is still there selling baguette

and there was panic they're like did anything happen did they all run out of bread and stuff all of france starved to death can you guys guess just give me a guess of the longest the length of the longest baguette ever made i would say probably around 10 feet 10 feet okay um any advance uh 200 meters well this is going to be impressive now andy well it's not because dan's completely ruined it it was an amazingly long bread until dan said 200 meters it was it was a pathetic 122 meters long which is literally half of what dan said no don't clap a bread that long that's rubbish oh you absolutely saboteur oh i had all sorts of extra stuff about this weird bread get i know what you're all thinking how do you make a bread that's 122 meters long do you get

one that's 200 meters long and cut it in half anyway no we do not um no you absolute baguette i will not have that you know after you've finished talking about this i'm going to tell you it's wrong anyway uh huh well okay well let me can i please tell you first because oh my god it was in 2015 it was at the Milan world expo there were 60 bakers involved and how did they make it 122 meters long they made a portable oven which slid all the way along that is impressive how was that and then they cut it into and they spread nutella all the way along it because nutella was sponsoring this anyway now that's true they did do that but that's not the longest baguette ever

oh because the record was broken this year i'm afraid yeah how long was it five million miles it wasn't that cheap it was 133 meters and it was done to raise money for the italian red cross so you've just ridiculed by your ridiculous guess sorry i'm very sorry okay it is time for fact number three and that is chasinski my fact this week is that whitney houston's record label once sent a cease and desist letter to Saddam Hussein asking him to please stop using the song i will always love you as part of his political campaign and yes it's risky to kick off with a Saddam Hussein fact in the america tour but this it was a song that he used this was in 2002 and he was running for president against um nobody and

it was sort of leaked in the western media that he'd been using as a political campaign song this arabic version which was basically a knockoff version exactly sort of verbatim and exactly the same you know nuances and sounds as of whitney houston's song i will always love you and so her record company arista records got in touch and said please stop doing that and surprising enough i don't think he took a blind bit of notice but yeah how weird is that he did very well in that election he got one he got genuinely 100 percent of the vote because there's normally i was reading an article about how dictators like to pitch it you know do you are you modest do you just get 90 do you do you go all in and you get 100 or do you sort of say around 95 actually in the course

of this i found out the um the most impressive result of all time in any election uh and that was in 1927 in liberia uh in the country at the time there were fewer than 15 000 registered voters the winner charles king won 243 000 votes turnout was 1680 percent and he was given a Guinness world record for fraud and so that song of course made famous by whitney houston but actually uh dully passed it originally yeah yeah and she made an absolute fortune on the song from when whitney houston released it but then they asked her about this thing with saddam hussein and she said i was surprised as anyone but it's too serious an issue to comment on not for us guys um saddam hussein was asshole asshole i think we can all agree but in 1980 he was given the keys

to the city of detroit oh yeah yes this was when he was still you know very much in uh in the good books of the usa and um he had made a big donation to a detroit church and i read a i read an article about it which said that he he still had them you know even to the end um but other key holders they weren't on him right at the end i mean he was not trying to get into his bunk they're going to fucking detroit right no but other people who are key holders to the city of detroit include santa claus steve wonder and elmo what a group photo we should at some point i think we should move away from saddam hussein yeah so just something about campaign songs uh america does a very good line in cool

campaign songs for your presidential campaigns it's almost the highlight of your presidential campaigns but um i like bob dole so do you know what bob dole chose in 1996 when he he ran against clinton he um so he used the song soul man uh as in written by isaac haze david porter in the 60s a big kind of civil rights anthem isaac haze who was the voice of chef in south park as well so this big yeah civil rights african-american anthem and he used it but he changed the lyrics to dole man incredible and not only this i can't i can't believe he did this it was performed by sam and david like a duo who sang it and sam actually re-recorded it how ignominious is that with the lyrics dole man um and then he so he changed the lyrics he sung it a bit then the writers

got in touch and said we really don't endorse you at all you're nothing to do with this song please go away um and also it didn't work at all anyway because it sounded either like a dole man or sold man when he sung it and they do like the puns don't they in the campaign slogans there's been loads of good ones oh well good so um uc's s grant said grant was another term um thomas e jewey when he was up against roosevelt said jewey or don't we and did did he did he win no thomas yeah he famously was the president of about no of course he did he win there was alfred landon who was up against fdr and he said let's make it a london slide very good yeah it's funny because all these people were on the losing side weren't they okay here's someone who was on the winning side franklin

pierce he said we poked you in 44 we shall pierce you in 52 wow and then it really was another time wasn't it and then four years later james bucannon came in and he said we poked him in 44 we pierced him in 52 and we'll buck him in 56 amazing yeah there was another one it's so steven duglass another famous u.s president not uh so he ran against lincoln and he had a song written or he wrote a song which i don't know what the tune was but it was about kind of how uh people were always going on about how lincoln was this kind of saint it was like tell us how great he is how he seeks his closet every night to kneel and pray any lie you tell will swallow swallow any kind of mixture but oh don't we beg and pray you don't for god's sake show his picture because he was so ugly oh i know right

and now we think of him as quite a noble looking character but apparently back in the day yeah not he was eight feet tall only with only with the hat then yeah you don't know what happened when you take the hat off it might have been a really tall far yeah he could fit an entire frenchman under that hat george w bush he relied on tom petty's single i won't back down during his 2000 campaign he then got a cease and desist letter from tom petty and immediately backed out amazing i have to say it's there's a good there's a good sort of argument that you should not get into

politics because when you do you just find out that all your heroes hate you like it's well it's really so this is the thing so there are all these stories about musicians complaining but basically if you're playing at a venue which has a public music license you can play their songs basically yeah so i mean this happens lots and lots and we should say it so people who have asked donald trump to stop using their song or declined his you know said please please don't play that have included neil young r.e.m twisted sister adel elton john the rolling stones queen george dead george harrison's estate dead pavarotti's estate steve steven tyler of aro smith dead prince's estate forl riana guns and roses and neil young again

i'm interested that neil young is the one who they went back to twice do you think he was the one they thought okay who was sort of the like the least against us yeah we're gonna have to move on to our final factory shortly on political songs um so when america first became independent they they kind of took god save the queen of god save the king and they just added their own lyrics so they had god save great washington god save the 13 states god save america but it was all to the same tune as god save the king until they stuck on their theme tune that they have now okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that in 1898 a boston magazine described the game of croquet as a source of slumbering depravity

a veritable frankenstein monster of recreation and we've got a lot of depraved people in tonight so basically when like croquet was quite uh an elitist sport in the uk and then it came over to america and everyone started playing it became like a game that everyone loved to play like the whole country played it and it was really thought to be quite depraved and there are a few reasons for this one reason was people were like gambling on it a little bit but another reason is because men and women played together and often when women would play their shots boston are you still that puritan we're all going immediately into the stocks after tonight's show so women would

deliberately shorten their dresses to play more comfortably they've as they played a i know as they played a shot they might lift a skirt and show a bit of ankle this article it is amazing like it's so fervent that it all like it you know i you sort of think my god is this person serious it's really so the article that i read it in sorry yeah it is um it's in j star and it's by a historian called john stern gas and it's called cheating gender roles in the 19th century croquet craze oh nice so the and also the other thing was croquet it is a devious game because you get the no it is it is it you know there's a lot of um sort of mucking around you can do with your opponent's piece it's like basically chess but you can move the other guys

bishop like it's mean um and it's it's so nothing like chess it is unbelievably like chess it is unbelievably like chess it's not i will go i will go to the wall for this there is a lot of tactical play i read somewhere saying it's a bit like chess and i thought what kind of idiot that's my would make that comparison you've been reading my blog i'm very glad um but have you ever played chess with andy where he comes with a mallet and just smashes it up but it does it does provoke it's so frustrating if you're losing at croquet because your opponent just uses your ball to get their ball all the way around the course and this article that you were quoting the the 1898 one it said it is not long before every honorable feeling every dictate of morality has become

obliterated in place of our refined and upright people are two pairs of gruesome moral monstrosities the poison of croquet eats deeper and deeper into their souls i know it's really good i love that like so milton bradley who made these croquet sets they had the rules and one of the first rules in capital letters was keep your temper uh the philadelphia evening bulletins called it the destroyer of lifelong friendships and a ruiner of happy homes um the international herald tribute reported that a woman testified during a separation hearing that her husband refused to speak to her for days after she questioned whether his ball had really gone through the hoop amazing my okay first of all why on earth did that get to court in the first place i read that it was

like the judge said this who's going to court because their husband didn't speak to them it feels like there were underlying issues in that relationship because no but my my friend back in england um she broke up with her boyfriend over a game of croquet really really and i was part of that game and i have to say i was the one who went that guy's got to go because he was horrific in this game he did exactly what andy was saying he was he was playing chess um that doesn't mean anything unless he was literally holding a chess board and playing chess while playing croquet but it's you think several moves ahead you're fairly i only think the most controversial thing about it so croquet was kind of a feminist moment and the reason it was so controversial largely was because it

was the first game ever that women had played and majoratively so every croquet set had on the front of it a picture of a woman playing croquet and this was crazy between 1860 and 1890 you know women weren't allowed to barely leave the house if they rode a bike they were in trouble and they were all playing croquet and not only that but it turns out they were all heinous cheats and so this this really pissed people off and so there there was this big theme that women were terrible cheaters in all games um there was i think added to the official rules of croquet uh when they were codified was this manual that said don't cheat we are aware the young ladies are fond of cheating because in quotes it is such fun and they think the men like it well there are very good ways you can

cheat if you're a lady playing croquet so it because ladies at the time were very long uh and often hooped skirts which come out quite far so it's the work of a moment to just walk over to your ball just stand on top of it no one can see because the skirt's on the ground all the way around kick it over a bit into position and then suddenly you're lined up for the next shot that's very cool it was it was an olympic sport at one point wasn't it was that sorry it was an olympic sport for one year uh yeah 1900 1900 it was in France in France um yeah what they could barely move the balls it was like the burrowers yeah um yeah no but the french did really well in it didn't they no they well they were the only it was a bit of a saddam hussein moment they were the only people

who took part and they won all the medals yeah sorry uh the the next olympics the 1904 olympics croquet was kicked out but then the american version of croquet which is called roke was then done at the 1904 olympics and it was purely american to played it and won all the medals there as well and yeah well done you guys um yeah but this is this is my i think this is my favorite fact about what we found for this fact is that uh roke so roke is the american version the way they got the name roke it was invented by a guy called samuel crossby he was from new york and this was in 1899 and he came to it by removing the c from the front of the word and the t at the end of the words and that's it wow yeah isn't that if you read roke websites that's like the legendary story of

yeah well you know the reason why it was dropped from the 1900 olympics is because one person turned up to watch it yes there was one spectator and there were seven players yeah it was um it was an english guy who was living in niece and he came all the way over from niece to paris to watch the first matches he didn't even watch the final and the reason that the french won it and the french were the only people who took part is because there was a group of croquet players who lived in paris and they didn't want any foreigners playing at all and so they made it so all the games took place over like three or four months and so no one could afford to stay in paris for that whole time and so it's only people who live there who could play it yeah sneaky so he had a courage of

cheating um actually sorry can i just say that olympics um so there weren't that many spectators as any of the sports really um apart from in the discus there was quite a few because it was in the boire de boulogne so a lot of locals were there um but the 1896 discus champion who came to 1900 olympics he managed to dispatch his discus into the crowd on all three throws oh is that extra points or a bonus prize or do you guys know who invented croquet no no no it was a guy well his name's quite controversial which is why i raise it but um it was a guy called walter thomas jones whitmore he was an english guy and i've actually he invented it in charleston house which i've been to in england it's a lovely place i've played croquet on the lawn um it's just that kind of life

where he's um but he was called so he was called walter thomas jones whitmore but he was born walter thomas whitmore jones the reason he changed his name which he did in 1867 was because his best friend was called willy dickens and they used to go for walks together down regent street and he got really sick of willy dickens making a joke every time they passed the drapery dickens and jones at regent street you're going oh it's you and me mate look it's you and me dickens and jones so look fuck it i'm gonna drop the surname jones wow wow that's amazing that's petty we should talk a bit about modern croquet because croquet is really exciting today because they've guys it is it is thank you and he's actually an official commentator back home at the uk it's

it's amazing commentary oh what a great chess movie he's just made there there's a new game in town and it's called golf croquet and it's got much less of the chess actually it's much more it's a speed and a speed game basically yeah yeah yeah um it's uh the champion uh the american champion is called ben rothman one of the actually egypt is one of the best countries in the world at golf croquet they clean they clean up they went all the awards men's and women's they're really really good at it anyway the american champion ben rothman was profiled by the san francisco chronicle and the entire interview read as basically one long sick burn on him so it started off ben rothman is the champion of the world and practically no one knows

it and that and they do a series of box pops over the course of the interview with people who are saying yeah i've never heard of him uh a few feet away from where he is practicing his game um so in the article ends at lake merit the parade of passersby who had no idea they were in the presence of greatness continued croquet doesn't do anything for me said alex pineda who was walking by the croquet ground with his dog dominik for who croquet did nothing either just ends with the line i think it's cool that he's world champion thanks for telling me i still don't care about croquet okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening boston you've been amazing good bye