No Such Thing As A Fish - 296: No Such Thing As A Glowing Ballet Dancer

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Live from Philadelphia, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss crash test moose, radioactive slippers, and the multi-presidential inventor of chewing gum. 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 Philadelphia! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the star of the film Candyman, where a character has bees coming out of his mouth, negotiated a $1,000 bonus for every time he got stung.

He ended up with $23,000. Wow. Yeah. How bad is it to be stung by a bee? Do you think you'd be deliberately angering the bees so that you got a few more stings than a bit more money? Or not? I would, but that says more about me than it does about, um, yeah, although in the mouth

I imagine it would be a lot more painful than normal. So this is Candyman, this is Tony Todd, this is a kind of cult horror film, and one of the inspirations was from the Johnny Carson show, where there was a man called Norman Gary, who was a bee-based performer, and he had an, he had an act where he played the clarinet while covered in bees, and people loved this. And he then became the bee wrangler, the official bee person on Candyman. And I think it's him and Tony Todd, they're the only two people to have done all three Candyman films, is the star and the bee guy.

Wow. Can you explain, can you explain what Candyman is? Because I haven't seen it, so. It's, uh, Dan, you watched it when you were a child. Oh yeah, yeah. It's a horror film. Um, there's a guy who has a hook, and if you say his name into a mirror five times, he kills you.

So, in theory, you shouldn't do that, but people, they do. Don't they? Yeah. How many times have we said it so far on the stage? Um, but it was written by Clive Barker, the great horror writer. Oh yeah, yeah. I think he did Hellraiser as well. And the bees that they use, actually, there is a logic, it wasn't bees that were just

ready and furious and waiting to sting. Um, they made sure that the bees were only 12 hours old, so imagine you've just been born and you're suddenly in a Hollywood movie, it's incredible. And, uh, so yeah, so they went into the mouth and, um, the idea is that the stings wouldn't be sharp enough, even when he was stung, it wouldn't have the sting of a, say, 14 hour old bee. Um, and once, uh, they'd done each take, the bees would be vacuumed up using a tiny bee vacuum.

Did you know that you can get a bee vacuum cleaner? Yeah. How's that different from a normal vacuum cleaner? I think it's just a little bit kinder on the bees, I would guess. Um, it was, it was a mini one. Like it was, yeah, it's different because it's a bee size, not like a bee would use it as a vacuum cleaner. And they'd be sucked up and then returned to their dressing room for the, you know,

sort of to await the next take. Wow. They didn't have their own dressing room. They do mean a bot, a wooden box. I think, yeah. Well, you've seen our dressing room tonight, that's, it's full of bees, but actually the main thing is with this bee bearding thing, which is what the clarinetists did. Okay.

So what you do is you get a queen bee and you put it in a little cage by your face and then all of the other bees kind of come along because they like the queen bee so much and they hang around your face. And the way that you get them off normally is you spend maybe a couple of hours getting them on. So you have a massive bee beard and then you just jump in the air and when you land, all the bees just disappear. No, they don't disappear.

They just stop holding onto your face. That's amazing. Yeah. And does that not irritate them? A little bit. You might get stung a few times, but then you walk backwards and someone's kind of firing smoke in your face so that they're getting a bit sleepy, a little bit drowsy and then you can get away.

That's so crafty. Isn't it really? That's so weird. Daniel Madsen, who I think was the lead female character in the film, said it used to take ages for their bee rang, just as sweet the bees are. Well, yeah, because what they did with them is they kind of smeared their face in pheromone. And so the bees just really did not want to leave them. She said that basically you have pheromones on them, so they're all in love with you.

All the bees. That's nice, isn't it? She was allergic to bees, I think. She was very slightly, wasn't she? The director said, no, you're not. You're just afraid. This guy, Norman Gary, the bee wrangler, he has a Guinness World Record that is obviously bee related, but it is for most bees in a mouth.

Wow, really? Yeah. How many was it? Any guesses? I would say about 14. 14. 14, yeah. 14.

65. 65. 65. Yeah. 66. Okay. Wow. That's an incredibly dubious method, Dan Wins, but he had 109 live bees in his mouth at one

time and you get a sponge soaked in sugar and they like that, obviously, so they always seek that out. So you can sort of train them to go where you want them to go with that sponge. So then he put it in his mouth. You have to close your mouth for 10 seconds for the record to be valid. So they're all in there. And then you put a mesh cage up to your lips. You blow them all into the cage at the same time, then you close the bag, and then to do

the count, you have to allow them to escape one by one while you tally them. Really? One by one? Until then, you don't know if you've got the record, because you've just got a load of bees in your mouth. Correct. It's easier to count them out than it is to count them in, I guess. Yeah, you can see that.

Hey, I was looking into horror movies generally because I realized I just don't know much about sort of like the behind the scenes of movies. I found this really fun fact, which is The Omen, the movie The Omen. So Damien, it's now the classic name for, yeah. So he wasn't meant to be called Damien. Oh, no. Really? Yeah, originally the screenwriter, David Seltzer, he wanted to name the Antichrist Domlin, D-O-M-L-I-N.

And the reason he wanted to call him Domlin is because he knew a Domlin who was a totally obnoxious brat, he said. It was a friend, it was the child of a friend of his. And it was his wife, the screenwriter's wife, who went, you can't fucking do this to Domlin. Immortalize him as the Antichrist in a movie. They're not going to go, well, it might be another Domlin. Yeah, exactly. So it's Damien, but yeah, it should have been Domlin.

Wow. But now all the Damians get that, it seems unfair. But at least there are all the Damians, there's not just one Damien in the world who knows it's about him. They used to have a lot of horror movies within Sexin, like this one Candyman with the Bees. With it, between 1966 and 1978, there were six major films featuring Bees as the main horror in that film. One of them was called The Swarm, and The Sunday Times has said it's the worst film ever made.

Richard Velt in The Wilmington Morning Star said, The Swarm may not be the worst movie ever made. I'll have to see them all to be sure, but it's certainly as bad as any I've ever seen. All the actors involved in this fiasco should be ashamed. Apparently it's absolutely awful. It's got Michael Cain in it. It cost him tons, it was really expensive. The budget was like 20 million.

It came out in the same year as Star Wars, which was made for a lot less money, and it was basically about a load of killer Bees. Now the American Bee Association decided to do a cease and desist to The Swarm for defaming the American honeybee, and as a result at the end of the movie there's a disclaimer saying that the killer bees in the film burn no resemblance to real crop pollinating honeybees. I bet they bore some resemblance. I was reading about The Swarm too. It does sound absolutely amazing.

It's 2 hours and 40 minutes long, which is hefty. Michael Cain said that he only did it because his mother needed a house to live in. It's quite sweet. But also they kept finding all the way through the film, because they filmed it with nearly a million bees. It's a big, huge cast, basically. Huge cut, what the credits at the end. B1, B2, B3.

But the cast and the crew, they kept finding little yellow dots on their clothing because of all the bees. Michael Cain would eat that before eventually being informed that that was not honey he was eating, but that was just bee excrement that he'd casually been snacking on throughout the filming. Wow. That's when you do need a bee with a little vacuum cleaner, don't you? The cleaner bee.

Another horror film, which involves animals going nuts, was The Birds, and that they had a bird trainer in The Birds, and in fact, he's a guy called Ray Berrick, and he trained all birds in all films that you've seen with birds in for about 20 years, so the Birdman of Alcatraz was another big one. He has such cool tricks, so I don't know if you've seen The Birds, but there are lots of scenes where the birds fly towards the lens of the camera and attack it, and they put meat in the lens of the camera, so the birds would fly at it. Cool.

It was quite weird because there are no special effects in that, so they just had these birds attacking them all the time, and the lead actor in it said, it was Rod Taylor who was the lead actor who said there was one particular raven who absolutely hated him, and ravens do take against people. We've discussed this before, so he said he'd get up, go on to set every day, this raven would immediately turn up next to him and go, and then start just biting him, manically, and then every day on set he'd say, look, is Archie working today? Archie being the raven, and he'd always turn up, and it was really sad because Tippi

Hedrin, who was his co-star, also had a relationship with a raven, but she had a really nice one, so a raven befriended her, loved her, they couldn't actually use that raven in the film because it was too nice. Imagine if you watch the movie and they're all attacking her, but one of them is just kind of on her shoulder, just leave them alone, leave them alone! Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that, as well as using Crash Test Dummies, Volvo tests its cars with a Crash Test Moose.

They have a Crash Test Moose, which as far as I can tell is called Mooses. So this is done in Sweden, they have a 790 pound Moose surrogate and they make it from a stack of 114 rubber discs, and the idea is that it's sort of sitting in front of a car, so rather that it's not the moose inside the car as a Crash Test dummy, it's sitting in a distance and they ram the car into it and it splays itself all over the car, so it's just to show the damage that's being done to the car. Actually it's really important isn't it, because if you're driving along and there's an animal in the way, a lot of people say really the best thing to do is not to swerve

out of the way because you might hit a tree or another car, you basically should keep going, but with a moose you definitely shouldn't do that. And the reason being on the shop, people here know, but basically they've got spindly legs and a massive big fuck off body, and so you go into those legs and they just matchsticks just go and then the body just hits you at the right height to go right into you, and it's really really dangerous. There is amazing footage of the Crash Test happening and it's, yeah the top of the car just gets taken out basically, but I think there are, yeah did you say there are two

of these? There are only two on the planet, but they are both in Sweden basically. Well you do need it in Sweden because that's where they have a lot of moose of course. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I think, yeah, yeah, no, it's a very good idea. I'm surprised there isn't one in Canada to be honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the thing with moose in Sweden is there are so many moose in Sweden that if you're travelling across a highway, you will pass within a thousand feet of a moose every twenty-three

seconds on average, but it's just one moose and he's really fast. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Incredible. They do have really cool, so there's a place in rural Virginia called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and it's their testing centre and it's where they do a lot of crash testing for cars, but they occasionally will have sort of fun derbies between different cars.

Oh, what do you mean? I've really oversold that. Basically. I wasn't even that excited about it. Well, for their 50th birthday they had a grudge match between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu. And what do you mean they just crash into each other? Yeah, yeah. It was to show how much safer cars are these days because the beautiful old 1950s car,

the whole front just really crumples and the other one doesn't. Wow. It's a good news story in many ways. You have died in style, haven't you, in that nice old car? I guess so. But they really had to persuade people that safety was a good idea for cars. What? Like deaths in car accidents kept creeping up and up and up and the car industry kept

saying, God, yeah, awful, but what are we going to do about it? And they really had to persuade them. So Ford introduced a car in 1956 which had a steering wheel where the steering wheel, if you hit something, the steering wheel column would deform on impact. Okay. This is a good thing because it means you don't get hit in the middle of the chest by a spike of metal, basically. The car was not popular.

Despite being sold with that, it was very much outsold by other cars which had very dangerous steering columns. Do you know the first crash test dummies were live humans? So this happened a few times, actually, but from the 1950s they started testing the crash impact on human bodies and there was a researcher called Lawrence Patrick. And he basically volunteered himself. And he made the point that actually people have been talking about using inanimate objects, all things like the dummies we have today, but you can crash a dummy into a car as many

times as you like and go, oh, look, it's really dented here and its heads exploded and its foot fell off. But you don't actually know what that would mean if it was a live human. You don't actually know if the dummy is dead, but would this kill a human? Right. So this guy from 1960 to 1975 was a human crash test dummy. And he used to do things like he took a 50-pound metal pendulum to the chest repeatedly and that was to test the steering column.

So he used to break ribs and things like that. God. Part of his job was hurling his knee repeatedly against a metal bar. That's amazing. Yeah, he took over 400 deceleration rides to then that's where you sort of simulate the feeling of a crash. And yeah, it sounds horrendous. And him and his students would lie down and they'd have stuff like what's called a gravity

impactor where you'd have to be lying down and you had kind of this like metal rod suspended above your cheek. And then it would just jab you in the cheek. It would be like a robot jab you repeatedly and harder and harder in the cheek to see how much you could take. And one day he said he couldn't take it anymore. They went, well, let's make cars that don't inflict more than that. Wow.

But let's bring it right up to that point. Wow. And he was, that guy was Lawrence Patrick, you say. Yeah. And his students called Harold Mertz who went on to develop the first or the standard crash test dummy. Right. So it was based on all that kind of stuff.

Oh, wow. Because he had such a traumatic experience here. Dummies, they are getting older. We're all getting older. Who are we getting older? The dummies. They're being made to be older now. Oh, they're made older as in when they're first.

Oh, right. Yeah. How does that work? As in the bones aren't as strong. They're a bit more fragile, basically, because people are getting older. Again, back to your point, James, we're all getting older. But drivers, drivers are getting, society is aging. So, you know, the crash test dummies which simulate, you know, strapping young person

in their prime are not a realistic way of simulating what's happening if you're driving and you're 120 years old. No. You know. And fatter as well, they're getting, aren't they? Yeah. Because we're getting fatter. And sort of more varied.

There's this problem with dummies and it happens with all technology where it says the standard dummies have been made for the average man. And so then we've proven that that's how strong this car is. And it's always a man and it's always a Western man. And they've finally clocked on to the fact that not everyone on earth is a Western man. And so obviously, like, women tend to be lighter, different parts of their body, a bit weaker. And so now they've finally started making dummies that are, like, very in size. But one of the things is they've had to get fatter.

I think the average American has put on just over two stone in the last 20 years, 25 years. So the dummies are about to follow suit. 28 pounds. 28 pounds. 28 pounds. Yeah. Well, that's not much weight to put on over 25 years. You're actually keeping quite fit if that's all you put on in that period.

You don't gradually put on more and more weight each year. That's not how it's, but that's not like a healthy weight. Sorry, as a man in his 40s, yes, you do. I've got something that you might like, Dan. There is a theory that crash test dummies explain the Roswell landings. Jesus. What? So this is a claim that was made about crash test dummies that people might have mistaken

crash test dummies being used in parachute drops. If you're testing a parachute and you want to see how hard, you know, someone hits the ground with that particular parachute. So maybe the Air Force were collecting in crash test dummies and mistook them for alien bodies being collected in. Right. Because that's where a lot of military testing might happen. And these were six foot long things and they were hairless and they were made of a weird rubbery substance. Yeah, yeah. So it's not a widely adhered to theory.

No. It's obviously aliens, but it's still. Yeah. I can't believe you thought that would excite me. What I wanted you to say is aliens are real. That's the... Speaking of theories and adhering. Tenuous.

Very tenuous. Let's go with it. Google has invented a new thing which is human flypaper. And the idea is if you have a self-driving car, you put this flypaper on the front of your car. And one of the problems or one of the main ways that people get injured if they get hit by cars is not even the first impact is where you get thrown and you end up hitting your head on the floor or stuff like that or you get run over. And so they think that what might happen is you drive along, you hit pedestrian, instead of throwing them over, they stick to the car. Oh, wow. And then you can slow down and then they can just unstick themselves.

There must be so many situations where you're late to somewhere and you're like, I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to go and you're on passing cars on the highway with a dude stuck to the front. Oh, I found a great Moose related headline because I was looking up some Moose facts as well. This is a headline from South Dakota. Is it Kilo Land or Kello Land? All right. No one knows and I think it's fair to say no one here cares. Okay. Let's say Kilo Land news.

This is a genuine local news headline in South Dakota. Moose moves from one field into another field. It goes on, be on alert driving near the Marion Road exit on Interstate 90. A little after five Thursday night, a combine scared the Moose. Clearly just one Moose involved in this whole state scared the Moose out of one field and into another. This is the same Moose that's been hanging out in the area north of Southwestern Sioux Falls since Monday. So maybe there's a reason that nobody here has been to South Dakota is all I'm trying to say. So we move on, let's move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that Americans used to make the slippers radioactive so they could find them in the dark. Now, I must say probably not many Americans in this, but I think definitely some of them did. So there is an advert online for this product which you could buy in the 1930s called Undark. And it's like a paint and it contains radium. Can we just clarify that it wasn't online in the 1940s, was it? You're absolutely right. It wasn't online in the 1930s.

It was a different medium back then and it's been put online now. Got it, just checking. I saw it online in the last few days. But yeah, I think it was in magazines and things like this and it was called Undark. And it says, the advert says, does Undark really contain radium? Most assuredly. So it's real radioactive stuff and the whole point of it is you would put it on things so you could find them in the dark. So they said that you would put it on watches and clocks, on push buttons, on the buckles of your bedroom slippers,

on house numbers, flashlights, compasses. Well, flashlights, I don't know why because you can turn them. Well, you need to find it in the dark. You need to find it in the dark. You're absolutely right. And basically, in the 1930s, they were putting radium on everything, even though not realising perhaps that it was killing people. Yeah, they were obsessed. It was a craze.

And the newspapers constantly contained it. I think George Bernard Shaw said the world has run raving mad on the subject of radium. And of course, there was very famously the radium girls who were the people who worked in sort of 1990s. And the radium girls were there and they had to paint radium onto clocks to make their hands glow in the dark and they would lick the paintbrushes and so they would swallow a little bit of radium every single time they did that, which was extremely bad for them, it turned out. And worse still, they would paint like little messages on the teeth for their boyfriends and like their clothes would glow in the dark.

So when they went out clubbing, or whatever they did in the 1920s, they would always wear their work clothes because it meant they shined in the nightclubs. They were like human glow sticks dancing in the clubs. They properly were glowers in one. So it was a big scandal by the 1920s they started dying and people realised it was probably because of all this radium. And when they exhumed their bodies years later, they were still glowing from all this radium. It was amazing and they'd open their cupboards in the morning and all their clothes are just glowing. Absolutely bizarre.

And then of course, because they were getting very sick, there were lawsuits. And it was due to a guy called Leonard Grossman who was a lawyer who worked pro bono for the whole time. And it was after eight appeals that they managed to get the companies to admit that they were wrong and managed to get something back. Although the last one, the last radium girl, died at the age of 107. Not so long ago, only in the last 20 years I think. But she quit within a week of working there because she hated the taste of the paint. Yes. And she was counting herself lucky at age 107 in 2014.

But like they weren't to know, I suppose, and it must have been so exciting. And also uranium had the same thing when uranium then became a thing and this was this other very, very dangerous nuclear substance people got very into. There was a time when hamburgers came with free shares in uranium mines. Like a little Happy Meal, but it was a share in uranium. Really? What? There were some, right? You know, is it pronounced boogey? You know, B-O-U-G-I-E, the sort of things. Boogey.

Sorry. There were radioactive boogeys which were wax-covered rods to be inserted into the penis. Sorry, I didn't know this word boogey until now. Is that what it is? Boogey, yeah. Well, there's a modern meaning of boogey which is a bit different, a bit different to that. Is that what boogey nights, that movies about? That's right, yeah. It basically is about that, isn't it?

Yeah. Wow. Some people said if you fed your chickens radium, then their eggs would incubate themselves. Wow. Not true. Weirdly, you mentioned the curies earlier, so Mary Curie. She was in the news this year. She's in our book, our new book. Yeah, because someone, it was her birthday and the cake arrived, a surprise cake, and

they opened it up and on the cake was a drawing of Mary Curie. And she was confused because she had no idea who it was. It turns out that there was a miss hearing over the phone what the parent had actually asked for was a cake of Mariah Carey. And as a result, she had this Nobel Prize winner on her cake with no idea who it was. Wow. All I want for Christmas is uranium. So Mary Curie, Pierre, her husband, died in a traffic accident.

And then years later, she started dating again, and she had an affair with a married man, which was very scandalous at the time. And it led to this huge core celeb. There were either two or five armed duels over this affair that she had. Wow. And the wife of the man she was having the affair with, her name was Madame Longvin. She had someone break into Curie's house and steal the love letters. All of this about Mary Curie, Nobel Prize winning, you know, and the letters were stolen

and then they were leaked to the press. So suddenly this is a huge story. And her lover, Paul Longvin, had a duel between him and a journalist who'd insulted him. And there's a letter from Einstein to Mary Curie saying, don't worry about all this. This is irrelevant. Really? It's really cool because it was just before she won the Nobel Prize. Her Nobel Prize was slightly overshadowed by this huge story.

Really? Yeah, yeah. Three days before she was due to go and collect it, the story broke. And they were saying, oh, maybe don't come and collect your Nobel Prize because this is scandalous. But then Einstein wrote her a letter saying, forget all that. You've got the award. Get the award. Wow. Yeah.

She used to be always called on to test the radium products. You know you were saying at the start, James, that a lot of products called themselves radioactive. But they didn't always have it in, is that right? Yeah, they very often just pretended and then put a bit of different glow in the dark stuff in it. She would be called to verify that stuff contained radium. That it like definitely was deadly, basically. It'd be like, my child's toy says it's radioactive. Can you just check, Mary Curie, that it is?

She'd be like, yep, definitely got lots of radium in it. Wow. Good luck to that kid. Wow. She actually fell on a little bit of hard times after a while and she didn't have enough radium to continue her research because radium was really, really expensive. There's not much of it in the ground, so it's really hard to get. And so there was a fundraising campaign led by American women and Curie travelled to the United States

and she was presented with one gram of radium by President Warren Harding in 1921. That's so cool. It doesn't sound like a lot that, right? But it was cost them $100,000 for a single gram of radium. And that, at the time, in 1921 was about the average budget of a Hollywood movie. Wow. So for one gram of radium, you could make a whole movie. That's so cool.

Isn't that amazing? They did, because when they were trying to refine it in the foot, like before they'd even discovered it, they were using a thing called pitch blend, which is a kind of uranium ore. And it's got the, it's got radium in it, but it needs to be refined a lot. They went through seven tons of pitch blend and they ended up with one gram of radium after all of that refining. That's incredible. This is why there was a ballet dancer and choreographer called Lowy Fuller, who in 1904 created the radium dance, which was a really famous dance at the time.

And she wanted all the ballerinas to be wearing head to toe costumes made entirely of radium. And she was sort of mates with Mary Curie and she wrote to her and said, can you make me a bunch of ballerinas dresses made entirely of radium? And thank God, Mary Curie said, I'd absolutely love to. It sounds like a great idea, but it's just too expensive. And so she had to make do with a sort of slightly less glow in the dark other material and the ballerinas lived just another day. Have you heard of magic radium massage?

No. This was a 30s product, which is curious because if the radium girls were dying in the 1920s, then you would think... Well, they still used a lot of radium until sort of 40s and 50s, I think. Well, the magic radium massage, this ointment, when massaged into the sex parts, this is the other, acts as a healthy tonic and stimulant, tending to give firmness and strength to the organs. It is especially effective for improving the circulation in the genital organs

when they feel cold, clammy and lifeless. Soon. I mean, that is useful. If you need to get up to go to the toilet in the night, you just follow your car. Where did I leave that penis? Yeah. All right. It's time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chazinsky.

My fact this week is that the man who introduced chewing gum to the world had already been president of Mexico 11 times. It's crazy. It's a very strange career trajectory. This is, of course, probably the most famous, maybe the most famous of Mexican ever, General Santa Ana in the 19th century. He was president constantly. He's got about, he's sort of hated in three different, very specific places.

So the U.S. hate him, the Mexicans hate him, and Texans hate him, and I know Texas is part of the U.S., but some people say that they don't, they pretend they aren't. But yeah, he's, so he was at the Battle of Alamo, and he was disgraced there because he was very, very brutal, and then that was what led to the cries that remember the Alamo, which led to him and his troops being defeated at Jacinta later. But anyway, he had lots of sort of military defeats,

and somehow they kept on making him president again. He kept on being exiled from the country, and when he was finally exiled from Mexico permanently in 1869, he went to New Jersey, and all he brought with him... That's not the joke. The joke is not, that's what you do when you hit a rock bottom. Wow, you can just say New Jersey in an aggregate. It's good to know.

So he went to New Jersey and he brought with him as insurance a ton of this chickle gum, which they all chewed in Mexico, and the bloke he was living with said, oh, what's that gum? Can I try and make something out of it? I'm going to try and sell it. And he tried to make sort of tires out of it and toys out of it and masks and Wellington boots. None of it stuck, as it were.

And so eventually he saw Santa Anna chewing it one day, and so he thought, okay, I'll try and sell it to people and tell them to chew on it, and they loved it. And their chewing gum was born, or popularized, at least, in the West. He was quite amazing, wasn't he, Santa Anna? After the independence from Spain in 1821, basically a whole country just kept having these coups and counter-coups and whatever,

and he just kept reinventing himself to whoever was taking over. He said, oh, I'm with these guys, and then they would make him president. So at one stage he started off as conservative, and then he became liberal, then he became a Democrat, and then he became a dictator. And all those times, each time, he became the president.

And by way of comparison, Donald Trump started off as a Republican, became a member of the Independence Party, then was a Democrat, and then was a Republican again. Hasn't been a dictator yet. But yeah, he just kept reinventing himself so he could get the power. It's really amazing, isn't it?

He didn't go to either of his own weddings. He just couldn't be bothered to turn up, basically, or he was travelling or busy or whatever, so he just deputized someone by... Can I just say, you are about to get married. Certainly am. It doesn't work that way anymore. So he married twice, mostly for, we think,

for money both times, because the women he was marrying had very large estates, and he was in need of cash. So the first wedding he had, he empowered his father-in-law to be as his proxy. Oh. So basically, her dad would walk her, you know, up the aisle. He gave her a way to himself. Basically, yeah.

Wow. Do we know if he sort of jumped round the other side of her at the crucial moment? Yeah. Just put a different hat on. He actually lost Texas to the U.S., possibly because he was having sex in a tent. No.

So this is... The tale is that at the Battle of Jacinto, he was distracted by a Texan woman who, so it was a ploy on her part, she's sort of this folk hero. And this was reported at the time by an English journalist, and apparently this Texan woman snuck into his tent and seduced him and shagged away, and then he lost the battle while he was in the tent,

not in charge of his troops, and then had to leg it. How long was that sex session that he lost? Well, the battle famously only took 18 minutes, so... That's not too bad, isn't it? In my house. My wife will be going, you hear that? 18 minutes. He can do 18 minutes.

Dad, you could always use a proxy if you have to. Sorry, it's okay, honey, your dad's on his way over. Did he still have his leg at the time? That happened. He did have his original legs at that time. Okay, because one of the other things he was famous for was losing a leg in a conflict called the Pastry War, which was against French forces who had invaded Mexico.

I think that's why it's called that. So he was wounded and he had his leg amputated, and then four years later, as a kind of political move, he had it disinterred, and he held a state funeral for his leg, so he got to attend, and it was a really fancy funeral. So the leg got taken to the capital in a coach, and there was a beautiful monument constructed,

and there was cannon fire and poems were read, and then the leg was eventually reburied. How shit is that for his wife that he shows up to a funeral for his leg, but not to his own wedding? But then on the bright side, for two years later, after he'd done that, it was exhumed again by his opponents and dragged through the streets

with people chanting death to the cripple. So, yeah, he was obsessed with this leg. He used to, sort of like, before he'd even done the big state funeral, he used to carry it around waving it above him in parade. Really? And he gave it two funerals. He gave it a small funeral on his little hacienda

before the big one when it first got lost. He was always reminding people, one of these really annoying... You'd always let it drop into conversation. But the pastry ward, do you know why it was called that specifically? No, I don't. It is related to the French thing, but it's specifically because there was one French pastry café

in Mexico, and it was owed a big debt by the government, and it wasn't being paid, and so this pastry chef called the French government and said, Mexico owes me all this money, it's not paying, and so it got a bit out of hand and war happened. Oh, man. Because of that. The French ended up really overreacting,

so they... Do you think he rang them up and said, they owe me an arm and a leg? They negotiated down to half of that. You know, you can visit his leg in Illinois. Well, his fake leg. It's in a museum in Illinois, and there's like a chicken dinner there as well,

because supposedly he was eating chicken at the time, so it sort of like sets the scene. So when you say his fake leg, you mean this prosthesis. Yeah, exactly. Someone galloped off away when he wasn't looking, took his leg, and it's now in Illinois. It's been there for years. Yes, so this was another fight. This was the later battle that he actually lost, wasn't it,

when he had the prosthetic leg, and as you say, he was eating a chicken dinner in his tent, and the battle was lost again. He really lingered over it. He spent about 20 minutes eating the chicken dinner. Disaster. This guy needs to stay out of tents. I always think it's really weird though, because in that thing where the soldiers came along

and they took his leg, and they also took $18,000 and the chicken dinner, but everyone always talks about the chicken dinner. It's so weird. And then he got another leg, then he got a peg leg, so just a piece of wood for a prosthesis, and then that got stolen as well. It got stolen and was reportedly later used

by Lieutenant Abner Doubleday as a baseball bat. Wow. So this fact was also about the fact that he introduced chewing gum to the world. Can I mention a couple of chewing gum things I found? So chewing gum, obviously we had chewing gum that was around for a while, and then bubble gum arrived,

and bubble gum was invented in Philadelphia. Yeah! How cool is that? Did you guys know that? Probably. You didn't know that. Okay, so bubble gum was invented here. There was a guy called Frank H. Fleer, although he didn't invent bubble gum itself. So double bubble was the first ever bubble gum that came out.

What? Yeah. There was no bubble before... No, chewing gum was just chewed, and then he was like, let's take it big. He went straight to double bubble. There's no single bubble chewing gum. Oh, I see. Well, no, no, there was a prototype, which didn't work.

So he's not the inventor of double bubble. He is the inventor of its prototype, blibber blubber. Stop. Absolutely true. Blibber blubber was the original bubble gum that he invented, but unfortunately it didn't quite work out. So the problem was is when you blew the bubble... No one could say it for a start. Blibber blubber.

So Frank H. Fleer. So the problem was is that you would blow the bubble, it would pop, and it would go all over your face, but the stickiness of it was too much that you needed a solvent to actually take it off your face. So when he was marketing it initially, it was with this little product that would make sure that it would come off, so it didn't work out.

Never sold, never made it actually to shops, but instead then someone who was working for him said, let's take it differently, and that's how we have double bubble. Whoa. Yeah. So when was that? This was 1906 that he posted this, yeah. Because there was one other claimant to the invention of bubble gum who is Waldo Seaman, who...

Wow. What did he call his? And it didn't go down very well. With chewing gum, make sure you never swallow. That's what I'm saying. So Mr Seaman was... Waldo Seaman. ...working for a tyre company.

Where's Waldo? Which Waldo? That's a much more difficult and more adult version of the book, but it is. He's easier to spot though. You turn the lights off, you shine and talk, but it glows in the dark. That's the best UV Seaman-Wes Wally bubble gum joke that's ever been made.

That's the only one. No. Top 10. Anyway, he was a very serious guy, wanting to be taken seriously. His business was in making plastics and rubber and polymers, and he worked for a tyre company, and so when he made this thing that blew bubbles,

the tyre company thought, well, that's a huge defect. We don't want tyres that are bubbles. So to stop making it. And so he had to stop making it. But interestingly, did you know that tyre manufacturers, Goodyear, Tire and Rubber, for instance, are the biggest provider of the rubber core of chewing gum today?

Is it? Because it's not made out of that chickley stuff anymore. It's made out of, like, petrol chemicals, basically chewing gum, isn't it? Eventually, yeah. It's made out of kind of rubber in the middle. That's amazing. So actually, when, like, cars drive over the road,

they should be able to just pick up the chewing gum and just become part of the tyre. Oh, yeah. Eventually you just have a massively high car. Yeah. The ancient Greeks had chewing gum. A kind of chewing gum, yeah. So as you say, it was popularised when it became nice,

but the ancient Greeks were going around chewing mastic gum sometimes. That was the thing. It was really horrible back in the old days, because it used to be made with paraffin. So it was very bitter and very, you know, brittle and unwholesome. The one thing that you might do if you had some paraffin chewing gum is you'd have a plate of sugar next to you,

and you'd just have to repeatedly take it out of your mouth, dip it in the sugar, and put it back in. Oh, nice. Yeah. That sounds all right. No, not that. I've explained it wrong. We're going to have to move on in a second.

This is one more thing about chewing gum. The University of Copenhagen is currently working on fertility chewing gum. Is this another Waldo Seaman invention? That's the second best Waldo Seaman bubble gum based. No, it's for women to chew, so that you know where you are in your menstrual cycles. So if you chew it, it reacts with the, I guess, the enzymes in your saliva, and it turns a particular colour, depending on how far along you are

and whether you're in the perfect time to conceive. But then do you have to keep pulling it out of your mouth and looking at it and then pulling it back in again? I think there's a... Well, you have to take it out at least once, yeah. But that is cool. Yeah, it's nice. If it happens, that's going to be great.

In 1904, they had a big craze in America of chewing gum parties. Cool. And the idea of what you would do there is you would, each guest would come along with a big pack of chewing gum, actually lots of packs, and then everyone would sit around and chew their chewing gum until it was soft, and then they'd put it on a plate, and they would sculpt it into things.

Cool. And that was the game. That's kind of fun. This audience doesn't seem to think it's much fun. Wow, Philadelphia is a bit too good for that, apparently. Okay, let's wrap up. Okay, that is 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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account. So I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Yep, and James. At James Harkin.

And Czazinski. You can email our podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. You have everything up there. There's future tour dates. There's all of our previous episodes. There's links to things like our book.

And last thing to say is, guys, thank you so much. That was so much fun. We'll see you again. Good night!