No Such Thing As A Fish - 302: No Such Thing As A Hedgehog Circus

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Happy New Year! Enjoy a  bumper compilation of deleted bits from 2019 - all the facts, flubs and terrible terrible puns that somehow didn't make the edit. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now, before we start this week's show, Merry Christmas. I hope you've had a great Christmas. When I edit every single week, there's sometimes bits that just don't quite fit in with the rest of the show, but maybe they're just really interesting, maybe they're really funny and they don't fit in. Maybe it's just one incredible joke about hedgehogs that was just so good I thought it would detract from the entire rest of the show if I left it in, and so I took it out. I take all those bits, I snuffle them away like a hedgehog does with nuts or whatever it is that hedgehogs eat, and then at the end of the year, I put them all together for the best off show, and this one is a real bumper special. It's over an hour. I really hope

you enjoy it. It's us just messing around, and we'll see you in the new year with one of our normal shows. But in the meantime, enjoy this one, and happy new year. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. Can't be, what did I do? I don't know if I'm doing it too, is that okay? I'm just trying to put you up. Oh, okay, cool. No, sometimes because I think you're like, it's the volume thing, so I'm like, oh, should I just start again? No, no, it's just being a dick. Cool, all right. What? Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, as in the first Siamese twins to be written about in the West, they were really interesting. So they had a system where they

were both married and they would spend three nights each with each wife, and they, their great, granddaughter, was the first, was the youngest ever recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Music. But yeah, how weird is that? 2013. And yeah. Do you know her name? Yeah, she's called Caroline Shaw. Do you know her? Never heard of her. Okay. She's done work with Kanye West. How's she? Do you know him? Never heard of him. But the thing that tore Chang and Eng apart is that Chang developed a drinking problem quite late in life, and suddenly, suddenly. Hang on, if you develop a drinking problem, surely your Siamese twin also develops a drinking problem? They were only, they were joined at the chest, so I think they had different livers. Okay. But it's still quite annoying if you're

constantly attached to a drunk. Yeah, tell me about it. We haven't been touring for a while yet. There's one thing that sunny days are good for. Well, actually, there's loads of stuff. Okay, we're going to swim, a sunbathe, but mostly asking someone out. So it's good to ask someone out on a date, and this is a French study, obviously, and this French study found one attractive man, and they sent him round to ask out strangers. How did they find one of those in France? They had to recruit one from Scotland. Sorry, Scotland. We're looking forward to Aberdeen next week. I don't mean that. So yeah, they recruited this attractive French man and made him ask out lots of strangers on the street, and they found a huge difference. So when it was

sunny, 22.4% gave him a positive response. And when it was cloudy, so not rainy, just cloudy, then 13.9% did. That is quite a big difference. But they did warn that it's not necessarily that, you know, we feel more prone to say yes on sunny days. It might be that your flirting skills improve in the sunshine. It could be also that he was very bad her die. And when it rains, it kind of washes down his face. And everyone's like, no, I'm not going to come out with you. You just got in color your face. It's not raining. Maybe when it's cloudy. We don't know about this guy, because maybe when it's cloudy, he insists on wearing his Donald Duck shaped raincoat. What's his wrong with his raincoat? Donald Duck actually is a very sexy character.

Are you sure he's the right guy for this study? I don't see him making a difference. Trans is off. He's ready to go. In France, there's been robots that have been designed to help out with any kind of fights that might happen between, let's say football teams who happen to be watching the match in the same area. So in this case, there was a match going on between Russia and England. And there was a robot put in place called Allentim or Elantim. And his job, the robot's job was to basically stop the fight. But not only that, they can see by using data whether or not it thinks a fight is about to break out. So it can alert the police if it thinks that something is going to go wrong.

Unfortunately, before it could do any of its stuff at this match, someone beat it with a baseball bat. Yeah, and they couldn't revive it. So that was Allentim's career. Is that because Allentim has had a rough time? Is that the same incident that there's a video of on YouTube, which is where people are... It was in Russia and in Moscow, in fact. And there's a home video of people who are driving in their car, normal people, got a video, and they see someone drive out in front of them with a sidecar. So on a bike with a sidecar, and in the sidecar is a robot. So there's some chuckling in the car that we're in as the viewer, because they're like, what the fuck is that robot doing? And then they see that robot get cut up by another car,

and then both disappear around a corner. And then you, as the viewer, so these guys in the car with their home video, follow it around that corner. And at that point, the bike with the sidecar has disappeared and Allentim, slash Allentim, we'll never know. He's dead now. Spoiler. It's just standing by the side of the road. And the guy who's cut him up, gets out of his car, pulls the baseball bat from his passenger seat, goes up to him and knocks his head off. I've not seen the footage. It could be. It wasn't a football match. No, I should quickly say this was in Moscow. I said it was in France. This was in Moscow, and it was during the 2016 matches of the World Cup. But what happened to Allentim is they set up the first ever robot cemetery to bury him in.

Yeah, it was seen as like, don't do this to robots. Have you seen it? I've not seen anything, apparently. This robot cemetery. Well, I look at these pages that I click on. I don't just close my eyes and hope for the best. Right, this cemetery. No, this cemetery is a piece of shit. It's made to give robots a proper burial. It says it was spied by the murder of Allentim. And it's called a cemetery. If you look it up, it's a cardboard box full of parts of robot. It's in the lobby area of some kind of random conference building. And the person who set it up said, it's great. The cemetery's been really popular. We're already getting lots of requests from people to bring in their own dead tech, like a red toy car and some batteries.

Wow. It's a plastic bag. If you're a hedgehog who's running a circus, don't say roll up, roll up. Really boring circus. Yeah. There was another Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the famous one, who Kingsley Amos said was one of the best English novelists born in this century, in the 20th century. And she was, the problem with her, obviously, she had the same name as this extremely famous Elizabeth Taylor. And when her book Mrs. Lippincote came out in 1945, it was almost the same time as National Velvet came out for Elizabeth Taylor, the actress. And then they interviewed her towards the end of her life. And she said, I've had a rather uneventful life,

thank God. But sometimes the more eventful world intrudes into my life, I get fan letters to the other Elizabeth Taylor. Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one to shake them, but I have not got a bikini. It's actually slightly insulting from your husband to say, you know how you could really repel these people is actually send that photo love. I've got a fact about about people who are interested in Nazi memorabilia. So there is one guy who he does just seem to be an obsessive collector, but the Guardian profiled him a few years ago. He's called Kevin Wheatcroft. And he grew up a multimillionaire. He's the air to a huge fortune. And he has the world's largest collection of Nazi memorabilia.

He sleeps in Hitler's old bed, which he says he has changed the mattress. But to use a Lisa mattress. He owns 88 tanks, which is more than the Danish and Belgian armies combined. So they're quaking in their boots at the idea he might invade? They're historical pieces, obviously, and they wouldn't be much good today for invading anywhere. Okay. It is weird, isn't it? Collecting Nazi memorabilia. You've got to ask some questions, I think. They did ask him a lot of questions. They're doing the right thing.

But they concluded he was just, you know, he was a collector rather than an answer. Fine. If you ask some questions and people answer them, that's absolutely fine. I'm just saying you've got to ask the questions. There are lots of things he could collect though. Why did he choose that? Did they ask that question? I can't remember what his answer was, but I'm sure it was a good one. I really like the Nazis and wish they were back. I was reading that, so I was looking into just general shrimp, like eating shrimp particularly, because they're eating it on the space station. Did you know that there are shrimp recipes

available from the rapper Coolio? I did not know that. Yeah. Yeah. He released a cookbook a few years back called How to Become a Kitchen Pimp. I mean, there's great chapters, appetizers for that ass, salad eating bitches, vegetarians, question mark, okay, whatever. And then he has a whole chapter for shrimps, which is called It's Hard Out Here for a Shrimp, which is, some will know is a famous song. It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp. Yeah. So, and there's videos of people trying out his recipes, and he doesn't come across great with his choices of what to do. But yeah, but if anyone needs a Coolio shrimp recipe, yeah, it's

there. It's what a lot of people here came for tonight, I think. So Hedgehogs, there's a Hedgehog Olympic Games, which is from, I found this out from a book called A Prickly Affair, which is by a guy who's really into Hedgehogs. But he was talking, I think they're in America somewhere, and he was saying one of the competitors is a guy called Zugg Standing Bear, who was one of Gerald Ford's bodyguards. And he's now a champion, and he now has a champion hog called Buttercup, which he competes at the Olympic Games. And he reported of another one, who's a woman called Dawn Roebell, who says that she communicates telepathically with her Hedgehog. That's got to be cheating, isn't it? Yeah. You can't do that. Is it in the human

Olympic rules that you can't communicate telepathically? No telepathy, yes, yeah. Because what would you say as well? Throw the javelin really far, you know? Yeah, yeah, faster, you're saying, faster. You can't cheat in the Olympics. Well, actually, we have learned over the years, definitely. You can't cheat by whispering in someone's ear in the Olympics. But she does say that her Hedgehogs call themselves Star Children. They call themselves that. Yeah, they refer to themselves. Oh, I see. Telepathically, yeah. Sorry, what are the events at the Hedgehog Olympic Games? I think sort of racing and hopping and jumping. I actually don't, so I didn't read in this article, he didn't detail what the events were. I think Hedgehog races,

because they run quite fast, surprisingly. Yeah, not as fast as humans. Well, you could be a Hedgehog, yeah. That's why the interhuman and Hedgehog Olympics have never taken on. But actually, what people don't know is that Hedgehogs are allowed to take part in the human Olympics, but they've just never qualified. That is like, yeah, never reached a qualified type. I found just a couple of animal smells. So male silkworm moths, they can sense a single molecule of female sex hormone from a mile away. I'd never understand what they mean. I know, I don't get it. They say that because presumably you need the molecule to get into your nose before you sense it. Yeah. And so how can it be a mile away? I've just never understood that. It's

the same with sharks and blood. I just don't get it. Yeah. I know, that's the thing. All the things I read about animals smelling it, like albatross can smell fish from the air. That makes a lot of sense though, because it's the scent molecules that are the problem. So the scent molecules are coming off the fish, that's fine. Then it goes through the air and then up to the albatross's nose. But if you're smelling a molecule, that's the thing that causes you to smell this. It's a mile away. I think it's a distance, though, with the albatross is what is amazing scientists, because the molecules break up with whatever direction the wind is It is incredible. But at least we understand how it's possible. I guess it must be that the molecule

is entering the, was it a moth, did he say? Yeah. It must be that they can, when a molecule released by a female a mile away gets in their nose, they can tell the direction it's come from, or it retains its potency, or they can still detect it, even though it's traveled a mile. It must be where it is. It must be something like that. You can't smell a molecule from a mile away from the molecule. That's the thing. It's like when you're in the sea and you cut your finger, and there's a tiny little blood goes in the sea, then supposedly Jaws is able to tell it's there from a mile away, right? That's the whole point of it. But surely he has to wait for the blood to get to him, which will take ages, right, if it's traveling through water. Well, currents,

though, currents happen. It's like me looking at that wall on the other side of the room and saying, I can feel that from here. It just doesn't, in order to feel it, it has to come to you. Or you have to go to it. Exactly. We have to meet. I mean, Anna, that was a stunningly vivid example of that wall on the other side of the room. Where do you get these ideas from? I'm a creative kind of guy. Did you know the ISS is battery powered? I didn't know that. Is it AA or AAA? They're actually no A's at all. They are the size of fridges, the batteries on the ISS, but sometimes they have to change the batteries. How do you do that?

You take these fridges out, you rub them a few times, and then you put them back in again. So there are 48 batteries, and it's for when the station's in shadow, because there are big solar sails for when it's in sunlight. But these are nickel hydrogen batteries, and they are slowly being swapped over for new kinds of batteries, which are run on lithium. So they all have to be changed. And you get two astronauts out there who have to take a fridge out of position, like carry it back to the right place, and then put the new one in. And they have to strap them to a pallet. They weigh about 200 kilos, but obviously in space, they don't feel that. However, that is stressful. And also, if you slightly dent the back of it,

the connection bit, it won't fit in, and then you're absolutely stuffed. And they're trained, obviously, and taught about it. But a lot of them changed the batteries without having practiced it. Yeah, I haven't practiced that kind of thing. Yeah, gone work in MFI for a weekend, moving fridges around. I remember reading earlier this year that there are massive batteries all around the British countryside, which we use whenever our electricity goes off. Do you remember there was a massive power cut when two things got hit at the same time, and loads of people went off? Apparently, what happens then is these batteries kicking, and they're just kind of hanging around. There's like about 50 of them, absolutely massive batteries.

That's so cool. Isn't it cool? I didn't really read any more about them. So I can't really tell you anything. It's annoying because the way you're painting it, I'm now sort of imagining going on a roll walk and finding a giant duracelle funny battery just standing up in a field. That's what I imagine it is. Let's assume it's that. I would say this is not a fact. It was just a thought I had today, which is what happens to rain when it rains on a cloud? Oh, so you get higher clouds and lower clouds. Does it get collected by the lower cloud, like a sponge? Or does it go through the cloud? It darts through and just passes through them. Some of it might become the cloud and some of

it might go down through the cloud. It's such a good question. Clouds are not like sponges, I should say. No, but I guess because it's water, I just didn't know if it just sort of collected like a plug, like at like sky puddles, basically. It probably depends, yeah. It probably depends how big the droplets are. Because the clouds are very small droplets. By the time it's big enough to fall as a raindrop, that's really big, isn't it? It's gotten quite heavy. So actually, yeah, that's right. So it will be too big. If it's big enough to be falling, it'll be too big to be staying as a cloud. And it also, yeah, and it wouldn't ever rain on a cloud anyway, would it? It would only have a snow on a cloud?

Doesn't all rain start out with snow? Yeah. No. It's always, if it's raining outside, it's all snow, which happens to have melted on the way down. You're kidding. It's always snowing if you look at it that way. Yeah, that's very cool. Didn't know that. Just one more actual effect of climate change as it's happening is that some clouds may go extinct. What? Yeah, this is how big the effect we're having. So stratocumulus cloud decks, they're the very low clouds which reflect a lot of solar radiation back into space. And if levels of carbon dioxide go up much more, this might suppress the actual formation of these clouds. So you won't get them anymore. Oh, no. We can no longer make hilarious animal shapes in our

imaginations out of clouds in the sky. Oh, we'll still have clouds. It's just this one particular, it's not going to be a sunny day every single day. But what if this one particular cloud is the only one that ever made those shapes? You're absolutely right. Wow. It could be that. It could be the animal shape cloud. Anatojinsky really bringing home the eco crisis that we're in at the moment. You're welcome, Extinction Rebellion. Say it loud and say it cloud. That's what I... I went on to a website, CNN's most secretive jobs. And they had the usual things like spies and restaurant reviewers. Another one is award show auditor. Apparently you have to be very secretive with that. What's that? It's for results. So you don't screw up and give la la la the right

envelope. So what you need is a bachelor's degree in an accounting or related field and experience in accounting or auditing. That's all it says you need. And I've got both those things. He just told us. Yeah. Apart from that, you're doing so well. Damn it. That's awesome. Hey, how about a made up language? Yes, please. How about Dothraki? Oh, yeah. So four languages are made up. Oh, here he goes again. Oh, conspiracy theorist. Sorry. Okay. A recently made up language. Made up language. Yeah. So obviously so many people have heard it being spoken because of Game of Thrones being big this year. So tens of millions of people have been hearing it. It's more than Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and Scott's Gaelic combined. But I did not know the language

is full of little Easter eggs. So not many people speak it, actually speak it. One of them is the inventor, David Peterson, who's really he sort of makes languages for Hollywood as his job. Oh, wow. Yeah. And obviously, there are not many jobs in the world, but there are not many jobs in that industry, because it's such a rare thing to be commissioned to make a full language. So he has a little fun with it. So the Dothraki word for eagle is culver. And that is based on Stephen Colbert for reasons I didn't get to the bottom of. Yeah. And there are words based on his wife, not Colbert's wife. David Peterson, the inventor. The word for very attractive. So David Peterson's wife is called Erin. So in Dothraki, Erin means kind or Erinak means kind

one. Lucky is not fucking bit. Because he's really venting through these languages. I think I read and I so I hope this is right. But I believe as well that he's a Monty Python fan. And so there's points when there's armies coming towards some like a scene in Game of Thrones, where they're yelling at people coming towards them. He takes the words that were used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when they're yelling, you are French Cal, whatever, whatever those words are. I can't remember what they are. But yeah, it's Monty Python dialogue translated into Dothraki used. Yeah. So I've got a fact about modern trains, which is about the Queen, who as we know has the Royal Train. So when she's traveling on the Royal

Train and when she's been traveling overnight, there's a special instruction that gets given out. And that is that the Queen has a bath at 7.30 in the morning. So if the train is going then, the driver is ordered to the driver is ordered to avoid any bumpy bits of track so that her bath doesn't slosh around too much. Okay. Bumpy tracks. First of all, do we have bumpy tracks? Or are they all flat? You get bumpy bits, don't you? Trout corners. And secondly, Well, like you do not corner like round bits. Secondly, how do you avoid the bumpy bits? You can't swerve in a train. You get lifted up onto a boat. Then you gauge and it comes back down again. I think the Queen's freedom of movement is just severely limited as to where she can go.

She can only go to the flat bits. She can only go to the flat bits. Queen's going all directions. It's a very good point. That's weird knowing when the Queen has a bath. I think you'd be freaked out as the train driver. Every morning at 7.30 you'd think, oh, she's bathing now. Don't make any mistakes. She's naked ten yards from me. It's a weird thought. It's a big train. I don't think it's only 10 meters. It's like in the cab, in the tub. He puts the bath next to the driver's seat. More coal. One more thing about Leurot, which is more just a rant than a fact. Coloured Leurot disappeared off the face of the earth, right? Uh-huh. I think you can still buy it, can you?

You can still buy it. In 2004, it was 30% of Leurot that was sold. Now it's under 10%. And this, I was reading an article in the Telegraph about why this is happening, about how angry people are about it. Because people used to buy their Leurot to match their decor, right? And now they did. That was a thing. There was someone who wrote into the Telegraph saying, um, why is it impossible now to buy blue lavatory rolls? Unless we find some soon, I will be forced to redecorate my bathroom. There was another one, uh, correspondent in Bletchingley who described a priest friend who used to change the hue of his leurot rolls to match the liturgical seasons. Green for Trinity, purple for Lent and Advent, and pink for Saints

Days. Well, there's a lot of Saints Days, isn't there? Yeah, he was doing a lot of leurot changing. That is amazing. I suppose the other thing is like, you don't really get coloured, um, sinks and stuff like that, do you? Like in the seven seasons and stuff, you get avocado, sink, yes, yeah, stuff. In fact, that was the first time I knew the word avocado, because we didn't have avocados when I was growing up. You didn't really get them in the seventies and eighties, but, um, we used the word to describe the colour of people's toilets. Yes. So when people started eating them, I was so confused. You break your teeth. I have one more drink that William of Orange drank. Um, so I'm talking to William of Orange, um, who was married to Mary, so he was a

King of England. There's a few other ones, but this is that one. Um, he drank benediction posit, which was a mixture of warm milk, eggs, cream and ale, um, with nutmeg and custard on top. And he drank this on his wedding day, because it was what everyone who was rich and posh used to drink on their wedding day. Uh, and the priest would come along, he would bless them, and then they would give them this benediction posit, and people wouldn't leave until they drunk it. Uh, Charles II waited until the bride and bridegroom had finished off their bowl of posit and then drew the bed curtains himself on the day of the wedding. Oh, really? So I read that he stayed in the room shouting encouragement during me. There are lots of stories saying he was shouting

during the consummation, but we've asked the team before that consummation doesn't mean they're actually having sex. I mean, the bride was only 15 at the time. Um, but yeah, that's the story. So Charles, we think Charles might have been there because if he'd drawn the curtain, he could still have stayed on the outside shouting encouragement, couldn't he? Yeah, that's true. You know, when you were younger, and you just, you know, when you're 15 and you married a kid of England, someone draws the curtain, but they still give you instructions. You know, when you go to the loo, when you're a kid and you're just learning to go to the loo on your own, and your mum stands on the other side of the door and she's like, you know, have you wiped your bottom?

Maybe. So it was sort of like that. You pull the curtain, but you're still outside saying, you know, put it there, put it there. No, no, that's the nostril. There's another old Scottish one, which is if you're fishing and you catch a boot, that can go either way for you. If it's a left boot, that's bad luck. You're in serious trouble. Fish are not going to come to you. If you get a right boot, you're in much luck, and you have to nail it to your mask to say, look at my right boot, come fish. And in both instances, you're in a cartoon. And in neither instance have you caught a fish, which presumably is the aim.

Yes, but your boot business back home is going, you've caught a soul. I was quickly just on rudeness. I was reading Danny Wallace's book about rudeness, which is called Fuck You Very Much, The Surprising Truth About Why People Are So Rude. And he did some of his own research and he asked what people had done, because like Hannah was saying, people, if people are rude to you, you automatically are rude back to them. It's a weird kind of contagion thing. He was asking people what they had done when someone had been rude to them. And answers included, I rubbed fries on their windshield. I turned all their possessions upside down. I let a dog lick a sausage. I was serving them. And I slept with their partner.

That's rude. And was that all the same person? Had a very bad day. I was looking at flaws, some flaws. So the world's flattest flaw is owned by NASA. It's in Huntsville, Alabama. And it's made of this kind of resin. And it's a bit like, do you know these air hockey tables? So there's a cushion of air on it. And whenever, what they do is they kind of get like a sofa on it or anything. They can do it with anything, but the funnest one is a sofa. And they have little air coming out of the sofa. And then they push it along this extremely flat floor and it just kind of glides along. It's really, really awesome. And the way that, and what it's for is to see what it's like in space. Because it's like,

there's no friction. So things just keep moving. If you push them in one direction, they just keep moving. And I think we might have said before that NASA around there also has the world's biggest door. And they also have the world's most perfect bowls, which is a pair of mathematically perfect spherical bowls. If they are one point, they're really, really small. They're just 3.81 centimetres across. And if you scale them up to the size of the earth, then the highest hill on there will be 1.5 metres high. Wow. That's how perfect these bowls are. And is that because they're such perfect spheres in space? They're imitating the sun? They're using them for possible future gyroscopic motors. They don't know what they're for, do they?

Someone thought of the phrase, the most perfect balls in the world. And they thought, better make those. You know the saying, beer before wine, you'll feel fine. Oh, I thought it was wine before beer, feeling queer. I always get mixed up. Well, it turns out that neither of them works. And this is thanks to scientists who got 90 students drunk and found that none of them felt fine. No matter what. No matter what, a combination. He got 90 volunteers and they had, I bet he did. There are only 70 people in his class. They all had two and a half, there was a first group had two and a half pints of lager and

then four big glasses of white wine. And then the second group had the same drinks in reverse. So you've got beer, then wine and wine, then beer. And then there was another group who had only beer or wine up to the same level. And they all felt terrible the next day. One in ten of them threw up. A bunch of light weights. I knew you guys would say that. Can I just say while we're on trains, this is so apropos of nothing. But when I was in Japan, I noticed that the train drivers, they always point and shout stuff at themselves while they're driving the train, wherever they go. So if you're near the front, you'll always see this because you can see the driver. And just every like three or four minutes, they'll just point at something

that doesn't appear to be anything at all. And they'll just yell something that I don't understand. Right. And are they yelling to the passengers or to? No, they're yelling to themselves. And I read this today of what they were doing because I looked it up. They have a thing where every certain amount of time they point at like just a thing around the tracks. It doesn't matter what it is. And they shout where they are and what they're doing. And the reason they do it is so that they can concentrate the whole way. Because if you're not doing that all the time, you'll just kind of my daydream or something like that. But if every five minutes or so, you have to point and shout something, you're never going to kind of not think about stuff. That's wonderful.

Isn't it great? Yeah. I think it's stupid. Has anyone ever read the story of cry wolf? What happens when there's actually, you know, a huge bomb in the middle of the track and they're pointing and shouting, there's a bomb, everyone get off the train, everyone get off the train. And everyone's like, Oh, it's just the standard five minute, shouting fest he does. Maybe he shouts something. Maybe he doesn't always shout bomb on the track. Maybe he's normally shouting, I am concentrating now. But what I was thinking is if you're driving on the motorway, then every time you go past a junction, if you were to point at it and shout the names of the places that junction goes to, then it would help you concentrate and you get less sleepy at the

wheel. I think is a really good tip. Okay. Also, your geography of the UK would probably improve. You keep noticing all these. Yeah, that's true. Have you guys heard of hook swinging? No, no, this is another Indian ritual practiced in the 1890s, not very much in the 20th century. But basically, in order to make it rain, if there's a drought, farmers would find a willing volunteer and then they would sew large hooks into his back and they would lift him 50 feet into the air. Sorry, what? You would be lifted up into the air on massive hooks. It's very, very, very painful. To make it rain? To make it rain. It causes you lasting damage, obviously, extremely painful. However, you were allowed to keep the hooks afterwards.

Bonus. But only for three months. What? Why would you keep them? Well, you were allowed to keep the hooks and the cord and the knife for three months afterwards and beg with them and show people, look, I went through this for the community to show your bravery, but only for three months. So, when you said you had to find a willing volunteer, that actually does feel like the hardest part of that. Where were they finding these enthusiastic people? That's a good point. Also, I would probably just trust that that was the guy who was held 50 feet in the air with hooks, even if he didn't have them out of his back. I imagine he's a local celebrity. I imagine no one's like, oh, did that happen? Oh, okay.

No, I didn't read about that. Actually, a lot of people thought that chess wasn't, well, there are a lot of people who thought that chess wasn't a particularly intellectual game. Compared to something like Wist, for instance. And that was because the argument was that chess has a finite number of moves. There's only a certain number of moves you can make. It's quite a high number, but it's finite. And in Wist, you're playing with your wits and stuff like that. And it was kind of like, if you're doing something which is really regimented, maybe that doesn't help the creative part of your brain. That's what they used to say. Like, for instance, there was an argument in Scientific American in 1859 that Napoleon the

Great loved playing chess, but he was often beaten by a rough grocer in St Helena. What went rough in what way? They didn't specify. That was an asterisk. Shame much. Right, okay. I don't really know what rough meant in those days. It says, neither Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, or any of the great ones of earth acquired proficiency in chess playing. It seems to help people with an intuitive faculty for making the right moves. But at the same time, these people have often possessed very ordinary faculties for other purposes. So they thought it was only a very specific kind of person who'd be good at chess and they wouldn't necessarily be good at other stuff. Whereas Wist players, all of those people you

mentioned were keen Wist friends. I mean, if that's what they thought of chess, imagine their response to Angry Birds. Well, you do know pop culture. I've read about it. There was another old rule that used to be in place, which is that you could use a baseball bat, which had a flat side to it, like a cricket bat. It was just to help with accuracy, I think. But yeah, that was kicked out. So that was between 1885 and 1893. I think that was for power, wasn't it? You can get a bigger hit on it if you've got that big flat surface area. Then they ditched it straight away. I can't remember why. Maybe it just made the game too easy. I think it was that. Because in cricket, for instance, a full toss is a very easy ball to hit. Why then in cricket do they have the other side of the bat

in a triangle formation? Well, good question. And I don't know the answer, but I would guess that it's so that your sweet spot is a thicker part of the bat. So you want your edge to be very small because you don't want to edge the ball so they can catch it. But you do need it to be thick, so that if it hits it right in the middle, it goes miles. So you want it to be thick in the middle and thin on the outside. I don't know for sure. I think it's because if you flip around the bat the last minute, then you get a mental angle on your bat. And that's a technique they used to use, but they've never used it since, right? I don't know why they don't use it anymore. This is just a random fact. Nothing to do with what we're saying, just hedges. We were doing a

live gig the other day, and someone told us in the audience that if you go to Liverpool, there's a hedge of all the Beatles there sitting outside the station. But Ringo is really hated there, so people keep trimming his head off. They have to weigh ages for Ringo's head to regrow, and then someone immediately chops it up again. So sad. On mud, so there's the disorder where you eat soil or dirt. It's called pica, I think, where some people eat mud. But in southern parts of the US, eating mud is a traditional thing that some people really enjoy. And I didn't know this still happened, but it does. So it's in southern states, like kind of Mississippi and Georgia, real deep south states, and people eat kind of clay. And it's a very specific thing called

like white mud or white clay. And it's clay rich dirt, and they love it. And it's part of the diet. It's often poorer families, it's black and white families. And there are various theories about where it came from. But I was reading an article in The New York Times from 1984 saying this is so tragic, the tradition of mud eating will disappear in the next generation. And then an article from a couple of years ago, it hasn't disappeared, guys. It's still there. Is it because it's like higher minerals and stuff? We don't really know. I think it's, maybe it's just a traditional thing, but they like the taste. Are there recipes?

There are some recipes. Well, sort of recipes, if you count the fact that, for instance, people who like it will keep it in jars and sprinkle it with salt and vinegar. That's a recipe. Okay, yeah. That's a recipe. But I thought you said they like the taste of it. Why are they putting salt and vinegar on it? James, I like the taste of chips, but that doesn't mean I don't enhance it. You're so right.

Sometimes they substitute it for baking soda or for starch because they can't get to the right kind of soil, the right kind of mud. But apparently it's not quite the same. And there was an interview with someone called Mrs. Glass who said she's been off the dirt for a full year, even though she still gets really strong cravings. But she's been off the dirt because her husband said it makes her mouth taste like mud. Which does make sense. It is one of those pregnancy cravings that you hear about. It is, yeah. Yeah. My mum had that.

Did she? Yeah, mud and coal, I think. She didn't eat coal. People, women do. But she just had the craving. But it would usually be charcoal. Like, cousin, you get bits of charcoal and you could chew on it. Oh, but not a large lump of coal. No, you wouldn't go down a mine. No. My dad got home from work every day and she was a black face full of the coal basket. I'd be so good at it.

Equally, if you're having cravings for, you know, gherkins, you don't eat a billy of the gherkins. You just eat a small amount to get your cravings sorted. Yeah, it's true. It's just a funny idea of like replacing miners with pregnant women who they know where the coal is because they have the desperate cravings for it. They're just chewing through the rock face. Yeah, but none comes back up. Just on big shoes, odd shoes, used to be a big thing and they're called Krakow's. So Krakow's were shoes that were really popular from about the 13th century to the 15th, 16th

centuries. And they're called that after the assumed place of origin, Krakow in Poland. And they were also called Pulen, which is Polish, Polish shoes, Polish things. And they, so it was just fashionable to have these incredibly long shoes and they were gone for sort of eight, nine inches. And then eventually there were various edicts passed that said you had to limit your toe length to two inches, which is still quite long. And it was partly because it was seen as showy, like we've talked about the sumptuary laws before, and partly because it was quite difficult to pray, apparently, because it's quite hard to kneel down when you've got a 10 inch toe poking out.

But you can always see if somebody's in a toilet stall. You can usually tell that just from the engaged side. He's poking your head under that little gap between the grass. Oh, so, you know, you might be to use them to wipe as well. Oh, you've got to be flexible for that. I mean, you know, they're using bacteria to solve crimes now. That's a cup shell I want to see. No, they are using it to solve crimes because we all have this fingerprint,

which is our huge cloud of bacteria that we're walking around with. And they're all individual. And so police have started thinking maybe we can take the bacteria that's left in a room that's been burgled and then match it to a database of other people's bacteria. And if there's a match, they did the robbery. But it's quite cool because it's a very good plan. And they've experimented with it by staging a load of mock burglaries, which just sounded like the funnest science experiment to be part of.

So there were 400 study participants, some home owners and some who had to pretend to burgle their homes. And they had to properly act it out. So they did stuff like they rifled through all their drawers and they like carried away their TV. They all had to open the fridge and kind of have a sip of the coke in the fridge because that's something that burglars do apparently sometimes. How to sip of the coke in the fridge?

Yeah, burglars always do that, you know. Do they? It's a signature move. The one thing that burglars do do a lot is poo in houses, don't they? Sorry to bring it back to poo. I think they might have asked them to do that as well. Maybe it didn't make it into the study right up. Apparently that does happen because you're so stressed, your body just wants to defecate.

If someone's left a poo in a house, you probably don't need to swab for the microbiome, do you? But so do all of them. We're looking for a corn cob who committed this robbery. I'm done looking at it. I'm done. You can ask your question anyway, though. Well, it's just going out. So if the four of us are in this room, we all have our bacteria.

What did you call it? The cloud, is it where? The biome. We'll all be so different, so noticeably different. Well, the thing is, the more you hang out with people, the more your biome is similar to theirs because you end up sharing bacteria. Yeah, they're all the same now. There is a thing.

Yeah, we're basically all the same microbiome now, probably. Well, not really the same. But they are still really individual, so people develop really differently. And you develop it in the first three or four years of your life, I think, specifically the stuff that your bacteria are going to want. But the other thing is you can get a hotel room, and I think it's within something like two or three hours, that room will be indistinguishable from your actual house, from the microbes in there.

Oh, OK. And also, because I always take all my furniture to the hotel rooms. I always do a poo in the car. Just makes you feel like home, doesn't it? Oh, good. That's crazy, though, using that for crime. That is crazy. That would be really weird if you could see, if you spent all your time,

for example, with a dancing partner, like on Strictly, if your microbiome came closer to your dancing partners, than it was to your real life partner at home. I'd like to see that headline in the Daily Express. Sean Walsh's Microbiome. We're going to have to move on to our next fact in a second. I've got one last thing that I like, which is that in 1956, there was an English composer who was quite well known at the time,

called Malcolm Arnold. And he actually wrote an overture for vacuums. So when you saw it, it was vacuums on stage. It was three vacuums. It was one floor polisher, four rifles, bizarrely, and then an actual orchestra. And it was a piece that he put on called A Grand Grand. And it was dedicated to US President Herbert Hoover.

So that was quite a nice thing. Very good. Just on losers, as you were just saying, Anna, in the campaign. OK, Dan. You know, let's do this backstage. Just some other rainmaking ceremonies. Oh, yeah. Because they've always existed in hot countries, I guess,

because people need rain. And they are quite a big thing in various parts of Africa. So in South Africa, the Lovadoo people have a rain queen. And the rain queen is basically their ruler. Well, they always have had, traditionally. Long May She Rain. Long May She Rain, indeed. And that sort of implies that she's sort of urinating on her people.

There's a replacement for rain, which she doesn't do. I'll just file my little pun. Sorry, you've got disgusting images. So this is this woman who isn't allowed to marry herself, but she can have female wives in inverted commons. And so she also has to bear at least one child, at least one daughter, because you inherit it from your mother. So she has to bear one daughter by a royal relative.

Interesting rule. And then age 60, when she hits 60, it's assumed that her powers of making the rain come, or sometimes stopping the rain. Her powers are perceived to have waned, and she's expected to commit suicide by poison. And so she has to do this. And there was this really controversial scandal in 1959,

when the reigning rain queen refused to bloody commit suicide. She was 80, and people kept going, come on, you've lost your powers, now do the thing. So your daughter can take over. And she understandably was like, I don't want to. And so this sort of ruined the tradition for a while. But it's being brought back. So the next rain queen, when she comes of age,

when she turns 18 in a couple of years, is coming back into the fall. Have they fixed the succession procedure? I think they might have tinkered with it a little bit around the edges. Yeah, it's more optional these days. Rain dance is quite big in North America as well, historically.

They're probably the ones we know of most, or we hear of most. The Hoppy Snake and Antelope Ceremony is quite a common one. And people wrote about this a whole lot, because it was performed in August, it was to ensure abundant rainfall, but it used live snakes. And they did loads of different ceremonies all the time

for loads of different things, but this was the only one that used live snakes. And so this was the one that became really famous. And that's why the North American Rain Dance became one of the more famous kind of ceremonies that they all had. And it's because it had snakes in it, and the snakes were exciting.

Yeah, that's very cool. Do we know what they did? You would dance around in a circle. Me saying that makes it sound like I'm just doing a throwaway comment of what you did. It was very important, but yeah, basically, it was dancing around in a circle with live snakes.

Was the snake in the middle of the circle? Or were you holding the snake as you danced? I think you were handling the snake. In fact, I know you were handling the snake. Okay. Yeah. Otherwise, the snake might leave the circle, get a bit bored.

Probably doesn't believe in this, you know, city. It might have been ahead of us, scientifically. There was a Cypriot rain ritual in ancient times where you had to do a rain dance, and then after the dance, you had to spit on the back of a turtle. Okay.

In the book I was reading, it said that henceforth, it became popular as a spit turtle. Such a rubbish job to have. That's awful. That's like at school, if someone spits on you once, you get known as spit handling or something.

Was it allowed to keep the saliva on its shelf for three months and a day with it? It's a museum in Kansas. It's a very small museum, but it pays homage to all the losers of presidential campaigns. So it's got a picture of them, a bit of a biography.

And it's run by this lady who, when I was reading the article, she was very excited about the last election that you guys had, because she really wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. And I don't know if it's because she didn't want her as president. It was more that she was excited

to have the first woman ever in her museum of losers. And she was really proud of that. Finally, a woman will be in the losing museum. We have to find these silver linings where we can. Do you know how you can weigh a whale? No. Oh, well, at a whaleway station.

Well, no. So it used to be that to weigh a whale, you would have to get one that's been beached or one that's dead, something like that. But it's really hard to weigh them in the wild. But they've got this new system of drones, which are able to estimate the weight of whales from the sky.

Cool. So they no longer have to shove a set of weighing scales underneath the beached whale. Well, mostly it's just that joke doesn't work anymore. Another joke, ruined by the scientists of the world. You bastards. I actually also have a French... This is very tangential, though,

but it is a French and fast food fact, in 2016, there was a McDonald's in France, which was subject to an armed robbery. And two guys burst in with guns. They were armed. It was obviously very terrifying for all the customers, and they wanted all the money in the till, which is about 1,500 quid, I think.

But unfortunately for the two robbers, also dining in the restaurant were 11 off-duty members of the French SAS. SAS. Yeah, well, the French paramilitary special forces, and they're really, really good. And they kept their cool. They didn't do anything during the hold up.

And then when one of the robbers was leaving, he tripped a bit, and immediately they pounced on him. And then they shot the other one in the abdomen. But still, it's what? Well, they took him to hospital. I don't think he died. I mean, he was... But then sent to prison for armed robbery.

Okay. So it's a funny story with one quite bad-sounding injury at the heart of it. Why did they wait for him to trip? What if he didn't trip? They didn't immediately want to start firing their guns in the restaurant, because they thought, well, there are customers here, and we want to...

Yes. Customers here enjoying their meals, trying to blank out the armed robbery. I'm imagining that Ronald McDonald is stood there with his massive clown shoes, and he kind of trips. I don't know what would have happened if the guy hadn't tripped. I'm sure they would have thought of some other way of resolving the situation.

I know, yeah, yeah. I'm sure that's not the strategy of all of the French SAS. Do not make a move to one of them trips. Do you guys know that chess pieces, the pawns, they used to have jobs, each of them? What did they work as? So in the Middle Ages, monks tried to represent them as citizens.

That was the idea. And so you had an agricultural worker. You had a farrier. You had a weaver. The fourth was a businessman. There was a doctor, an innkeeper, a policeman, and the last one was a gambler. Wow.

Policeman. Yeah, but policeman. I like that. So that's no longer used. That would have made blindfold chess a lot harder, wouldn't it? If you had to remember all every individual pawn. The farrier to E4. Also, you would think they would have pawnbroker and pawnstar.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure it had been invented in the Middle Ages. What, pawnbrokery? Pawnbrokery had been, I think. And well, the queen didn't used to be a piece either. So the queen wasn't a piece until about 600 AD. And then she was really rubbish for ages,

because queens thought it was quite inferior. A male should be the leader. And this only changed in the 15th century when the queen came along who was actually decent. And people started to say, hey, queens can be powerful. And this was Queen Isabella of Castile. So it was Isabella and Ferdinand.

And basically their relationship mirrors the one of the king and the queen on the board, where she... You can only walk one step in any direction. And she was legging it everywhere. He was always running and hiding behind the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker or whatever. Was it, but no, behind the Castile. The castle.

The Castile. Castiled, yes. No, she, so when they got married, she forced him into this really humiliating marriage where she got much more authority than him. She used to ride out to command troops on her own, leaving him behind. She was made queen of a particular country or state,

and she didn't even bother to tell him about it. But yeah, then they changed the queen and made her more powerful. And one argument to say this is why that happened is that in Russia, the queen remained impotent until the 18th century when Catherine the Great came in. And then she got a lot of power there.

Just this is not to go out really, but I just found out that I found a paper called Reservoir Dogs and the implications for disease control. Because obviously reservoir is the animal that the disease lives in. Oh. And this is from the early 80s, which is before Reservoir Dogs came out.

And no one knows where the name Reservoir Dogs came from. You're kidding. Yeah, so my theory is that Tarantino was reading a very obscure medical paper about rabies in Zimbabwe, and that's where he got the name from. Nobody knows where the film's name comes from. No, when he was selling it, he claimed that it was a gangster term for a rat.

But actually, that's not true. And some people think he might have misheard the name of the title of the movie, Orovoire Les Enfants, which is a French movie. Yeah, it is. It's not very similar to Reservoir Dogs, is it? But yeah. And also, it doesn't sound very much like Reservoir Dogs.

Nope. I believe your theory. I just one thing about someone who dealt with syphilis, and this is in the early 18th century. It was a guy called Daniel Turner, and he was the first person ever to use the term syphilis to refer to the illness. So it came from actually an epic poem

written about 100 years earlier about a guy who got it, in short. And so he was called, the guy in the poem was called syphilis. He was a shepherd. Yes, exactly. So it was a poem about a shepherd called syphilis. And so then this doctor said, OK, well, let's call this disease syphilis.

He's just like a boy named Sue, but worse. Sue's poor sister. And so he also wrote about the use of, another new word that he coined, the condom. So it's about U.M., but I think they're the same thing. And he said, that's the most effective thing to prevent its transmission. This was 1770.

But I was reading the thing, the report he wrote on it, and he said, the condom is the best, if not the only, preservative that we have from syphilis. But by reason of its blunting sensation, I have heard people say they've chosen to risk the clap rather than engage cum hastis sic cli pietis, which means... Well, the one person got that. And we're so sorry that you've got that.

I actually really want to know if you did get that. Did anyone get the Latin for that? No. Well, I really enjoy the idea of putting really rude stuff in Latin to make it more appropriate. But it means, with spears, thus sheathed. What do you have a sheath for a spear? To have a sheath for a sword?

Sure, that's a long sheath. Or it's a tiny sheath just for the head of the spear. But both of them feel impractical in the battle situation. I mean, just a couple of sheaths. He hadn't thought it through. You're completely right. He was feeling so smug about the Latin translation. Have you guys heard about James Harrison?

No. James Harrison, he's an 81-year-old. Sorry, this is a few years ago now. But at the time, he retired from being a donor, a blood donor, at 81 years old. And he'd been donating blood for every week, virtually every week, for 60 years of his life. And he was known as the man with the golden arm.

And in Australia, he had a very rare type of blood, which they reckon there was only 50 people or so that had it. And it was very important because mothers who were pregnant, they would have rhesus positive blood. But if the baby had rhesus negative blood, which would be inherited from the father, that would go against the baby. And it would start killing the baby inside the womb.

So they used his blood specifically to save all of these babies. And the Australian Red Cross believe that over the years, he saved the lives of 2.4 million Australian babies from the 60 years of giving blood. 17% of women are at risk of this in Australia. And every single batch of anti-D, as it's called, is from this guy. Wow.

Yeah. So he's an absolute hero. And he's just retired. Kind of mean to retire, to be honest. Come on, mate. Stick at it. No, I've done a good long time saving children, and now I'm going to stop.

Wow. Crazy, though, right? I was reading a tiny bit about dog research, because dogs have been researched in historic medicine for so long, because they were just a useful thing that was always around quite tame. And so, you know, Pavlov of dog fame. He had some breakthrough dog research,

although most of his breakthroughs weren't what we now think of him as doing. So obviously, we think of the Pavlovian dog response as a behavioral thing. But really, he was interested in dog digestion. I think it's that kind of thing that he got his Nobel Prize for in 1904, and not the experiment that people know.

But one of the things that he did was, he looked at, he was really interested in dog saliva, and how dogs generate, when dogs generated saliva, and that he did this thing where he created fistulas in the esophagus of dogs, and so a little hole with a tube attached, which meant that when dogs ate, it would just come straight out again of its neck

and not go into its stomach to find out what would happen if they weren't getting the, you know, if they weren't filling up their stomach as they ate. And so he had all these dogs with food just, how frustrating would that be? You eat your food and it's full straight out of you again. What is going on? That's like a torture that you'd be given

by the gods in the afterlife. It is, isn't it? Yeah. Forever hungry. Yeah. Yeah. He also used to sell quite a lot of dog saliva, I think. He made quite a lot of money out of it.

Yeah, he had a dog gastric juice factory. He does just a dog. He does make him sound very evil. Yeah. I think he wasn't a nice guy anyway, a lot of people say, but this one particularly, he just had these dogs working to produce loads of saliva, which he bottled up and sold. And what was the purpose of selling it?

The idea was that it helped out with things like dyspepsia and stomachache. Sorry, you would drink it? Yeah, yeah. You drank dog saliva. Oh, yom birelli. Before you were saying that you would kiss a dog, and now you're like...

No, I said yom birelli. Oh, sorry, it's a word I'm not familiar with. I just have a couple of things about saliva. Great. Humans, obviously when the plague was around, so the 1400s and the 1500s, that was a massive thing where kissing almost became taboo, because they thought that that's what was spreading it,

so they stopped. But what I didn't realise was the alternatives to not kissing, to make sure you still had great sort of sexual contact with your partner in the face. Alternatives. Oh, my God. Alternatives. We're licking, sniffing, and nibbling of eyebrows.

Sorry, wait a minute. So you couldn't kiss because you didn't want to get any bacteria going over, but you could just lick someone's face. I think you'd lick their forehead or their ear, or go for just general away from the mouth licks. But nibbling of eyebrows was a safe alternative, supposedly, at the time. Wow, so would you lick someone on the cheek

if you didn't really know them, and lick them up the middle of the face if they were your partner? If you're in France, you'd have to lick them on both cheeks. That's so true. Can I just tell you about a news story from 2012, which was quite good. So this was about a leak in a statue of Jesus, and it was in a Catholic church in Mumbai,

and the toe of Jesus started leaking, and so a miracle was immediately declared. It was obviously holy water because this toe was crying, and so lots of people came and visited. That's way more emo. Lots of people came and visited this sobbing toe, and the church promoted it as a site of pilgrimage, and it was quite good for tourism in this relatively

backwater of Mumbai. And then this guy called Sanal Edamaruku, who is a rationalist, a buzzkill, and some day went to investigate, and he found that it was moisture from an overflowing drain that was being fed by a pipe issued from a nearby toilet, and he was investigated for blasphemy by various police stations, then has fled to Finland,

where he's been an ex-half of the last seven years. So when Jesus cries, don't say it's a toilet. Quite right. It's weird though, isn't it? If you have water coming from your toe, if I have water coming from one of my toes, I would say it was probably sweat. Yes.

Not like holy water or tears or anything. No. I have, I mean, I've embellished with the tears. It was holy water. It was holy toe water, yeah. Toely water. Toely water. Very good.

Can I just do one more quick thing about leaks? So here's a family thing, which isn't really, it's not a legal thing, but I read it the other day, and I think it's kind of cool. In medieval Scandinavia, they would have civil wars, and families would often put brothers on opposite sides of the battles, so to hedge their bets,

so that one of them would survive the war. Wow. That's cool, isn't it? It's quite clever. It's dark. It's dark, but it makes sense. It does. So that's, you want to continue your genetic line and say.

Yeah, exactly. You want to make sure that there's someone, or someone to look after you in old age, or to look after the farmer or whatever, so you would put, yeah, one brother on each side. But the thing is with war, it's not like the winning side in a war, every single person survived,

and the losing side, everyone died. You could very easily put them on either side, and they're both killed, and then you look like an idiot and a twat. But what would often happen afterwards is like the losing group would be punished. Yeah, okay. But if you put two on the same side,

it gives that side a tiny extra advantage. It does, but then if the neighbors have got three kids, and they put them on the other side. Ah, yeah. Yeah. It's always a problem, isn't it? The answer is not to have a war. Or any kids.

Yeah, yeah. So there are enclave countries as well, aren't there, which are countries wholly inside other countries. Oh, yeah. So Lesotho in South Africa, literally in South Africa, actually, is one of them. And one of them is San Marino, this tiny country inside Italy.

It's like, so Italy has two smaller entities within it, the Vatican and San Marino. And this is kind of off the beaten track a bit, but in 1999, San Marino was really worried about its male citizens being ensnared by sexy foreign women. And it banned them. Banned all women?

It legally, it legislated. It banned any female domestic servants younger than 50. So it's true. When was this news, eh? 1999. I'm serious. You are joking. No, no.

Because there was this sort of panic in San Marino about foreign women coming as carers and domestic servants and marrying the elderly men they were looking after, and maybe not with their best interest at heart. Maybe there was some financial motive or something. So it literally just banned any female domestic servants under the age of 50, assuming that if once you get to the age of 50, you're probably fine.

1999. I know. I don't know if it's ever been repealed as well, actually. Well, only one way to find out if there's anyone under the age of 50 who fancies a trip to San Marino. And then prison, yeah. I found someone who was the arch enemy of gravity. So he was a man called Roger Batson,

and he was an American businessman. He was a Newton fanatic. He made a lot of his money using Newton's principles in business, you know, for every action. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And he had a sad life. He lost a couple of close relatives to drowning. And he, instead of blaming the water conditions,

he decided gravity was the culprit because it pulled them down. So he described old man gravity as our enemy number one. He wrote this essay. He said broken hips and other broken bones, as well as numerous circulatory, intestinal, and other internal troubles are directly due to the people's inability to counteract gravity at a critical moment.

And he founded a gravity research foundation to basically destroy gravity if he could. And how is that going? It's ongoing. They now have slightly pivoted away from that, and they just sort of research it. I did read about that guy. He's pretty amazing.

He believed that there was a metal alloy which had anti-gravity properties. And if they would be able to find it, they'd be able to, like he said, they'd be able to co-terror planes in it to make it impossible for them to crash. But he didn't say how they'd be able to land. But he actually, this institute that he put a lot of money in,

it was both him and Captain Birdseye. He put the money in. I don't know if you have that in America, actually, Captain Birdseye, but he's like a frozen food guy. But he was real, and he made a lot of money from... Wait, what? That feels to me like the bigger headline

is that Captain Birdseye is not here. But just so you guys know, anyone who's now listening to this podcast, back in England, has just gone, what the fuck? Do you guys not have Captain Birdseye? Guys, you don't know what you're missing. He's great fun.

He sells you fish fingers, and he sort of pals around on boats with children. They got Captain Crunch. They got Captain Crunch. Captain Crunch is different. Except... Well, Captain C is no qualification for this. There is probably a secret club

where Captain Crunch and Captain Birdseye hang out together. Bitching about gravity. So, he was an anti-gravity... Yeah, he was, and when he first put the money into this, him and Captain Birdseye, they paid for three people to sit in the US Patent Office, just looking for any patents that were anti-gravity inventions.

And then as soon as one came in, they would go and find that person and go, have you found it? Have you found it? And they never did. There's a grant that his company give to lots of universities, and one of the rules of receiving the grant is that they have to get this monument where he has words about his personal...

But it's quite coded, but it sort of says, I don't think gravity is a thing. We'll conquer it. So, they have that sort of planted at these universities. But a few of the universities, from what I've read, the students like to push it over. I tried to find a site called...

I tried to find if there was a YouTuber, like with an A at the end. Oh, yeah. A website for Tuba people. Oh, yeah. There isn't, sadly. Well, there's a niche. There's a niche.

Then I tried to find YouTuber, like for potatoes. Oh, yeah. Is there? No, well, there might be, but to be honest, it's so hard to search YouTuber with an E.R. with potatoes in mind. And I... You have to put minus quite a lot of things. You have to put minus PewDiePie, minus...

Exactly, Zoella and all of this. I did find a guy who made a self-driving potato two years ago. Did you hear about this? Bizarrely no. Yeah, of course, I saw that on YouTube actually. I've been looking at the Chess Records. Sorry, not Chess Records, the record company. The Wikipedia...

You know, Chess was a record label, was it? Yeah. Wow, we do. Hang on. No. It's a music record label. I think it was a record label called Chess. That was an extremely esoteric joke, I think.

Yeah. It was... You meant to un-confuse us, and you've actually confused us a lot more. What I meant to say was, I've been looking at the Wikipedia page for the Records in Competitive Chess. It was a musical called Chess.

Yes. I think there was a record label called Chess. I'm sure there was. It doesn't make sense. There are so many record labels, aren't there? Anyway... I was eating an apple, and I don't mean the record label. There's a company called Love Honey

that makes sex toys and stuff like that, and they recently revealed the weirdest search terms they've ever had. And that included pepperami lube. A few others. Pies for women to get horny. Pickled onion condoms. Wow.

No? No. No, no. Probably not. Probably not this time. Pope Gregory issued a special decree saying that Satan was half cat. Wow.

So not all popes have been fans of cats. Yeah, wow. Because there was Pope Paul II, and he was a 15th-century pope who had his cat treated by his own personal doctor. And then Pope Paul VI had his cat dressed up in mini-cardinals robes, apparently. Although I've never seen a drawing,

and I don't know if we have evidence of these tiny cat cardinal robes, but... It's called the Vatican, not the catican. Yeah. Very nice. Oh, now come on, that was good. I was reading about so Spartacus, the movie Spartacus, starring Kurt Douglas.

So Kurt Douglas has Michael Douglas as a son, but then he also has Eric Douglas. And Eric Douglas is a lesser known... You know, you haven't really heard of him, right? So he was in the industry as well. And there's a very famous story of him going to London to do stand-up comedy, and he did it in a London club.

And he started telling jokes, and he was getting nothing from anyone. And he got really angry on stage for the fact that he was getting nothing. So he suddenly turned on the crowd, and he was furious with them, and he was saying to them, do you know who I am? I'm Kurt Douglas's son.

And someone in the audience stood up and went, no, I'm Kurt Douglas's son. Fantastic. I was looking at very, very loud things. We mentioned Krakatoa a while ago, and we said it was the loudest noise ever. I looked into it a bit more how loud it is. So that was the volcano that went off in the...

Yes, in 1816, I think? Was that Tambora? Oh, it was 1883. Yeah, yeah, 1883, it happened. But the Krakatoa was the equivalent of hearing a noise in New York that happened in Ireland. And it would take four hours to get to you. So there was a ship 40 miles away from Krakatoa

when it went off, 40 miles away. The ship was blasted so much that half the crew's eardrums were shattered, and the captain had no idea what was going on. He wrote in his diary, I am convinced the day of judgment has come, just because this noise was so loud. Imagine having the wherewithal

to write, update your journal on the day of judgment. You've got like 10 minutes left to live, Max. What are you going to do? Well, I better report this. It used to be a thing where the vacuum cleaner was only in one place in your home, and you would attach huge tubes to it. So the vacuum cleaner had its own spot in the house.

I mean, it stays in one place in my home, certainly. So you didn't move it around? You didn't move it around. You just have a great long tube to the bit you needed to suck at or cleaned. But then the Hubert Cecil Booth, who was a huge figure in the vacuum cleaner invention process,

he created a giant vacuum cleaner for cinemas, which was hidden basically inside the walls of the cinema. So it's in the building, and there are pipes going through the walls to all sorts of different power points, vacuum sockets in the cinema. And when you want to clean, you find the vacuum point in the floor,

and you open that up, and it's just constantly sucking away at that point, and you just attach the hose to that and get hovering. So were there ever accidents where it was opened at the wrong moment and a whole audience got stuck into it? Thousands. That's why they stopped it.

Too many deaths. You know, hedgehogs can get balloon syndrome. Why have you said that? Like, it's something we all know. I've seen one with it. It's amazing. I've heard of it. It's just as many as referring to balloon syndrome

as like they get flu. You know, they can get balloon syndrome. Let's think we all know. So, sorry. Balloon syndrome is a condition that hedgehogs can get. There. And basically, it's because they have lots of space under their skin,

and this is to allow them to roll up. It helps them roll up. But if air gets trapped under their skin and it keeps getting in, they can just blow up and up and up and up, and then they can be the size of a beach ball. So, and then the best thing to do is genuinely to pop a needle into it and drain the air.

You're kidding. Can you take one of their own needles? Probably, yeah. Probably, good. God, that's the ultimate irony, isn't it? It's like being a balloon made of needles. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, so sad. But if they learn to cooperate, then they'd be able to puncture each other's balloon syndrome. So, that's the lesson we've learned here, right? If they join forces, they'd pluck a needle out of each other. Yeah. That's a good point.

You know, they've got draw strings around them. What? Hedgehogs. No. They kind of, they have to... They're thinking of money purses. Oh, sorry. I'm thinking of money purses again.

No, they have this muscle called an orbicularis, and it's a ridge of muscle, which goes all the way around. It's like a skirt, basically. And it's what allows them to roll up. So, they just tighten the orbicularis, and the drawstring just closes, and they can stay like that for hours.

But, but when they run, they hitch up their skirt, basically, and they have these weird long legs. So, if you look up footage of a hedgehog running, it's got much longer legs than you're used to. Because it's still not lifted up in the skirt all around it. No way. It's bizarre.

Guys, heard of the game Campaign for North Africa? Yes. That's incredible. Campaign... I don't know if we... I don't think we've spoken about it before. Campaign for North Africa, the Desert War, 1940 to 1943.

It takes roughly... They've worked out 50 days without breaks to complete the game, and you need 10 players. It comes with 1,600 cardboard tokens. Yeah. Wow. It's in... And it's so detailed.

It stretches... The map that you play on, it stretches out 10 feet. Yeah, that's how big it is. Big table, basically. But, so, it mostly sums the game, the Campaign for North Africa. It's made by a guy called Richard Burke,

who, you know, just wanted to develop the most complicated and realistic game possible. If it's 10 feet long and it's the Campaign for North Africa, is that not just Old Desert? Yeah. Yeah. Is it? Was it made?

It's not a great game. Well, it's... Wait, are you... What are you saying? I just think you could make it smaller. Yeah. Oh, you mean cut out the desert. Yeah.

Cut out the desert. What if you cut out the desert? You haven't got a game, have you? But... So, for example, there is a thing in the game which you have to do. You just get a sheet of paper, and it's mostly sums.

So, every game turn, 3% of your fuel evaporates. Unless you're the British before a certain date, because they used rather inefficient means of storing their fuel, they used drums instead of gerrycans. So, if you're British before a certain date, 7% evaporates every turn.

Amazing. If you're Italian, you have to have... You have to distribute an extra water ration to your troops so that they can boil their pasta. Otherwise... Otherwise, there is a greater risk that they will become disorganized and desert.

Like, it's incredible. They worked out that if you played this game as a hobby, so the game which is the Desert War 1940 to 1943, if it was done as a hobby, you could make it last longer than the war itself for playing it. And it was more traumatic. Shall we finish? Or what can you...

You know how you were saying about how you would give lamb's blood to someone to make them more lamb-like? Yes, yeah. Another thing they kind of thought was a good idea was if you had fallen out with your husband or wife, your discard might be settled by giving each other your blood.

So, I might swap blood with my wife and then it would kind of bring her to my point of view all the other way around. Wow. And would you... So, would you maybe sneakily inject the other person with your blood to settle the other... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think you'll find I'm right, darling. Wow, I do believe you're right. That's weird. No, it would be like if you've been... If you'd had problems in your marriage for a long period of time. Then it might kind of solve things. Well, so you're saying it's the last resort?

It's the last resort before getting divorced. This is one thing you'd try. That's amazing. And did you have to swap... When you say swap, do you mean I can just give you a little cup of blood and you can give me one or do you have to put it properly in? It was a proper transfusion.

Yeah. Well, that's kind of... I did the blood brothers thing with my best friend when I was younger, which is basically a mini transfusion, isn't it? It is. This is a very, very small transfusion. It was quite small, yeah.

And the idea behind this of the blood giving you whatever it came from, that began with Samuel Peeps, who at the Royal Society was telling about a guy who only lived on women's milk as in breast milk. And apparently he used to be angry and fretful, but by taking this women's milk, he became a good-natured patient

and found himself so well, and they thought he'd somehow got the characteristics of a woman drinking breast milk. But if that was the case, then every baby... That would be all right. Well, you don't see many babies with mustaches, do you? Very good point. Like all men have.

Like all men have. Just one more thing. There was a guy called Petridae Abano in the 13th century, and he said that he who drinks menstrual blood, or that of a leper, will be seen to be distracted and lunatic, evil-minded and forgetful. And his cure is to drink of daisies powdered

and mixed with water of honey and to bathe in tepid water and to copulate with girls. It does sound like he was building up to an excuse. It was the weirdest day of ever. But menstrual blood was thought to be quite a negative thing, quite a lot, wasn't it? Although Pliny thought a lot of fun stuff,

but thought that one of the things you could do was collect the menstrual blood of someone, and I don't know how you go about doing that, and then you sprinkle it over your crops because it kills all the bugs. Because it kills everything around. But not the crops. Doesn't kill the crops.

Crops love it. Bugs hate it. And also, in Papua New Guinea, so in an island called Wogeo, which is a tiny little island off Papua New Guinea, then menstrual blood is thought to be cleansing, and it's thought to be kind of a good thing to menstruate, and men want to do it.

I mean, this is really disgusting. Sorry, guys. But they will sever their willies in order to mimic the menstruation of women. I heard they just sort of cut them a bit. With crab claws. Oh, they don't come off. Sorry, they...

Sorry, it's just the word to say. Sorry, you're right. When someone says his head's been severed, you don't think, oh, he'll need a plaster for that, won't he? Sorry, you are right. They didn't chop them all the way off because you can only do that once, really. You need a very willing and patient crab, too, don't you?

Yeah. Do you think what? You think it was attached? Well, yeah, I imagine so. Oh, OK. It's cruel if you cut off the crab's claw to cut your own penis off. I know, but you can at least control the claw at that point.

Maybe the crab wants to emulate menstruation as well, so it's actually quite grateful. Probably not. OK, OK, we'll sort of get something out of that. So, you're right. He did kind of move his face a lot, didn't he, Garek? That was one of his main things that he did when acting. There was a guy in 1756 who said that his realistic style

went too far. His over fondness for extravagant attitudes frequently affected starts convulsive twitchings, jerkings of the body, sprawling of the fingers, and slapping of the breast were no good. And he was a really good friends with Hogarth, the artist, and so he was probably the most painted man in England at the time because Hogarth used to paint him all the time.

But Hogarth used to complain because he moved his face so much all the time that he couldn't paint him properly. Oh, wow. Really? There's one portrait of him which is in the British Museum, I think. It's called a mechanical portrait, and it's a picture of him being painted by Hogarth.

But in the space where his face is, there's one of those spinning wheels behind the picture, and you can have 30 different facial expressions as you wheel around. He is very interesting. He ran Drury Lane, which was one of the theatres that he had for 30 years, and no plays that were new plays at the time have survived.

It's a very odd thing because there are a lot of plays in that time. And he was someone who he was doing a lot of the scheduling, and despite his absolute love for Shakespeare, he also had to do things that he absolutely detested. Pantomime, he absolutely detested. He hated clowns, but... Oh, no, he didn't, yeah. He didn't.

Nice. Oh, no, he didn't. Oh, my goodness. Everybody, he's behind you. This is what we have to deal with. God, that's just a proper insight into how bad I feel about facts all the time. Oh, he didn't.

Random guy? Okay, you're right. Mustn't have checked my facts. You're definitely right. Yeah, so he made the start of an evening be the thing that would be the clown. And he, so like the pantomime clown stuff would be... That's what we do too, Dan.

Yeah. Slavduck, okay. So what I was saying is... I will get to the... You will. To what's probably a wrong fact. But so before a play started in the evening, they would have an appetizer,

which would be a Harlequin-style clown, a Grimaldi who would come on and do a bit. He absolutely hated that. He, at one time, he was at a puppet show and he had to leave because he thought the applause from Mr. Punch was so repulsive. He was just like, I've got to get out of here.

But he had to keep it in because people loved it, particularly King George III loved it. He'd never laughed so hard, apparently, than when he was seeing a clown swallow a whole carrot on stage. And that was the reason for keeping it. Everyone in this audience is thinking, God, I wish that was what was on tonight.

And you apparently swallowed a lot of carrots. It wasn't just the one as well. Amazing. Yeah. But... We've all been there. Yeah. Okay.

Let's move on. Before you find your prince, you have to swallow a lot of carrots. What are you applauding?