No Such Thing As A Fish - 318: No Such Thing As 'Of Quails and Men'

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

James, Anna, Andy & Historian Greg Jenner discuss forks, eggs, ants, and why American audiences can be a little too Kean.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody, I hope you're all keeping safe and well and 99% indoors. I just wanted to let you know about a very exciting guest we've got on the show today. It is historian Greg Jenner, you'll probably recognize him from his previous appearances on this show, or from his own podcast Your Dead to Me, which is sort of a comedy history podcast. He gets fantastic guests on, it's really a great listen. And he also has a book out at the moment. He has a brand new book called Dead Famous. It's about the history of celebrity. I've already started reading it. It's a rollicking good read. It covers a whole bunch of historic celebrities from the 1700s onwards. And if you thought that throwing your underwear at celebrities was a modern phenomenon, then don't

you worry, it's got historic precedent. You can always use that as your defense. You'll find out that and lots more stuff in his book. So that's Dead Famous. Go order the book now, Dead Famous by Greg Jenner. And spoiler alert, you're about to hear about one of those historic celebrities in the upcoming podcast. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Hello, and welcome to another Working from Home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from our respective solitary pods. My name is Anna Tyshinsky, and I am sitting here in my home. And in their homes, we have James Harkin, Andrew Ontamari, and historian Greg Jenner. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our

four favorite facts from the last seven days in no particular order. Here we go, starting with you, Greg. Thank you very much. Okay, my fact is in 1825, Britain's most famous actor was nearly murdered by his own furious audience. Was he murdering a role at the time? No, no. It's quite a complicated story. So his name was Edmund Keen. And he was an absolute genius. He was the greatest actor of the 19th century, still to this day, greatly revered as a Shakespearean actor. But he was an absolute bell end. He was just the worst guy. I love him. He's my favorite. He's sort of the star of my new book because everything he does is just great and bad, simultaneously. Such mixed messages here. And he had been, this was in America at the time.

This was his second American tour. It's 1825. He's in the city of Boston. And previously he'd been there in 1821. And he'd basically angered the crowd by refusing to go on because there weren't enough people in the audience. He was a bit of a diva. And he'd sort of, you know, he'd looked around the curtain and gone, no, there's not enough people. I'm Edmund Keen. I'm the great Edmund Keen. I'm refusing to go on. It basically left a sort of sour taste in the mouth. The Bostonians told him to never come back. And then in 1825, he comes back and he's just come off the back of a huge sex scandal. And he thinks he'll run to America and get away from the scandal in Britain. But they all read the papers. So he turns up, comes back to New York. They chuck

oranges at his head, which is not too bad. But he gets to Boston and 5000 people storm the theater and try and kill him. Wow. Oh my goodness. 5000. That's quite a big gig. That's what I'm getting out of that. I read that they turned up after the start of the show. They do. Yeah. His audience was probably several hundred people. And then an extra 5000 sort of break down the door, smash their way in. That's kind of good news and bad news, isn't it? Because on the, you know, good news, 5000 more people want to come and see you. But the bad news is they also want to kill you. Yeah, they probably weren't paying, I guess. No. And what happened? Did he, presumably he survived, right? Yeah, he does. He throws down his wig. He runs out the back door.

He sprints up the street and he hides in, I think it's one of the theater employees houses around the corner. And he runs in the door and hides in a linen basket. Oh, well, it's so clever. It's so clever because because he's an actor, he's a master of disguise. But for him, just taking off a wig is a disguise. You know what I mean? True. But the audience do track him down and they come to the door. But luckily, the theater employee's wife is pregnant and it sort of calms them down. Because she comes to the door looking, you know, vulnerable and sort of like, please don't stomp my house. And they kind of go, oh, yeah, all right then, I guess. I guess we won't murder the English guy. So he gets away with it and comes back to Britain. And then is this right,

Greg, that then he carried on the tour? Because this is what I love about Edmund Keane. He doesn't really take his subtle cues very well. So yeah, he carried on with the tour. Well, it can only get better from that quite low starting point, presumably. Well, I read that the rest of the tour, he did Philadelphia, but there were protests. And then he did Baltimore, but the night was canceled when a mob refused to let the curtain go up. And then he did Charleston, and the crowd loved it. So it was such a, we've all had those tours, haven't we, where you kind of do Norwich, and it's good, and then Bristol, and it's good. And then you do Dunstable, and you get chased out by a baying mob. And then, Greg, I want to know if this is true, right? This I read this in a book

called rogues and vagabonds by Vivian Ellicott. And they said that he then did a Canadian tour. And he got really drunk after one of the gigs and then disappeared and went to live with some Native Americans. Is that true? It's true. He has made an honorary member of the Huron Native Tunis tribe there. They give him a full ceremony and he wears the stuff back in London. He wears the sort of the headdress and the clothes. He's got a pet lion as well, which he walks around London with. So he, isn't it true that he did the gig and then he just disappeared and no one could find him anywhere and eventually turned up in a wig lamp. But this was pig Edmund Keane. This was him to a T. He was famous for vanishing mid-dinner party, mid-gig. I mean, my favourite story before

he becomes famous is that he was meant to be playing Charles II in a play and he doesn't turn up for the gig. The theatre manager has to go on in his stead. Doesn't really know the lines. The audience start booing because the play is going poorly. You know, the manager's sort of looking down at his script trying to read the lines as he is on stage. And suddenly a voice calls out from the royal box and it's this voice going, keep going, lad, you're doing really well. And it's Edmund Keane and he has drunkenly, he's a raging alcoholic. So he's stumbled off to the pub. He's got a skin fall. He suddenly goes, I'm meant to be in the theatre, but he can't remember how or why. So he stumbles into the theatre to watch his own play. And then what's

lovely is that he starts out with encouraging heckles and then gradually he starts to agree with the audience that the play is crap and starts heckling his own castmate. And he's then carried out or forced out by security and fired from the gig. He was a child, like a minor child star. He played Flaos, didn't he? Was that his first role when he was six? That's right. So the thing you should know about Edmund Keane is that he's very small and he's very weird looking. He kind of looks a bit like Steve Buscemi. He's kind of got these furious features. And as a kid, he was a brilliant gymnast. So his mum, who was a bit of an absent mum, but at one point she was in his life, she described him in the sort of plays as a sort of

child genius, but he was actually a teenager. He basically, he was so small that he could pass for a child, but he was in his teens. So he was briefly famous in his teens. Then he had an absolute disaster and was a wandering actor who nearly starved to death on several occasions. At one point, he and his pregnant wife walk 180 miles from Birmingham to Swansea for a gig. They don't have any money. They're sleeping in hedges in the height of summer. She's seven months pregnant. Really rise to riches. No wonder he didn't know how to deal with the enormous wealth when it came. It really is. He literally overnight fame, literally overnight. It's incredible. But that's a lot of planning to get to. If you know, we've got a gig in Swansea in a fortnight.

You can buck all your hedges in advance. So we should say that Keen was, as well as being a bit of a rogue, was, as you said, a brilliant actor, apparently, as far as we know, right? And I think William Haslett was very impressed with him and sort of friend of the show. Big Willie H. Good old Willie H. He sort of kickstarted his career, although he was asked to give a review. So I went to see him in, I think it was playing Shylock, his first big role, and he was asked to give a favourable review, which I didn't realise people do. You sent a reviewer to the theatre, but you'd say, yeah, but make it a really good review. So Haslett had to be a bit like, look, I was asked to give

a favourable review, but I really do mean it this time. It's great. But he was particularly good at villains, it seems, I think, wasn't he? He seemed to play, he played Richard III very well. He played Iago, played Shylock, and he played this guy called Sir Giles Overreach. And I'd never heard of this play, but apparently it was one of the most popular plays in the 19th century. It's called A New Way to Pay Old Debt. And it was written by a contemporary, almost contemporary of Shakespeare, just after him. And it sounds great. It's by a guy called Philip Massinger. And he wrote about 50 plays, apparently, and we've lost about half of them. And a whole bunch of them we've lost because they were collected by an antiquarian sort of book collector. And his cook, who was called Betsy

Baker, fittingly, didn't realise how precious they were and used them all as pie baking dish liners. So they were just there to line dishes for pastry. And we've lost them. But he was this great, like he's not known at all anymore, is he? No, not really. No, no, a lot of playwrights of that period actually don't really have a modern reputation. It's kind of interesting. But I mean, it reminds me of the biotapestry was briefly used, I think, as a wagon covering. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I mean, several sort of priceless things. Now you kind of look back and go, there was a brief period where we basically using that as blue tag. I read just going back on to Keen, he became very rich very quickly, like you said. And then he was

living in London. So he's living in quite high society, right? But he also had he was a bit rough around the edges, as we've learned, right? So I read that he people used to make fun of him because he would sprinkle Greek and Latin into the conversation. But he wouldn't really know what they mean, like Delby? Yeah, yeah. It's one of my favorite facts about him. One of the reasons I love him, and he's absolutely my favorite, because on the one hand, he's such an asshole. And the other hand, he's sort of man of the people. He didn't speak Greek or Latin, but he didn't let that stop him. And so he would go to dinner with his posh friends, Lord Byron and William Haslett, he hung out with the king, the princes, and he would stand up and give a speech in dead languages that he couldn't

speak to people who spoke them. So he was like the opposite of Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson, obviously speaks dead languages to people who can't speak them as a way of showing off how clever he is. Edmund Keane did the opposite. And everyone was like, that is not Latin. But what I like is that he would leave sort of midway through the speech, he'd be like, yeah, this isn't really working. And I don't really like these people anyway. My people are my drinking buddies, the Wolves. And his drinking club were called the Wolves. And they were all kind of this rowdy bunch of people he'd meet in the pub. And so he'd leave these parties midway through a speech or whatever. Wouldn't say goodbye, he'd just go and he'd be found a week later, Comatose on the floor of

a pub in Deppford, surrounded by his drinking buddies. But what's brilliant about Keane is that he was also incredibly vengeful. He was such a petty guy. And so he used the Wolves as his own personal kind of fan group to go and boo every actor who'd ever sort of wronged him or any stage manager who hadn't hired him or anyone who'd ever crossed him in his entire career, he would use the Wolves to go and sit in the front row and just boo and heckle the entire play. Amazing. Here's a thing, Greg, that I read and I want to know if this is true or not. So Keane was considered to be the best actor in England, which is true, I think. But what that was like was like being a heavyweight boxer. And whenever another upstart kind of actor came along, they would challenge you

to say, I'm a better actor. And the way they would do this is have a contest of a fellow where whoever was the best actor would be a fellow and whoever the upstart is would be Iago. And they would just kind of do this play to try and upstage each other like a heavyweight boxing championship. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely right. And you also had these two main theatres, the Jury Lane Theatre and the Covent Garden Theatre. And you would quite often see people mounting the same play at the same time to see who was the better, who is who's better, Richard III, who would be the better, Hamlet. And so, yeah, it was a very much way of keeping in check who the new kids on the block were. Did you have to, I mean, if you were trying to

decide, did you have to run between the two theatres during the performance to compare and contrast? Not, they wouldn't be on the same night. It would be roughly a similar period. So, you know, within a few weeks of each other, you'd be able to sort of compare. Okay, that makes it easier for audiences. Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of flicking over from channel four to channel three. ITV. But Keen was so jealous and so vengeful that he would set out to try and destroy all of his rivals. And so he would do his absolute best to undermine them. He would often refuse to act alongside people. He fired any actor who was taller than him and he was five foot four. So that was most actor. He fired any actor who was better than him or any actor who was better

looking. So much so that famously people would go and watch Edmund Keen act, but they would leave before the end of the play because all the other actors were crap. And he also famously later on had a lot of power in deciding which plays would be put on at the Drew Lane Theatre and he rejected 500 scripts because other actors had good parts and he was jealous of them. No wonder people thought he was the best actor of his time. No one else was allowed to do anything. All these other five foot three actors are insanely ugly. In fact, it was a great time to be a five foot three ugly actor. Tom Cruise would have fit right in. That's mean. He's a very handsome man. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that it wasn't

until 1913 that we finally figured out how to stop our food tasting like our cutlery. It was just all, everything tasted like metal before that. It all just depended how tasty your fork was. So I was sort of reading about the history of stainless steel, which is effectively when this revolution happened in being able to taste your food rather than your cutlery. And before stainless steel was invented and finally applied to cutlery in 1913, we'd had metal tools obviously since, you know, the iron age, the copper age, things were made of copper and the bronze age, but they all are quite reactive with the stuff you put on them. The only thing that doesn't react with the food that you're putting on it is gold. But that obviously was out

of the reach of your use and your mise. So most people couldn't do that. Yeah. You know when they moved from the copper age to the bronze age to the iron age or whatever, did everything just start tasting different? Is that like, is that the main thing that happens to people who are living there? They're like, wow. It was a revelation. Yeah. Even chicken, even chicken, which tastes like nothing starts to taste completely different. In fact, actually, that thing of everything tasting like chicken would have been true back then. Everything tastes of fork. It's like, have you ever had, have you ever eaten tarantula? Yeah, it tastes a bit like fork. Yeah. But it's a really interesting thing, actually. I mean, I made a Radio 4 documentary about this

and I got to, I was on with a material scientist and we got to taste foods with different types of spoon made of different materials. Who are you on with out of interest? So it's a show called The Origin of Stuff and the scientist is called Dr. Zoe Laughlin. Yes, I was really about her. She's great. Sorry. She's really cool. She makes stuff like all that. She's got a BBC program at the moment where she makes her own trainers. She's really cool. And I was also on with Katie Brown who's the host and a food writer called Bee Wilson and we tried mango and strawberry. Can I just say, we always are asked what's your favorite dinner party? Yeah. Guests. I think the four people that you've just mentioned there is pretty much my favorite.

It was pretty fun. Yeah. Bee Wilson, what a legend. Katie Brown, love her. Yeah, it was amazing. Shame about the Greg Jenner aspect. I mean, it's a shame. I brought it down. I mean, I ruined it. But so what was really cool is we tried mango and we tried strawberry yogurt and we tried them with copper spoons, silver spoons, zinc spoons and gold spoons. And it's amazing. Like the genuinely, genuinely you don't realize how much you're tasting the spoon and the metals until you're not tasting it. I did read that eating mango sorbet with a gold spoon is just about the best, you know, Epicurean treats you could possibly have. Is that true? It does sound really good, doesn't it? I mean, it doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't sound like you're slumming it. They don't have it at many motorway

service stations, do they? It sounds better than, you know, muller fruit corner with a bus ticket. And there was a point in the radio show where I stopped talking and I was just eating the mango, just happily. Just like everyone else was talking about the science and I was just sitting there eating all the mango because it was amazing. But what was really interesting is that copper makes sweet things much sweeter and it makes other things much more bitter. So savory things much more bitter like vegetables when you eat it with a copper spoon, tastes really metallic and sharp and bitter. But when you did the strawberry yogurt, it tasted incredibly sweet as if you'd poured loads of artificial sweetener into your yogurt. What about foods that are bitter sweet

like chocolate that's 85% cocoa? That'll be really interesting, wouldn't it? I don't know actually. Weirdly, I had some 85% cocoa last night. If only I'd waited 24 hours, I could have tested this right now, right here. Do you have a copper spoon? Yeah, I bring my copper spoon everywhere with me. It's in my front pocket. Yeah, good point. Well, people used to, though, in the past, they used to have their own personal cutlery. You'd go everywhere with your own knife and that was, it would be your knife and you'd carry it everywhere and you'd only eat with your own knife. And then gradually people started to introduce forks because forks come quite late. Didn't people carry it around in sort of cutlery shoulder bags, aren't there?

Lots of those throughout history that like, you take your cutlery satchel to a party. How much cutlery are you taking? Are you taking your asparagus spoon as well? Yeah, your terrapin fork. Of course. If it's not a 13 course meal, I'm not going to the event in the first place. So if this is true about the cutlery that you're having, does the phrase being boredom with a silver spoon in your mouth, is that a bad thing? Does that, doesn't, oh yeah, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Everything tasted like shit for him. Yeah. That's what it originally meant. Well, so silver is less reactive than most metals, but it's still apparently,

and Greg would know, does leave a pretty pronounced taste. Yeah, it does. And then you really, you taste it as soon as you then taste the gold, which tastes of nothing. And the gold was just amazingly interesting because it doesn't taste of metal, it doesn't taste of anything, you're just tasting the food. Whereas the copper was really reactive because it's all about the electrons and the help free, they move around. So gold is inert, but copper conducts electricity really well. So it kind of, you just sort of get that activity in the mouth. So you're really feeling all the kind of taste buds going, wow, what's happening? Whereas gold's much more sedate and gentle.

I mean, your mate Zoe, Dr. Zoe, did say, I think at the end of this event, which I'm so excited you attended, she said you haven't lived until you've eaten off gold. So that's a bit of a blow for most of us. Almost everybody, yeah. But should we get back to the actual original fact, Anna, the 1913 thing? That's how it really is, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, we should talk about him, what a hero. Do you want to tell us a bit more? Do you want to do it? Oh, yes, I guess since I sort of brought him up initially, fine. But we have a historian here, it's like, you know, why do we have to do all the work this week?

Exactly. I forgot I could put my feet up for God's sake. Right, fine, 1913. There's a metallurgist called Harry Brealy, and he's actually working as all the best inventions often came from sort of trying to work on weapons, because really, all countries want to pump money into his war. So he was working on alloys for gun barrels to try and make the steel in gun barrels harder. And he, so he was testing out lots of different alloys, steel alloys, and he added chromium to one. And when he was doing this to test sort of how strong it was, he had to etch into it with various chemical additives. And he noticed that the chromium was very resistant to these. And the thing is, this had been spotted before. So stainless steel is

basically you add a certain amount of chromium to steel. This had been spotted. But the theory is that the reason Harry Brealy realized how useful it would be for cutlery is because he was working in Sheffield. And Sheffield, for many hundreds of years, as I'm sure any listeners in Sheffield will know, has been famous as a cutlery manufacturer. So straight away, when he saw this material, shoved it in his mouth, went, Oh, wow, that tasted nothing. I can use this. Because he was working on gun barrels, would it be fair to say that Harry Brealy literally brought a knife to a gunfight, which is in a way what the First World War was? That's exactly what he did. And that's where the saying comes from.

Yeah, very strong. But the interesting thing about Brealy is that he, he was not the first person to be experimenting to this. And I think various other countries have claimed their own scientists got there first. But he, he turned it into cutlery, which is a huge deal. He was in Sheffield. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing... You don't have Sheffield in France, do you? No. Sheffield, we have the couteau. And he was, he was quite a socialist, really, wasn't he? And basically, they never painted the invention of stainless steel in Britain. So it meant that anyone could make it. And also, any money they did make, he wanted to share with everyone else in his company. And his

bosses weren't particularly happy with that. But they did paint and tear around the world. So it meant that if anyone made stainless steel in USA, Canada, Italy, France, or Japan, they had to get a license from Sheffield to do it. So that's how they made all their money. And then eventually he retired. And he started a charity called the Freshgate Trust Foundation, which he said he hoped would help lame dogs over styles. It's good to have an ambition, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know exactly. I don't know if he was like giving legs to dogs or lowering styles. I'm not really sure, but one or the other. Are we 100% sure it wasn't a metaphor? Yeah, it feels like it's a metaphor or Harry Styles.

Does he mean getting sheepdogs to jump over Harry Styles? Because I would watch that. That's really nice. Yeah, it is nice, isn't it? I like to think it's not a metaphor and it's an exact explanation of what he was doing. I believe that. Because what you need when you've got a charitable campaign is a little big thing, they say, or a big little thing, you know, which is where it taps into a problem that we all know. So instead of saying, let's solve plastic pollution, let's take this one particular example. So rather than saying, let's just replace all styles with gates, which is an impossible dream, you say, let's just help lame dogs over styles and it's achievable. Yeah, it's good. And yet that invention

doesn't seem to have lasted in the same way that Stainless Steelhouse. I don't know about your guys dogs, but my lame dog still can't make it over those damn styles. I'm constantly, whenever I see a style, there's a queue of sad looking dogs. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that ants have a special stomach, which is just to contain food to throw up into the mouths of other ants. Isn't that lovely? And then do they go down the line? So do those recipient ants then throw up their food into the mouth of other ants? I mean, how many times does food get eaten? The recipient? I don't know. That's such a good point. You don't want to be at the end of that line, do you? Like the human centipede is the worst position, I think,

is at the end of the ant vomit line. That's definitely true. It's not quite as bad as a human centipede. In fact, the human centipede, if it was the human ant, would be very different. It would just be two people cellotaped by their mouths. I don't want to talk about this. I know I mentioned this because it's got a weird analogy to human life, but I've already remembered it. Go on, talk us through it then. Okay, so this is a process called trophallaxis, and it's another way of ants talking to each other basically. So they make noises, they touch each other, they have pheromones, and they also throw up into each other's mouths. It's all liquid mouth-to-mouth stuff. It's actually, I say that, it's not all mouth-to-mouth. Sometimes it's bottom-to-mouth. Anal secretions are imbibed

according to the scientific way of describing it. Yeah, that is a bit human centipede, isn't it? Yeah, it is. I know, yeah. But it's very useful because it has a purpose. They're not just doing it for fun. They have information in this stuff they're throwing up. So it might contain hormones, and maybe you can feed these hormones to a larva, and it will change the way that the larva's life develops. So a larva which receives this kind of vom is twice as likely to become a larger work around. So your whole life can be changed by someone else throwing up in your mouth as an ant. I find that amazing. It's like Captain America Super Serum. You can supercharge you into a supercharged ant. It is basically like that, yeah. And the amazing thing about this research is

how it was done. So the researchers, they had to collect this fluid from the mouths of ants, which were returning to the colony after a while away, collecting fluid, and they kidnapped them, they anesthetized them, and then they squeezed them very, very gently until they threw up this stuff, and they collected 0.34 millionths of a litre per ant, and then had to analyze what was in that. What kind of dexterous, tiny-fingered researcher did they find to anesthetize and then extract ants? It's very hard, you're getting a tiny chloroform rag over the ant's mouth, isn't it? If the Ant-Man movie had been anything like the science, then it would have been Michael Douglas taking a dump in his mouth, and then he saw the superhero. Is this part going to be a string of

superhero references that I don't understand? Yes, it is. I'll just laugh along. Do you reckon that this stuff that they vomit up could be milked for human consumption if you had enough ants? Yeah, I guess it could. I think it's very much a last resort. I know you're getting to the end of your canned goods at this point, James, but I'm not sure we're there yet. Well, we do have ants in this house. Yeah, maybe the big beans first. Ants are not the only animals who do this, are they, who vomit in each other's mouths for various different reasons. Vampire bats do it, so they vomit blood into each other's mouths, which I would argue is one step more disgusting than the ant version. Do you want to do a Batman thing here, Gregor? Yeah, absolutely, yes.

In order to defeat fear, you must become fear, which means you have to vomit blood into your mates' eyes. They're really sweet, aren't they? No, they are. They do it to strangers, or to people who they've just met, basically. Is it like a handshake? Because that has to be a viral nightmare. Yes, exactly. We're not allowed to handshake anymore, but we're definitely not allowed to vomit blood into each other's faces. You can't do anything these days. But yeah, so when you first meet a vampire bat and you wanted to be friends with them, you vomit blood in their mouths. And they gradually raise the stakes, so it's their way of making friends. So you start off with vomiting a small amount of blood, doing a small favor

for someone, and then as you get to know and like each other and trust each other, you will end up sharing lots of food with the other vampire bats. It's really sweet. That's cute. I was really surprised that wolves do it. We're not talking about Edmund Keen's friends. The wolves drinking love. I bet at some point, actually, Edmund Keen's wolves did throw up into each other's mouths. But also, grey wolves do this, which I find very sweet, but they leave the vomit in special piles and then it's for their cubs, so their cubs come along and chew it up. And when I was reading about this, they do it with blueberries. So you think of wolves as sort of tearing apart prey animals, which they do, but they love blueberries, apparently. And so they'll

go and pick loads of blueberries, go to the bush, throw them up, and then their kids eat them. That's true. That reminds me of Pliny the Elder. Do you know the story? I mean, you must know the story of the Indian ants in Pliny's natural history. I mean, we all do, but why don't you just tell us anyway? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Pliny the Elder is one of the sort of great naturalists of the ancient world. He's fascinating. He's really interested in science and all sorts of things. He writes this lovely section about ants and how collaborative they are and what they do. And it's really lovely and it's quite accurate. And you kind of read it and go, oh, that's good. That's right. And then

he gets this weird paragraph where he's like, and in India, they have Indian ants, which are giant and they are the size of foxes or wolves. And they hunt and mine gold. And they dig it up on the ground and they carry it back to their lairs. And any passing Indian who happens to sort of pick up the gold is torn apart by these giant ants. It's pretty terrifying. And modern scholars are like, well, that sounds not like an ant. That's probably a marmot or some sort of other creature. But they were convinced in the ancient world that there was a sort of race of giant mega ants that hoarded gold like dragons. It doesn't sound much like a marmot, if I'm honest. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. No. So it's probably a translation error, but it's got a nice bit that

comes after a long bit about ants being, you know, really interesting animals and then you get to be confused. Pliny, he did let his imagination run away with him sometimes, didn't he? Yeah, it's a great man. Yeah, I think it's okay to riff. But this is the weird thing is that it is weirdly socialized, because the theory is that lots of insect colonies like ants or termites, they basically have one collective stomach. And so forager ants deliver food at a rate which depends on how full the individuals they encounter before are. So if everyone you come across is really hungry, then forager ants kind of raise their game and food flow rates kind of get matched to how hungry the overall colony is

based on the information you're taking in. That's amazing. It's really neat. How do you spot hungry ant? Do they sort of limp and drag them? Because I don't know if I could tell if an ant had lost weight for it. If it's so weak that it can't get over a style, then it's a very hungry ant. Forager ants actually self-isolate. Do they? Very thoughtful. Yes, they would have been absolutely nailing it around this time, probably are. So they go out and pick up food from outside the colony. And so they're the most exposed to pathogens and stuff, because they're in the outside world. And scientists find that when they deliberately expose them to a fungus that kills them after a few days, if they infect them with it,

they'll avoid going back to the nest. And this is even before they get sick. They've got an instinct that seems to know they've been infected with a fungus. They don't go back to the nest so they don't infect their friends. And even their fellow forage ants will also not go back to the nest, you know, as if they've come into contact with this ant who's infected and they won't go back to the nest. And then meanwhile the nurse ants inside the nest will retreat deeper and deeper into the nest. Wow, but is it not true that the ones who are self-isolating do come out once a week to applaud the nurse ants? They do, yes. It's very moving actually. If you put your ear to the ground you can hear it Thursday. Another animal that does this vomiting thing is honey bees. So if you're

living in a honey bee house or a hive, as they call it, it might get too hot, right? It might get too hot. And so when it gets too hot what happens is some water collector bees go out, they drink a load of water, and then they come back and then vomit it over everything and everyone. Wow. It's almost like incredible. Yeah, like a hosepipe kind of thing or a fountain. Like a fireman. It's cool. Like a fireman, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there is a thing about the nectar that bees drink, isn't it, because they drink the nectar and then they come back to the hive and they regurgitate it into honey pots, basically, for the workers in the hive. But there's been a study done, I think, within the last couple of months, saying that the sweeter the nectar is, the harder the bees

find it to regurgitate. So if it's not very sugary, it's very easy for them to regurgitate because it's not very viscous. It's quite thin and it takes four or five seconds. So they just, you know, they lean over the honey pot, they get another ant to hold the hair back a few seconds and it's fine. But if they've been drinking really, really sweet honey, or really, really sweet nectar, rather, it takes about 30 seconds for them to come up and they basically have to lean over the honey pot and straight, they just sit there going, it takes ages to come out. Do you remember when we went to John Mitchinson's birthday party a few years ago and all the elves sat in the kitchen and drank mead? Oh, yeah, yeah. What you explained there is exactly how I felt the

next one. We all performed the Honey Bee Ritual later that night. So there's one particular, one regurgitating creature makes a seriously massive sacrifice. That's the desert spider. So she regurgitates food for her offspring as soon as they've hatched. But what she does, she eats an enormous amount of food so that she can feed it to them and then it goes into her stomach and then in order to, like she needs to pre-digest it for her offspring and so her stomach properly digests it and this involves her stomach creating massive amounts of digestive enzymes so that she can throw up enough to feed all of her offspring and her stomach creates so many enzymes and so much stomach acid that it starts to eat her from the inside out as well. So she throws up all this

food for her kids and then after about two weeks, once they've finished the food, her body's been eaten away enough that the kids can eat her as their last supper. That's so weird. It's weird, but it's good parenting actually in a way. Yeah, it's short term parenting because once they've eaten you, you can't do much, you can't take them to the park after that. No, you're right, that's when the dad really has to step up. That's a bit like, have you ever heard of the Melified Man thing? I think it was medieval Arabia, top of my head, people who at the very end of their life, this is a thing you could do is you just only eat honey, you just only eat honey and very gradually your body becomes sweet and then when you died, they would bury you and mummify you and then

many years later on people would eat you and you'd be sweet tasting and it was a sort of a religious thing. Yeah, I was going to ask what the incentive is for this. I don't know. I think if you earlier in life got to eat someone who was a sort of honey monster lying under the ground, then I would be willing to enter that scheme where after my death people could do that to me. Imagine if they rebranded sugar puffs with a Melified Man on the front of the box. The rotting corpse of a person who once ate honey. I'm not convinced that if you ate the, like presumably by this point, quite well decomposed body of someone who ate honey for a while before they died, I don't even know if that

would taste of honey by that point, would it? I mean, did it work? Oh, don't spoil it. It's just going to taste of very slightly sweet human carbs, isn't it? I think so. If it would depends what fork you're eating it with, doesn't it? I've read, so this is just briefly back to Ants. I just want to share with you the intro of an article in The New Scientist about a particular kind of ant, okay? It's a couple of sentences. I think it's worth telling you. The article begins, suppose you could have sex with your brother or sister in the full and certain knowledge that any children would be safe from the harmful effects of inbreeding. Would you be more willing

to commit incest? The longhorn crazy ant certainly is. Wow, that does feel like the journalist has got lucky by finding that ant, doesn't he? After he's already written the first two sentences. I mean, I didn't know it was, I didn't really know it was a bad ant when I clicked on it, and I was very disappointed. Yeah, what a, what a start. An opening, and would you though? No. Yeah, I think that's probably the right answer, isn't it? Probably. Well, Queen Cleopatra did, of course. She married two of her brothers.

And she didn't even do that in the certain knowledge that she would be free from the damaging effects of incest. On regurgitators, do you remember last week, you won't remember this, Greg, because you weren't here, but Andy, you talked about human ostriches. Do you remember? Oh yeah, yeah. So they would swallow bits of metal and bits of glass and so on and that. And the modern day, you know, version of that, they have the soil swallows, but also you have regurgitators. So on Britain's Got Talent, a few years ago,

there was someone called Stevie Starr, who could swallow a Rubik's cube that was mixed up, and then when he regurgitated, it was all solved. No way he couldn't. No throat is big enough for a Rubik's cube. It was a small, it was a small Rubik's cube. This makes tying a knot in a cherry stalk look like really child's play. Okay, which do you think would be harder, learning how to solve a Rubik's cube with the inside of your stomach, or learning how to swallow two Rubik's cubes,

one pre-solved, before you do the show? Yeah, yeah. A lot of people think, I've read a lot of forums about it, a lot of people think that maybe he did your trick, which is having two Rubik's cubes inside him and one of them comes out, but then a lot of people who do this kind of regurgitation, they think, well, you know what, maybe it is possible to do that. No way, man. And he definitely does, but he definitely does other tricks with his regurgitation.

Apparently he learned his skill when he was a child and he swallowed his pocket money, so no one would steal it. Wow. Nice. And then when he brought it back up, it was what? A different denomination? He's like a bureau de charge. That's amazing, James.

I don't know, I don't know. Did he not win? No, he didn't win. What? That's an amazing talent. There's no justice. No. Who won as some singer?

Probably that dancing dog, but in fairness, do you remember that dancing dog? In fairness, it could get over styles, so quite skilful. In terms of the guy who, the human ostriches, did you talk about Polyphagus, Nero's? No. So, Emperor Nero, according to Cetonius, the Roman writer, talked about Nero having a kind of a pet man who was probably a slave, but we're not quite sure, and he was known as Polyphagus, which is Greek for all eater, eats all things. And he would eat anything, including humans alive, apparently.

You could throw him a human, and he would eat the human. How big was Polyphagus? Well, apparently he was a very large man, and he was sort of a glutton or a gourmand, who would eat anything at all, and he would devour. He sounds like a very large man with big claws, who hibernates everyone, certainly. Well, so that's one of the actual interpretations of Historian Delight. Are you sure it's not a bear? But, yeah, so...

A pet man. I'm trying to work out which is the worst thing to be a slave, or a pet man. Both are very bad. It does sound like a very bad euphemism for an enslaved person, doesn't it? He's not a slave, it's a pet man. It's awkward you don't have the sound of that, Andy, because that is what your wife calls you when she refers to you, but... Unbelievable.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that Ancient Egyptians had artificial egg incubators, but they didn't have thermometers, so they measured the temperature of the eggs by holding them to their eyelids. Really nice. Isn't that lovely? So, very quickly on this, Egypt has been famous for a long time for its egg ovens, and they have been going back from at least the late period of the New Kingdom,

which is 500 BC onwards. And we know that because Aristotle wrote about them. He said that the people in Egypt make eggs that are hatched spontaneously in the ground by being buried in dung heaps. And then 200 years later, there was another historian called Diodorus Siculus. Sorry, Greg, I don't know how you pronounce that. And he also said that these egg hatching was really amazing, that the Egyptians did. And then throughout history, you get loads of people writing about what great egg hatchers

the Egyptians are. And I was reading an article about the modern day egg hatchers in Egypt, and they said that they still use all the old techniques, including this way of telling if it's too hot, which is they put them next to the eyelids, because that's one of the most sensitive parts of your body is. And apparently it's still done today, and they've been doing it for thousands of years. I had no idea that it was still happening today. That's very, very cool.

Yeah. Yeah, isn't it amazing? Wow. And it's extraordinary the ability to, I guess, they were mass producing egg, because what's interesting is that chicken eggs were not eaten in Egypt for all the pharaonic periods. So when you're thinking of pharaohs and tombs and pyramids, they don't have chickens at all.

And then they were introduced, as you say, about 500 BCE probably. And then they went mad for them. They were like, yeah, we love eggs. It's brilliant. They're producing tens of thousands of them. So like I say, it wasn't ancient, ancient, ancient Egypt. It was just before the Romans arrived. Still pretty ancient.

Yeah. I would argue that's ancient Egypt, depending on where you're looking from, which is now. This is the problem with ancient Egypt, is that ancient Egyptians were aware of themselves as an ancient culture. So there were ancient Egyptian pharaohs who did archaeology on ancient Egyptian pharaohs, which is amazing. And this Herodotus used to travel, apparently he traveled to Egypt to go and look at the ancient stuff.

So an ancient Greek philosopher and writer went to Egypt to go and look at the old stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, and everyone who went to Egypt or wrote about the Egyptians always seemed to mention these amazing egg buildings, which they used to make their eggs. So in the 18th century, there was a French scientist called Rene Antoine Fershaud de Romere. And he said that Egypt should be more proud of its hatcheries than of its pyramids.

Fair enough. Realmore, actually, who, yeah, he was one of the people who went and reported on them. He, I love him because he's the guy who almost gave us paper, but then didn't. So he was a guy who was a Malian entomologist and he studied paper wasps. And he suddenly looked at paper wasps and he said, Oh my God, these guys are chewing up wood into pulp and then mashing it together to make paper. Guys, we should do this. And he wrote that in a paper, which wasn't on paper, ironically, but people ignored it.

And then they didn't, we didn't figure out how to make the paper that we know today for about another hundred years. So I've always loved the idea that wasps were making paper for just thousands of years before we figured it out. What did they do with it though? Good point. They're not writing Ulysses, are they? They never call.

They never write. But he's one of the brilliant men of the 18th century. There are lots of sort of fantastic French scientists in this period sort of milling around being quite fancy and clever. And he was an entomologist, but he had all sorts of interests. But what was really fun about him is that he was really fascinated by birds as well as insects. And he used to advise King Louis XV as well, who was the King of France after Louis XIV and Louis XV to get back to eggs.

Louis XV was really into his soft-boiled eggs. He was really, really, like he really enjoyed them and he would have them every Sunday. And he had an ability to swipe the top of the egg off with a single blow of his fork, like a little execution thing. Which Louis was this? Louis XV. So pre-revolution. Pre-revolution in the 1750s.

There's a bit of irony there that he was able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. He could guillotine his egg with a single blow. And people would gather to watch the king eat his Sunday egg. And the valet would announce it by hushing the room and saying, the king shall now eat his egg. And then everyone would go quiet. And then he would do a little swoosh thing to capitate the egg.

And some people in the audience started thinking, yeah, that's a good idea. Can I just say, like, I don't want to put myself as some kind of amazing French king, but I can chop the top of an egg in one swish as well. No, you can't. I can. What I'm saying is it's not exactly swallowing a Rubik's cube. As far as skills go, is it? It's not that great.

No, you're right. 18th century France has got talent. It was a much less good year. But James, can you do it in front of an audience? Because that's where the pressure is. It's like going on a quiz show. We can all answer stuff in our lounge, but when you've got people watching, that's when the pressure's on.

You're absolutely right. You're so right. I would almost certainly freeze under pressure. And also, you specified that he was doing it with a fork, for God's sake. And this was in the early days of forks. People barely knew which way around to hold them, and he's decapitating eggs. OK, fine. He nailed it.

Yeah. Did you see a few months ago, archaeologists found some Roman eggs, 1,700 years old. They were chicken eggs that had not been opened, and they'd been deposited as part of an offering to the gods. And they accidentally cracked them, and the smell was intense. Wow. Like 1,007 year old rotten egg.

Really, really intense, sulfury smell. Pretty full on. Oh my God. I have eaten 100 year egg. I don't know if anyone else has had that. Wow. Oh, that's what it's called. Like in Chinese cuisine, they call it the 100 year egg.

But actually, I think it's just a very slightly gone off egg or something. Or they cook it in some way, then it smells a bit sulfurous, and it tastes a bit kind of bitter. But I don't think it's 100 years old. It's not dated back to Julius' time. OK, no. No. You've got a supply issue.

I mean, that's the case. But yeah, I can only imagine what the 1,000 year old or 2,000 year old. 1,700 years old. Yeah, it's from the, I think, 4th century. They must. And I think a couple of the eggs, they didn't crack. So they've got two preserved Roman eggs, and then I think they broke couple.

Those must be the oldest extant hen's eggs in the world. Surely. There can't be any older than that. I don't know. I have not asked around, but it's pretty good. Because one of the eggs in the world will be the oldest one, won't it? That's just maths. Yeah, that's true.

I don't even know if that's maths, you know. That's philosophy, Andy. Oh. Philosophy. Well, the Roman's super keen, because it's weird when you look at the popularity of eating chicken, it really didn't become the meat of choice. It wasn't particularly popular meat until the last couple of hundred years,

maybe. I think people ate such a wide variety of bird. But the Romans were quite into chicken, right? Yeah, they were. I mean, they also had sacred chickens, too. So there's that famous story of Claudius Pulcair, who was a Roman general, a naval general, and he was just before a battle,

he was going to do the thing called augury. Or I think the word is ornithomancy, where you're trying to fortune tell using birds. And what he did is he put down some corn for the bird to eat, the chicken to eat. And the hope would be that the chicken would eat the corn, and that's a good omen for your battle. And the chicken didn't eat,

and all the soldiers on the ships were freaking out. They were like, oh my God, we're in a lose of battle. And so Claudius Pulcair, he freaked out, he picked up the chicken and he threw it over the side and said, maybe it's thirsty. And it did not go well. They lost the battle, the soldiers panicked, because he drowned the chicken,

and there was a sort of inquiry afterwards about doing this terrible thing to a sacred chicken. Interesting, isn't it? Because actually, obviously the chicken not eating has nothing to do with the battle, but in a way it does, because he threw it overboard and everyone got worried about it.

And there's like a placebo. Yeah, yeah, it's a morale issue. Yeah, it is a placebo effect. It's kind of funny. So the Soviet Union tried to incubate some eggs in space. And it worked, eventually. They brought quails, because they're kind of smaller than chickens.

A lot easier to have a quail in a spaceship than it is to have a chicken. So they had a problem, and that was that when the chickens were born, or when the quails were born, they couldn't eat or drink. And that is because if you get a quail when it's born, it can't lift its head up,

because it's not strong enough. But that's fine, because all its food is on the ground. And if anything it wants to eat is on the ground, so it just kind of lies there with its head on the ground and eats and eats and eats, and eventually gets strong enough to lift its head up. But in space, of course,

you don't have the gravity to bring the head down to the ground. So its head and neck were just kind of floating around in the space, and it meant that they couldn't feed. So if you put some food down for the quails, they couldn't eat it. And so the cos... Well, doesn't the food float?

Exactly. Can you not lift the food to the level of the floating quail? You can, and that's what they did, but they had to do it every two hours. And these cosmonauts had other things to be getting them with. They couldn't just be feeding the quails every two hours. No. And so eventually, unfortunately, the quails carped it.

Did they actually? Yeah, they did. But then they tried it again a bit later, and they made tiny little hammocks for the quails, which would hold their heads in place. And then they could hold the food in place as well, and so the next lot were fine. I had pet quails when I was young.

Yeah, because I'm allergic to cats and dogs and other animals, and my dad was like, I'll get you a bird, but we don't even want a bird in the house, so we'll get you some quails. So I had some quails in the garden. Did you try all the animals until you settled on quails? It feels like you tried cats allergic,

tried dogs allergic, tried mammoths allergic. Yeah, I tried Indian ants. They were feral and furious. They tried to steal my gold. And then I tried a pet man, but he tried to eat me. We ended up with quail. Yeah, sadly, actually, my brother,

who was very small at the time, he crushed the quail legs in his hand accidentally, because he didn't understand his own strength, and so that was the end of our quail. Oh, my God, like Lenny from A Mice and Man, or what? Yeah, it was. It was a sort of sad moment. Quails and Man is a slightly more upmarket version

of A Mice and Man, isn't it? It's a bit middle class, isn't it? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in touch with any of us about anything that we've said on this show or about anything else in yours or our lives,

then you can contact these guys on Twitter, James Yaron. That's James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Greg. At Greg underscore, Jenna. And Greg, your new book is called Dead Famous.

Where can people get it, in case they don't understand how to buy books? Well, these days, buying books is actually quite hard. So, yeah, I mean, Waterstones is a good place. Independent book shops, lovely. Amazon have got it. The audiobook is me reading it, and people seem to quite like it.

So that's a nice way to get it. That's safe and relatively cheap. So, yeah, it's a history of celebrity. It's quite funny, and it will surprise you, I hope. So, yeah. Oh, amazing. Go and find out more about Edmund Keane, and it's crazy ways.

If you want to listen to any of our old episodes, you can go to knowsuchthingasafish.com. We have just put up the whole first year and the whole second year for free. So that's a hundred and four. That was the math there. Old episodes that you can go back and listen to now. Thank you so much for listening this week,

and we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.