No Such Thing As A Fish - 336: No Such Thing As A Delicious Emergency Salad

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Dan, James, Andy and Sara Pascoe discuss DNA, 747s and TMI from a certain beetle. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, before we start this week's show, just so you don't think that Anna has suddenly affected a East London accent, she is still away and in her stead this week we have the absolutely fantastically funny, brilliant, smart, amazing comedian Sarah Pascoe. Now Sarah has a book that's just come out in paperback, it's called Sex Power Money and that book has an accompanying podcast which is also called Sex Power Money which you can find in all your normal podcast providers. Both of those things are absolutely brilliant, you should definitely check them out. But for now, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to

you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and special guest Sarah Pascoe and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, Sarah. Hello everybody, my fact is for 15 years, German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist. Wow, amazing. It is amazing, but it's also quite dark. It does involve things like murder, so this isn't like a trigger warning but I know that your show is sometimes just like, oh this ladybird bought a hat, so if anyone is listening. I think you're confusing us with play school. Yeah, I mean more like this ladybird

looks like she bought a hat but actually it's a very interesting evolutionary shadow. So I just wanted to say to people who are listening, like if there are children, I'm not going to go into any great detail about murders but it does mention murders. So in 2007 two police officers were shot in Hellbron, so obviously it's terrible. A 22 year old female officer is killed and her male colleague was badly injured. Now they found the DNA of the killer at the scene and they ran it through a database where obviously DNA has been stored from other crimes and they found multiple matches. In 2001 a 61 year old furniture dealer in Freiburg, Germany had been murdered by a strangulation and the DNA of the killer of the police was found

in his apartment and so this is completely befuddling for the police because this is completely different MO. This is a manual strangulation of a furniture dealer and then this murder of the police which seemed to be completely different. They couldn't connect the reasons why you would commit those murders. This becomes even more confusing when they found a match to a very very cold case from 1993, a 62 year old woman and again a different murder MO. They tried to find links between those two victims, the 61 year old and the 62 year old but they weren't connected in any way at all. So they've got a serial killer and it turns out from this DNA that this is a woman which is incredibly rare to have a female serial killer. She's been working for nearly 20 years.

I'm not working, I know it's not working. She's been employed as a serial killer for like for like two decades. They're going back through all of these cold cases, going through the data and the stuff that's coming up on her is just so incredulous. So at the end of October in 2001 in Budenheim, Germany, there's a break-in in a trailer. So no murders are committed because it was empty at the time and her DNA is found on a half-eaten cookie on the side of this trailer. So they don't know what she was doing there but they now have a name for this serial killer, this woman. They call her the Phantom of Helbrunn. Now if I was the German police at this point in the case, I would have called her the Cookie Monster because she's killed three people.

I think the reason they had no sense of humour about it is because she'd killed a police officer. I think if she hadn't, they'd have had a lot more fun with the naming. But Sarah, you're saying she didn't exist, what's going on? Well, at the moment she does exist very much. Sorry, that sounded so play school, Andy, that I think Sarah's justified in The Lady Bird with a Hat. But what happened? So it's completely incredible. At this point they now have a whole room of police officers who are completely focused on catching her. They also call her the Woman Without a Face because also so

far they have no witnesses. Wait a minute, how did she eat the cookie if she didn't have a face? This is why she's so mysterious. So the woman makes no sense. She's killing, she's robbing, she's snacking and there's no consistent MO. And by 2007 she is now in another country. She's in Austria robbing an optometrists. And now because her crimes have gone into Austria, they actually have different rules in terms of what they can do with DNA. And so they find out that this woman is of very likely of Eastern European descent. So between 2003 and 2007 the Phantom's DNA is found at over 20 burglaries or motorcycle thefts. They've got a reward of 300,000 euros for her capture and over 16,000 hours of overtime have

already been paid for the police force. And I've also, I looked at some of the press from the time. So this is from 2007. Now this was quite a big deal because they found her DNA on a syringe that was half full of heroin. So perhaps she was also an addict. Was that why her spree was so unpredictable? Such an old story isn't it? You start on the cookies and then you just work your way up to the really hard stuff. Or maybe because you're so, I don't know if heroin gives you the munchies but maybe that's why. She was like I'm busy, I'm busy robbing but also I would love a biscuit. So this is from Time Magazine in 2009. The Phantom was not only a brutal killer suspected of committing six homicides but also a common thief. She had been involved in a car

dealership robbery and a school break-in but in both cases others convicted of those crimes denied her existence. No one had ever seen her, no security camera had ever captured her image but when witnesses described her they sometimes said she looked like a man. So this is what those so this is what those police are dealing with right. So this criminal is this Eastern European woman who looks like a man is so incredible at her job and that and everyone is so scared of her that even people who they definitely know were in the same place as her doing the same crimes are like no no no there was no woman. What woman are you talking about? It's crazy it's like Kaiser Soce. It's like this mythical super boss that everyone probably thinks they're working under.

Exactly that like so who is this woman? It's starting to sound to me like she doesn't exist. Where was the clue? Was it in the original fact where Sarah said she didn't exist? So the story ends in 2009 they found the burned body of a male asylum seeker they took his DNA in an attempt to identify him and their results had a hit on the database. It was the phantom of hell broom they found him but the DNA is definitely female so they've got this man who's been killed but then the DNA is coming up as this definitely definitely female DNA so obviously I've written what the fuck was going on was probably what the police said in that task force like what the hell is this and that's when they realised that this must be a contamination

All of the places that had had shown up the the phantom of hell bronze DNA the cotton swabs that are used to take DNA traces they all came from exactly the same factory in Bavaria where they employed Eastern European women and the reason that this had been allowed to happen was that those swabs were supposed to be for medical use not for forensic police use so there was never an instruction to them that they couldn't like lick the swabs I mean they're not licking the medical swabs though are they no I don't think so I think they're just maybe not having the same you know like air airtight completely safe things and so yeah it was just this incredible DNA mistake and

there have been other DNA mistakes and do you think Sarah because it's like everyone trusts DNA so much don't they it's like this basically if DNA says it's right then it must be right and all of the other evidence pointing to it being wrong must be wrong do you know what I mean but people who are really scared of DNA it's for that exact reason like so we've had cases in the UK there's a case I think his name's Adam Scott which you guys might have read about but he was sent to prison for four and a half months for a crime in Manchester it was a really brutal crime on a woman and and he said that he was in Plymouth or Portsmouth he was one of those places down south he said he said I was definitely there so he had an absolutely watertight alibi which

they didn't check because they had his DNA on the victim and then after four and a half months of being in prison and obviously he was he was actually in a paedophile and rapist's wing of a prison so he's also having like a terrible time um it then turned out that his crime actually what he'd done is he spat in the street and they'd taken his um saliva and they'd they'd in the lab they'd confused the samples one from a brutal crime one from one from spitting and he'd gone to prison for nearly five months now I'm not saying that that's an appropriate sentence to spend five months in a paedophile wing of a prison for spitting in the street but I it's not far off yeah I do hate spitting I do but but also I think a lot of premiership footballers are going to

suddenly be in prison oh god can I just ask do we know who this Bavarian woman is and was she informed of all her crimes she's the phantom of hell broom did so did we did they track her down like I actually couldn't get to the bottom of that I'm sure she really made sure they didn't there must be data protection issues about that although although if I was a serial killer and I wanted to commit crimes across multiple jurisdictions across multiple years I would definitely get a job in a factory that packed cotton swabs and then I would just crack the cotton swabs to where they had been that's a lot of work and I'd commit my crimes and Andy that's just second novel right there there was a murder called the time travel murder it was in

the 90s and what happened was they found the body and they took DNA from it and they matched it with someone who had died a few years ago and they were like how on earth could that happen you know how can you have someone who who died and then committed the murder and what it was is they've been using the same nail clippers to cut the fingernails to test right and from now on they always use disposable fingernail clippers whenever they're taking any fingernail stuff and they always put the clippers in with the clippings so whenever you take the DNA you always have the item which found the DNA in the first place I found a case like that as well so this is this is in America in California um so a man called Lucas Anderson was considered as the main suspect in the murder

of a silicone valley millionaire but what happened was that paramedics had treated him earlier in the day so he hadn't died but they'd then accidentally transferred his DNA to the crime scene when they attended with the victim later on they must have thought that's such a coincidence as well god that's so weird that that bloke we were treating earlier today turns out to have been here murdering someone but I don't know if it's the same one but there was one that was like that where the guy was being treated because basically he was blind drunk and they took him into the hospital and obviously all this kind of contamination happened but then when they arrested him afterwards he was like well I was drunk I might have killed someone I guess it's pretty bad but you can

like if um if you shake hands with someone for two minutes and then the person that you shook hands with is uh touches a knife then your DNA will be on that knife that's another great plot that's a great plot line and it's the handshake murderer um no no no it is two minutes he's when he's very friendly who can you convince to shake your hand for two minutes I bet Darren Brown could do it that's true I found a DNA related crime this year that was a good this is a good result for the police but it's not a human one it's the police in south wales there's just been this year a trial about a missing cow oh yeah um so this cow went missing very expensive cow cost three thousand pounds it was worth that and um the farmer who had owned it

he suspected one of his neighbouring farmers so they've took blood samples and this by the way this all happened three years ago and it's come to trial now I imagine there was a very lengthy pre-trial procedure but they took blood samples they compared them with samples from the complainants farm from the victims farm and it proved that the cows were related so it's a good result well that's a good news story yeah no one was murdered and the guy got his cow back do you know what 2020 hasn't been that bad at all um have you guys heard of soulmate um you're gonna have to give us more context so I've been looking into lots of different ways that you can you can bust a criminal and obviously

it's from DNA through to looking at prints there's so many different ways and soulmate is a really interesting thing that's been set up which is they also track the footprints of criminals as they're leaving and arriving and often you can see the print of the soul of a shoe but you don't necessarily know immediately what that shoe is a soulmate is a database that has over 31,000 individual footwear records that quickly helps you to identify so on the spot you can put in the shape you can put in a logo you can put in the crime scene print basically and it matches it to an existing type of footwear it's remarkable how they can track down if it's a new shoe they can find out who bought the shoes in the area and so on and the another one for your novel maybe is

like someone takes some converse and cuts the soul off and then puts them on the bottom of some Doc Martins or something oh that's really good different size yeah um some more ideas for your novel Andy while we're still brainstorming so um if you get a bone marrow transplant from someone then your DNA will be the same as the person who gave you the transplant so that's quite a good one that's wow that's amazing and also you know um they kind of one use of DNA is to find species in the wild right you might take a bit of soil and then sequence the DNA and you can tell what animals have been there and stuff like that well the best way of doing that is not by collecting samples but by collecting stuff from spider's webs because whenever an animal hits a spider's web

they leave some DNA in that web and so you can take the webs and you can work out what animals live in a forest for instance so maybe your murderer kind of is running through a forest gets caught in a massive spider's web and they use that as a as a thing I love that okay so how about this while you're shaking hands with someone for two minutes right you're the killer um you use that they're distracted by the handshake and you use that time to inject them with some of your bone marrow right so then they've got your DNA inside them but you've got their DNA on your hand and then you can go and commit the crime it's like face off uh but slightly wow but hang on if you if you're able to transfer the bone marrow as the murderer isn't that all you need to do

try transfer the bone marrow and then drop them off outside a police station and they would be busted as you for all the crimes exactly but Andy's just going for a second level I think I haven't committed the crime yet Dan because I need their DNA on my hand before I hold them yeah I think the third level is what you're forgetting is actually it should be a spider because they've got eight hands they can they can shake hands with eight people at the same time they can get eight lots of DNA while catching people in their webs and stealing their DNA and also no one will suspect them because they're a spider and then imagine how small their fake converse will be oh well guys thank you you've put so much thought into what is going to be

easily the worst novel published okay it's time for fact number two and that is Andy my fact is that to run a Boeing 747 you need a binder full of floppy disks okay yeah is that like the key is that the key to turn it on a floppy it's not the key to turn it on no wouldn't that be nice um but this is a fact that's been revealed recently or I mean I think quite a lot of people who work in 747s will have known it already but uh Boeing 747s and in fact a lot of planes Boeing 747 737s they were products of the late 80s and at that time the most effective way to store information was with the floppy disk and um there was a recently a cybersecurity firm did a walkthrough for of a decommissioned 747 and someone spotted a drive in there and said oh that's a that's a

floppy disk drive that's uh very old-fashioned now this isn't every 747 some of them will have been updated by now but it is still uh quite a few of them wow didn't we have a very similar discovery a few years ago about trident yes yeah yes the nukes were all uh well certainly American nukes were all on floppy disks I think until like only last year or something right the American ones yeah it's amazing it's it's terrible it's kind of terrifying and it's kind of terrifying because I guess you know as long as you have the equipment to read these things does it even matter what there are no exactly I like the idea of the old-fashioned technology because I like I always really liked clippy the Microsoft paper clip and I really like the idea that he might be just like

popping up on things I said hello it looks like you're trying to launch a nuclear missile and so Andy what do they use these I I read I think that they have like the details of where the airports are and the flight paths and things like that yeah exactly and there is a problem though because these disks they they can store I think a standard like three and a half inch floppy disk can store about 1.4 megabytes on it give or take um but the databases that they are loading onto the planes are getting a bit bigger and sometimes you have to load up to eight disks in sequence and get all the information off them and onto the plane wow but there might be a bad disk and you might have loaded seven floppy disks worth of stuff on and then you find one of the

disks is flawed or corrupted in some way then you need to start all over again it'd be a bit disconcerting if you got through seven of the floppy disks and you had to start again if I was a passenger and I heard an announcement saying from the captain apologies this flight is going to be taking off late the floppy disks are not respond does anyone have floppy disk number eight for the London two Barcelona route just on the off track do you know that Tim Berners-Lee used to go door to door with the internet on a floppy disk no yeah in order in order to because the big problem obviously when you were telling people about how the internet would work is that you would need to show them but the reason he invented the worldwide web is because computers weren't

talking to each other if he'd sent them something their computer was running on different systems it wouldn't necessarily translate it so he had on a floppy disk in his computer which he would carry around with him he would go to different places and show them the first website the original CERN website that he'd created and it lived on a floppy disk and there's a project that's going on at the moment where there's a guy who works at CERN he works a couple of offices down from where Berners-Lee worked and he's trying to preserve the earliest bit of the internet where we have the first websites and so on and the very first website is missing which is the one that Tim Berners-Lee created wow that's very cool we don't know where the earliest one is we don't know the various

they're convinced it's out there somewhere they think that there's a disk out there and it was lost at some sort of conference in California one night someone disappeared with this and so it should be out there still there's a hunt going on they've asked the globe that's a job for the work experience kid isn't it can you just go through these five billion discs one of them shouldn't have the first website on it if there aren't any pilots listening can you just have a little look around the cockpit if there is there is a spare disk just check what's on there I would think that the work experience kid wouldn't even know what a floppy disk was did you see this survey in 2018 that asked children under the age of 18 what each of these things are so they

showed them like a floppy disk and a teletext or a postcard or whatever and 67 percent of children didn't know what a floppy disk was yeah I think that's fair I think that's fair I think it would be higher for things like the mini disk which we have extensive mini disk collection at the family home and yeah well you know my parents got really into storing things on on mini disks which didn't take off spoiler sorry it's weird isn't it that basically everything that we use now is just going to become obsolete and it doesn't even matter what kind of things we're saving or whatever it's all in a hundred years time no one will be able to read any of it it's not like a book where you can everyone will always be able to read the book well maybe not always but for a long time

they will be able to it's like they've come up with a new way of storing data on like a little quartz thing and it'll last for 13.8 billion years it lasts forever but of course the problem is that in about 20 years no one will even know how to access it it's going to look like a bit of rock yeah I find that really interesting it'd be really cool though if like the next Rosetta stone is literally a little stone oh wow yeah it could be like the next Rosetta stone they get a usb stick and a mini disk and a floppy disk and they're like how do we get the data out of this one it's a bit like getting the data out of that one and stuff um it's very James just on what you're saying there the bbc in 1986 they made a what they call it digital doomsday book okay so I'm not sure if it

was a copy of the real doomsday book or if it was an example of what civilization was like in 1986 but they made it on an acorn computer and they used a video desk player so for the storage device anyway 13 years later by 1999 it was completely unreadable and a team of researchers had to spend three years developing the software to access something from 1986 so yeah it's a problem it's cool though there is a lot of floppy disk archaeology going on which is quite fun so for example Andy Warhol a lot of art of Andy Warhol's is saved onto floppy disks that we don't have and I think it originates with there was a party that Yoko Ono threw for Sean Lennon when he was young just after John Lennon had died and at the party was Andy Warhol and one of the guests

was Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs brought him the original Apple Mac computer as a present and he was showing Sean Lennon the paint function on it where he was drawing and Andy Warhol spotted that and went over and started doing his own drawings on it and he was fascinated by it and that led to a whole thing of Andy Warhol doing original art purely on his his apple on paint or on another computer sorry wow was it on paint wow that is yeah and they say he saved them to floppy disks we never published them and so people have been finding lost Andy Warhol art on all these floppy disks that are kept in his archives are going through all the floppies god he might have the original internet yeah he might do I've got just one more thing on floppy disks which is about

prints um oh so cool yes the artist prints the musician prints prints we all know who I'm talking about when I say prints um so you may remember in 1993 he changed his name to a symbol which he called the love symbol and it was a combination of the you know the male and female symbols with the arrow and the cross and things um and it had entered his consciousness during meditation and so obviously he wanted to get it out there but the thing is nobody knew how to print it and so his management Warner Brothers they did put it up online as well but they also sent out floppy disks of the symbol to various magazines saying this is what you have to call prints now this is his name and so yeah that's how they distributed the new name of prints that's really cool yeah I think he

did it also because he was very annoyed with his management yes because he had a lot a lot of beef with them he had 500 songs that he wanted to release and Warner Brothers said that might flood the market for print songs just a little bit could you not do that and so he was furious about that and as a result he changed his name to that I got one tiny thing which is referencing back to our first fact which is that um there was an American serial killer who was um they were on the hunt for him and they were reaching out to this guy to communicate with him and the guy asked out in various channels whether or not he could communicate with them not in person but via floppy disk and they said yes to that and they did that by putting it in a newspaper by saying Rex it will be okay as

a message to him but they said he couldn't be tracked wasn't that the thing as in yeah yeah it'll be completely anonymous if you send us a floppy disk exactly he was asking will this be okay will I be will it be anonymous and they said yes anyway they he sent him the floppy disk they were able to trace it back to his church and then um they caught him this is extraordinary and he was furious how did they catch him because they used they found out that he'd used the floppy disk on a particular library computer yeah something like this and they said who's who's a member of the library and it turns out he was I think ahead of a church yeah yeah they like so basically they lied to him he said that there weren't you can't trace computer like geographic information via

floppy disk and they said no you can't but they they can yeah he was really annoyed with them for febbing about that when he murdered multiple people yeah lying is also against the law Andy yeah is it yeah you don't expect the police to be also criminals it's like you can't trust anyone anymore why are they called floppy disks when they're not floppy I'm so glad you asked James they should actually they should be called stiffies in South Africa they're called stiffies aren't they yes are they it's because the very original ones but I think also if you're on an aeroplane and you hear the captain saying does anyone see my stiffy then that's going to be more worried isn't it okay it's time for fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week

is that in the 1920 US election which was the first after women got the votes in America only one woman in the whole of Georgia managed to cast a vote so this is the 19th amendment it was ratified in august 1920 and it granted women the vote but the election took place on the second of november so it's only a few months later and most of the states kind of facilitated the new voters like they came up with ways to make sure that people could register in time but mississippi and georgia especially were so against the idea they were so massively against the idea of women voting that they tried to make it as difficult as possible for women to vote and in georgia they said you had to be you had to have registered six months before the election

in order to cast a vote and obviously six months before the election they hadn't ratified the law yet but luckily there was one lady called mary jarrah white who somehow on april the first signed her name on her poll tax and also registered to vote at that time no one's quite sure how she managed to do it they're time traveling voter it's so strange because it seems like she shouldn't have been allowed to do it but whoever was organising it um allowed her and she was allowed to vote in november and she did but she voted for the losing candidate but she still managed to vote i like i like the idea that they were like um or what harm can she do she's silly idiot we'll let us sign she'll never be able to actually use our vote yeah also april first not the best

data sort of have what looks like a prank a woman finally voting yeah to know if you'd believe it oh do you think that's what she was doing in april fools and her husband she came home like guess what i've got the vote and then at midday she's like ah got you um yeah but georgia um at the time uh 58 percent of the population of georgia were baptists and um the baptist religion certainly then it's still now but certainly then it was very much against women being allowed to do anything they were subservient to the men the men organised the family uh and the women just if they had any influence they were supposed to influence their husbands and then their husbands would influence society um georgia's constitution said that females are not entitled

to the privilege of the elective franchise nor can they hold any civil office or perform any civil functions and there was only one position in office that they were allowed to hold and it was state librarian if librarian was the only job that i was allowed and i was to be subservient what i would do is cut the last page out of every single novel in the library and then i would like fuck you man oh my god imagine getting through all the way through and the second novel and not finding out that it was a spider after all all the reveals are on the last page in this novel as well i'm really packing it right in at the end um i was looking into sort of other examples of women voting early or sort of other earliest women to vote in various places um this was

a really weird thing after the american revolution for three decades in new jersey women and men had exactly the same voting rights and women were allowed to vote not in national elections but in new jersey they could and um and they did vote so the people have been looking through old electoral lists and they found lots of women's names in some places it's not 50 50 but it's up to about 15 percent of voters were women uh there and it was um it was racially equal to as whether you're black or white and then um it was restricted in 1807 to white men it was seen as some kind of oversight that had happened because there were all these charges of uh the people said there were petticoat electors which is women who'd been manipulated you know they they couldn't possibly

know make an informed decision about who they were voting for um so that was one supposed problem with the system and the other problem was apparently men putting on dresses to vote and then voting six or seven times for the same person i'm manipulating the vote that way which i would have thought would make you more conspicuous as a as a voter it's not clear to me yeah how that helps yeah and how come they're not petticoat manipulators if they're dressed as women surely that's also yeah yeah andi again i i'm not saying that i approve of this lockdown that happened on we were voting but i think that's amazing that that was such an early sort of aberration there yeah again not aberration in a bad sense i said aberration a positive aberration

from the norm but actually before 1920 there are a few different states that allowed women to vote so uh wyoming had full women's suffrage from 1869 uh but the reason they did that is because they wanted to attract single women to the state uh really yeah they had a lot of kind of migrant male workers who were working in wyoming and they thought well how can we get more women here well let's let them vote they should have done what nightclubs did in essence on a friday which is make it free hooch free hooch for ladies in groups they don't have a man with them what what is what is hooch sarah oh you're so young what hooch is that no it's not young what it's poshness um so you remember alco pops uh yeah yeah yeah so hooch was kind of one of the original mass marketed oh wow it was it

was a lemon flavored drink uh so like uh uh i guess and it was marketed towards women okay well i i liked hooch as well okay but i mean like when i when i say marketed towards i absolutely don't mean that it was supposed to be in a feminine drink but it was like a if women don't like the taste of beer then you've got this now sweet drink you can drink out of a bottle in a nightclub actually i quite liked watermelon bacardi breezes as well so maybe i was just of course you did you've got a heart and taste buds and the other state which had full women's suffrage um at the time was utah and the reason they did it is because they wanted to show the rest of the country that the women were not oppressed by the

practice of polygamy and they were saying no no but look they can vote they can vote yeah i read about this and they also didn't they hope that women would vote for um the the non-church leaders so they would perhaps this this was a way of ending the practice of polygamy was to allow women to vote and then they would vote against it unfortunately they kept voting for it and then people said all right well let's take the vote away from women in utah after all so backfired but that was the thing wasn't it they they sort of worried that once women were given the vote that it was a sort of useless vote anyway because of the nature of the relationship between husbands being this dominant character in the relationship they would only vote for what the husband told

them to vote for anyway so it was a sort of it was a cancelled out vote in terms of if they'd go the other way which is really interesting because there's been recent polls that show that had it not been for the voting of women in recent elections in america between 1968 and 2004 republicans would have swept every single presidential race in that period uh when they broke it down and looked at it yeah so interesting but also that's why it's so important that voting is secret because then of course even if you did have somebody oppressive in your household you can always say oh yeah i voted for exactly who you told me to but you still have your autonomy and your freedom to cast the vote for you yes you believe if all of your wives are telling you to vote one way you've got to have the

freedom to say yeah yeah of course yeah i love the idea that the women in utah were like why would we get rid of polygamy i don't want a husband all to myself god just spread him out between i only have to see him once every eight days when the 19th amendment was passed the president at the time was woodrow wilson but woodrow wilson had had a stroke in october of 1919 and actually his wife was the de facto president of america around that time so the doctors came in kind of secretly and didn't really want anyone to know that he was really sick and they said he said well obviously woodrow wilson can't really do anything but what we're going to say is maybe edith wilson can kind of run everything on the sidelines and he can kind of just be there and not do any press and stuff like

that so technically or not technically but de facto lee um the president of the united states when the 19th amendment was passed was edith wilson female i knew it was suspicious i knew it was suspicious well on the other hand um she was very much anti suffragettes i think possibly because she had to be uh and because you know obviously they were fighting against the president at the time but um she called the suffragettes the devils of the workhouse so yeah that's reverse psychology that's how you that's that's how you get yourself into a powerful position no no that's the last thing i want got it have you guys heard of um the suffragette cookbooks that were published in the usa no this is very weird so you don't associate um the suffragette movement with

you know the home economics thing and and publishing cookbooks but this is exactly why they were published so the the kind of stock impression or uh that was given by opponents of the suffragette movement was that you know these women were neglecting their families they were letting their children go hungry they weren't looking after the home so the the movement got together and published lots of um cookbooks with kind of suffragette recipes and um they were quite they were quite good one of them was for emergency salad which is one part onion to nine parts apple with any dressing that's the salad so how bad is this emergency you're going to eat an onion yeah and so these books had lots of stuff in one of the one of the women inside there was

Alice Bunker Stockham who was the uh only the fifth female doctor in the usa and she was openly pro masturbation for men and for women alike which was her that was her big thing was this part of the recipe he did say any dressing i i don't know if if if one of my criticisms of the suffragettes was that these women aren't neglecting their domestic duties i don't think the apple onion salad would convince me otherwise no that's a good point i i think that would be my proof of like look at what these lazy bitches are calling it dinner it's an onion and an apple are you kidding me i want lasagna i didn't realize what an influence the british suffragettes had on the american ones um i've

read a few articles about this and it's so for example emeline pankhurst did tours of america talking to huge groups of people about the the fight for women's rights and she played madison square garden which as you know we're all performers here like what a gig madison square garden yeah do you think that was already like i've broken america exactly she didn't fill it she had 3 000 people there but i mean that's that's as big a gig as you know the three of us from fish have ever played that's you compare no such thing as a fish to the suffragette movement to the us can i just say also dan we we played 3300 at the um hammersmith apollos so slightly more actually than pankhurst yeah okay what is the capacity of madison square garden

it's it's over 30 000 i think oh okay so actually she did she did really badly she definitely tanked it maybe she said it's socially distanced yes spanish fluv yeah gotta be careful yeah yeah sorry it's 19 810 just to just to lessen the bombing of the sales for her um no but that is that is that that's the depressing thing when you get the email every sunday with your ticket sales and she's sending out those are tweets like plenty of tickets left bring your friends two for one can't find out about british feminism there'll be a free emergency salad for everyone who buys a ticket okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that

there is a species of japanese water beetle that survives being swallowed by a frog by crawling through the frog's body and escaping out of its anus now wow this is amazing it's the first documented example of prey doing this through a predator escaping via the digestive system it has to literally crawl all the way through the digestive system and make its way out the back and it's um it's a thing that was discovered at kobe university where a frog was put into this enclosure see through box and this water beetle was in there water beetle got swallowed and there was nothing for 115 minutes and then suddenly you see and there's videos online you can watch crawling out of the bum hole of this frog is this full water beetle that's covered a

bit in feces you can't really see that but they tell you it is and it just wanders off and we've never seen this before so it's very exciting i'm a bit a bit worried that you sold that so well that you can go online and watch a video of a beetle crawling out of a frog's anus covered in feces that probably no one's listening now they've probably all gone to watch it oh that's true okay well welcome back to the show you've seen it now amazing isn't it um so yeah so uh this is um this is a guy by the way who experiments a lot on the defense mechanisms the defense mechanisms that he says are sort of impossible defense mechanisms that you could not predict and he's found a number of things that are really interesting a bombardier beetle being swallowed by a frog will eventually be

vomited back up because of an explosion of chemicals inside he's he's responsible for us documenting all that stuff and this is his latest discovery we should say this guy's name he's called Shinji Sugiyura and he's an ecologist at Kev University and he's got loads of form on this as you say Dan it's unbelievable and so he he wanted to test properly because the frog doesn't have teeth when it eats the beetle so that's partly why the beetle survives um but I say it's a really big part of the reason oh yeah yeah they haven't I because I feel like all the animals who can't escape from bum holes or from mouths like it is because they've been chewed up by the the person or the animal eating that it's not because they haven't evolved to be clever enough no no

you're right it's yeah it's a major part of the success strategy make sure you're eaten by someone which has no teeth um but he wanted to test how they do it and so he took some of the beetles that he was going to be testing on and he glued their legs together with sticky wax so basically he turned them into Harry Houdini uh beetles and then he let them be swallowed by the frog and those ones uh were immobilized as it were and those ones did not manage to make their way out so his hypothesis at the moment is that what they're what they're doing with when their legs are free and they're swallowed is that they're using their legs not only to propel themselves through but to hammer on the sphincter of the frog and and convince it to expel them I read it as tickle

the cloacal opening rather than hammering it as well I may have sexed it up a little bit I'm sorry for you know sorry and you've sexed it up hammering over tickling is more sexy well it depends how it depends how you want to kind of anthropomorphize the beetle like is it terrifying it's going get me out of here or is it going oh this is fun I really don't like this hypothesis where he's like I wonder if things are harder if your hand comes oh yes it turns out it's actually more difficult to do things it's interesting though because the tickling at the end almost suggests that that's a bit of information that's passed on to all the beetles that once you get to the end the way to open the magic gate is there's a little tickly thing and you've got to tickle that that

sounds to me more like that you have to have inherent knowledge whereas the hammering done can we use the technical words like anus rather than magic gate we tell you this every week Dan what you just said sounded like what used to happen in like just seventeen and more magazine it's like if you want your guy to speed up there's a magic button up he's gone tickle the magic gate has very different overtones to hammer on the anus yeah it's a terrible children's book but yeah the hammering sounds more like the right hypothesis I would say it's sort of just a I'm at the end I'm trying to keep going it's like when you know when you're running out of seconds at the crystal maze get me out you know it's that kind of moment but also presumably if

you've been struggling all of the way down through the frog's body anyway like you would still be moving there it's just that because because human beings have two sphincters don't we we have kind of one that we have no conscious control over and one that we do have conscious control over and and so obviously if there's movement in a part of your body where it's kind of automatic you would just then feel the need to go to the toilet yeah it's how you can have emergencies because the non the part of the your sphincter you don't have conscious control over will be like right I'm ready to go and then the conscious part goes oh my god this is an emergency situation what's why did we why did we evolve to have a dumb sphincter and a smart sphincter I think maybe

it's a safety thing as in it might there might be scenarios where it's more dangerous to draw attention to yourself yeah if you're trying to stay very quiet and avoid a predator uh and then yeah which doesn't make sense because actually it's a fantastic weapon to have to hand yeah if you are in danger what just randomly pooing with no no because then you could just you could just throw it at the lion or whatever or the the or the bad monkey so just very quickly on the rest of this study so the really interesting thing is we we do know of other animals that pass through the digestive system of another animal right there are a few of those but what is really interesting about this is the fact that we we think that they're

actually actively crawling through there and the reason that we know that is because like you say they he salitates his legs together or whatever glued the legs together but also that the bugs can get out with as little time as like six minutes whereas normally it would take a couple of days for a frog to digest its food but they can get out there in six minutes six minutes is the real that is the real crystal maze thing isn't it yeah imagine eating a meal completely unaware and then feeling terrible and realizing that your meal is still alive and it's yeah it's got a destination in mind there is a beetle called the coffee berry borer that lives exclusively on coffee beans but it can't eat caffeine so it only eats coffee but it doesn't like caffeine and the only way

they can do it is they have a special bacteria inside them that kind of deals with the caffeine and if you take all the bacteria out of it out of this beetle by giving it antibiotics or whatever it'll die because it can't can't deal with the coffee so it only likes the science is so awful and if you and if you glue all their hands together no they can't even pick up any more coffee beans what's an interesting science experiment yeah you're right i mean how are you going to learn things but at the same time for the individual coffee berry borer why can't we just all appreciate life's mysteries have you guys heard of the epomis beetle in fact i i i don't think we've mentioned this before again frogs prey on it the frog bites it but at the moment where the frog

bites it this beetle lover sinks its teeth into the frog's tongue right and then it starts releasing enzymes which melt the frog's flesh and this this goes on for a few days unfortunately for the frog and the frog is just stuck there with what it thought was its lunch and it's slowly being eaten by its lunch it's basically um it gets turned into a straw through which the beetle lover is drinking and eventually the frog is just a part of skin and bones it's dead and the the lover wanders off so the scientists who were testing this they observed 400 standoffs between these two the beetle always wins oh my god there was one case there was one case where a toad managed to grab the beetle and quickly swallow it and then it started looking a bit peeky two

hours later it threw up and then the beetle ate the toad oh my god and andy can you let me know is there anywhere i can watch this on youtube uh yeah yeah yeah it's funny pranks for toads there's there's another beetle the male diving beetle it has sperm which uh team up with each other so this is very rare obviously normally normally sperm is a kind of um what are those games it's sort of one versus everybody you know zero some game i'm yeah like british bulldog british bulldog it's like british bulldog sorry sarah came up with a proper academic answer what i was trying to say was it's like british bulldog um so but this is the really weird thing the male diving beetle their sperm uh effectively do a conga and they team up hundreds of them and and even

thousands of them and they all go in a line or they sometimes go in a crocodile they'll go in pairs and it's because the female diving beetle's reproductive tract is unbelievably complicated and um the female will often store sperm for for months or years to fertilize herself later and um the males kind of form a train trying to just get through to the area they need to be to fertilize the egg um because otherwise they will just be lost what's in it for the other sperms the sperms at the back of the conga i don't know i guess it will it will probably improve all of their chances of getting there even if they're not the person at the front i suppose and you all have this very similar genetic material don't you so you're still passing it on that's

a good point but what as as you say what is the point of being at the back of a conga what's the point of being in a conga well sometimes it splits off and you become the front that's very stressful i wonder if that happens with these sperms not at the back though you can't let go at the back that's just a person walking if you're still kicking your legs out to the side then it's still a conga even if it's just you i've never had that happen to me doing a conga but i would be terrified that it would i would cling on for dear life to avoid the responsibility of becoming the king but sometimes the conga sometimes like flips around in a way you're not expecting and no one has a good enough grip to hold on to the person oh my god or it goes it

goes into a place you don't want to go like it's they start going they think it'd be funny to go into the toilet so it's like it's a wedding i don't want to go and look at people at the urinals and i think if they have like very complicated labyrinthine vaginas that probably that is exactly what we're saying about there will be conga and splits off and things going around and also getting becoming very tired the energy exerted means that some of them will get tired at the front and i think it will be a collective yeah it'll still give you a good chance because that also happens in a conga sometimes you get like a wave of speed don't you like some of the people at the front go a bit too fast and then some of the slower people can't hold

on and then they become the front of the conga that's very cool i feel like biology is actually so easy to choose a conga analogy okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and sarah at sarah pascoe yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there as well as links to bits of merchandise or you could also go to an independent bookshop website and get the new paperback sex power money by sarah pascoe sunday

times bestseller uh that's out now do do that we will be back again next week guys we'll hope you're all doing well we will see you again with another episode goodbye