No Such Thing As A Fish - 342: No Such Thing As A Presidential Fight Club

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the most badass members of the Roosevelt family, the legend of Barry Towncouncil, and what on Earth a not-a-bird is.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone! Welcome to this week's episode of Fish. I just want to let you know that the episode you're about to listen to was recorded live at the London Podcast Festival at King's Place and that it was recorded just a few weeks ago. That's right, we actually managed to do a live gig in the year 2020. It was such a fun night. It was actually the first time that the four of us had been in a room together since this whole pandemic kicked off. It's about seven months. So that was incredibly fun. It was amazing to see some of the Fish listeners sitting out there in the audience all sitting there with their masks on, spread out around the auditorium so that we could make sure everyone was nicely socially distanced from each other. And so big thank you

to them. Big thank you to everyone who joined us online to watch it as it streamed. It was our first ever global gig as a result. And most importantly a big thank you to the staff at King's Place who made sure everyone felt safe going ahead with this gig. So yeah, we hope you enjoy it. It's our first gig of the year, possibly our last, hopefully not. But here it is live in London in the year 2020. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the London Podcast Festival. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Tachinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order,

here we go. Starting with my fact this week, my fact is that Theodore Roosevelt once was shot in the chest but survived thanks to a 50 page long speech tucked into his coat pocket. He delivered the speech reading from pages that now had two massive bullet holes in them. And he did a speech which lasted about 90 minutes. And that's where the idea of bullet points came from isn't it? Come on. It's been seven months. Yeah, this happened in 1912. He was in Milwaukee. He was on his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium and he was in an open top car and as he was standing up to wave, a gunman who was called John Shrank shot him in the chest basically at point blank range and the bullet still went into his body and was lodged inside his body. But rather than go to

the hospital, he said, I'll just quickly do my 90 minute speech and you can actually see if you go online, they have in a museum the pages of this speech. And when I say massive bullet holes, they are ginormous, these two ginormous bullet holes. But yeah, he was a badass like that. He was a badass. Like to make sure that it hadn't penetrated his lungs, he coughed into his hand three times and checked for blood to make sure that he didn't have to go to hospital. That's pretty hard car, isn't it? All of his aides were sort of standing around because they were quite nervous about this. They thought he should go to hospital. Lots of the crowd. He announced right at the start. He said, friends, I should ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether

you fully understand that I have just been shot. And so people were standing around and sort of ready to catch him at the side of the stage basically and he kept glaring at them and he refused to even cut it short. Did he not have to miss out the odd word that word the bullet holes have gone through? It actually didn't make any sense at all. It kind of came out as like a redacted speech that he wasn't giving us all the info on. Did you guys see this? This allegedly happened when he announced, by the way, I've just been shot right at the top before he got into the actual stuff that was on his pages. Apparently, when he said that, someone in the crowd shouted fake. Well, I think Donald Trump was alive back then. Supposedly he stepped forward and said, no, no,

it's real. Here's my bleach shirt. The guy had to come up and put his finger in the hole. They left the bullet in, didn't they? Forever and ever, I think, because it was too dangerous to extract it. So just kept it in forever. But he sent a telegram to his wife, I think, straight after giving the speech. He dictated a telegram to her when he was on his way to hospital saying he was in excellent shape and he just had a little injury, no more serious than one of the trivial injuries their kids were always getting. Their children were neglected is what I've read into that. It is one of those things that makes you understand why there are generations who say, you know, they don't make the might they used to. You can't imagine the, you know, us snowflakes

standing there and delivering a 90 minute podcast with bullet holes through our chests. I wouldn't do it. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, it's very weird. I mean, what was interesting about him was he was very much into physical exertion. He was in pushing his body all the time to sort of be the strongest he can be those accounts of him where he would hang a wire over a river and it would be a fast flowing, very dangerous river with currents and he would just hang on the rope just to bring his body strength better. But like the risk of if he'd fallen into the water would be possible drowning. And he was just like always on the edge. Well, do you know that's because he was brought up that way. His parents were something called muscular Christians. What? That sounds so cool. It sounds

half cool, doesn't it? They worship at the church of our blessed lady of the six pack, don't they? What is a muscular Christian? It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. So the idea was to be a good Christian. You had to kind of look after your body and be really muscular. It was quite, I wouldn't say misogynistic, but it was of its time. Like it was basically men should be strong and they should look after the women kind of thing. And it was quite popular in America at the time. And according to Wikipedia, I read this verbatim, it said muscular Christianity spread to other countries in the 19th century. It was well entrenched in Australian society by 1860, though not always with much recognition of the religious elements.

That explains quite a lot, doesn't it? But he was quite a wimp initially, wasn't he, Teddy? In his childhood he was, well a wimp is harsh, he had asthma. That tells you a lot about Anna in the school yard, doesn't it? I had a very specific role in the playground. No, he had a really difficult childhood. He had really bad asthma and he was, he described himself as quite sickly and quite weak. And he got beaten up as a teenager and found he couldn't defend himself. And so he demanded boxing lessons from his dad and got them. And he devoted himself completely to becoming someone who was able to beat the bullies in future. And yeah, it was hardcore. There's lots of sources that say he was the first American to get a brown belt in judo, which like a lot of his biographies

claim he was certainly very good at judo. What's brown definitely is below black, right? It's below black, yeah. That's not like the greatest boast. It's the one below black, okay, just because brown's a bit of a yucky color. No, it's just, but then black just has like these extra like first and second debt, like black goes on. It's fine, we'll talk later. You come back to me when you've got a black belt in judo. I have one in taekwondo. I'll have you know. Second Dan. Yeah, you do. There were two Dan's in the class. He, I think as well, I think he had mega anger issues as well, because he wouldn't let something go. There was a story that happened in 1886. We still second Danning as I was going on.

I'm just laughing at my own joke. So good to see you again. Yeah, so 1886 Roosevelt, his boat was stolen by these two thieves and they took the boat and they started riding it away. And rather than letting it go, he was like, no, I'm going to chase them and I'm going to get it back. And he knew that they had such a head start that would take days. And so he was like, screw it, I'm doing it anyway. So he decided to do it. And this is how preparity was. He took food that he wanted to take in pursuit. He also took a copy of Anna Karenina because he thought protect him from the next bullet. Yeah, no, I think it was downtime that he was like, just going to bring a book that's

Tolstoy, isn't it? Yeah. So he was effectively a cowboy for some of his pre presidency life. And he, I think this may have been the same incident, but he he was chasing outlaws. I don't know if he was kind of a deputy sheriff or a deputy marshal, something like that. He was chasing three outlaws at one point. He caught them. He then had to watch them for 40 hours when he was sort of bringing them in. And he kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy. Yeah, that was it. He was reading and he was holding his shotgun over the kind of bad guys. No, he was reading no way. And he finished Anna Karenina halfway through the 40 hours. And he was like, well, what am I going to do now? And one of the outlaws had a book and he said,

give me your book. And he started reading his book. Oh, what's so funny? Did he read it to them? I don't think so. Was it like Theodore Roosevelt's lethal audio book time? Or was it? Yeah. Because Anna Karenina loses her head at the end. Maybe he was like, this is what's going to happen to you. Wow. And spoiler. I cannot. If you haven't read Anna Karenina. She loses her head either metaphorically or literally, we won't specify which, but it involves a train. There is no one. There is no one listening to our podcast that has not read Anna Karenina. I actually can't believe you just did that. I think we've just lost all the online listeners and some people at the back have walked out. And also, I don't think she's not leaning over to vomit on the railway.

The train doesn't knock her head off as far as I remember. It's just a full on death by trait, if we are really revealing the ending. I think we've committed now. So yeah, go for it. I think it's amazing. It's a thing that's sort of not attached to 19th century outlaw folktales that there's always a sort of break to read a book during a chase. Always carry a book. Everyone's got a book on them. How cool is that? The Outlaw Code. Yeah, I just wonder what the Outlaws book was, because it can't have been more Tolstoy. What are the odds of them having probably something really like how to steal a boat? He had cowboy practice, actually, when he was a kid. His parents used to stick him on a horse or

in a carriage just behind a horse and make the horse gallop at breakneck speed as fast as it possibly could with his mouth open, not the horse, Teddy with his mouth open, because they thought that would cure his asthma. No. It doesn't feel like that would work. Look, have you tried it? I'm not a doctor. Thomas Jefferson tried to and I think thought he successfully cured his diarrhea by horseback riding. That feels like that would cure your constipation rather than your diarrhea. Yeah, you would think right. Yeah, but maybe it floods it out. But you put asthma sufferers on the carriage behind him and that's two birds one stone. I just love all these old horse prescriptions. Get on a horse and yeah, Theodor Roosevelt kind of

invented piranhas. So interesting. He, and I stamp, I stamp by this, so. Wait, I know what's happened. Andy, you've got my notes. Sorry. No, he did. He genuinely did. So he wrote a book, I think was in about 1913. So he'd already been president by this point and he'd been shot and everything, but he was he did lots of expeditions and big game hunting and all of this. He wrote this book through the Brazilian wilderness and in it he has this long bit describing these ferocious piranhas that you get in the Amazon and how they can strip a cow's flesh from its bones in a few minutes. And he said that they will snap a finger off a hand in cautiously trailed in the water. I never witnessed an exhibition of such impotent savage fury. So that's all is basically all thanks to him.

But the reason, I mean piranhas don't do that unless they're really, you know, unless it's really dry and they're really crammed in together and they're really, really hungry. Some of them are vegetarian, for example, but. The ethical piranhas, there are more and more of them. But they reckon that maybe this is just a theory that when he was visiting the area where he saw this kind of exhibition display of piranha activity, it's because his hosts had blocked off a bit of the river, chucked a load of piranhas in there, let it dry out, not fed them at all. And so by the time the Roosevelt arrived, they were really, really, really ready to eat and

that's what made it like that. And are you saying he invented the piranha because he sort of invented our idea of the piranha as a very vicious animal? Yeah, I see. It's half fair. Yeah. He was a tough boss. Given that he was a tough man, he kind of expected the same from his cabinet, for instance. He had this thing called the tennis cabinet, which was initially started as a way of him exercising with all his kind of younger employees. And so his younger ministers would go out and play tennis with him. And he thought tennis actually was really dull because you didn't really get to fight each other hand to hand. And so what the tennis cabinet became was every day they had to get together and they picked a target on a map. And without checking any of

the terrain, whether it was full of rivers or mountains or piranhas, they had to just walk to that target without stopping and without diverting from a straight course. And so they ended up doing things like at one point they were all made to swim through a half frozen river. And yeah. When he was president. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's his cabinet. Well, then he used to have these big boxing fights in the White House, didn't he, where he invited professional boxers to come and really fight him. Yeah. You were asked to come and beat up the president. Imagine if the current president offered that outside the White House. Imagine the Q. We're going to have to move on very shortly. Well, we have to talk about the most hardcore

member of the Roosevelt family, which is his daughter Alice. She was amazing. Yeah. She basically was such a handful. At one stage, Roosevelt said, she kind of interrupted when he was doing something. He said, I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both. Wow. And she was totally hardcore. I mean, to be fair, it sounds like he was basically running a fight club instead of being president. She was wild because he, she had a bit of a traumatizing upbringing because so his wife and mother died on the same day. And he was very upset about that understandably. And he refused to ever speak his wife's name again. But awkwardly, his wife's name was Alice as was his daughter's. And so he never, he refused to ever say his daughter's name.

She was a bit messed up about that. And then they sort of made friends again a bit, but she used to do crazy stuff. Like she smoked publicly on the roof of the White House. She played poker. She partied all night. She kept, so she had carried bag around with her all the time in which she just kept a dagger, her pet snake, who was called Emily Spinach, and a copy of the Constitution. Sorry. The snake was called what? Emily Spinach. Emily Spinach. Great. Have a copy of the Constitution. The Constitution, the US Constitution. Was that a tip from her dad in case you go out and assassination? Yeah, fold it up. Yeah. The reason that she smoked on top of the White House roof was because he said

he forbade her from smoking cigarettes under my roof. And so she's like, fuck it, I'll go on the roof then. That's so wonderful. And then once Roosevelt left and the next guy came in who was Taft and then Woodrow Wilson afterwards, she was banned from the White House, wasn't she? Oh yeah, was that when she buried a voodoo doll of someone under the, in the grounds? She buried a voodoo doll of Taft's wife under the grounds before she left. And then she made some kind of ribald joke about Woodrow Wilson that no matter how much you Google, you could never find this joke. Believe me, that's how I spent the last five days to find this joke. But yeah, everyone hated her who came after her and they wouldn't let her in the White House at all.

Wow. The woman who made a joke that's too rude for the internet. We need to move on to our next fact. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that some squirrels can put themselves in a deep freeze for the winter, then thaw themselves out to have a pee and then freeze themselves again. Yeah, they're very cool. They have a piss break during hibernation. Well, it seems to be, yeah. So this is the Arctic ground squirrel and they are the most extreme hibernators on the planet. They live so far north. They hibernate for about 270 days of the year. Wow. Yeah. Imagine not leaving your house for 270 days. They don't even have Netflix, James. They don't have anything.

So yeah, they slow down so much that their hearts beat twice a minute when they're in this sort of deep, deep chill state. They can stop breathing for several minutes at a time when they're in this state and most of their body gets down to almost minus three degrees Celsius. It's incredibly cold. We don't know how they do it, but they don't freeze as in ice crystals don't form throughout them. They have some way of stopping little ice crystals forming and because that would kill them, obviously, but they aren't that cold and they just look like little stones on the ground, basically. Yeah. So if you've got a bottle of water and you can kind of make it go really, really, really cold, but then there's nothing for the ice to form around, then it won't freeze.

And that's the same with these squirrels. But what that means is if you pick up one of these squirrels that's hibernating and shake it, it will die. So don't do that. Would it freeze at the same time? You would shake it and then it would like smash it twice, wouldn't it? Yeah, it'd be like a frozen squirrel. Is that because shaking it, you get a bit of debris in and as soon as you get a tiny particle into their body, presumably it gets into their blood and it freezes it? Exactly. Even just like by shaking it, a little bit of carbon dioxide inside the blood might just come free and then that would, everything would nuclear around that. But they do have these periodic wake-ups, don't they? Yes. Where they sort of wee and actually don't do much else,

really. In fact, I think, like, largely they don't even urinate. They just wake up in order to go to sleep. Which is amazing, right? Yeah. I always thought hibernation was sleep, but no, it sounds snackering. Yeah, it's absolutely exhausting. So they've got this store of fat between their shoulders, which apparently acts as sort of thermostat. It's the only bit of them that's staying functional when they hibernate. And when they get a bit too cold, they shiver themselves awake. And if you watch a video of them, it is very sweet. They're a little ball that starts shivering until the little ball of fat pumps blood around. And it's just so that they can wake up out of hibernation in order to have eight hours good sleep and go into their REM cycles, have some

dreams and then otherwise they get sleep deprived in hibernation. I don't know if you guys read this because you said they had dreams. I read one article and it was from Brian Barnes, who is like the main guy on this subject. And he said that they take a lot of magic mushrooms just before hibernation. And nobody knows why they do it. Well, they're trying to get as much fat as possible. So they're trying to eat as much as possible. But it just so happens that the thing that they eat are these mushrooms, which are hallucinogenic. And we don't know whether it gives them crazy dreams for the 270 days or whether the liver might be able to detoxify it or something. So we don't really know. But it could be that for that whole 270 days, they're just thinking of dogs with nine legs.

That's so cool. They're quite chemically altered in lots of ways because I don't know that. But the other thing they do to survive is that they produce steroids in their body, massive, massive levels of steroids during the summer months when they're building up. And they build their muscles by a third in size. They increase by a third in just a few weeks. And now normally, that would lead to what we call roid rage, you know, extra aggressive behavior, real fury, tiny testicles, tiny testicles, and a deep urge to spread Christianity, of course. But they don't, for some reason, they don't go into a rage. So they can survive the the testosterone coursing around them. And the males have to stop when they do hibernate. And then this is a bit

weird, but their testicles shrink a lot. So we see that. But then when they wake up, their testicles swell hugely, and they get a massive extra rush of testosterone when they wake up the next time round. And they basically go through puberty again. They basically do this every year. That's rough. Yeah. That is rough. And the males live way shorter than females do. They live about six years. And when they wake up, they do actually go into a sort of fighting frenzy with other males. And then they have puberty. And then they hope to mate. And then I think the reason they live shorter is because they have to go through puberty six times in their life. And it's too embarrassing. The voice drop it where it's a bit wobbly. Yeah. The acne again.

They are awake for longer than the females, though, aren't they? They go to sleep a bit later than the ladies. They sort of store food and a little cash. Whereas the ladies just fall asleep. And they wake up earlier in order to kind of get start getting ready for mating. And essentially, the females wake up about three weeks after the males. And the entire waking life is waking up immediately being mated with within 12 hours of waking up by a male, being pregnant, gestating for 25 days, caring for the young for 10 weeks, going back to sleep. That's their lives. They probably need a lot of sleep after all that, though, don't they? They have very weird burrow systems or very, very clever burrow systems, actually. So they have three different kinds of

house. They don't just have one basic burrow. The way they know that is because when you're researching Arctic ground squirrels, when researchers are researching them, they have to make really detailed maps of where all the burrow entrances and exits are. So that if you take one away to study them, when you put them back, you put them at the right door, like you don't put them in someone else's house. So they don't notice when they wake up. They have no idea someone's been in rearrange the house, basically. I guess so. Yeah, they don't wake up and go, where am I? That's not my picture. But they have. You could put them the other way around when they're hibernating just to freak them out. So they think, oh, lovely, I'll go to sleep facing my

favorite nut or whatever. But they wake up facing their second favorite nut. That's like my wife. She goes facing her first favorite. She wakes up with the second. I mean, it did sound like you were going to say facing her first favorite. Poor woman. I was just a steer away for a second. But on hibernation, I was reading a blog about hibernating hedgehogs. And there was this wonderful thing where a person says, a way that you can tell that a hedgehog is hibernating is because they look like they're dead, basically. If you go up to them, they're in the ball. All you need to do is go right up to one, put your ear next to one, and you know it's hibernating because you can hear it snoring. It's not sweet. A little

of a hedgehog. And they snore when they hibernate. Not all of them sometimes and possibly not even then. But it's just from a blog. But that's really sweet. I have a fact about squirrels, other squirrels, Californian ground squirrels, slightly different kind of ground squirrel. So in 1918, California basically decided to wage war on the squirrels. And they had something called Squirrel Week, where posters were put up all over the state, encouraging the children of California to kill as many squirrels as they could. And there were posters just aimed at children saying things like, slay the mother squirrel during breeding season, March to May. Because they were quite invasive and they ate a lot of crops and they carried bubonic plague, which is a

bad thing. So there were reasons for it. But it was pretty dark. So there was a pamphlet which advised how you could hook up your exhaust pipe to a squirrel burrow and wipe out a whole batch of them. And they were depicted with little German soldier helmets because the First World War was still going on. It was saying, we may be fighting Germany, but we're also fighting the squirrels. In Squirrel Week, the children of California killed 104,000 squirrels just in that week. And there were prizes for the schools that did best. Yeah, wasn't there one girl who had like a kill list of over 3,000 alone? Yeah, she was like the head of the top of the pack. She went on to single-handedly defeat the Nazis. The Cape Ground Squirrel is an interesting ground squirrel.

And that's because they can self-filate. And not only can they do, they do so. You would. It's not like you and me just telling people we can do. They prove it. Prove it. For God's sake, don't prove it. Not before you showed me your favorite nuts. Right. Can I get on about this self-masturbating squirrel? You know self-masturbating is the only kind of masturbating, James. Well... Go on. If I do the fact, some of it might get in the podcast. Because if I masturbate a pig for the... I don't think you're masturbating. I think you're just...

You're giving it a handy. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Because there's a breeding program for pigs. I'm not just... Sorry, just to dress the seam. I think I would be masturbating that pig. I think technically that's probably not true. Really? I think... Well, I've got to go and refill in all the forms now. You've got to rename the blog. So, squirrels, they do it supposedly as a form of self-medication. Okay. And the idea is that if they clean their genitals, it might stop them from getting an STI. Okay. And the best way for them to do that is to masturbate. Right. However, they live in the desert and they can't afford to lose any water. No. And so they need to get the water back into their body. And so they clean their genitals

and they take in their fluids. Okay. It's base two and base three is what you're saying. Base five. Golly. Well, gosh. Wow. Whatever works. That's because you have this podcast, you always learn something you didn't know before. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, let's... Yeah. We've actually got to move on, guys. We don't actually need to, but I really think we should. I have one more thing about... This was about going to the loo in the middle of the night. Oh, yeah. So Victorian tourists, I mean, 19th century tourists, what you would do if you were a tourist in France because lots of, you know, accommodation would not have much in the way of sanitation. Women would purchase an object which was sold called the inodorous standard pale. Okay. And

pale is in bucket. And it had a mahogany rim and a hermetically closing cover. And it was basically a... What are we calling it? Kind of chamber pod. But the brilliant thing was it was disguised as a hat box so that you could carry it around without embarrassment. But you definitely don't want to put your hats in it. If someone asks, can I borrow your hat box? I've got a hat spare hat I need to carry. What is the excuse, the recommended excuse you're supposed to... I don't know. But it is a good excuse if you accidentally piss in someone's hat box. We need to move on to our next fact. Okay. It is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that in 1385, a four-year court case began after two nights embarrassingly turned up to a battle

wearing the same coat of arms. How embarrassing. Yeah. Were they completely mortified? Did someone go home? Did they both fight the battle? They both fought the battle. It was a bit later that the court case happened. So this was during the Hundred Years' War with France in 1385 and Scotland had signed a pact with France and some French soldiers had arrived north of the border. And so Richard II just come of age trying to kind of show that he meant business. He decided he was going to invade Scotland. And so they all went over this big army to invade Scotland and when they did there was a guy called Richard Scroop, spelled Scroop but pronounced Scroop. He was the first baron of Bolton and so Robert Grovesner of Cheshire and they both turned up and they realised

that they had the exact same coat of arms which was an azure with a bend or that's a blue background with a gold sash and everyone felt very awkward. The court case sounds amazing. The court case really was, it was the who's who of the 14th century. Yeah, really. Well it was a bit of, I think it was a bit of a fix, this court case. So it was, who do you say it was Scroop of Bolton against Grovesner of Cheshire? Yes. But it was it was held I think in York Minster and in York Minster the Scroop coat of arms was all over the place so it's kind of subtle branding for the Scroop side. Yeah I should say it's not the good Bolton in Lancashire, it's the shit Bolton in Yorkshire. Ah. Okay. Got it. That's why in York Minster they had his coat of arms. Got it,

got it, got it. That makes more sense actually I was wondering about that. Yeah but then it turned out later on after this court case was over there was a third family also using the same coat of arms. Right. But they were in Cornwall and everyone said oh well it's Cornwall you know it's a they said basically they said well it's a different country so the rules are different there as at the time it was. Well also the guy in Cornwall who claimed that his crest was the same was a guy called Carmenow and he claimed that his crest had been given by King Arthur which was quite impressive considering he didn't exist. We didn't definitively not exist. What? Yeah King Arthur didn't definitively not exist there are later reports of a character called

Arthur anyway we don't but he's not an absolute he's not like Peter Pan. Well it's a good job you weren't in charge of this court case either. Wow so there's maybe a King Arthur that's quite he didn't do any of the stuff. Well that sucks yeah that's just a guy called Arthur then. It's kind of like Robin Hood there's someone with the name but none of the rest of it's true so it's not even worth it. Who was who of the 14th century? I want to know what a court case of the who's who of the 14th century was. They named a single person for the 14th century they were that what was that? Jeffrey Charter? Yes exactly what was that? John of Gaunt? Owen Glendauer? Yes him as well. That really is a who's who. Anyone I've heard of in the 14th century was in this

court case. Was this the most exciting court case of the era? It doesn't sound like a big deal. It really wasn't it was quite dull and it was just basically everyone came in and so let's say John of Gaunt turned up. John of Gaunt would go in and he would say I once saw this guy with this coat of arms on this date and I saw this guy with a coat of arms on this date and I saw this on this date and then they got all of the evidence together and they worked out who had the best claim on it. Yeah precedence wasn't it? Yeah who would seem it at first. So but this was in the court of chivalry and the court of chivalry is an exciting thing because this is a real court that exists and it hasn't sat since 1954 okay. It really is dead isn't it? Well it might it might be coming

back. Wait a minute but what were the knights of armour in 1954? Oh the in the 1954 case was a dispute between Manchester Corporation and Manchester Palace of Varieties over unlicensed use of the Manchester coat of arms. That is dull but before that so okay there is a chance that the court of chivalry is going to have to sit sometime soon because of weather spoons okay. This is so exciting. So last year last year Barry Town Council in Wales. I thought that was his name. What a botch that's so nice. No he he invented the town council. It's very impressive yeah what a guy. Sorry yeah Barry Town Council in Wales. They were furious with weather spoons because weather spoons in Barry had put the coat of arms of Barry the Barry coat of arms on a carpet in their pub

and Barry Town Council said hang on a second you've got people walking on the Barry coat of arms maybe they're going to the bar maybe they're going to the toilet we don't know where they're going you know maybe they've got a dog with them I mean they said it was very disrespectful. Tim Martin the boss of weather spoons refused to remove the carpet he said it's a perfectly good carpet we paid a lot of money for it just let it wear out and we'll replace it in 10 years or so whatever so they may yet go to the court of chivalry if if anyone can be bothered to yeah they'll have to resurrect the entire court and do you think it will be a who's who of the 21st century with sort of George Clooney Brackabar everyone have you ever met Barry Town Council

I've met Barry Town Council yeah I love the the rules of chivalry the whole chivalry thing I didn't quite know what goes into becoming a knight when you were made and you were kind of trained in order to become one but it was more than battle it was it was all these things like you had to learn how to box wrestle run you had to read write you had to play the harp and sing that was part of becoming a knight yeah which is really sweet you also you had to be a very good wooer that was part of the code of chivalry was you had to devotedly woo one woman and it didn't the women could be married that was fine I lance a lot I think was constantly wooing a married woman again possibly didn't exist or not yeah yeah he was a figure of chivalric mythology but you know he was

like a being to emulate he was wearing guinevere wasn't he yeah I thought he went for he went for top trumps yeah yeah you can't all hope for guinevere but guinevere also also I think a figure of chivalric myth so not real so all of these people are setting the standard that you're supposed to imitate and the reason it all came in the chivalric codes was because knights were so badly behaved they were just like around rampant around the countryside so there were lots of books written about how to correct knights behavior and so there were all these courtesy books written in the sort of 12th century and 13th century there was one called the book of the civilized man directed at knights and it just had sort of a bullet pointed list of rules so don't spit don't talk with your

mouth full don't take huge helpings don't play your nose on the tablecloth all things today that we would agree with don't wind off a pig don't auto fillate a mixed company maybe thirsty but the bars over there there was a don't defecate well sorry there was you were allowed to defecate you weren't allowed to attack your enemy while he was defecating on chivalrous yeah unless unless he's riding a horse to cure his diarrhea in which case he's on a horse he's very gay yeah wow have you heard of the the Scottish court and what they do to badly behaving knights no they will destroy your arms i presume your coat of arms um they will be very mean they will break your stained glass windows which have

got your coat of arms in them they will smash any unwarranted seals again seals like seals but then they will issue a letter of horning okay of what so horning like horn the horn yeah sorry like like i've just given this pig the horn for my dog so but they do a letter which denounces you as an outlaw and then they have three blasts of a horn and that means you have technically been put to the horn pretty exciting stuff yeah and wait what does that mean to have been put aside from the fact you do three bars of a horn but what's i don't actually know what the ramifications you're not not a knight anymore right you're in there yeah you're not a knight you've been put to the horn do you know why they're called coats of arms it's because you used to have a coat that you wore

over your arms your armor and that's where the word comes from really isn't that amazing yeah but everyone was hoping that it was a coat made of arms so yeah that's the dream but you used to have your armor and you would always wear a cloak over and the reason being that if you're fighting somewhere hot then wearing armor is pretty bad like you're basically going to cook in there and so if you wore a cloak then it could stop you from getting from the sun's rays from cooking you and so you would always have to wear this cloak and on the back of the cloak it would have your arms your coat of arms and so that's where the word came from wow superman basically like the original yeah saying who you are your logo on your back that's so cool and the idea was you

wanted people to know who you are because if you're an important person in a battle you don't want to be killed you want to be captured well you don't want to be captured you want to win but if you're your second best if you don't win is to not die the team talking like this a halfway mark right we've given up on a on a win but we are going for being captured all of us so yeah so you wanted to be captured and so you would have this kind of coat of armor so that people would see you on battle and not kill you they think oh well he's worth something i'm gonna take him instead of killing him and then i'll be able to get some money quite catching someone else's shiny pog is it yeah yeah that was a very specific sort of 1994 kids there um

jeff bezos has a coat of arms see yeah it's got two tortoises and a rocket a rocket is it i'm just imagining a cock on bull's formation you know what i haven't seen it i presume it is it's kind of good to see him it's jeff bezos absolutely you can just you can just get them made though because there's the college of arms in the uk except scotland do you know what the blue mantle pursuivant at the college of arms gets paid each year i didn't know what most of those words no there's a lot of kind of cod latin and conference and stuff no blue mantle pursuivant or pursuivant is a is a junior position at the college of arms guess what he gets paid um a tenor a year or seven shillings and six pence

half a crown three sticks and a dead porcupine lovely uh pogs pogs and it was closest it's 1395 really for the ceremony where he was invested in his role he had to buy a pair of silk tights which cost double his annual salary and is that taxpayer funded for god's sake do you know what the you know all those weird words you just said all all that language you know what it's called no it's called blazin so in heraldry the weird language of heraldry which is lots of stuff that we don't understand it's called blazin and all the vocab and it's also related to the the habits of heraldry so or the traditions so for instance there's a difference between english and scottish heraldry in blazin and that is how you erase a bear's head

and so this is you know if you see a coat of arms then you'll sometimes have an animal like a lion or a bear on it and if you've got an erased head what that means is a head that's been decapitated from a body or it looks like it's been torn off from a body so it's got sort of ragged edges in the neck uh you will have seen it a lot but the way you tell the difference between an english coat of arms and a scottish coat of arms is uh a bear's head in english heraldry is erased horizontally under the neck and so it goes across and you get some neck in whereas in scotland it's erased vertically and you cut the neck off so if you imagine a vertical line going down so if a bear's got a neck english no neck scottish we've been doing this podcast for six and a half

years now and i think that is the least useful piece of information ever said adi if you are galloping into battle against the scots which may well happen in the near future you're gonna need to know um we need to move on to our final fact of the show it is time for a final fact of the show and that is ana my fact this week is that the audible bird protection society has warned its members against bird splaining and so man's planing is when a man annoyingly so but if a if man's planing is when a man is awkwardly explaining something which he doesn't need to is bird's planing when a bird explains something to you we don't call them birds these day we call them women sorry i've i've been asleep for 270 days and my testicles are so sore

it's not you're right it's an incorrect use of the splaining uh etymology because it's not like when a pigeon gets really patronizing it's basically this is an article on the audible website which is so this is like the authority on birds and is a bird writer becker heisman she was sort of inspired by birdwatchers who do things like get extremely agitated if people refer to a canadian goose as opposed to a canada goose or a seagull birdwatchers hate people calling it a seagull because there's no such thing as a seagull there are gulls lot and don't live by the sea a seagull apparently it's a nonsense term her warning to birdwatchers is and i'm repeating it now that it can put people off if as soon as you casually mention a seagull

in conversation someone says well actually there's no such thing as a seagull so you're not making any sense and um that's the official word of of the birdwatching society but that's my life with you three yeah sorry about that um but yeah birdwatchers are they're a pedantic breed they can be and just to clarify yeah a canadian goose should be a canada goose and gulls lots of lots of different 11 different types of gull in the uk and there is actually an account a twitter account called at no such gull which is about and the name is no such thing as a gull and it's kind of about how gulls seagulls don't exist and so i don't really want to slag off people who are really pedantic about it because they do actually follow qi and retweeted us very recently in fact yesterday i think the

most fascinating thing about that fact is you were on twitter yeah i only go on for birdwatching updates i could be hard though being a birdwatcher i think we should cut them some slack yeah in um 2013 they found this amazing rare bird on the island of harris it was a white throated needle tail normally you'd only find it in asia or in australia um but it was on the island of harris probably got caught on a draft of wind or something and so everyone suddenly got a message on their phones or on their twitter account saying guys there is a white throated needle tail on harris and loads of people went up there to the island all the way up in the north of scotland to see this bird which was then hit by a wintered by no in front of all these birdwatchers oh that's what it was

going i've got an amazing updraft here wow this it does it does happen something i think there was a story that someone there was a is it a farolope there's a book called a farolope i think anyone know uh actually it's i think it was something like a gray farolope and i'm going off memory so i really can't remember it but it was these birdwatchers had got to it and they were so excited about seeing it very rare in the area where they were and then they saw a buzzard just arrive and land and eat it right in front of them but then they did say although the buzzards actually they're very rarely feed on that kind of prey so kind of two birds with one stone to be honest they used that phrase they used that phrase genuinely yeah well they're funny guys

have you heard of other birdwatching slang oh yeah this gets used in the in the birdwatching community do you want to have a guess at what a not a bird is is it something that's not a bird something that's not a bird it's something that looks like a bird from a distance but once binoculars or a spotting scope is used turns out not to be a bird is it something that's either a plane or superman that's right have you had a sudo bird sudo bird sounds like it's also a not a bird yeah well a sudo bird is something that looks like a bird and perhaps even moves like a bird until it is examined through binoculars or a spotting scope and found to be something completely different what is an example of a sudo bird like a bag of crisps bag of crisps very good wow very good you

know and of course in the tree this very much feels like sort of class one of ornithology doesn't it are you struggling to identify a bird do you know more slang do you know what jizz is in it yes let's move on i see i see you read my blog then jizz is the sort of when you can't quite see what the bird is and you talk about the vibe of the bird like it's giving off this vibe so it must be this kind of bird so it kind of it moves a bit like a black bird and it's kind of blackish and you think that probably is a black bird is that what it is i think so yeah it's basically the whole demeanor isn't it jizz that bird's jizz is well it's tall it's fat uh it's brown it's wow one of its words it's tall it's fat it's yellow i watch you say to me street

it's been in use for a long time though i think it even predates jizz as we know it today but there are rumors that it stands for general impression size and shape which was a military term in the second world war but it actually comes from before that from 1922 and it now it's spread to like all biologists that you'll talk about a plant jizz as well which i like one etymology i don't know if this is true either but people say it just is what what is that bird oh it just it just is yeah jizz feels to me like it comes from jist hey what's the jist yeah that's better isn't it yeah do you know what um gripping someone off is in bird watching well it can't get very exciting you can't you've got to do something to pass the

hours while waiting for the white tailed needle thing but um gripping someone off is a bad thing to do in bird watching it's where you see a bird that someone else has missed out on and then you tell them about the bird that you've seen so you'll sort of you're sort of bragging to them and you know that they've missed the opportunity to see this bird oh really yeah yeah it's and if someone's not noticed it maybe they were looking at in the wrong place or whatever so that's a bad thing to do don't uh don't grip off if you do go bird watching so you're just not allowed to share if you see something cool you're not allowed to keep a secret in case someone gets upset they didn't see it you're supposed to share but some asshole bird watchers grip people off and they're

like oh yeah i saw it last week you're too late i could have told you but i didn't yeah right just as it's disappearing down the buzzard's gullet you say i've just seen a farolope or whatever yeah this fact was about the audible society right the bird society and he actually is incredible character from history who was the first person to put together a sort of great collection of paintings published in a book of the birds of america and it's one of those rare books now that it basically outsells any book in terms of price value at an auction so a copy went a while ago for about 11 a million 11 million yeah it's we've got one in our house no an original oh i don't know okay so it's not all of them going for that no no no your kindle pdf is not

going to be sold at southerby's have you noticed that every uh branch of waterstones has a massive safe in the middle of the shop floor that's where they keep that book yes i was this close to starting up and walking off the podcast never to return fuck you guys so sorry so some some versions are very expensive yeah this is um so it's an amazing book and he used to paint these birds and it used to be a bit more of a vicious bird spotting thing these days the idea i think of hurting a bird in any way would be horrible back then in order to paint the bird and spot them you actually had to kill them so he used to go around and he would shoot birds and then what he would do is he would put sort of wires onto them and pose them as if they were mid-flight so that he could

capture them as if they were in the nature and they were alive which is very different to any kind of drawing at that time it was usually very posed and very still so he kind of he did that brilliantly but the other amazing thing is this book the original books how tall is your book it's about this big yeah so it's a big book and the original the idea was he wanted to capture the birds in their full size so when you saw it it was almost as if you were in front of one wow yeah but what's really wonderful is he slightly miscalculated the size of some of the birds so in some of them they've had to be contorted to sort of fit to the page like squished down with yeah but yeah really fascinating character he was do you know how he made his living before he

got into the bird drawing business or in fact as like you know while he was drawing birds as a hobby he made his money as a deathbed artist so that's someone who if someone you love dies you go oh my god we forgot to get a portrait of them we'd better get one now and you went and you would paint a portrait of a dead person of the corpse and it would be lying in repose with maybe a bunch of flowers or photograph or something but would he would he pose them like he later did the birds as in with with wires and with absolutely yeah doing the high jump or backflip however you wanted it have you guys heard of um Phoebe Snetsinger Phoebe Snetsinger is amazing so she um in 1981 was diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided that instead of going into a home and just kind of

succumbing to it she decided well i've not got much time left so i'm going to go and look for birds okay and she took a trip to Alaska to look for birds and she kept looking for birds and kept looking for birds and luckily enough got into remission and kept looking for birds and she was the first person to see more than 8 000 species of birds ever and when she died eventually she'd seen 8 398 birds which was 85 percent of the known species in the world she's seen isn't that amazing wow so good um we're gonna we're gonna have to wrap up soon guys oh what yeah but we are you have but we are no yes but i haven't told you about Graham Moss yet right you've hooked me go for it this is a bird watching story from this year and it's just a rather rather nice one it's

donkaster baby owl webcam banned by facebook over sex and nudity rule so this summer a man in donkaster called Graham moss uh he set up a very sweet webcam of some baby owls in their nest and just so were you looking at moss news you were working on this is a complete coincidence although there is a book about bird watching by someone called steven moss all right you've been looking at moss news and fortunately it's coincided with the research for today but you got lucky um but it got his his webcam was taken down twice because it breached the community guidelines on adult nudity and sexual activity but what was happening nothing nothing was happening it was just some baby owls but either algorithmically it's sort of algorithmically there we go

no one's no one's seeing this outside this room but i um but yeah it always thinks he was pranked but i think it's possible that algorithmically someone would see some sort of you know writhing flesh in a nest you think that looks that looks rude were they featherless are they naked well they were baby owls so i think they probably would have been very feathered yeah okay you can get in trouble with things like that the um christmas island tourist board um went onto facebook to advertise the island's annual burden nature week with the headline some gorgeous shots here of some juvenile boobies oh no and facebook for some reason took them down and they appealed to facebook saying charlie some mistake we're just talking about this bird which is called a booby and facebook

went nope that's kind of fair i read there was an interview uh birdwatch ireland uh there was a member called nihil hatch and the the person interviewing just got so excited that he was called hatch that he derailed the conversation in order to say uh that's funny isn't it and then he turned out he said it's actually not as uh sort of uncommon to have a bird related name for members of the birdwatch in ireland it's it's a bit more common so he then listed off a bunch of people that were past and present people as part of it so we had donnell finch ashling talon steven wing dav bird bit up bit on the nose david that is that is so a fake name isn't it look at miss talon over here she's picked a part of the bird dav bird dav bird yeah anyone else

there is uh mark robbins and see mark's picked a species of bird not like you dav Olivia crow um and yeah mark robert do you think there's some some nice people in bird drawing societies go mark robbins just saying look robbins do you think they go dav bird i've got one last thing just on the subject of being pedantic and bird explaining we've actually had i've been sent a um a whatsapp message by alex bell who is one of the fish team he just wants me to pass this on to anna anna's gull twitter thing is at no such seagull not at no such gull and i think we now know who runs that account 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 and someone on their blog um i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m all at porky's big adventure dot james at james harkin and adder you can email podcast at qi.com we can get us on our group count which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there um so uh just quickly before we end just a huge thank you to the london podcast festival and to king's place it's truly awesome that the arts are trying to

get through this and we feel so lucky to be able to do this in front of you guys today and i hope you had a fun time and um so that's it we'll be back again next week we'll see you then goodbye