No Such Thing As A Fish - 345: No Such Thing As A Sideways Treadmill

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss a swearing mongoose, gangster candy and the wickedest man in the world in this year's Hallowe'en special. 

Hello and welcome to a special Halloween edition of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1930s the ghost of a swearing mongoose led the BBC to revise its working conditions. This is quite a story so Settle in. Right so there was a guy called Rex Lambert and he worked at the BBC. He was the editor of the BBC magazine The Listener and he

got interested in a story of a talking mongoose who lived at that time on the Isle of Man. So he went to the Isle of Man, investigated this talking mongoose and wrote kind of kind of published a book about it. Anyway he had a rival, a career rival who sat on the board of the BFI with him which he was also on, who decided to use this to bring him down. So accused Rex of being a crazy man because he believed in this talking mongoose and essentially Rex sued this other guy for slander and he won and that whole case kind of drew into sharp relief the fact that the BBC wasn't treating its employees very well because the BBC was a little bit unlawed, Wreath were a little bit like yeah this Rex got you right he does sound like a bit of a loon and so after that then the government

got involved and was like look BBC you've got to start treating your staff better even if they do believe in talking mongoose and sort your act out and they did change their rules and policies. I feel a bit sorry for Rex Lambert because whenever you look him up on the internet all you can find is one that he believed in talking mongooses and two that he once said in his magazine The Listener television won't matter in your lifetime or mine. Yeah that's the only two things he's remembered for. Well but he did die two weeks after saying that and he was speaking to the world's oldest man at the time so actually and then and the batteries had gone in that guy's remote hadn't they? Hey we're being a bit rude here. This mongoose has a name Anna.

Sorry yeah the mongoose has a name it's called Jeff. Jeff the talking mongoose spelled G-E-F. I've read that he also may not have completely been a mongoose I mean for one thing he was a ghost so to ghost have a species and secondly he was also described as a man weasel which is even spookier really. He kind of sometimes claimed to be a mongoose he sometimes claimed to be an extra clever mongoose and then sometimes he claimed to be part of the fifth dimension and then sometimes claimed to be the eighth wonder of the world so you know. Yeah he used to say I'm a freak I have hands and I have feet and if you saw me you'd faint you'd be petrified mummified turned into stone or a pillar of salt that was kind of like his catchphrase. It sounds like a

wrapper. Yeah why are you talking like he was M&M? To be honest the bit where as you be petrified mummified it sounds like it's going to end with why might be grease lightning that's where I was heading with that. Yeah he had a bit of an identity crisis Jeff he changed from one moment to the next we should probably mention that he we're just going to talk about Jeff presumably rather than pbc working conditions. He was a mongoose who appeared first appeared in the Isle of Man in 1931 I think in the house of a guy called James Irving and his family and first he was described as a yellow and brown rat-like animal with a long bushy tail and he was a bit of a sensation he became quite famous throughout the country for a while. Did he ever appear to anyone outside

the house of James Irving? Some people heard him certainly there was their good friend heard him sort of talking outside the porch although coincidentally it happened that their daughter Vori was known to be a skilled ventriloquist and also was very good at impersonating animals. Was she drinking a glass of water at the time? That sets the deal on it. He did used to go to the market with them. He got the bus into town. Really? I didn't hear the bus. He brought back gossip about the neighbours. Yeah really? He sometimes used to live underneath the floorboards of the bus company so that he could listen to what the bus drivers were saying. Oh wow. Did he? Wait is this true or are you guys just making this up now? So right basically all of

this is false right? This is kind of this is a ghost that was claimed by this family and became famous for a little while but we are all four of us on the side of it not existing or? Seriously guys I go away for one week you have Rhys Darby on when I come back all of you are paid up members of Spook Club. I mean his story has holes in it doesn't it? He claims that he was born in Delhi in 1852 so that he was 80 years at the time when he first appeared. No backstory of how he made it to the Isle of Man. No big trip sort of revealed in all his tours. Oh I thought that it was that the neighbours had brought in some mongooses from outside of the Isle of Man to kind of chase after Berman. And Jeff was one? And Jeff was one of them yeah. Jeff the classic Delhi name

it's G-E-F isn't it? He spelled it himself you know when they asked him what's your name they originally called him Jack and they said okay what's your name and he said oh it's Jeff G-E-F so he gave the name himself. He did although he wasn't very good at speaking any Indian language so they talked about him like he was a great linguist he was fluent in English and he did seem to pick up other languages very quickly as well but he only knew sort of I think he knew the word Hindu and he knew sort of one or two other words that everyone would have known at the time. It's not enough to get by it's not enough to get by in India. He didn't know how to say bottle of beer for instance that was one that he really struggled with. When this was investigated more

fully the the hairs of the ghost mongoose were found out to be the hairs of a dog and the imprints of Jeff's paws had been made with a stick it turned out so yeah. But they did this is how sort of not seriously people were taking it but how much it caught on in the news I think it was just silly news season because they sent them to the British Museum didn't they and the British Museum analysed the the footprints. Well it's the 1930s wasn't it? Yeah it feels like it was a bit of a whole silly season the 1930s apart from the Great Depression and the rise of fascism yeah apart from that there was a chance to have a bit of a breather after the First World War. Yeah when the reporter from the Daily Dispatch went over to see this

supposed mongoose again didn't see it but heard it talking apparently the mongoose gave him a tip for the Grand National which is quite good. On another occasion he sang three verses of the Manx National Anthem then two verses of the Spanish National Anthem followed by one verse of the Welsh National Anthem. Well they're all very well known in India so that must be where he picked those up. It's so weird. In an attempt to inject a bit of realism into it at one point James Irving said yeah he is very good at languages and he actually can speak fluent Flemish but he's not infallible because he thinks it's German so Jeff spoke Flemish but believing it was German. So this Lambert guy who went over the person he took over with him to investigate was Harry Price

who is one of the great ghost hunters of the sort of that boom of ghost hunting like Hans Holzer who Ghostbusters was based on. They were the first people who went to all these locations, wrote these big books and he had his ghost hunting kit with him because there used to be goggles that they would wear that they could claim would help you to see spirits. Arthur Conan Doyle famously owed a pair as well. He used to go ghost hunting. Every single time we talk about anything dubious that anyone ever believed in is we are the Conan Doyle's in there somewhere. He's just getting involved. It's like oh it's something that's definitely not true. Yeah I'll stick my ear in. That's great. That's true but so he would have cameras that the idea would be is

the camera would have trigger weights and a trigger thermograph on it so if the temperature suddenly changed drastically in a room it would trigger the camera to take a photo and he used to have a sort of matches with him and the matches were not only to help him see in the dark but they were also to entice a ghost to respond if the ghost used to be a smoker. So he'd pull out the matches and think that maybe the ghost would be like oh thank you a light. Yes please. That's so funny. Oh just a cigarette suddenly appears floating in the air floats towards your match. Hey have you guys heard of the Ikneumon? The wasp? No. No it's so there is the wasp but there's a mythological mongoose known as the Ikneumon and it used to exist back in the

day so this is another sort of fabled mongoose but it used to slay dragons that was the belief of how yeah so this is not a gigantic mongoose this was a regular size mongoose slash weasel there's debate about what this fake thing was so what it used to do is that it used to cover itself in mud and then it used to enter the nostrils of the dragon and then it would burrow out through the dragon and that's how it would kill how it would slay the dragons and in Egypt the Ikneumon was I think seen as a real thing so there was a sort of weasel mongoose type animal that used to chase rats and so on and you can read about it in history so Pliny the Elder wrote about it Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it and I found in the 18th century an English poet called

Christopher Smart wrote about it in his poem called Jubilate Agno he mentions the Ikneumon but the Ikneumon's killed by a cat and the name of that cat is Jeff well well that was a that was a long way rounds to an extremely dubious piece of coincidence wasn't it this whole fact has been dubious I think that's a beautiful coincidence that there have been two spooky mongoose it is not one called Jeff and one the thing that called it was called Jeff there's some reincarnation happening there called Jeffrey of what as well Jeffrey Jeffrey yeah Jeffrey I've given him a nickname with it with a j or with a g with a j and without but without an e at the end so there's a lot of weird anomalies going on in their names jeo ffry oh okay but wait a minute that's a bit like Joffrey

who was in Game of Thrones and what do they have in Game of Thrones but dragons dragons mongooses oh boy there's been a lot of thought in history that mongooses can kind of attack and kill other things they go after snakes for instance and in real life that does happen that mongooses and snakes attack each other especially cobras and the mongooses are highly resistant to cobra venom and often if you put a mongoose and a cobra against each other then the mongoose will come out on top so people use the mongoose as kind of protection against cobras and knowing this there's a really popular indian beer called cobra beer and there was a rival who brought out a new beer and they called it mongoose because they wanted to beat the cobra and so whenever

I have the choice between a cobra beer or a mongoose beer in an indian restaurant I always choose the mongoose one because that's the one that beats the cobra and I think I'm the only person in the world that that marketing has ever worked on hang on isn't there also a kingfisher beer yes there is where does that fit into the rock paper scissors world of the cobra and the mongoose kingfisher is for James his wife he's sitting there going look I'll just get a kingfisher and I'm sure about that lecture that my husband just gave you the Royal Navy used to have uh you know they used to have ships cats ships to catch uh catch rats and things um lots of ships had ships mongooses which were very effective at catching rats and cockroaches and that was a thing

but what we've learned from Dan presumably is that you don't want to have a ship's cat and a ship's mongoose because the cat will just eat the mongoose gotta be very careful there right did we learn that well didn't wasn't it Jeff the cat who killed the mongoose yes sorry it's all right Andy I I drifted off halfway through that story this is there's going to be a quiz at the end of this section for which facts were fake and which facts were real it is quite hard to keep up but on on real mongooses still just for a moment they are quite vicious aren't they and they can kill each other and for that reason they all give birth in synchrony because if they didn't give birth on the same day then their offspring would be killed so the only way you

can stop other mothers from killing your children is if they don't know whose children are whose and the only way you can guarantee that is if all the children appear at once that's so stressful so as a kid as a as a mongoose kid you have to call everyone mum so they think that you're their child that's useful if you're in school and you accidentally call your teacher mum like like some people I've heard have done in the past it was twice it was literally just twice and you say no no I did it so that the people didn't eat me oh I wish I were a mongoose just one more thing about mongoose specifically their their anuses are quite cool so they have anal glands where they from which they plant their scent and one of their tricks is to do a

handstand scent and so they'll they'll mark their scent to mark their territory or sometimes they'll mark scent on a potential mate to warn off other mates to warn off rivals and the handstand scent what they do is what it sounds like they flip over upside down onto their hands so they can get their anus up as high as possible and then mark their scent as high up as possible because that means that a rival can tell that you're quite tall so a rival will then smell your scent on the person they want to mate with and be like wow you've managed to reach her head with your anus you must be really tall I'm not going to get involved here I don't know if I can take that kind of height and then if he like walks past a tree and smells the scent does he think that this

is a mongoose with an anus where my head is and so he must be like 10 times bigger than me is that the idea of it or it's like it's as if no other mongoose knows about headstands it's like one mongoose has worked this out and I think they all know about head maybe they all know about headstands but like the taller person is still going to get it higher up on a headstand so if you're short maybe you wouldn't do the headstand thing because that's going to advertise that you're short is it like giving your wife a basketball to carry around and everyone who sees it will think oh she must be going out with a really tall guy it's exactly like that yeah but the idea is that all of us give our partners a basketball the only advantage is to the first person who

does it yeah so James cut this bit out because I'm going to start I'm going to start doing that I'm going to get my wife to walk around with a pole vault pole and people will think wow she has to pull a bolt just to kiss him and be pardoned I'm going to stick to the anus secretion I just have one more haunting thing there is a sweet shop in great yarmouth which is explicitly not haunted it's the seems to be the only sweet shop in the UK which goes out of its way to say this is not haunted there are no ghosts here wow is that the lady that protests too much kind of issue it's owned by a man called Nigel Parrot who is a very devout christian and he put the sign in

his window a few years ago saying to all my wonderful customers this shop is definitely not haunted even though the town ghost walks appear to think it is but it gets more interesting a sign because he goes on all demonic paraphernalia has been destroyed so he gets into the details he says Jesus Christ died so we could be free from all other spirits and negativity he is alive today and his is the only spirit in this place so apparently there is a spirit in there yeah he's haunted by Jesus I know that's cool the BBC interviewed him and he said this place might have at some time in the past been haunted but if Jesus is alive and with me then this shop is no longer haunted wow did you see though the BBC followed that up with some research they looked

into this Nigel character and it turns out he died in 1673 okay it's time for fact number two and that is James my fact this week is that famous occultist Alistair Crowley used to make a curry so hot that he only served it on glaciers so the diners could use the snow to cool their mouth down afterwards wow isn't that amazing yeah but I mean this is not like he would invite you for dinner and then you'd get a location delivery which was in a different land like he was mountaineering wasn't he was mountaineering he would make this curry they had no kingfisher or mongoose or cobra to wash it down with and it was so hot that people would run outside and they would kind of stuff snow into their mouths and in his autobiography the Confessions of Alistair Crowley he said that

some people said he should make it in London but he said he would refuse to do it because there's no glacier there or glacier there to um to help people so um that's a thing it's a real chicken or egg isn't it like did he go to the glacier because he wanted to make the curry or did he make the curry because he found himself on this glacier we'll probably never know we'll probably never know and probably it was just he happened to be on a glacier he happened to make some curry and that's it but yeah he wasn't occultist but before he became an occultist he was really a mountaineer uh Alistair Crowley he was known as the wickedest man in the world by the British press because of various things that he did at one stage he set up an abbey in Sicily and lots of

crazy stuff was happening there to do with sex and pornography and drugs and all that kind of stuff and he got kicked out of Italy by Mussolini and that made the news and people started calling him the wickedest man in the world but he he was basically kind of a devil worshipper satanist occultist kind of guy who yeah was just famous for doing crazy stuff it does feel like the wickedest man in the world but was much lower uh again pre-hitler uh it feels like he sneaked in and got the nickname at a time when the currency was a little bit weaker you're right yeah mind you if if Mussolini's calling you a bad guy then you do have to be concerned yeah that's true yeah the signs were there even in his mountaineering career so I he tried he he attempted the second

highest mountain in the world and the third highest didn't he I think and failed at both but he tried K2 in 1902 and then Kanchenjunga in 1905 which is the third highest mountain in the world and he went up there with a group who didn't get along with him after a while and tried to depose him as their group leader and then there was a big fight and a few of his co-walkers said they were going to turn back and go back down the mountain and so he went to bed in his tent and he heard them going back down the mountain and they caused an avalanche and there was lots of screaming and shouting and cries for help and he heard all of this four of them were killed he just sat in his tent what he did was he sat in his tent listening to the screams while everyone else in

his party went to help them and he wrote a letter to a local paper about how he has no sympathy for people who get involved in mountain accidents because they should be more responsible yeah and there was a thing about that being because he was really wicked but on the other hand it kind of felt like he was just being really stubborn in that case because they'd had that argument and they said right we're going back down he's like no look there's going to be an avalanche I can see there's going to be an avalanche so whatever you do maybe go down tomorrow like but just don't go down now and they went down and they got stuck in the avalanche and you can almost imagine him in his tent going see told him yeah he's going to happen I think he was going more curry for me

if you have a row and you hear someone falling down the stairs immediately afterwards you're going to that's a result for you that's the universe telling you you're right about the argument in a way yeah so maybe who's the Alistair Curly of this podcast but there was a huge like storm about it afterwards there's a massive stuff in the press about it and that's kind of when he gave up mountain airing that was after that catch and chunger incident and k2 I believe it was k2 he never reached the top of not because they couldn't make it up there but because of differences within the team again he fell out with the team he pulled a revolver on one of the members and they the guy he pulled the gun at Guy Knowles was his name kicked him in the groin it will cause some

tension in a group when you pull a revolver on somebody yeah but I actually one of the things I love about Kanchenjunga the third highest mountain is that no one's ever got to the top of it and lots of people have got to 10 meters below the top and this is because local tradition has it that it's so it's in the Himalayas and local tradition has it that spirits live at the top and you can't disturb them and so everyone who's ever climbed it every mountaineering expedition that's been up there which is a couple of hundred people I think out of respect for the spirit at the top they stopped just beneath it that's very respectful it is but you can't imagine that Crowley would have done that he probably would have he would have got to the top and done like a macarena

on top or a little jig or something wouldn't he yeah he would have spoken to the spirit if Crowley had known about the Chillingham cattle he would have been up there and touching them all over like nobody's business and that is an episode pullback to a hundred episodes ago that was I think it's more like 300 episodes ago that's amazing these are some cows who live in a field that James wants to touch anyway um oh I see what you're trying to do here is deflect who's the Crowley of the group yeah absolutely yeah um one the one thing he climbed which I think is more impressive than K2 is beachy head he climbed the cliffs at beachy head from the bottom to the top but he was a massive boaster about the things he did he wrote the general

opinion was that no one had ever climbed it there was however a legend that it had once been done I settled the point by walking up smoking a pipe with my dog and he put in brackets I had no woman available in nine and a half minutes guys I mean I was at beachy head a couple of weeks ago and I'd struggle to climb it and so would my dog how did he get the dog to get up I don't know he might have had a dog perpoose there is an argument that a lot of the stuff in his autobiography might have been a bit mediopi yeah that's true might have been a bit a bit talkingy mongoose perhaps he claimed that it was his idea for church hill to give the v sign um he said according to some people like rabble and some earlier writers the v sign was a good way of

fighting against the swastika according to kind of ancient eastern rituals and so that he claimed that he also claimed that it was down to him that stanford bridge football ground was aligned in the way that it's aligned and that he gave chelsea football club its team colors of blue that was all down to him that's what he claimed wow very cool once once you've defeated the nazis what are you going to do next I guess pick the team colors for a premiership team this sounds like obviously bullshit that he was claiming all these things but he was quite an influential character back in the day particularly with counterculture america so oldest huxley was a big fan of his um he he very much set up a lot of ideas that got carried forward about

free thinking um his religion that he started which is thelma was an idea that you do stuff for you rather than you do it on behalf of the community which suddenly was this new idea that hadn't really been explored too much in the past there's a great story about how he set up uh thelma um which was it was his wife who claimed that he was going to be dictated this message by a guardian angel who called eyewass and she she said that he's got all these messages for you and he didn't believe it so he took her to a museum in kyro to say you've got to show me who whores is and she didn't know when they got there they passed a huge horror statue and he went okay so this is this is nonsense she doesn't know but she kept walking on and she found this um this thing at

the end which whores appeared on and she went that's the guy there and he went oh my god that's whores and he looked up the catalogue number of this particular piece and the number was 666 in the catalogue and so he thought this is a sign the synchronicity of this means that she's right and then he went into a room for three days and he was dictated to by this guardian angel a book which is still in publication today and is the basis of his whole religion thelma well his wife was called um louise wasn't she and the book was called thelma and louise and um it got adapted didn't it his wife was called rose and the sad thing is that basically within a year of her doing all of this stuff with him and kind of coming up with this religion he'd dumped her

and he'd found this other lady called leila waddell and leila waddell was a violinist apparently not particularly good one but an okay violinist and he decided that he was going to form a band like a girl group like little mix but she was going to be the main person this violinist they were called the ragged ragtime girls and apparently they were amazing they played in london and they absolutely pulled the house down is it called pulled the house down is that what you say brought the house down yeah they didn't pull the house down they brought the house down and everyone loved them and it looked like they were going to go on a massive tour around europe um but instead crowley decided that he was going to go on a tour of some random parts of russia instead so they could have

sold out every single theater in the uk for instance but he decided he was going to go to russia and they were going to tour there instead and they went there and they were quite successful in russia but the reason that they went there we think is because he might have been a spy for the british government and at that time rasputin was kind of getting his claws into um the uh cesarevich in russia and maybe he was there to kind of look after and see what was going on with rasputin and that's why this quite good girl group never made it because they had to go to russia with him on this trip wow a tragedy a great loss to music crowley used to live on the banks of the Loch Ness um and often tried to summon the Loch Ness monster up at certain points but he that's where he

did all of his biggest um achievements in the early days of spreading the the magic that he was that he was claiming he could do so he was trying to summon up demons and battle them in order to make the world a better place what you wouldn't summon them to battle them just send them away surely well you need to battle them to make sure they don't come back yeah it's like buffy the vampire slayer she does not summon demons well someone does definitely someone does yeah um that house on the is it bowlskin house bolskine bolskine isn't that what they make notebooks out of um that has burned down twice in five years and then the owners started selling the rubble uh dan you're interested in buying um i'd see i'd be

so keen on buying rubble you can get a you can get a whole bag of it for just 50 quid you're kidding no are you serious i don't know if it's still being sold but you better get on it don't come on dan's wife and children have to put up with so many of his dodgy purchases what are you doing i wouldn't be allowed i've genuinely been told by finella i'm not allowed to bring alistair croley's book into the house she thinks um yeah because like she's scared that it has powers with it and also we're in lockdown so we'd be around these spirits a lot i've got quite a few of his books here and i don't think we've had any problems here so far i don't i don't think spirits have much respect for government guidelines about covid safety i think if they want to go out they're

going to go out they're not going to be trapped there with you but it's interesting i mean it's it's a historical house not just if you're a croley fan but if you're a music fan led zeppelin's jimmy page bought that house many years ago and he was very obsessed with alistair croley as um as a lot of zeppelin fans will know he's he's very much into black magic um but he didn't really ever live there he lent it to a guy called malcom dent who looked after it and had his kids there and so on and he claims that there were a lot of spooky happenings while he was living there um that his wife was sort of um attacked by a big beast outside and there were long goose um just one other prominent thelomite who is quite surprising was jack parson's who was another leading thelomite

who crowley installed and he was the father of the us space program which is kind of concerning actually when you reflect on it so he's a rocket scientist in the 30s he invented things like jet engines and jet fuel needed for spaceflight and he also believed in a lot of this occult stuff wasn't he the one who elron hubbard kind of got in with his life and started living with him and his wife and then just ran off with his wife or something ran off with his wife that's right yes yeah he did ran off oh i think ran off with he ended up sort of having a foursome with his wife and a 17 year old girl who then married elron hubbard and they founded Scientology and parson's went on to try and conjure up a new lover when she abandoned him for elron hubbard and he did that

by masturbating onto magical tablets to the background sound of this is nicholas parson's did you say this is the person who went on to found america's space program so you're not allowed okay it's time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that japan's yakuza have been told they are no longer allowed to join in trick or treating the yakuza is japan's mafia for anyone who doesn't know that and they're a big syndicate of lots of different little groups this is one particular group that has been told this year that no more trick or treating allowed even though everyone loves it when the yakuza do trick or treating it's it's quite funny they've done this in the past for many years it started when some kids accidentally came up to their

offices and they uh knocked on the door and a very startled yakuza member didn't know what to do and sort of fanned them off with money and then they suddenly realized hang on if we can get kids to come and get candy off us they might see us as good people and that's really good for recruitment because the yakuza have a very big problem with recruitment a lot of their members are mid-fifties now and they have trouble bringing in the youngins i don't think it's great for your pr if you want in to come across as a good guy to as an elderly gentleman start luring children to you with sweets okay so so they're not trick or treating they're sort of being the recipients of trick or treat they invite children and they put up decorations and they put up inflatable ghosts and they tell

people to take pictures and about i mean the last few times they've done it about 800 parents and children have shown up so it's quite it is really popular the security was impeccable they get a lot of really good reviews yeah one local woman said not only were the decorations great and the gift bags full of tasty stuff there were two big lines for cotton candy and the gangsters were super nice so they're right shame about the massive bloodbath in the living room but once little dany got over that we had a great time um they do have a lot of social outreach missions in the yakuza so um this year when the coronavirus thing was just beginning um they offered to disinfect the diamond princess cruise ship which had been impounded in yocahama

and they they said yeah we'll do it well you know we're gangsters we're meant to be doing the difficult tricky jobs that no one else is doing they gave out masks they gave out toilet paper so they have a lot of kind of soft power that they're using yeah they do they are we should say sort of not necessarily good guys um not necessarily because i read i read a piece in the guardian about how they are really struggling and it did feel a bit like god this poor organization is really on its last legs here but they do do some weird stuff uh one of which is often sort of killing people um another is the habit they have of casting off their fingers so that's the probably most well known yakuza tradition is that if you're a member of the yakuza and you do

something wrong you have to cut off your finger and apparently one of the ways you can now tell that they are losing their membership is that prosthetics makers are doing really well so there are a couple of interviews there's one with someone called shintaro hayashi in 2013 who said he's noticed he's getting loads more calls from people who want prosthetic pinky fingers and that's because people have chopped off their pinkies because they're in the yakuza then they've decided i think i might go for another job and it looks bad you don't know little finger and so they go for the fake finger wow that's that's a sign and apparently a lot of the gangsters who are higher up they have different fingers for different seasons a finger to match

every occasion so they go for a tanned finger oh i see yeah not a kind of a pumpkin spice finger for autumn i was thinking like a finger that can hook apples off trees for the autumn maybe that's so good or like a really long one that's like a um ski pole for winter brilliant nice but it's a nice christmas finger yeah yeah who wouldn't like a christmas finger in spring you could call it a springer stunning brilliant and you could i don't know what you'd have on your spring finger but maybe uh maybe a sort of spike so you could plant seeds in the ground ah great idea i think the spike is suddenly bad for pr again if you impale everyone you shake hands with yeah maybe you're not going to get that job

so when they're um like the prosthetic makers are giving them new fingers i wondered if there might also be a thing about a tattoo removal because they're quite famous for their tattoos aren't they yakuzas there was a book that came out last year called i give you my life which was photographs of the wives of yakuza members um because actually it's kind of interesting the way that the women are in this society because they're not considered members of the yakuza um but they they are not in the way that you might think of like mafia wives and stuff kind of clueless of everything that's happening especially the wives of the top level people they kind of know everything that's going on and their tattoos kind of tell you a lot about

their history and stuff like that which i found really interesting um but i looked into the history of the tattoos in japan and it goes all the way back to the fifth century and the japanese government used tattoos to punish their criminals and that's why the yakuzas are so tattoos now it kind of goes all the way back to that and if you ever did anything bad you would get a line across your forehead and then the second one they would put an arch over the line and the third one they would put one extra kind of line and that did the symbol the kanji for dog and it would like you would have it's like almost like if you did a crime here and the first time they put a d on your forehead second time i know and the last time they put a g and then you could say put a d then an i then a c

it's kind of the same isn't it it's like playing hangman on someone's face that's what i was thinking it'd be great if that's what they drew with hangman symbols and then if they complete the thing they hang you right oh wow yeah wow oh that's very punitive but that is wow yeah yeah it takes a lot of goes to get there but there's always that debate you know do you draw the extra beam between the horizontal do you give the guy arms so you could say i'm going to give you one extra crossbeam because you know you've shown repentance yeah suck if the last detail on that drawing was to draw the fingers on the person but you'd already lost seven of them so japan only started doing trick or treating and halloween generally in 1997 and this was as a result of disneyland in

tokyo they had their first ever disney happy halloween event and everyone loved it and it was sort of come here and experience this western thing that they do so everyone started doing it and it's spread to different amusement parks so universal studios started doing it and they had their hollywood halloween got bigger and bigger and so it's a proper thing there now and they have one extra element to it that none of us as far as i know do which is they have a post halloween cleanup on november the first where everyone goes back out into the streets the next day still in costume and they clean up all the rubble and debris from the night's party so useful like people could clean the feces off my front door that get there that's not just halloween

no but at least the guy's clean once again okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that ghost crabs use teeth in their stomachs to growl at their enemies so are these ghost crabs or real crabs called ghost crabs these are not ghost crabs called jeff who live in the isle of manna sea yeah exactly so the ghost crab is a real thing it's it's sort of small and pale and looks a bit ghostly hence the hence the kind of common name for it lives in the atlantic beaches of the usa that kind of place the guardian says they're named for their sandpale bodies and nocturnal antics so i guess yeah active at night as well

also ghostly um and these scientists at the scripts institution of oceanography were looking at them um because they noticed they could hear the crabs making a noise but the crabs weren't doing anything to to make a noise as it were as in they weren't almost like they were they were doing ventriloquism like fiery from the isle of manna yes exactly it was exactly like that um and so they they thought well this curious we're going to investigate uh this is a scientist called jennifer r.a taylor who led this research and they tried a couple of things they put an endoscope into the crab's mouth a tiny endoscope and it immediately just bit it and crushed it obviously so then they used a thing called uh laser doppler vibrometry and they bounced a laser off

a crab basically and various different bits of its interior and they found out that it has this feature inside it called a gastric mill which is something it uses to grind up food internally it's got a kind of extra mincing layer inside it oh yeah and uh when they provoked a crab by you know presenting it with a hand or a model of another crab or whatever it would make this growling noise just by rubbing together its internal teeth in its stomach so cool so it can do it on command like yeah have you listened to the video of them growling andy yeah yeah because it's not we should say it's not like a kind of like like a dog growl it's a quite a high pitch like a can you kind of noise yeah can we can we hear exactly what it sounds like then can you

do a good impression uh it was like but if you're if you're a rival crab that is a car of yeah you don't want to mess with me yeah terrifying terrifying growl yeah uh yeah but they that's so cool it's a massive like i have a macerator toilet downstairs in my house um which is when you yeah no but i just like that's what i relate that to it's is that the noise it makes what's a what's a macerator toilet it sort of grinds it all up in a tank behind it right we've got one of my parents house as well it's incredibly annoying because it does make that rumbling growling sound throughout the night it growls yeah it growls as you flush the toilet you should just install a big old ghost crab and shit in its mouth

well use nature use what it gave us uh and the idea is i believe just to get back to the ghost crab in real life is um if you're a if you're fighting if you're a ghost crab but you want to tell someone to fuck off at the same time and you don't have a voice box you can't like click your claws because you're using your claws to fight with um but if you do it with your stomach then it frees up your hands to do some fighting exactly it's hands-free technology but for crabs it's amazing what if you're fighting and also eating what have you got then your stomach busy you've got yourself to blame don't eat and fight they're very fast aren't they these these crabs they are known to be the fastest crustaceans that we have and they can reach up to 3.4 miles a second um and

per second sorry miles per second yeah well that is that's almost the fastest thing known to man so i think i think you've missed through the end Anna don't say Anna don't say 3.4 miles per second i think if someone's about if someone's about to shit in your mouth you'd go away that fast as well sorry okay got it yeah incredible so they can ask the Atlantic in an hour or so it's amazing they're not more widespread yeah yeah they're the fastest crustaceans that's why they called the ghosts you you say it's there you turn around to tell someone and it's not there anymore so sorry how fast can they go can we stop they can uh they can run up to 10 miles per hour is what i read okay or three meters per second in fact uh yeah that sounds

more legitimate than what i said before it is still fast but now it sounds really crap one reason we know how they're so fast um is that they did put ghost crabs on a treadmill are they um which as we all know they've put all animals on a treadmill but i can say and i did look really hard for this i've never found the study which put a mongoose on a treadmill so that should have been my fact here but yeah there was um a study in 1990 by wj van art in south africa where he put ghost crabs on a treadmill and found that they could run for two hours before getting tired whoa that's amazing did he i have a question did he put them on the treadmill did he put the treadmill sideways well no it doesn't really matter which

direction the yeah of course it does no no but you would move sideways yeah yeah but you would just put the crab on the sideways you wouldn't change the direction of your treadmill would you that's just a matter of perspective if you want to snooze sideways running in a gym you wouldn't have to go to the person at the desk and say sorry can you turn this treadmill around sideways running i'm banned from all the gyms in south london for dragging the equipment around i'm surprised they work on treadmills because don't they run in a weird way where they sprint really fast and then they stop and then they sprint and then they stop and i think they think that's about um that lactic acid builds up if you sprint as we remember

from biology and to get rid of that waste product you stop and then your body disposes of it so i would have thought on a treadmill they're going to go flying off the back you're also moving sideways that's the problem is that is that you go from side to side across the treadmill they're like that okay go video yes no the um the thing which they do was stopping occasionally that is when they're being pursued by a predator um they use that trick so yeah not when they're generally at the gym i think clearing as in do we know how they're clearing lactic acid or does it just naturally dissipate if they stop for a bit i think that's it yeah same with us as soon as you stop then you'd repay your oxygen debt whatever don't you wow it's amazing anything

can catch them really at the speeds we know they can go now i didn't even know treadmills could go that have you guys just uh on crabs in general okay uh have you heard of mitten crabs these are a huge problem kind of hard to remember them but i don't know yeah so this is a thing they're also called the Shanghai hairy crab and uh basically they've they they look like they're wearing mittens they've got these huge um hairy claws at their front and uh they are a traditional food in china they get eaten a lot but they're also unbelievably successful around the world they're in the world's top hundred most invasive species they're so popular in china they're vending machines sometimes with live crabs

inside them that you can i know you can just buy um china even has a museum shaped like a giant hairy crab um yeah i'm trying to sort of imagine how a crab works in a vending machine because do they have to hang from those bits that the chocolate bars hang from i think i think they're wrapped i think they're wrapped up that's how you transport them traditionally is you bind their claws up and things i think it's like the chocolate bar thing isn't it but you have to turn the entire vending machine around 90 degrees so that they can come out sideways you'd be so annoyed if the your crab was it's just stuck out of claw and got hanging off the edge and then you did that again and again and again and every crab did a little crab conga it would be good to have you know those claw

machines that kind of pick up things to have one of those picking up crabs yes because they'd think it was sort of a giant crab god coming to pick them up and take them up to crab heaven what a good way to go and i have some more spooky crabs you can have yeti crabs vampire crabs zombie crabs cannibal crabs or wizard crabs which um amazing which is fancy oh wizard crab please wizard crab yeah okay so this is a crab um that has the latin name harry plaques severus okay it's quite a nice story actually so it's you would think that that was named after um harry potter right because you've got severus snake and you've got harry potter um but actually they were discovered by a guy called harry conley hence the harry and um the word severus comes from the

latin for rigorous because he was an amateur collector of um crabs and he spent his whole life really rigorously kind of going through these kind of piles of rubble looking for crabs they he found it and it was only found to be a new species 20 years after he died but they named it after him uh and the person who named it did admit that they did very much like harry potter and there was a double meaning but at the same time it was named after this harry and the severus meaning rigorous so that's and then are they are they called wizard crabs because of the harry potter thing or was this guy actually called wizard jr and he was a satanist he he was a black magician i'll be honest that was my calling them wizard crabs they're not actually they're not called

wizard crabs they're kind of wizardy crabs are they because they're kind of like harry potter yeah absolutely definitely definitely if they don't have a common name yet you can give them a common name well i didn't realize that we we had that kind of power i think we do very exciting i think we can try it out we could push them push the envelope so do any of these crabs have the actual common name that you've given them or were you all you just bluffing us with your zombie crabs and your vampire crabs um yeti crabs and vampire crabs are real okay um zombie crabs are crabs that are turned into zombies and cannibal crabs are crabs that eat other crabs what do you mean crabs have turned into zombies yeah so there is a barnacle called loxo thylacus panopai

otherwise known as loxo and they will find a recently malted female crab and they'll go into her undercarriage and lay their eggs in there and they'll turn them into a zombie so all they'll do is look after these baby barnacles and the worst thing is that if there's two of these crabs in a couple they'll take the male and also infect the male and change his anatomy so he looks a bit like a female and acts like a female and the male and the female both of whom now looking at like females all just look after these baby barnacles because they're like zombies that's all they can do and they just sit there while these baby barnacles are just eating off them and being born off them yeah so the crab is oh yeah the crab is the zombie i guess and the barnacle is

the guy in charge is the is the is the wizard i can only think of the word wizard now the only feasible capillary i have the barnacle is like the um the zombie plague that turns everything into zombies yeah right got it um yes crabs are quite cool they were only discovered in 2005 and they really are called yes crabs um and they farm their own food on their arms so they're really cute actually they look like a cuddly toy because they've got these really hairy shaggy arms a bit like the crab that Andy was describing earlier and huge colonies of bacteria live there in their heads because it's such a nice wet hairy environment to live in and then they just spend their days eating the bacteria it's quite nice although probably not if you met a human

who kind of farmed bacteria on their arms and they lived off eating that probably you wouldn't nice wouldn't be the adjective no really what student hasn't sort of licked their armpits for sustenance particularly low day so vampire crabs are kind of they're quite beautiful crabs they've got glowing eyes they're really lots of amazing colors are often quite dark purple a bit kind of draculary and they're quite become quite popular pets quite recently and the thing is that you can't really breed crabs because they're all cannibals like I said they kind of eat each other and so um the only way to get these vampire crabs is to go and find them at source so there's people in southeast asia who will go down search for these crabs and they'll bring them back and then

sell them onto dealers now a lot of them are very like interesting colors that are really good for pets and if you know where to find a particularly nice purpley one with bright green eyes then you're not going to tell anyone else where that is right because you want to have your stash and so people have been doing that and they found that some of the species that are quite popular for pet owners are actually brand new species that have never been described ever before and they can't find that where they're from because the dealers won't tell them where they found them right that's them very cool I'm out of spooky I've got I've got a um the orangutan crab oh yeah which if a crab was going to a halloween party might dress up as an orangutan like that's the

only connection I could make really the halloween thing um but it's really beautiful to look at it looks like an orangutan it's it's ginger red brown hair all over and uh the hair catches the debris of of animals coming by so it traps itself in its hair so it can just eat the food that's stuck in its arms and so on nice but it's good for camouflage as well I think isn't it doesn't it sort of suck up debris as it goes so you can't see it actually speaking of camouflage the ghost crabs that we talked about at the start they are kind of some of them are quite sandy colored in a light sand as in um dry sand and some of them quite sandy colored in a dark sand which is like wet sand and what they do is they know what color they are and they'll run to the area which is most

like whatever their color is nice just desperate to match but they can I think change can't they but it's not as quick as like a chameleon so I think they lifted up the light colored ones living in light sand plopped them in dark sand and they can camouflage themselves and turn themselves the color of the dark sand but it takes about a month so for that month they're sitting there on the dark sand really flashing like a beacon then eventually if they survive that they've turned the right color yeah and it's short grabs they can camouflage themselves too but when noisy ships sail nearby it takes them way longer to change they can't do it as quickly and this is a problem because if they they're not changing color then they're much

likely to be preyed on and it's basically because they're stressed they're stressed by the noise of the sea and that's a bit like those of us who can't really work to music it's more life and death than not being able to work to music but yeah if you like my job is my life actually but then some of us work better to music I work better having a load of crazy j-pop going in my ears when I'm working so are there some kind of um are there some crabs that just love ships going past and they're just like oh yeah nice one I can get everything done I can collect a load of crustaceans today and usually it's better for exercise so anytime a crab's on a treadmill you know okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get

in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland James at James Harkin Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep where you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there as well as links to bits of merchandise that we're selling and uh yeah that's it we will see you again next week hope you're all doing well join us again for another episode goodbye