No Such Thing As A Fish - 347: No Such Thing As A Bacon Scented Sleep Mask

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Dan, Anna, Andrew and James discuss prisons, escapes, chess and why you can never have too much spam.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that in 1978 chess player Victor Kochnoy accused Anatoly Karpov of cheating using an elaborate yoghurt based code.

Is it an elaborate yoghurt or an elaborate code? I actually added that word elaborate to kind of make it feel a bit better than it actually is. No it is an elaborate yoghurt, it was blueberry wasn't it? How basic are the yoghurt's that you're eating today today? You think blueberry is elaborate? Anything about standard Greek is elaborate. I've read some places that it's blueberry but some places that it might be the even

more elaborate bilberry yoghurt. Okay that actually, that really is top tier. So basically what had happened was we'll get on to everything that was happening around there at the time because it was an extremely controversial match but Karpov was just playing chess and then suddenly someone brought him a yoghurt and no one knew that they were going to bring a yoghurt. Normally you would have your snacks at very specific times but suddenly they just brought him this blueberry or bilberry yoghurt and then he made a really good move and Kochnoy

who for various reasons was quite suspicious thought that this must have been a code and whatever the flavour of the yoghurt was going to be that was telling him what kind of move he had to make. And then Kochnoy later on he did say that it was a joke and he was trying to parody the fact that people are always blaming each other of cheating but the truth is that he definitely did make the accusation, the officials took it seriously and they changed the rules to say that everyone had to decide what snacks they were going to have before the game started and they had to have them at certain times.

So it's not the idea that maybe he wrote something in the yoghurt, in bilberries. Oh he drizzled it in in honey, that would be clever. So basically this was 1978 this guy Kochnoy he's a great great chess player possibly the best chess player never to become world champion but he had defected from the Soviet Union and the reason he defected is because the Soviets had decided to give other people a chance as their main challengers and not let him do it. So he decided fuck this I'm getting out of there and so he went to live in Europe eventually in Switzerland but because he was so good he was still like the main challenger to Karpov

and so they had this game but the Soviets were trying every trick in the book to stop him from winning. So at first they said that he wasn't allowed to take place because he didn't have a state as in he wasn't Soviet anymore, he wasn't Swiss yet, he didn't have a country and then when eventually the chess authority said well you know he has he's the best he just beaten a guy called Petrosian who was previously thought to be the best so they thought okay well he's got to take part but the Moscow newspapers refused to name him they just called him the opponent or the challenger they wouldn't say what he was called and his family were

still in the Soviet Union and the Soviet authorities refused to let them leave so they kind of kept them hostage because they were so upset about this guy who defected and was possibly about to become the world champion. So with the family pissed off when he was just lounging around eating blueberry yoghurt mid-match that's a bit casual for somebody's family's got a gun held at them. Yeah no I see that point I see that point but he thought that possibly I think that by becoming the world champion they wouldn't be able to get at him because he'd be world famous.

Yes there were other the match had other accusations as well didn't it so Korshnoi brought his own personal chair which he'd like to play chess in. Fair enough you're sitting down for several hours you want to be comfortable but Karpov's team they were the ones who were suspicious now and they requested the chair be dismantled the next raid. Wow really yeah nothing like that. What would be expecting to find in there you wonder. An extra chess piece oh it doesn't work like Monopoly does it you can't just bring an extra bishop on them. Theoretically if no one noticed you could accidentally just drop an extra bishop on

there. Wait I'm sure I took both your bishops no you're misremembering it yeah no you only took one. But this one is a it's a different design to the other bishops from afar. Well it looks like a bit of a chair leg. The paranoia looking into this of chess players and what they must go through I mean if you were playing a game it feels like half the game is just looking out for ways in which the other player is cheating. There's a yogurt there's a man standing over there there's a chair like you know which one of these are giving him the details. The man standing over there is a really good one are you talking about the French team in 2012. Yes that's right yeah in 2012 there's an Olympiad in

Russia and there were accusations that the French team were managing to get the messages to the actual player and by standing in pre-arranged spots behind the board so I'm not sure of the exact code but it's like if I'm standing over here then use your knight or if I'm standing over here there's a great move that you can't see the bishop or whatever. Did they not all stand in the exact order of which the chess pieces are on the board? Or two if that we're on a horse? Yeah one of them had a little miter that would be really fun. One of them's reading support and is why is your manager only walking diagonally? Why is the queen here? And they never proved that did they? They often don't sort of prove it so that's still an accusation

we should say I don't think the French team were found guilty of doing that but it does make you think is it not after a point easier to just play the game well than to memorize this very presumably quite complicated code of standing formations? The problem is that computers are better than humans now right and so if you can somehow get a computer to tell you what to do then you're going to be able to be even the best human and so that's why cheating now is even more of a problem than it ever has been before. Although I listened to a more or less podcast the radio foreshadow more or less and they interviewed the head of research at chess.com who was saying it's so it's quite interesting now spotting cheaters who are cheating with computers

because computers play in a completely different way to people so he was acting like anyone could tell the difference straight away which I imagine we couldn't but he was saying you know you can tell after a few moves if someone is suddenly using a computer and the key difference is that computers don't plan they don't have a memory of the move that preceded and they don't have a long term strategy and so they when it comes to a move they act like they've never ever seen the board before and they just do what's the exactly perfect move for that moment whereas human beings we have a plan and then we want to stick to it even if sometimes circumstances happen that mess with the plan so for instance it's very unusual for a human to willingly take back a move in chess

because if you've made a move you don't want to retract it a computer got no compunction about that just do it when when it wants to when it sees it's the best move. The thing about retracting your moves with computers that's like where you almost go back to your previous position right because the retracting moves that you or I might have a problem with if we were playing chess would be if I moved my knight to a place and then I took my finger off it and then I go no no I want to take that back right and that actually did happen with the one of the greatest chess players of all time which was Kasparov Garry Kasparov when he was playing against a woman called Judith Polgar and she is probably the greatest female she almost definitely is the greatest female chess player

that's ever played and if she'd have beaten Kasparov in this game it would have been the first time that a woman had ever beaten a world champion in a game of chess and he moved his knight into what would be a bad position and then he took his finger off it and he went no no I didn't take my finger off it and he put it back and then he ended up I'm not sure if he won or tied the game eventually she carried on she became the 10th best player in the entire world anyway but that could have been such a big moment of the first woman beating a grandmaster but yeah did you guys read about her Judith Polgar she's amazing so no she was her father was called Lashlo Polgar and he had three daughters and he trained them all to be chess players and it's one of those

stories which kind of half sounds a little bit like you know he's really forcing them to do this and it's quite bad but then on the other hand they all loved it and whenever you interview them they're all like oh this is what brought our family together we all absolutely loved it and so his daughters Suza, Sophia and Judith all became grandmasters eventually Judith could beat her father by the time she was five years old at 15 she was the youngest person male or female to be awarded a grandmaster title and then eventually she played against Kasparov and should have beaten him but wasn't allowed to because of that and there was a great interview with Suza when they asked her about playing against men and she said that she'd won loads of matches but she'd never won against a

healthy man after every game there was always an excuse I had a headache I had stomach ache there was always something. Well I think that's a bit eggs in one basket training all three daughters to play chess if it was up to me I would train one to play chess one to play drafts and one to play snakes and ladders and I would hope that one of them in the field would become the world champion. Yeah the problem with snakes and ladders is it is literally all down to luck of the dice isn't it there's well there's literally no strategy there at all a lot of a lot of people say that it's just luck and there's no strategy but I would say actually I do remember when I played against you there's that guy stood in the corner with a ladder in front of him so he wanted to do it.

Don't you say that about snakes and ladders I was reading this article that really annoyed me because of what you've said so about cheating and games it was in the LA Times it was about whether you should let your kids cheat in board games and it was written by this guy who's four year old daughter cheats at snakes and ladders by like climbing up the snakes or jumping forward to the ladder bit and the gist of the article was you should let kids cheat because they don't really get a sense of fairness and ethics until they're seven or eight and before that they're just developing their creativity but the question was framed at the top as you know you're playing snakes and ladders she's cheating do you insist that your children play by the rules and then trounce them every single

time or do you let them cheat and I was like snakes and ladders is the one game where a five-year old does have a chance of beating you well it sounds like the dad is cheating all the time that's why I never let my little sister play me at snakes and ladders because she would have a chance of beating me actually I'm like no we're going bowling we're doing the test your strength machine again yeah that was until she was about seven years old yeah um chest.com they have chest detectives which I love so they've got six chest detectives and I didn't realize how big chest.com is I mean it's absolutely massive this global site since March the number of accounts they have closed for cheating specifically is 85,000 now obviously that might be some people

setting up new accounts after the first time but that is a lot of people cheating around the world well apparently it's 30% of chest masters again according to this quite exactly the people you thought should really be a prophet but they quite often play matches on there for money or tournaments and 30% of them he says he's had to give a warning to and he says there's a system where you give them one warning and you say our computers have seen that you're cheating and using a computer and then he says the vast majority of them don't do it again which he said is so they're really being noble and realizing they've done wrong but presumably they just think oh shit they've got detectives on this one. In 2013 there was a Bulgarian player called Berislav Ivanov

and he was forced into retirement due to a scandal he walked into the arena and they wanted to search him for an electronic device and they said can you take off your shoes and he said no my socks are too smelly so I refuse to take off my shoes and they said right okay well you're disqualified and basically you won't be able to play in any international competitions anymore. Wow. Jesus. Has he stuck with that? He doesn't play anymore. He doesn't play anymore and that's maybe because he has such smelly feet it's possible they have such smelly feet you know. He also I think in that same tournament that he had a few suspicious moments and another one was where a competitor spotted a suspicious bump under his shirt and grabbed it which seems like an

incredibly awkward moment if you've got that wrong but said it was indeed an oblong object similar to an mp3 player but then somehow didn't catch it I don't know if you ran away into the crowd or something? My torso he said is so smelly. Well that there's that story in 1993 at the world open where there was a guy called John von Neumann and he came in and he was playing he was an unrated newcomer and he was wearing headphones the whole time suspicious already and he drew with a grandmaster in this tournament this is an unrated player and everyone kept pointing out that he had the suspicious bulge in one of his pockets which appeared to make soft humming noises and buzzing sounds at real pivotal points in the match and so they got him afterwards and

said listen we think there's a bit something dodgy going on here and one of the tournament directors quizzed him about chess and it turns out he didn't even have the basic fundamental knowledge of how to play chess when asked the basic question yeah so he was sent in he had someone on the headphones just telling him what to do the only move the knobbly one no not that one no no the one with the one with five knobs on the end don't take your finger off it once you touch it I want to see the Michael Spicer the man in the other room you tit okay it's time for fact number two and that is Andy my fact is that imitators of Harry Houdini included Houdini, Boudini, Udini, Houdini, Houdini, Houdini, Houdini, Bernardi and cunning

the jailbreaker oh my goodness yeah there's a footballer called Troy Dini I wonder if he was originally a Houdini probably probably if it's he's very good in the box that's a Houdini joke about him getting out of the box there we go um so this is this is from a great article on Genie magazine which is a kind of magic Wikipedia uh a Wikipedia about magic that is and it's just about all the people Houdini was so successful that just everyone started imitating him um there was another guy called Kola who obviously didn't get into the main fact because it doesn't sound enough like Houdini but his his catchphrase was give my regards to the chief of police which is just such a great thing to shout as you're escaping yeah um yeah and often these people would

advertise in a way that you would definitely think it was Houdini right yeah so like there was a guy who was called the great Alexander that you would think well that sounds often like Houdini he's fine right but then I saw on wildabouthoudini.com which is like a blog all about Houdini there was a flyer from this guy called the great Alexander and it just said in massive letters Houdini and you would think by walking past that Houdini would be there but it actually if you read the small print it said Houdini the great escape artist would be outdone by the great Alexander which I think we should give a shout out to wildabouthoudini.com because it is unbelievable it's made by this guy called John Cox and he's collated I think it must be every

single primary source about Houdini ever like every newspaper clipping every diary entry of everyone who ever met him it's so good you can just disappear into it well it's really nice isn't it because you get the article and often you then have to do extra digging but he's he's put the picture of the newspaper where it was originally mentioned like for example Houdini didn't start off as Houdini when he got into the world of of performance he was originally a trapeze artist and he was billed as Eric Prince of the air and he you read that but next to it he's tracked down the original citation for it in an advert in a newspaper to show that this existed as a real thing so he's really done his research for the website. Yeah he's got the Houdini source of why

he left one of his very first jobs as Projea the wild man of Mexico or Projea maybe which I think we've mentioned before that he played this role and his job was to snarl madly as raw meat was thrown at him and so this is one of his early performance acts and he quit when he ended up being hit in the eye with a slab of meat and indeed he recalls this himself there's a 1902 newspaper article what's also great about him is that he wrote prolifically columns for newspapers and he was writing while he was in Berlin for Oktoberfest in fact and he said I couldn't look at my trainer for three weeks because my eyes were closed that caused me to become tame because of this meat slab slapping him in the face. He had his own magazine. Who did Houdini? Houdini had

his own magazine called conjurer's monthly magazine and it wasn't explicitly his magazine but if you read any single edition of it you would notice that it was plugging Houdini it was writing malicious gossip about other magicians Houdini didn't like and criticizing all the people imitating him it only lasts for about a year but yeah. He did like to sort of have a go at other magicians because he did find himself constantly having his ideas and his inventions stolen and he desperately wanted to make sure that people couldn't use them but that was really hard because if you were to patent your invention as part of the patent you would need to reveal what the trick was so he could never do that. He did get around it slightly there was one loophole that he managed

to find which was he had the Chinese water torture cell and that was one that he prized a lot and what he did was he put on a play where that was in the play this act that you would escape but he only put the play on to one person sitting in the audience and then he was able to copyright the act as opposed to patent it so that no one could then do it because it was copyrighted as a play. When he died he gave his tricks to his brother didn't he so his brother was also a magician or an escape artist which I didn't know. He was called Theo but he went under the name Hardine which is almost like one of these ripoff names isn't it? Yeah in fact it's just about the only sound that is not made by those imitators. And when Theo died in 1945 the props went up for sale

and they were eventually bought by David Copperfield and they're currently in storage in Las Vegas and the way to get through them they're in a big room that's next door to a sex shop and you have to go through the sex shop to get to the warehouse and there was an interview with Hugh Jackman who'd went to see them and he said that the way you get to this warehouse is that there's a mannequin in the sex shop and you have to press the nipple of the mannequin and when you press the nipple a special door opens and you can go in and see all of Houdini's tricks. Oh my god. That is so good. Would he be happy about that? Those tricks should never... They shouldn't exist really still should they because when Houdini died he gave them to his

brother to Houdini and the stipulation was that once his brother had died that all of his stuff all of his magical effects and and physical things had to be burnt and destroyed so that's how that was meant to end. However Houdini sold a lot of it during his lifetime in the 40s to a guy who was a Houdini enthusiast called Sidney Hollis Radner and Radner then put it in a magical museum the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame at Niagara Falls. Now in 1995 a fire broke out in the museum and completely destroyed the museum however all of Houdini's stuff survived despite the whole building going down so it feels like it doesn't want to disappear feels like it wants to continue on. Who really was escaping all that time? Was it Houdini or his equipment? Because if they escaped

a fire maybe he was a patsy to them. His tricks were quite interesting weren't they especially the escaping things. He escaped from piano boxes from coffins from ladders that he was locked to from glass boxes he once escaped from the belly of a whale. Is that living or dead the whale? It was dead the dead whale. Okay still good and when he was in Leeds he got into a big barrel of beer. You guys read about this one it's pretty cool. It was at the Tetley brewery and they put him in a massive barrel of beer and said okay you have to escape but Houdini was tea total and he became overcome by the alcohol and lost consciousness and had to be hauled out by his assistant. That is so good. Wow he used to do that by the way there was a level of PR about that

where the beer keg in particular would be if it was a town that's centered around a beer industry he would use that as a way of promoting and appealing to everyone there. But if you're somewhere that doesn't do beer let's say he's going to you know the home of Melton Mowberry pork pies. Does he have to escape from an enormous pie? You mean the home of Melton Mowberry pork pies? You mean Melton Mowberry. Yeah exactly I had a momentary loss of confidence thinking is that an actual town? But yeah imagine that because actually the pastry case of a pork pie is technically known as a coffin isn't it? So he is escaping from a coffin. And actually what you do is you put him in the pie and you put the pie on a conveyor belt going towards a massive oven and if he can't

escape the pie in time he'll be cooked. He has a connection to the first ever episode of no such thing as a fish. Can you guess what that is? Okay what did we do? What did we talk about? We talked about CERN and the large hadron collider. Oh we talked about the Philippa Langley finding Richard the third under a car park. I cannot believe you guys have not mentioned the most obvious fact from episode one. We recorded the whole thing locked inside a cave. Before Andy came here we had an Andrew Hunter Flurry, an Andrew Hunter Murray, an Andrew Hunter Flurry. Does he have something to do with President Garfield's anus? Yes he does. Did he escape from President Garfield's anus? No he did not. He never went in in the first place.

He was obsessed with murderers so he bought all this paraphernalia. He had this massive collection and he was obsessed with John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln of course and he was also obsessed with Charles Guto the man who killed President Garfield. He bought all of these things to do with him like his phrenological analysis and he was locked in Guto's death row cell and escaped and that was one of the famous tricks and in the process he freed all the other prisoners on the same death row as him. Apparently he freed them and then he locked them up again in the wrong cells. I have one more thing about Houdini's habits at home because he and his wife were extremely close. Not as close as he was with his mother which is another story for another time

but when Houdini and his wife had an argument he would leave, he'd walk around the block and then he'd come back and he would open the door of the room where his wife was and throw his hat into the room right? If it was thrown out again she was still angry and I guess he would do it again and if the hat remained in the room she she calmed down and they were going to resolve it. What if the argument was about him leaving his clothes hanging around the house all the time? Like a lot of the arguments in my house are about. You keep throwing your things all over the floor. He was actually one of the things he was as famous for as escaping apparently and this is

according to the Wild About Houdini website was his needle trick and the East Indian needle trick involved him basically swallowing a whole load of needles and some thread and then he'd vomit it all back up again but the thread would be threaded perfectly through all the needles with a little knot before each one very impressive yada yada yada but the weird thing about that is talking of how close he was to his wife she died in a place called Needles. No. Needles, California. That is the least spooky thing I've ever heard.

It's like I've spent days searching for a Houdini-based coincidence. That is the least impressive coincidence since Geoffrey the cat and that mongoose that time. I have one last Houdini imitator to mention. This Houdini impersonator was dubbed Harry Houdini and it was an orangutan from Borneo who lived in San Diego Zoo and whose real name was Ken Allen. That was the name of the orangutan. His real name. His real name.

Real name. Real name. Real name, isn't it? Yeah. His real name was something in orangutan language probably. It's what the zoo called him. He was called Ken Allen. But Ken Allen is quite a famous orangutan I think.

Very famous. Yeah, for the fact that he was constantly successfully escaping from his enclosure and no one could work out why. So he got given the name Harry Houdini and they eventually had to bring in mountaineer experts to look at the wall to see if it was the crags in the wall that he was somehow gripping onto to getting out and it turns out that that's what it was in the end and they had to spend $40,000 eliminating all the holds in the wall so that Ken Allen couldn't escape anymore.

But yeah, Time Magazine listed it in 2011 as one of the top 11 zoo escapes of all time. And I refuse for this podcast to ever end until we cover the other 10. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that when the gates at Surman Lena Prison in Finland are locked, it's to keep tourists out, not to keep prisoners in. This is his prison on an island just off Helsinki, just really near Helsinki, and it's an open prison. But I was reading an article in the New Statesman, an article written by Helen Lewis,

a journalist who went and visited and she wanted to go and check out the prison because it's quite famous. And they'd have to close the gates because tourists keep on wandering to the island, which is a tourist destination in its own right and trying to get in. So prisoners are allowed to wander out, people are not allowed to wander in. But it's an amazing place. Finland's one of these places that has lots of open prisons, so it's got 13 open prisons. I think about a third of their prisoners are in these prisons and they can do things like they

have like therapy horses and they have saunas, they have their own little houses like huts that are sort of like hostels that they stay in with shared cooking facilities, nice little sitting room with a big widescreen TV. You can stay, you can go to the mainland if you want, stay with your family overnight if you ask for permission. It's a good sitch. And as a result, it has practically no recidivism. So it's really interesting because it seems like it's for people

often nearing the end of sentences where they might have been in higher security prisons for the early part of their sentence. This is a way of slowly acclimatising them to life on the outside. So you're not just going straight from maximum big house, you know, 23 hours a day in a room to the open world again, because that's a really juttering change. I did read though that, and I'm quoting exactly here, attempts to escape are limited to a few dozen a year, which sounds like a lot to me. It does sound like a lot.

That sounds like an enormous amount. Given that there are, I think there are only about 100 prisoners in there. In 2013, they had doubled the number of attempted prison escapes in any other country in the world. Wow. But the idea is, why would you try and escape? If you're getting towards the end of your time and you know that if you try and escape, then you're going to get put back in the big house again. Then that's the idea, right?

That's why you would never in theory make sense that you would never try and escape. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Maybe it gets you more time, more jail time in that same place, because that sounds like a pretty cushy deal. Sadly, I think you get sent back to one of the normal prisons if you try and get out. So it's not a good plan.

But I mean, the conclusion of most people who look into it is that the disadvantages of the odd escaped not too dangerous prisoner are outweighed by the advantages of the fact that places like Finland and Norway is another one like this have a recidivism rate of 20%. So only 20% of prisoners after like, I think it's 10 years end up back in prison, whereas here it's 75% and in the US it's 83%. So it seems to be working. And also there's no challenge in an escape because you get, you literally get given a key to your cell.

Yes. The Harry Houdini of Finland is not very impressive at all, is he? Just opens the door, wanders onto the ferry. Saves loads of money as well. I don't know how our prisons, which are very kind of unpleasant situations, managed to be also so expensive. But I think it costs, whereas these ones are quite cheap. So it costs the equivalent of 160 euros a day compared with 205 euros for a closed jail.

I guess maybe those, those locks, those locks cost money. Yeah, it'll be tiny things, won't it? Remember that fact James told us about when they took a single olive out of the meals on airplanes that they saved? If you take a single bar out of a prison gate over the year, that actually leads to huge savings. America used to have rotating prisons, which I did not know. That sounds fun.

It's unbelievable. It's basically, there's a central pole and there's a cylinder of cells all the way around it. And if the warden turns a crank, I have no idea the mechanism that powers this must have been pretty big. The prison rotates and you get locked away. You basically don't have a door to escape through once the prison has been rotated. That's clever. A bit like an escape room.

It's exactly like an escape room. Yeah. Yeah. There are only a couple left. One of them is called Squirrel Cage and it's in Iowa. And that was three stories tall. But that's not a functioning. That's now a sort of museum heritage thing, isn't it?

There are no rotating prisons currently operating in America. That would be too much like fun. Because they were really dangerous. It was too dangerous for the prisoners as well. Because let's say a fire broke out in the prison or if the mechanism broke down and it took ages to fix, you would have people dehydrated, not being able to eat, not being able to escape. Yeah, absolutely. It was too chaotic.

So they eventually had to abandon it. I assumed you were saying that people got squished as the rotating happened. Like in the revolving door. Oh, no. Oh, okay. They did. Your hand could be caught as if it's suddenly, if you were putting your hand outside the bar and they suddenly very quickly rotated it.

They were saying that hands would get lobbed off and arms. What? Yeah. So it was a very dangerous mechanism. Jesus Christ. Well, you just need a recording that you get at the theme parks. Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle slash prison cell at all times. And they won't get lobbed off.

Wow. Boy. Well, that turned horrific very quickly. Another very dangerous prison that is also a kind of open prison is this extraordinary place, San Pedro prison in Bolivia. It's the largest prison in La Paz. And it basically is its own town and sort of not deliberately. It's through corruption really.

So the inmates all have jobs within the prison walls. And the only way in which it's now a prison is that it's surrounded by guards who won't let you out. But the inmates all have these jobs. They rent accommodation. They live in there with their families quite often. They get their money mostly from working in the cocaine factory inside the prison. And then they sell the cocaine to tourists to come and visit the prison. And in the 90s, I don't know if any listeners were backpacking in the 90s,

but apparently it was a backpacker hotspot. It was this unwritten rule that if you went to La Paz, the backpacker, you could get let into this prison and hang out in this really quite dangerous environment, just lapping up the local culture. And the only reason they cracked down is because they used to offer tours around the prison. And the government cracked down on this because they thought the police were big stalking the money from the illegal tours. And they have politicians and stuff inside.

They have elected leaders in the prison who apparently enforce the laws of the community, mainly by stabbing people. Wow. That's like a fit, like only in the hand or something. You know, you steal an apple, you get stabbed in the hand because you can't just send someone to prison within a prison, I guess. No. Okay.

It sounds like you're an advocate for this place, Anna. It does a little bit, especially when you said it's where you get the cocaine, and then you're like, oh, and this is also the place where you lap up the local culture, which sounded like the most obvious euphemism for dream taking I'd ever heard in my life. You can lap it up, you can sniff up the local culture, rub the local culture into your gums if you want to. It's the backpacking experience. Oh, my word.

You guys, of course, know Eamon de Valera, the hero of Irish politics, right? Sure. But why don't you just, for the listeners at home, why didn't you quickly explain to them? Eamon de Valera, great hero of the Irish independence movement. He was locked up in, oh, I think it was about 1917 or 18, right? That's right. And the story, he escaped, right? But the story of how he escaped is absolutely insane.

He was in for possibly conspiring with Germany. That was the charge. So he stole a key from the prison chaplain, impressive. He got some candles from the chapel and he pressed the key into the candles, right? So now he's got an impression of the key. But the problem is, you need someone to make the key. You know, he didn't have the facility to do that. You need to make some metal to pour into the thing, right?

Exactly. So what they did was, he and a couple of, I think, fellow prisoners, they sent the IRA a Christmas card on which they had got someone to draw a cartoon of a drunk man holding a big key. And the key that they drew on the card was an exact copy of the impression he had taken from the chaplain's key, right? So basically it was a code saying, make a key that looks like this and it'll get me out. The guards didn't notice.

They made the key to the dimensions on the card. They sent it inside a cake, genuinely inside a cake. Christmas cake, probably. Probably. It got through. It didn't fit the lock. They made it too small. As soon as he got out of the cake, he thought, oh, this doesn't fit.

Did they make it the size of the drawing on the card? Well, they had to do it again. They had to send another amusing cartoon, this time with the kind of Celtic symbol in the middle of which was a key. I was going to say, did they have to wait till next Christmas? Or did they do it like maybe as a Valentine's card or an Epiphany card? You're like, oh, in Ireland, this is a thing we do every year. Big thing, yeah.

So then basically, they sent the second cartoon. They sent it back another key. That also did not work. This time it was too big. The Goldie unlocks key is coming up. Very nice. Eventually, they just sent a third cake to the prison. And inside that cake was just a blank key and a set of files saying,

make your own bloody key. And it worked. Just one weird thing on prison, like living within a prison, is that women don't have to wear prison-issue clothing in British jails. And men do. And that's been the case since 1971. And it's because research finds that people are here to the rules better if they're not actually wearing uniform.

And I think the idea is that it sort of humanizes you and it's like, I'm more willing to obey the rules. In America, with famously quite strict penal system, the inmates often do have to wear orange. Or in fact, when oranges the new black came out, some prisons stopped their female inmates from wearing orange and made them go back to stripes because orange had become cool. Really?

Not allowed to be cool. There is, in Norway as well, at the Bastøy Rehabilitation Centre. I don't know if it's the pronunciation of that. It's got an O with a line through it. Bastøy, I think it is. Bastøy. They have a similar thing where the guards don't wear uniforms. And they don't wear uniforms because they say they don't want to create

sort of unnecessary division between them and the prisoners there, who they don't call prisoners. They call residents because it just feels more friendly. It just feels like a cool dad, really, that prison. Closed. It's just quite a bit too hard. Speaking of words that begin with B-A-S-T, as we just were, with your Bastøy place or whatever it was.

Segway incoming. The place in Finland, which is called Suomenlinna, is it, Anna? Suomenlinna, yeah. Suomenlinna. That is, like you said, a famous tourist attraction, and it's because it's a bastion fort. And a bastion fort, you guys might have seen these. It's where you have a fortress, but instead of being a normal castle,

it's in a star shape. Have you ever seen those? You get them around Europe, don't you? Do you know why you have star-shaped castles or why you used to have star-shaped castles? Is it something defensive? Is it to confuse aeroplanes because they'll look at the castle and think that that's up because it's a star?

So they'll fly in the opposite direction. Brilliant. That's such a good idea. Oh, my God. That's so genius. But no, it was a time before playing some fudge. But Andy was pretty much there. So basically, it was in a time of cannonballs.

And if you fire a cannonball at a normal castle, it's going to hit the wall and it might make some damage. But if you fire the cannonball at a surface which is not straight on, which is not perpendicular, it's actually slightly slanted, then the cannonball might just kind of hit the edge of it and skid off the side of it. And so the idea was to make these star-shaped forts

where if anyone was firing cannons at you, then it wouldn't initially do as much damage. And so that's why they have it. So clever. So clever. Is that a thing called, I want to say a ravelin, or it might be connected to a ravelin? I think it is that, yeah.

I remember reading that word while I was reading this fact, but yeah. Because I went to one of them in Kronborg. When we were all on tour in Denmark, there's Castle Kronborg, which is the setting for Hamlet. And they have got these star-shaped fortifications outside. And it makes it, yeah, as James said. And that's a ravelin. Useless as for a javelin at a ravelin, right?

Yeah. That's the same, guys. That's their catchphrase. They got that painted above the gates. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of Hawaii's biggest annual festivals is devoted entirely to spam.

That's spam the food. So when they invite you to the spam festival, do they send you 5,000 emails telling you it's on every year? Extend your penis at the Hawaii Spam Festival. Yeah, I love this fact. It was given to me in a conversation that I had with a mutual friend of ours, Jason Haisley. We were chatting about it.

And he said, by the way, did you know that they have the Waikiki Spam Jam, which is this annual spam festival that takes place in Hawaii. And it is a massively popular festival there. 35,000 people attend according to their website. They have live bands playing. They have merch. You can get spam t-shirts, shorts, slippers.

They have craft booths. Can I just check? Sorry, the t-shirts, shorts and slippers, they're not all made of spam, are they? No, they just feature a picture of spam, I'm guessing. Right, because that would be absolutely disgusting and not survive a wash. I've got to say, Dan, when you sent round this fact,

I thought that it was a massive exaggeration. And I've been to Hawaii and they have lots of festivals all the time. And I was like, there's no way that the spam one is one of the biggest, which is what you say, but it so is. It's absolutely huge. Yeah, and they are obsessed. Hawaii is obsessed with spam and they have spam in places that I've never heard of or dreamt of thinking they would appear.

Okay, I need to get into personal detail. Well, okay, maybe I'll dig that up too much. But, you know, McDonald's has spam burgers, and so does Burger King. They have a spam burger. And yeah, you can get them in all the local dishes. Everything spam is just integrated all over Hawaii. I think the most common way in Hawaii that it's served

is quite nice because it's a sushi spam. And that's kind of a nod to they've got a big Japanese population, actually. And also, I think it's quite nice because Hawaii obviously has quite a difficult history with Japan. And now they serve spam sushi and it's spam on top of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed and it's called Spam Musubi. And that's where you'll usually sit. I think the reason that spam is so popular,

not just in Hawaii, but also throughout the whole of the Pacific, is due to the war, isn't it? It's due to the Second World War. Because basically the Japanese soldiers took over a lot of these islands and the people, whenever they grew food, they had to give it to the Japanese soldiers and they were forced to do all this stuff. And then when the Americans came and sort of liberated them,

they didn't have any food. They were just kind of searching for any kind of food they could eat. But the American soldiers had tons of this stuff. Like they had spam coming out of their ears, the American soldiers during the Second World War. So they gave it to the locals. And that's where the kind of love of spam came from. Yeah. I listened to a podcast all about spam, which was great.

It's actually the Business Insider podcast. It's called Brought To You By. And it's about the kind of the stories behind big old brands. And anyway, it was like places that have had a US military presence around that time, because spam was just kind of taking off. And places that have rice-based dishes, because apparently it goes very well with rice. And then places with very hot climates, because it's canned.

And so it's like a canned meat that you don't even need to put in the fridge. So it's like Korea, Guam, the Philippines. It's massive. True. And the founder was a man called Hormel. And the firm that still makes it is called Hormel, Hormel. So his son took over the family firm J Hormel. And he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 1945, just as the war was ending.

And he said that there was a file called the Scurrilous File, which contained hundreds of letters of abuse sent to him by soldiers all over the world, saying, I have to eat this spam. And it's disgusting, right? And he said in this interview, maybe the verb to spam will come out of this war. Nothing would surprise me anymore. I.e. he was saying that sending random letters or communications to someone who hasn't asked for it is to spam.

Now that is not where the word spam as the verb for email comes from, but it is an earlier link between the two concepts. Isn't that weird? That's so good. That is so good. We should say what the sort of received acknowledged fact of where it comes from is, is which is it was a Monty Python sketch where Terry Jones was running a restaurant, where the only thing that you could have was spam.

And would you like spam, spam, spam, spam? It just was always different. Spam, spam, spam. And that's where the people who gave it its name took it from that. So, but I think you're right, Andy. I think that's, that's more of a direct. Is that weird? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Be cool. Monty Python sort of ruined spam for a while. For a while, Hormel was really angry about it. Just getting popular again. I think people hated it in the Second World War. And then they started to enjoy it in the 40s and 50s.

There were these spam girls, weren't there? These Hormel girls who the company employed. And they were a band. They were this musical group. And they were worried because after World War II, 90% of sales have been to the army. And they thought, oh my God, we're going to stop selling it. And so the Hormel girls traveled around the US in 35 white Chevy's doing sort of singing, dancing, parades.

They had their own radio show and sales shot up. They made spam. Cool. They were known as the Spamettes. Sometimes they span. Nice. Because and they were all dressed in like soldiers. Not soldiers uniform, but like soldiers band uniform, weren't they?

And it was kind of to remind you of the wartime effort, really. But then also Hormel sold chili con carne. So he saw this thing with the Hormel girls work so well in America. So he thought, OK, I'm going to try and do it with chili con carne. So he created a mariachi band which went around Mexico trying to sell Hormel chili con carne. How did that go? Sounds like it was less successful. It was less successful.

Hormel's grandson was also in the arts. He still is. He's a guitarist and we all will have heard his work. He's called Smokey Hormel and Smokey is his birth name. That's not a nickname. He was called Smokey. Sounds like the company was too used to naming hams. And he's a he's a guitarist.

He plays blues and country, but he also appears on albums by Adele and by Beck and by yeah, Mick Jagger. And he's the main guitarist on what was Johnny Cash's big final major hit, Hurt, the Nine Inch Nails cover, Kid Rock, Joe Strummer. I mean, he's done them all. Hormel have a new innovation. They've got a thing that they've just announced this October. It's bacon scented face masks.

In a very 2020 story, they say it has... Is that to wear when you're asleep? No, it's to wear when you're going out and about and you want to smell bacon constantly. Not like a face mask that covers your eyes. Not a sleep mask. I mean, a COVID face mask. As James said, you've been going around in these COVID times just wearing a sleep mask. It's terrible.

I keep walking into people. How are you supposed to keep two meters away from people when you can't even see them? Because I was thinking like a sleep mask that smells of bacon is completely pointless because the smell of bacon famously wakes you up, doesn't it? Oh, no. This is a thing that they claim it has, and I'm quoting here, the latest in pork scented technology. I don't know what the last thing in pork scented technology was,

but it says keep the delicious smell of bacon always wrapped around your nose. Not sure. You can get a spam marita along a similar vein, which is a spam flavoured cocktail and soho here in this very capital. Yeah, get a Jinju Korean restaurant in Soho, and it's made of tequila, mezcal, agave nectar, pineapple and fresh lime. Sounds absolutely delicious until you add the spam. One more member of the Hormel family, which we were talking about a few minutes ago,

is James Hormel, and he is the main donor of the Hormel Center of San Francisco Public Library, which collects all the importance of LGBTQ books from the last 20, 30, 40 years of American history, and he also was the first openly gay man to represent the U.S. as an ambassador. So this was under Clinton's administration, and they needed a new ambassador for Luxembourg, and they chose this guy. James Hormel obviously done a lot of philanthropy and stuff, and so he's a really good person to have to do this, but the Republicans were just not having it. They were like, we cannot have an openly gay man representing the United States as an ambassador. So there's a massive, massive argument, and to support their argument,

the Republicans went to the Hormel Library and then looked through all of their history, and then found a load of what they regarded as very pornographic things, and they said, look, this man supports pornography. He shouldn't be representing the United States, and it got really, really high up this argument until it was pointed out that all of the works that they pointed out were in his library, were also in the Library of Congress. And then he became... Spam on your face. Have you heard of Mark Benson? No. Andy, you don't mean Mark Benson, do you?

I do. Give it his full name. Mark, I love spam, Benson. And we're going from one grateful anthropist to another here out there. Absolutely, absolutely. And what links them a single can of spam? This is a spam lover called Mark Benson. He's from the UK. And in 2017, he and his wife went to the festival in T-shirt saying, Mr and Mrs, I love spam, Benson. So his wife's on it too, and he has changed his name. So this is the Hawaiian festival they went to.

Yes, they did. And not only that, and not only has he legally changed his middle name to I love spam, but... I think if Mark Benson really likes spam, he changed his first name to I love spam. Actually, I think you can hide your middle name, can't you? That's a good point. I mean, he does have a T-shirt saying his name. He's not gone very far to hide it. But they went to Hawaii after they went to the Spam Museum, which is... Where's that? Is it Minnesota? It's at the headquarters. They call it the Guggenham, very clever. But they went to the museum and they got married there. They got married at the Spam Museum. Spam's brand manager got themselves ordained in order

to officiate at this wedding. So it's the most spam themed wedding ever. So good. You are now spamming wife. He said, you know why he said he changed... He loves spam so much, or he said he changed his name as a tribute to Spam, to his grandpa who worked in the Spam factory in Liverpool, and to the war effort. Okay. Quite right. It's one way to remember the war, I think. That museum that's... Oh, go on, Andy. You about to say something. They've got some lovely children as well. So we know at least they didn't need a spam donor. Okay. I'm glad I let you talk there.

That museum is in Austin, in Minnesota, and it sounds quite interesting. They have volunteer guides that are known as Spambassaders, and they walk around the Spam Museum with little bits of spam on toothpicks, which they call Spampools. Oh my God. Did you guys hear about the 1990s spam carving contest in Seattle? No. This was amazing. It ran for 10 years before being shut down. Maybe people lost interest, I don't know. But you were given two cans of spam, one plastic knife, and 15 minutes. You were allowed to bring your own extra tools if you wanted to, but power tools and chainsaws were explicitly banned. Sorry, two cans of spam,

and you might want to use power tools. Well, you're absolutely right. You would have gone on very well with the organizers, James, because they said that's overkill. Well, sometimes it's hard to open those tins, isn't it? So you might need... A sort of pneumatic drill to get in there. I think they're Ring Pools, aren't they? They are Ring Pools, they are Ring Pools. I'm looking at them upside down. There were so many good sounding winners. In 1994, the winner was Newd descending a staircase. So I'm going to carve that in spam in a quarter of an hour. Are you sure that wasn't just a description of the person who'd won?

I've not done a very good sculpture, but I am Newd, and I am walking down the staircase. Other winners included Jurassic Pork, Spamhenge, very good, and my favorite, a model of singer Spammy Winnett singing Spam by Your Man. 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 all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on that Shriverland, James... At James Harkin. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Bits of merchandise are up there as well. Go check it out. Anyway, we'll be back again next week. We'll see you then with another episode. Goodbye. you