No Such Thing As A Fish - 352: No Such Thing As Loki-day

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Dan, Anna, James and Andy discuss a warrior who was Trieu, letters that are false, and why nobody seems to know what day it is Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody, before we start this week's show, we all have an announcement for you. Are we all gonna do it at once? Now let's do one word at a time. Okay, brilliant. That'll be fun, you know, like that amazing improv game. Oh, great, yeah. So, I'll go first. We have... Written. A. New.

Book. That's called... Oh, fuck sake. Oh, Jesus, come on, guys. Never mind. We've written the new book. It's called Funny You Should Ask. It's available in all shops. It's really good. If you're looking for a last-minute Christmas gift, I can't think of anything better, really. It is. It's sort of a compilation of the weirdest questions

that might spring to your mind in your very bored moments, things you've always wondered, things you've never wondered, but now you're desperate to know the answer to, like, who would win in a race out of a human, a fish, or a mermaid? Or if I take a swan to the vet, does the queen have to pay? Yeah, if spiders can walk on the ceiling, why can't they get out of the bath? Huge question. Always wondered about that. Why does cat food come in beef and lamb flavours, but not mouse flavour?

Such a good question. Yeah. Buy it for your cat as a Christmas present. Your cat wants to know. And this book, it's not just written by us for it. It's written by all the QILs, so a lot of the QILs that you'll know because they've come on here, like Alex and Anne, but loads of the other QILs that are just a complete mystery, even to me, even though I've been working with them for many, many years.

It's fun. It's a lovely blue colour, and it's reasonably priced. It could not be the more perfect Christmas present to give you all the conversation you'll need. So get it for the facts, but mainly for the blue on the cover. And it's available in bookshops and on the internet. You know how to buy a book, do it. Funny you should ask by the QILs. OK, on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is, there is such a big market for fake letters by Abraham Lincoln that people have started selling fake fakes. Wow. Yeah. How cool is this? There's a big old market for fake letters of Abraham Lincoln. People, he died in 1865. And there were a load of scam artists in the 20s and 30s who started faking the letters and faking his signature, using old paper,

all these amazing tactics they used. And those fake letters are now worth thousands of dollars in their own right. They've sold for thousands of dollars each. But obviously, that means there's a market. And so people have started forging forgeries. And is it like Chinese whispers where the fake fake fakes look absolutely nothing like the original letters? It's just a picture of a horse's ass.

Yeah, Abraham Lincoln. But so these fake fakes, they have to be attributed to the fake writer, right? So as in people who became famous in that period for having written these fake letters in themselves have become celebrities in that world, and then they're buying fakes of the fake Forders one. It's not just a random fake. No. No, but also it's the fact that the real ones are so expensive.

Is that right? Like if you're a person with a normal income and you want to buy a Lincoln letter, you just can't afford it. So the next best thing is to buy a fake one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the weird thing is, there are so many Abraham Lincoln memorabilia collectors in the USA. It seems to be the national pastime.

I always thought it was American football, but I turned on the TV on Thanksgiving and it was just people passing around fake letters to each other. If you look closely at these stands in American football matches, they're all trading their Abraham Lincoln bits of beard. There are 15,000 collectors, apparently serious collectors of memorabilia, not just your fly by night amateurs. 50,000.

Yeah, which is 1000 more than there are books written about. Apparently there have been 14,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. Still a lot, isn't it? It's a record after Jesus and Napoleon, apparently. Really? I saw it when we were in Washington DC for our tour last year. I saw a huge pillar at the Ford Theatre where they have glued every single book that's been written about Lincoln,

or at least as many as they could get, to a pillar that extends to about four floors. So we should say the most famous faker is Joseph Cozy, right? And is it mostly his that are being sold, that are being forged? So Joseph Cozy was sort of the big Lincoln faker, who was kind of an amazing guy. So he started out, he went into the Library of Congress, he was really into American history and stuff,

and then he saw a pay warrant that was endorsed by Benjamin Franklin, so he had his signature on it. This was in 1929 and the pay warrant was from 1786, and he took it, and his argument when he was caught was that the Library of Congress belongs to the people, and he's one of the people, so it's not actually stealing. Anyway. Oh, wow, that's a good argument.

So he went to sell it to a dealer who told him it was fake. He knew it wasn't fake, so he basically devoted his life to making actual fakes to screw over these idiot dealers who couldn't tell the difference. Wow, I mean, that must have been pretty hard for him to go in and say, no, it's not fake, I stole it from the Library of... I mean, yeah, actually, I did buy it from a dodgy guy on the phone. It's so weird, this relationship he had with his arch enemy

is a bit like, you know, in superhero films, which I don't watch, they, I think, the superhero often, as well as hating his arch enemy, has this weird grudging respect for him, and they'll have a chat at the end, you know, where they're bonding. It's kind of like that happens. He had that with William Burquist, who was the investigator for the New York Public Library, and it was him who spotted in 1933

something dodgy was going on with the documents, set up this big sting operation, caught Cosy as he was trying to, like, escape getting away with forging stuff, and basically congratulated him, brought him down to the police station and said, you're a genius. And Cosy immediately was like, oh, thanks, well, you should see what I've done with this

and pulled some little forgeries out of his pocket. I was like, look at this. And Burquist was like, look, employ your talents better in future, please, don't do it again, off you go. And Cosy disappeared and immediately started forging loads and loads of stuff again. But they sort of hung out,

as well as Burquist trying to stop these forgeries getting into the market and trying to suppress him. They also, like, paid each other social calls sometimes. He would occasionally give Cosy a bit of money to help him on his way. Wow. It's very weird. All right, it's weird. Do you know how Cosy got started?

He got, he was in the Army originally. Not originally. He joined the Army as a young man, I guess. Not as a baby. Look, anyway. That's why they call it the infantry, isn't it? He got kicked out of the Army for assaulting a cook in his company.

I don't know why he assaulted the cook, but he forged a certificate of honourable discharge from the Army, because he was obviously dishonourably discharged. And so that was, I think, one of his first steps on the road to forging all this other stuff. Yes, but he signed it as Abraham Lincoln,

which was his name. He never really made money from it. He sold stuff quite cheap. I think Cosy was nervous that if he tried to sell it really expensively, people would interrogate it more. So he'd sell it quite cheap, and he said when he was questioned,

the pleasure that he got was from seeing that forgery that he sold, climbing up and up the auction market and then selling for a huge amount in an auction house, him sitting there at home, tapping his fingers together, going, I know that's just something I scribbled in my bathroom.

Yeah. And he had a little bit of a loophole, didn't he? Because he, in New York, it was illegal to kind of advertise something as being something it wasn't, and then selling it on. But if you went to someone and just said,

oh, I found this scribbled signature, I don't know who it's by. I don't know what it's on. I know it says Abraham Lincoln, but I don't know who did it then. And you sold it to them, and technically that wasn't a felony. So that's so clever.

Yeah. Well, we don't know. He might, I don't think he is, but there's a suggestion that he kept operating for years and years after he went AWOL, because he kind of dropped off the radar in 1943. But even in 1956, the New Yorker wrote a piece saying,

is he still producing forgeries? We don't know. So you're saying he could, were you about to say he might still be around today if you've actually got a signed copy of a No Such Things as a Fish book? Check us out, Joseph Cozy. Do you know how you can tell if a Lincoln letter is fake?

No. How can you do that? Oh, there are so many exciting ways you can tell. So one is what he wrote. So if he's talking about his iPad. That basically is one of the tips they give, is what's he, you know, is it signed 1866 or later,

in which case it's not real. But another thing is just what he signed. So he never, ever signed Abe or Honest Abe or Old Abe. Oh, the Abe beister. Exactly. It's either Abe Lincoln on letters or if he was a lawyer, he would just sign Lincoln. So there are all these things.

Also, if you wrote a letter on animal skin, then it's fake. Oh, really? Because a lot of presidential documents are on animal skin or vellum, and their letters are on paper. That's another way you can tell. Oh, it wasn't like he was an early animal rights campaigner

or anything. You know, we shouldn't be using the animals for our mess. Absolutely not. No. Do you guys see that, I think it was only in the last month or so, they sold a lock of Lincoln's hair for $50,000. Wow.

Although there is a thing about fake locks of hair, we do know that quite a lot of them exist, because one collector said, if every lock of Lincoln's hair out there was genuine, the man would have been a woolly mammoth. I'm not quite sure what the provenance of this is. $50,000. Yeah, that's amazing.

I went on eBay to look at what the most expensive items currently on eBay are that you can buy that are related to Lincoln. And hair is a big, big thing. So there's strands of hair that you could buy of Lincoln, and they're all quite affordable. I found one for 636 pounds that you could buy. I found an exciting, well, the more exciting one is the bundle that I found.

00:10:48,960 --> 00:10:50,400 It's for his baby son, all right? That's not for Dan. I'm more interested in this one for $1,500. You can get a bundle of Lincoln, Geronimo, Lord Nelson, and King George's hair. For $1,500, which is exciting. And then dice them all together.

No, they're four separate cards. Oh, that's true. Yeah, you could have the ultimate wig, the ultimate historical wig. I don't think this one's real, I have to say. The other things that this guy's selling is Tiger King, Joe Exotic. He's selling premium condoms of this guy's. So it's a big premium condoms of this guy's. Do you mean?

I know, because I only thought he did the basic condoms. I'm a bit annoyed that I've been buying the wrong Joe Exotic condoms now. I don't know Tiger King, Joe Exotic, but I don't think I need to. Oh, OK. It was a bit bigger. Imagine the superhero movie,

where you've got one superhero who keeps tigers and another superhero who's a woman who also keeps tigers and they kind of have a grudging respect for each other, apart from they don't really. Then that's pretty much where you are. Sounds amazing. Thanks. I'll watch it off.

Yeah, it's huge. I'm just on Lincoln Letters. Did you know that whenever he wrote a letter that was a bit angry or telling someone off or disagreeing with someone, as soon as he'd written it, he put it in a locked drawer overnight? The equivalent of not sending your email

until the next morning. That's clever. That's hot. Yeah. That's a really good idea. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, you should do that more often, Andy. I stand by everything I said in that letter to you.

I mean, Andy goes to bed at half-night every night. I know. And those 9.15 drunken emails from him are too much. Did you guys know that Abraham Lincoln's hair went to the inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt? I didn't know that. Yeah, so he was handed a ring by John Hay, who was the Secretary of State for Roosevelt,

but he was also Lincoln's personal secretary between 1861 and 1965. He had a strand of Lincoln's hair and he put it into a ring, and the ring was worn by Teddy Roosevelt on the day that he was inaugurated in 1905 as president. Yeah, so Lincoln was there. Do they do that kind of something old,

something new, something borrowed, something old? That's right. The day. Exactly, Lincoln related. For the next inauguration, it's going to be Donald Trump's hair that's going to be worn. And the something old is the actual president. Yeah.

Something orange. Speaking of Donald Trump, at time of recording, he still hasn't left the White House, and I'm assuming he probably won't have done that. We can put this out any time now, any time. Do you know someone else who refused to leave the White House was Mary Todd Lincoln? Really?

Yeah, so when Abraham Lincoln died, obviously it was extremely distressing for her. She was inconsolable. She locked herself into the White House, and Andrew Johnson couldn't move in. And so Andrew Johnson became president on April the 15th, and he couldn't move into the White House until May the 26th, because Mary Todd Lincoln just refused to leave.

You can buy her opera glasses. You can't buy them. Actually, no, there isn't one pair. This is the problem. So there is a pair of opera glasses, which ivory, and they were engraved. Mary Lincoln left these glasses in the box at Ford's Theatre, Good Friday, April 14th,

when our president and leader was cruelly assassinated. They sold for £9,000 last year. But there are at least three pairs of Abraham Lincoln's opera glasses in circulation, which does make you consider how keen was he on seeing this play? Well, it's so good for the collectors of the weird paraphernalia, which is a lot of it is around the assassination, isn't it? People collecting stuff that was at the theatre.

And it's great for them that Abraham Lincoln seemed to stuff his pockets with stuff. There's a collection. I think it's in the Library of Congress, and it's the contents of Abraham Lincoln's pockets on the night of the assassination. It's just full. I don't know how big pockets were in those days.

But that was two pairs of glasses, I guess. You lose one while you're sitting there watching the opera. You've got a second. One of them was mended with string, I guess, because such a humble guy, such a kind of Jeremy Corbyn-style leader, having glasses take together. Well, like Jack Duckworth, I think.

Jack Duckworth. Sorry, that's a coronation. It's a superhero. It's a superhero. He becomes Duck Man, when he finds a great stress. He was carrying a pocket knife, which I think is so painful, because he could have whipped that out and defended himself

had he not been shot in the back of the head. He would have literally been bringing a knife to a gunfight, hadn't he? OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that if you ask someone what day it is, they'll take twice as long to answer on a Wednesday as they would on a Monday or Friday. And that's because by Wednesday,

you literally have no idea what day it is. Does this data take into account everyone working at home and having no idea at all? We might come to that later. Oh, OK. But let me quickly explain this study very quickly. So this is a 2015 study by David A. Ellis, Richard Wiseman and Rob Jenkins,

and they asked people what day is it, is the first thing that they asked, and they timed how long it took people to respond. And most of the differences were not really significant statistically, but they did find a statistical difference between Monday and Wednesday, which was it took just over half a second for people to say, well, it's Monday, obviously,

and it took about a second and a half just under for people to go, it's Wednesday. And the same was between Wednesday and Friday, but none of the other comparisons were kind of significant. And they reckon that it's because Mondays are really depressing day because the week starts in, Fridays the exciting day because it's the new Monday, and then in the middle they all kind of come together.

And that's what they think. Friday is really exciting, because I get to go to bed at 10 o'clock on Friday. James, when they did the survey, when they were asking people, did they kind of dress up the actual survey as just a bit of form filling in before the experiment began? So he says, all right, let's just get you logged in.

So what day is it? And then timed them. You're smashing it. You would be at scientists. Yeah, that's what they did. They didn't tell people what the study was about. And they said, OK, first of all, what day do you think it is? That's so funny.

But then did they ask them to leave straight away? Because you'd really think you'd absolutely failed that initial question. Yes, out. OK, you can go. The whole rest of the day, you'd be going, fuck, is it Thursday? Is it Tuesday? But you'd kind of know it though,

because if you had to go in for a survey, I'd be in the preceding week going, oh, god, I remember I've got that survey on Wednesday. What are you doing on Wednesday? I've got to go and do the survey. I wish me in the forefront of my mind. That's a really good point. I'm not sure in the study, if they thought about that,

were actually the fact that they're doing the study affects the result. I suppose it does in a way like you say. Yeah. So the difference might be even greater. The difference could have thought. Yeah, could be, could be. But during lockdown, there was a study done in America. This was by the Southwest News Service.

And they asked people what day it was. And 59% of people said they were unsure what day it was. And that was this year. Wow. Most people didn't know what month it was this year. I'm not sure how scientific that one was. And there was another study with a different set of people which says what days it feel like.

And they found that usually people kind of got it right, but mismatches were 52.2% during a bank holiday. So more than half of people in a bank holiday week will not be quite sure or will think it feels like a different day than it actually feels like. Which I think is right. I agree with that. I definitely have that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People, it's because, and they've theorised that it's because certain days have stronger identities than others. Don't they? It's what they say, which is really sad for some of the real personality-less days in the middle of the week.

But I think in the follow-up study, which is also David Ellis and Co, they asked people for the words they associate most with certain days. It's very predictable. It's Monday is words like boredom, tiredness, and rubbish. Friday is fun, friends, party, and bacon, apparently. One of them is a couple of words. I mean, is there a big tradition of bacon Friday?

Is that what I don't know about? I think there is. I was going to say in my family, because I grew up in the Catholic family, we weren't supposed to have meat on Fridays. I mean, we weren't actually. Maybe that's why you're thinking about it so much though. Yes.

Oh, I could really do with a bacon salad. Yeah. I think maybe. I definitely, this is anecdote now, not data. But I definitely would allow myself to have a bacon sandwich on a Friday. Which is a bit less healthy than obviously the grains and vegetables I normally consume. That's such a scar.

Insight into your unbelievably weird mind, Andy. Friday. Friday is a huge day for you, isn't it, Andy? Bacon sandwich in the morning, 10 p.m. bedtime. Oh my God, you're off the chain. You probably got to bed early on a Thursday, thinking, well, I'm really looking forward to getting up for next morning. Like kids on Christmas Eve.

I want to maximise the Friday awakeness. Yeah. Actually, this is a thing where people are more concerned with their health on a Monday than any other day of the week. So just if you look at Google searches, people search for health related things, you know, how to stop smoking or starting a diet or make a doctor's appointment. They do that 80% more on a Monday than on a Saturday.

No one on a Saturday is searching how to give up smoking. We've all got our bacon hangover that we're trying to get out of. There are certain countries and cultures that make it a lot easier for you to remember what day it is. So in Thailand, they used to do a thing where they would dress in the colour of the day. So every day is assigned a colour. Sunday red, Monday yellow, Tuesday pink, Wednesday green, Thursday orange,

Friday blue, Saturday purple. And those colours were all to do with Hindu astrological influences and the colour was given to each one of them. So you would go out of your house and you would wear if it was a Monday yellow, that would be the colour. Everyone would be wearing yellow on a Monday. This is, yeah, this is a while ago. So, and it might be that you would have a statement piece on you

that was yellow just to represent it. And nowadays, because everyone knows their own colour, because they're born on one of those days, they have a personal colour, that becomes their colour. So more often than not, you'll see that as a prominent colour on someone in Thailand. And you can go, oh, you were born on a Wednesday or so on. That's amazing.

But then if it's a bank holiday, do you turn up on the green day wearing something blue and everyone's like, oh, it's so embarrassing. It's like going, it's like turning up to non-uniform day forgetting that it's happened and wearing a uniform, isn't it? Oh, God, it's the stuff of nightmares. I know what our colours are for all four of us here. Oh, yeah.

Of what day we were born on. So, Anna, you're blue. You were born on a Friday. What was I now? Yeah, James, you were blue. You were born on a Friday. Hey, we're blue twins. Yeah, and I am a blue.

Hey, we're blue triplets. Nice one. This is so nice and cosy and we're all friends and we're all the same colour. We're all mentally. It's like we've been chosen by the university. What day is it? Then?

You're purple. You're a Saturday. You're the tickly week you have to go. But we are now auditioning for someone to join the podcast who was born on a Friday. So if that's you, get in touch. Do you know someone whose middle name is Friday? Is it someone really famous?

I think that... No, I do. I do. But only because of research, but let's pretend I don't. Yeah, yeah. It's someone... It's a fictional character. It's not... I know that the horse in that riddle's first name is Friday. That's different, isn't it?

He rode in on a Friday. Yeah. It's not Man Friday, is it? Man Friday. So he'd be called Friday. Friday was his middle name. But it's someone whose first name is a day of the week. So...

Oh, Wednesday Adams. Wednesday Adams. So her middle name is Friday. And the reason that she's called Wednesday, I mean, I know Dan knows. Anyone know why she's called Wednesday? It's because Wednesday's child is full of woe, according to that rhyme.

And so she was like the sad child. She was miserable. Yeah. In Ghana, you are named after the day of the week you're born on. OK. So boys are named Kwadwo, Komla, Kwaku, your Kofi, Kwami, Kwazi after the days of the week. And girls are...

They're a female equivalent of two. Atsua, Abena, Aqwa, Ya, Fue, Amma and Akosua. And you get that name when you're born. And then you get another name a bit later on, but you keep your day name and it becomes your middle name. So you can tell from a birth certificate in Ghana what day it is. Did you say Kofi? Is Kofi anan one of those?

Mastery. Yeah, I guess Kofi is one of the names. That's the fifth of the list. Yeah. You just said, Andy, that you could know from a birth certificate what day the person was born. I was also saying it down. I was hoping we...

I was hoping I'd slip that one past you. Typical, typical purple comment. I looked a bit into Wednesday specifically because it's this underappreciated today. And I like the sort of stuff about the word Wednesday. It's basically the wrong word. So I've decided we should rename Wednesday. It's named after Odin, who was called Woden,

who is the early Norse god. And it was named that because it was thought to be a parallel to Mercury, which is what so, Mercury and all those romance languages, Wednesday is named after Mercury, the god. But I've recently been listening to the excellent audiobook on Norse gods by Neil Gaiman. And Odin is nothing like Mercury. So Mercury is like a fun-loving trickster, playful, wily.

Odin's not like that. I think it should be Loki. So I'm going to start calling Wednesday Loki and everyone's going to get confused. But the person who decided that it should be the equivalent, it should be Odin, was Tacitus. And this is in the first century. And it was when the Romans were kind of occupying bits of Germania,

as it was called at the time. And he decided Odin was the equivalent. And it was because, and I just love this word, they're both psychopomps, Odin and Mercury. Wow. And a psychopomp, again a word I'm going to use a lot now, is the word for a deity who escorts people from Earth to the afterlife when they die.

Wow. So that's a psychopomp. That's a great word. I thought that, let's say we're going to accept that it's Odin's day rather than Loki's day. Yeah. Let's just imagine that that's fine, which we all know now it isn't.

From this moment, we are all calling it Loki's day. But let's imagine it was Odin's day. Why is it not Odin's day? Why is it Odin's day? Like it's because it was another name that was used in Germanic areas for Odin. But Odin had more than 150 different names, any one of which we could have chosen for Wednesday

instead of Odin. So we could have had Grimm's day, a Grimm day. Oh. It's like for Wednesday, we could have had Skillfinger day. I would have been good. We could have had Sada, Saturday, but I guess that was a bit too close to Saturday, so I decided not to go for it.

That's great. But yeah. That's Skillfinger day. I take it back. It shouldn't be Loki's day. Let's call it Skillfinger day. Skillfinger day. I love that.

That's so good. Hey, what's your favourite day of the week, guys? It's obviously Friday. Thursday. Oh, Dan, you nerd. Is it Thursday because we record the podcast on a Thursday? This is the highlight of your week. It's the best moment of my whole life.

No, I like the number four. Four is my favourite number, and so that's the fourth day of the week. To my week schedule. I know Sunday is technically the first day, so it should be Wednesday. James. Yeah.

I think Monday is the first day officially, according to the International Standards Organisation, so I think you're fine with having Thursday. In Russian, Thursday is Čepjurg, which means like fourth day, so it works there as well. My favourite, I think, probably Saturday, where I can just chill out and watch the football.

OK, everyone's got good answers here, apart from Dan, whose answer is very weird, statistically. So 21% of young people say that Friday is their favourite day. Only 6% of young people like Sundays, and I think that rises as you get older. You start to appreciate Sunday a bit more. You're off the bacon binges. But Tuesday is just 1% of people's favourite day,

and I think Thursday might be another 1%er. It scores very low. Do you know why no one likes Tuesday? Because we were saying that Wednesday was named after Odin, and Odin was a pretty cool god, right? He was the king of the gods and stuff. Do you know who Tuesday was named after? No.

Tuesday was named after a god called Tia, who is one of the most obscure gods. We have literally no idea anything about this guy. We only have one myth of him that's left. We don't really know anything about him at all, and there was a wolf who was a baby wolf, but it was growing really, really quickly, and the gods were worried that this wolf

was going to get so big he was going to eat them all. And so they said, right, we're going to have to tie him down, so we're going to tie him in a load of ropes and stuff, and like magic god chains. But when Fenrir the wolf saw the chains, he didn't trust that anything was going to happen. So he said, okay, well, I'll kind of come and say hi, but only if one of you puts your arm down my throat,

because then I'll trust that you're not going to chain me up. And so Tia, the god who Tuesday's named after, decided, okay, well, in good faith, I'll be the one who puts my arm down your throat. And then, of course, they chain the wolf up, and the wolf bit his arm off. That's the only story we have about the guy who Tuesday's named after.

It's such an important moral to that story. Don't put your arm down a wolf's throat. That is an important lesson. Yeah, that's true. Yes. Without that, wolf arm casualties would be way higher than they are. I've got one last thing before we move on,

which is remember we were talking about that one dickhead who gets the colour wrong as they rock up to a sort of school in Thailand? I'm afraid I'm that dickhead. What? Because I was born on a Saturday, it turns out. Where are you? So what colour are you? I'm purple.

I'm with Andy. You traitor. I can't believe it. Have you just been doubled? Did you have a feeling, as you said that? I bet I've got that wrong. It wasn't something that anything wrong. Oh, we were just trying to get in Maya

and then Anna's cool club by pretending to be a blue. I was trying to be a blue, yeah. Yeah. No, I had a weird feeling come over me. I thought, I don't feel very blue. I had a quick Google. It turns out, I mean, it's so in line with my facts. Is this a situation where your whole life,

you thought you were born on a Friday and you've only just realised? Or was it a fact that you thought, I know what day I was born, I'm going to Google it and you just got the wrong answer on Google? Oh, which one? I got the wrong answer on Google. Yeah, I double checked it on a different site,

just as we were talking because it just felt wrong and I had a memory, just a memory of Saturday. I remember seeing the newspaper as I came out. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that according to Vietnamese historians, Chinese porters were once defeated by a woman who had breast so long she had to throw them over her shoulders in battle.

And this is, I think this is the second part we've had on the podcast about women with breast so long they had to throw them over their shoulders. One was a yeti. Yeah, one's a yeti. Female yeti. They have to throw them over their shoulders before they chase you or they might trip on them

and hurt themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Possibly. Can I ask, is this lady as real as a yeti? I would say she's more real than a yeti. So I'm going to say this fact is less of a nonsense fact than Dan's because it's recorded by historians and it's about almost certainly historical figure.

But I still find it hard to believe that this breast thing actually happened. But this, so this is this warrior called Lady Chu or Lady Chu as we'd anglicise it. And she is amazing and she's a hero in Vietnam. In the third century, she led this revolt against the invading Chinese Wu state. And the, yeah, the writing about her from almost contemporary

said that she was this extraordinary figure and her features included four foot long breasts, which either she tossed over her shoulders to get them out the way or sometimes she'd tie them to her torso so they didn't get out of the way of herself. It's interesting because I read in one account that they said that she had three breasts that were four feet long.

Yes. So I can imagine how two of them can be throwed over the shoulder, but the other one's going to hit you in the face, isn't it? When you... It is. Yeah. Maybe that's the one she strapped her stomach.

Maybe. Yeah, I've seen a painting of her with the third, sneaky third breast hanging down there. Okay, so we're not disputing the length of the boobs. We've actually just cracked that she had three and both of these points about going over the shoulders and around the stomach are true. Well, also...

That's exciting. Nine feet tall was the other thing as well. So I think, you know... Yeah, this is a sort of tradition in Vietnam where some historic warriors take on this mythical status and then they are written up as becoming more and more god-like. So, yeah, she was written up as being nine feet tall.

She could walk over 1,000 miles in a day. But there are various things we think she probably did do, like rode elephants into battle. So rode on an elephant's head. The stories say she fought with a sword in each hand. Again, probably why she had to tie down her breasts because otherwise you're in danger of slicing one off, aren't you? Oh, yeah.

She had a voice as loud as a temple bell. But I think she probably did exist, although oddly, she's not mentioned in Chinese sources, whereas she's mentioned a lot in Vietnamese sources. But I think for China, this was just... You don't really want to write about these people who defeated you a lot, especially if it's this woman with extraordinary breasts.

Whereas in Vietnam, it was much more of a great thing to record. Although there is one thing that a lot of the women got written out of history in China, didn't they? When Neo-Confucianism came in, they kind of changed the rules a little bit. So women had to be at home and had to have this exact role in society. And so a lot of the historians in China

wrote out all of the women in history, I think, that was 10th century or something. It was, I think it was before that. And Vietnamese society used to be much more equal, in fact, impressively equal, until it was sort of from the first century, Chinese started really encroaching. And like you say, it was Confucianism.

They really liked nuclear families. It was just all the same old stories, isn't it? Nuclear families, women subservient to men. Whereas Vietnamese society was much more clown-based. It was quite matriarchal. Some people say that it was actually more women-led than man-led. And so it wasn't totally unusual

for the idea of female warriors and female fighters. So she was eventually defeated. And there's a kind of myth about how she was defeated, which is really nice. Well, it's maybe a slightly sexist myth, actually. The myth is that she was very fastidious and that the Chinese general who defeated her sent his men out of the fortress naked,

kicking up all the dirt and grime. And she was so horrified by this that she left the battlefield. And then her men all panicked, because obviously the nine-foot warrior general has run away. And that's why they were defeated. But it feels slightly like

she can't cope with a bit of grime. Yeah, on some man's willies. Yeah, that was Chinese historians who said the men exposed their genitals and scared her off. Which, interestingly, was also claimed of the Trung sisters, who were some other Vietnamese warriors. And it was said they were defeated

when men showed them their balls. Well, there was this idea that you could scare these people away with penises, wasn't there? Because there is the really funny story of the Chinese commander who, after Lady Trieu died, started having nightmares where she came to him in his dreams and was saying that she was going to kill him. And so to keep her away,

he hung 100 wooden penises outside his house so that she wouldn't come to him in his dreams. I mean, that takes a lot of explaining away, doesn't it, when your relatives come round to visit. Why are there 100 wooden penises outside your house? Well, I just saw it in Homes and Gardens last week. They had a special offer on which, if you buy one, you get 99 free.

Well, what about the Trung sisters then, Anna, who you just mentioned? Oh, yeah, they're cracking as well. Again, these real Vietnamese heroes, aren't they? Worshiped in Vietnam. So this was the first century, a couple of hundred years before Chu. And they were Trung Trac and Trung Nhi.

And they defeated an invading Chinese army and they actually conquered 65 cities in the end. And this is about AD 40 and Trung Trac became queen. And apparently she was a lovely queen. She had quite a soft rule. She tried to restore a lot of Vietnamese practices. And yeah, they're amazing. And the idea is that they were raised by their mother,

who taught them just like you teach men. And so taught them how to fight, taught them lots of military skills. Yeah. And these 65 cities that they conquered, the head of each city became like the head of one of their armies, almost all one of their groups, all women. So they had 65 female generals who would fight

in the wars against the Chinese. Yes. One of which was the mum, right? Yes, exactly. Oh, really? Oh, so like the Kardashians in that sense. The momager figure is still very important to them. Very much like that.

But just exactly like that, yeah. They once killed a tiger so that they could write a promise to the people of Vietnam on its skin. If you've run out of paper, sometimes it's all you can do. I think Khloe Kardashian did that once, actually. And these Trung sisters were descendants of Lak Long Kuan, who was the original dragon lord, who is according to the creation myth of Vietnam,

he was the founder of the Vietnamese people. He married an immortal fairy called Ao Khua, and they got married and she laid 100 eggs who gave birth to the 100 noble families of Vietnam. And they became the elite of the Vietnamese society. 50 of them preferred to live in the mountains, 50 of them preferred to live by the sea, and they kind of split into these two groups of...

It's a bit custody battle, isn't it? It's a bit... Custody was made out of eggs or... No, you're right. It's like half of the people went with the dragon lord and half of them went with the immortal fairy and his families. That would have made a cracking version of that film, The Parent Trap, wouldn't it,

where you've got to get your parents back together, but they're a dragon lord and an immortal fairy. I watched The Parent Trap last weekend. That's so weird. Which version? The new one with Lindsay Lohan. Sorry, heathen. Now, you say new, that's pretty old.

When I said that Moulin Rouge was a recent film, I got the crap kicked out of me on this podcast. His comparison is new? New compared to the old one. I said that Moulin Rouge was recent, compared with the history of film, and it didn't cut any ice with anybody. Anyway, my point is it would have been vastly improved

if it included some kind of dragon lord feature. So it's a good comparison. I've got a couple of things on modern Vietnamese women, sort of, who are pretty interesting today. So I found this really interesting thing, which is the nail industry in America, so for manicures and so on, approximately 51% of nail technicians in America

are Vietnamese descendants. So either Vietnamese-American or have moved over there, 80% in California. This only happened in the last 40 years, and it's as a result, as far as we know, of one single person, which is Tippi Hedren. Really? Now, Tippi Hedren, the actor,

the actor who was in the Alfred Hitchcock movies. She's another in Melanie Griffiths. She was in The Birds. She was at refugee camp for Vietnamese in California 40 years ago, and while she was there, she thought it'd be good to teach a skill, and she noticed that they were all very obsessed with her beautiful nails.

She had them beautifully manicured and painted, and they all wanted to look at it. So she brought her manicurist in, and a lot of the women who were there as refugees were part of the military intelligence. So they were sort of high-ranking women, a lot of influence, and they all got taught how to do this.

And over 40 years, that spread to be a proper way of earning your money in America for them, to the point where it's now 51% of them all descended from this, supposedly from this one refugee camp that Tippi Hedren just happened to say, who wants to learn how to do this? That is incredible.

Remarkable. That could be also different if Tippi Hedren had brought something else. Like what? Well, if she taught them, I don't know, bowling, it could be like 80% of bowling champions in America are descended from Vietnamese refugees. Oh, thank God it was her and not you.

I feel like Tippi Hedren had her eye on the commercial market a bit more than you did. The demand for bowling tutors wasn't quite what it should be. There is money in bowling if you're good at it, and if you... The problem is that in America, there's so many people who already do bowling that even if you have been taught by Tippi Hedren, it's still going to be quite hard to break into that elite,

I would say. Yeah, I do see what you mean there. It's a problem. Okay, yeah. I won't try and start this. The first female billionaire in Vietnam was not too long ago, and it was as a result of something which actually slightly sets women back,

I would say, via jet air. There was this thing, I don't know if you remember, the Bikini-clad flight attendants. This is the idea that they would all dress in bikinis, and it became very popular because... They all have three breasts. Wait, so she made her money off that airline? Yeah, she made it go public,

and when it went public, it turned her into a billionaire, and she's the first ever billionaire from Vietnam. See, I mean, so do you mind about that? I like women, but I hate billionaires. It's difficult. That is tough. Well, luckily, there's not many of them. Luckily, most of the billionaires are men.

Yeah, thank God. I can still like most women. So it's really interesting, I find, about Vietnamese history, which is the fact that it's kind of historical, but at the same time, so much of it is very obviously folklore and not real, and trying to work out what is which. And I suppose that's quite a lot of similarity with things like the Amazons, right,

which were largely thought to be quite a mythological group of women who were warriors who attacked the Greeks and attacked various different people, but actually, the more we look at it, the more we think that there might have been some truth in it. So there's this group of people who lived around Ukraine and around all the way up to Siberia, and from around the 9th century BC,

they were attacking the Greeks and attacking a lot of different groups around there, but because they were a nomadic tribe, you can't really say, well, this group of society will stay at home and this group of society will go to battle. Basically, everyone had to go everywhere. And so all the women got taught how to fight, and we know this because a lot of burials have been found

of Scythian women, and about one third of them have been buried with weapons, which suggests that they will have been warriors. And so we think now that a lot of the Amazonian stories that came through classical times might have been referring to the Scythian women. Really? Yeah. That makes sense.

Kind of interesting. And because of their horse riding skills, they could deliver any package with one day delivery. That was the Amazonian promise back in the day. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the few incredibly rare times a giant squid has been seen attacking an ocean vessel,

which was an image made famous by Jules Verne, was in 2003 when a boat was attacked while competing in the Jules Verne Trophy race. Amazing. What incredible coincidence. So this was, I should say, that this was reported by the captain of this ship taking part in this race, Olivier de Casalsen.

And he is a captain who's had over 40 years of experience in the ocean, and he was taking his boat on this trip when suddenly it kind of ground to a halt. He was thinking, what the hell is going on? And he saw through the port hole this giant squid, which was attached to it. He's never seen anything like this in his life.

He quickly radioed it in saying, we've got a giant squid that's attached to the boat. They brought it to a complete halt, so they stopped it completely, and it sort of just disattached itself and went off, and that's the last that we saw of it. So we don't have a photo. We don't have anything that can sort of completely verify

other than his experience as a sailor, and as a good sailor as well. So the Jules Verne Trophy is to try and beat the record of going around the world, isn't it? Did he beat the record, do you know? Or? So the way the Jules Verne Trophy works is you hand over the trophy to someone who beats the record.

Weirdly, there's a world record, which is separate to the Jules Verne, so you have to specifically pay up to this membership group. So he did not win it that year in 2003, but he did win it in 2004. So what I'm thinking then is, in 2003, he's sailing around the world. He hasn't beaten the record, and when he comes back,

he says, well, it's because I got attacked by a giant squid, and they say, do you have any photos of it? And he goes, no, I don't have any photos, but I got attacked by a giant squid, and then that's why I didn't win the race. And I'm not saying that he's lying, I'm just saying that I'd like some evidence. I agree, and I would love to see some three-foot boobs.

We can't all have what we want. No, that's absolutely true. It's not the first thing you do. If the first thing you do when you're being attacked by a giant squid is take a photo of it, then you're one of those irritating millennial types who's always got your iPhone on you, and actually, they're a big fish to fry,

like getting it off your boat. I'm with this guy. You know the Jules Verne trophy that you mentioned, Dan? Yeah. It floats, but it doesn't float just in water. It floats in air. What? This is so cool.

The Jules Verne trophy is a metal sculpture of a ship's hull, right? And it's quite long. It looks like it's about six or eight feet long. And at the ceremony where you hand it over, because you have to hand it over to the next people to win it, everyone puts on gloves, and you take it out of its case where it is floating

on top of a magnetic field, you hand it to the guys who've won it, and they put it back in this huge glass case in a magnetic field, so it just hovers there in mid-air, and then they put it away again. That's quite cool. It's a floating trophy.

Isn't that awesome? Why does it? Because of the magnetic field. Yeah, but just because it's cool, right? That's the idea. Yeah, because it's cool, yeah. Great. And Jules Verne, he's a science fiction writer.

Well, it's a cool science fiction thing. Jules Verne, the reason that this is named after him is because it's around the world in 80 days, right, which is what he wrote. Can you name any kind of transport that Philius Fogg used in around the world in 80 days? Balloon, hot air balloon. Hot air balloon.

Amazingly not, right? In the book, he doesn't go in a hot air balloon at any stage. It's so weird. It's, if you look at, in all the Disney films, he's always in a hot air balloon, and if you look at, like, lots of the books with an illustration on the front, there's always a hot air balloon in it,

or on the post, or whatever, but no, he just goes by train and by boat. I mean, it would be a much more boring Disney film, wouldn't it? Just a guy getting trains around. It's a commute. It's a film. That's a Michael Portello documentary, not the most thrilling novel of the 19th century.

That's fascinating. I think the first thing he wrote was about balloon, wasn't it? It was a short story about a cool something, like adventures in a balloon, and I feel like people must have conflated those inflated, conflated, and inflated balloon. You don't inflate a balloon. One of those hot air balloons, do you?

Don't you? You certainly do. That wasn't the main problem with that joke, I have to say. The technical issue. You're right. It had it. Jules Verne had an amazing life, didn't he? Yeah.

I loved the fact, as a boy, his uncle was the mayor of Brains. Really? Yeah. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing the French town of Brains correctly. How's the spell? It's spell Brains. He was mates with Alexandre Dumas,

amongst other people, who was this great inspiration for him, and actually, kind of sadly, Dumas' son once wrote to Jules Verne saying that he considered Verne the true son of Dumas over himself, which shows a real lack of self-confidence. Did he write, he wrote Musketeers, was that it? Yeah, and Monte Cristo.

Yes, sorry. Andy, for your pronunciation in French, you might know him as an Alexander Dumas. Do you guys know how Jules Verne and Dumas first met? Apparently. In a hot air balloon? Nice. It's almost as cool.

This is actually something that was sent in by a listener called Elise Cramer, and it's from a 1954 article about a party that Verne was at, where he was kind of bored, and he was a bit of a rogue, and I think he was referred to as witty and impudent in the article. And so he decided to leave,

and he left by sliding down the banister, slid down the banister, smashed straight into someone at the bottom, like smashed into his torso. So he stood up, didn't know what to say, said the first thing that came to his head said, have you had dinner? Quite an odd thing to say to a stranger.

And the man replied he'd had an omelet, which Verne said no one could make an omelet as well as he could. And so this guy was like, all right, you make such a good omelet, make me an omelet, I'll come around for dinner next Wednesday. And he gave him...

It's the story. It's a true story. This guy handed over his business card, and it was Alexandra Dumas. This sounds like, you know, if you and your partner met on Tinder or something, and you're like, well, we're going to have to come up with a story whenever anybody asks us how we met.

I'll say that I made an omelet. You say you were coming down the banister. Yeah, omelet was the original eggplant emoji, I think. Seems there was a sexual thing going on there. So the thing about Jules Verne is in Britain, I would say we kind of see him as more of a kid's author, right? Because I certainly read a lot of his stuff

when I was a teenager or younger still. And the reason is because he had really bad translations into English. So in France and in Russia and in lots of different countries, he's seen as quite a serious author. But in Britain, he's more of a kid's author. And these translations were just bad. And the thing about his translations,

I find really interesting, is that the British ones were then translated into Japanese. So in Japan, they get a translated version of the English stuff, not the French stuff. I mean, obviously, these days, you get better translations for everything, but the original Japanese ones. And then in China, they translated the Japanese ones,

which had been translated from English, which had been translated from French. So you get this weird sort of Chinese whispers things going on. But also in Chinese kind of oral tradition, as a storyteller, you would kind of add your own little footnotes and stuff like that. Right. And so the original French one section of,

well, I think I've not written down what Bucket is, but I think it's around the world in 80 days. And really apologies for my French here, but it says something like, So it says after the Civil War, a new club that was very influential was established in Baltimore. Which is in Maryland.

And the Chinese version becomes, anyone who has studied world geography and history knows of a place called America. As for the American War of Independence, not the Civil War, by the way, even children know that it was an earth-shattering event, a deed that ought to be recalled often and never forgotten. Now, among all those states that participated in the war,

one of them was called Maryland, whose capital, Baltimore, not the capital, was a famous city teaming with crowds and packed with the traffic of horses and carriages in this city, was a club magnificent in appearance. And as soon as you saw the high-flying American flag flapping in the wind in front, you naturally felt a sense of awe. Amazing translation of that one sentence.

Someone who doesn't want to be a translator, they want to be an author on this stuff, translation. Also being paid by the word. And the only thing people are going to write in about is the reference to Maryland as opposed to Maryland. Oh, Maryland, yeah. Oh, my God. I'll be furious, James.

Oh, pronouncing things. Bang of the Nations. Not so easy now, is it? There was a guy who claimed to be the real Philius Fogg, who was called George Francis Train. We've mentioned him once before, actually, I think. So he went around the world in 1870, and then the book was published at about 1873, give or take,

but he had already travelled around the world supposedly in 80 days. Yes, so he was 80 days travelling, but he stopped off in Paris for two months. During his time, he was arrested and sent to prison for two weeks. And I think it might have been Dumas who got him out of prison, actually.

But he was basically, it wasn't really an 80-day full trip. But the first person who did it in under 80 days, I think, was Nellie Bly, who did it in 1890, right? And she did it in 1972, yeah, that's right. And released the book around the world in 72 days, very unimaginative. I think you could sue her for that. But she also, she pit-stocked and said hi to Jules Verne

along the way. How meta is that? Cool. She, yeah. That is weird. It's like your book's coming to life in front of your very eyes. So she was a journalist, right,

and she was working for, was it the New York World? It was for Pulitzer anyway, yeah. So she was working for Pulitzer, and she said, I want to go around the world in 80 days, and I want to write my story about it. She was an investigative journalist, and the newspaper had a Nellie Bly guessing match where people could guess exactly how long

it would take her to get around the world by the minute. And if you got the closest, then you'd win a prize. And she travelled by ship, train, and donkey, the three things that she... Nice, right. Feels like the ship and the train probably did most of the work. When she met Vern in Paris, she...

He said, you know, I'm so impressed by you. If you manage to do this in 79 days, I'll applaud with both hands. Don't you question what the alternative way of applauding is? Yeah, she was cool. She... They didn't want to send her around at first, I don't think. So she had this idea,

and she insisted on being sent around the world. And first, the editor of the New York World said, no, a woman can't do this, I'm afraid. And she said very well, start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him. And so then they caved. And she sort of brought one outfit,

a few changes of underwear. But she had a rival, didn't she? This woman called Elizabeth Bisland, who was sent round by Cosmo. And it was the sort of classy alternative to Nelly Bly, who was racing her, basically. But Nelly didn't know to begin with, right? So she was engaged in a race she wasn't aware of.

And then when she found out, she just didn't care. She was like, I'm not doing this for a race. Oh, really? Yeah, what? She claimed she didn't care, but she sprinted away when she was told. I'd rather see if they're going to remake around the world in 80 days for the one billionth time

or whatever for Disney. Then I would much rather see the Nelly Bly versus this woman from Cosmo trying to race around the world in 80 days rather than some Philly as a card character. It's not great spectator, I guess, because the race is very much two quite separate people. You just have to keep cutting between them.

She said apparently the moment when she found out was in Hong Kong. And so Nelly Bly arrived in Hong Kong and Elizabeth Bislam was beating her at the time. And in fact, I think was beating her until she got back to Britain where she was told she'd missed her boat, which was actually a lie.

She hadn't missed her boat. No one knows if that was a trick. But when Nelly Bly got to Hong Kong, a guy who met her there said, oh, are you the one that's racing that other person? And Nelly said, yeah, I'm in a race. I'm in a race with time. And the guy said, I don't think that was her name.

Wow, that's she discovered. It is a good premise for a film because one of them is working for Cosmo. It's all kind of high powered and doing it in high heels and it'll scrubbed up. And the other one's Nelly Bly, who's sort of a street urchin vibe to her. That's what I was saying.

It's amazing. And then it's a bit like race around the world where you make them have to stop in London and meet each other and stay in the same hotel and talk about, you know, you know, okay, fine. And they become friendly in the way. Working up, yeah, they become friends. No, but they become enemies,

but they respect each other like superheroes and super enemies. Like forgers and their chasers, okay. Another part of Nelly Bly's life, which would have been a good movie, is when she exposed all the insane asylums in America because she pretended to be insane and got herself committed to an asylum

on Blackwells Island in New York. And it was basically an expose of how badly treated these sick people were. She showed that they were doing beatings and ice cold baths and forced meals, including really rotten butter and rotten food. And that actually changed the way that asylums works in America, thanks to her expose.

Yeah. But she never got out. That's the sad thing. She kept saying, I'm a journalist. I've just been writing an expose. Sure, you are. Yeah. I've always thought you had to stop in the middle.

I've been around the world for 80 days. Yeah, right. Yeah. And the nurse turns around and suddenly you see it's Elizabeth Diskin standing there. No! Roll credits. OK, that's it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with us about the things that we've said on this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James.

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