No Such Thing As A Fish - 354: No Such Thing As Worrying About What Might Happen

Episode Date: January 1, 2021

An all-new bumper compilation of silliness with Dan, Anna, James, Andy, Jenny Ryan, Tom Scott, Rhys Derby, Alan Davies and Sandi Toksvig Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone welcome to the end of 2020 oh my days we made it it's the end of the year and the start of what hopefully will be an amazing 2021 for all of you guys um what have we got for you well we have our annual clip show it's massive it's one and a half hours of all the bits that didn't quite fit in the edits of this year's no such thing as a fish I really hope you like it these are always my favorite episode because they go from one thing to another to another you never know what you're gonna get but you do know that they'll always be something interesting or something a bit silly okay well what else is there to say I suppose uh our book fun you should ask is still available in all shops if you got book tokens do people still get book tokens

well anyway it's it's in the shops funny you should ask by the qi elves and also next year we hope will be a big year of touring for us as soon as the venue is open we will be back out there to do our thing meet all you guys so keep an eye on no such things at fish.com for any details about that and I believe there is one show that is currently on sale that will be in London in the spring so get tickets for that get our book enjoy the show and we'll see you on the other side happy new year on with the podcast hey guys you've got a quick quiz question if the date is Wednesday the 31st of December are you in the last week of the year uh yes yes yes that is incorrect you're in the first

week of the year so i'm afraid you're all have to leave what could not be in both no of course you can't be in both what do you mean it's Wednesday the 31st of December you're in the last no but the week's different isn't it because it's it's more heavy sets on the other side of the week in days if it was on a scale it would weigh over to the the new year week wouldn't dan's describing better what the international organization for standardization describes in terms of how to refer to weeks so you know across the world we have to have the same definition of week one week two week three of a year and the week week i've got to say i'm without the other one look the week week's up to start on a monday and we've got to have the same week so that trading

and business internationally globally works so there's an international body that decides what week one is and the definition of week one of the year is the week with the year's first thursday in it so if the first of january is a thursday then week one actually starts on the 29th of december which is that monday right so week one is that so if the 31st of december is on a wednesday then you're actually in week one of the next year because that's insane you can't have week one beginning two days before the year ends i'm sorry it's absolutely no one does things in weeks anyway you do things in quarters or when it happens like that anna always has her new year's party on sunday the 28th of december it's an absolutely banging event with me me and my cat

in attendance i'm sorry you guys have never been able to make it just very quickly what number archbishop of paris do you reckon andre van toa is is is he the current 20 23rd 22nd as far as i can tell he's the 30th so that's his actual name andre van toa and he yeah he was born with the surname 23 and the the best guess is that it was because and a sort of ancestor of his was found and adopted and they were found on the 23rd of a month and so they were given that surname yeah so but as far as i can tell he's the 30th there's there's a lot of breaks in their archbishops over the years uh so there might be a few that are not in there hey what's archbishop van toa's favorite band i don't know andy what is archbishop van toa's favorite band iful 65 and it's because

they have a french name and then a number oh really what well iful iful no no i do understand that yeah and he's french uh and he has a number in his name do you know what their favorite punk band is i don't know it's blink 182 and that's because french people blink like the rest of us and there's a there's a number following that i really think we should move this on i i've got to get out of here what is archbishop van toa's favorite album by adelle there's a few options there 21 because he's called 23 and it's just another number yeah yes very interesting he proposes it to the original 19 it's closer isn't it closer to him yeah are all of adelle's albums numbered yeah oh mate yes yeah 19 that is the age she was when actually not the ages anymore

they've become untethered from her age but yeah got it i thought i was thinking she can't have released 23 albums or 21 albums this early on in her career okay that makes a lot more sense there's an indian loser uh called shiva keshavan and he has been a true victim of the indian government's low prioritizing of various olympic sports he it's you can you can understand why the indian government isn't prioritizing prioritizing the loot look no think about the himalayas think about the pre-o territory you've got for looting i was just thinking that shon khanri would be a good luge manager like coach because he'd be like you're a loser you're a loser and all the s-h is shon khanri's both got shiva keshavan you're a loser um but so he had to train

on wheels uh not in a proper luge thing because that's normally on ice isn't it the loo he had to make a sled basically with wheels on and just train on busy roads oh wow just going downhill in the himalayas and he had there's footage of him dodging a herd of goats which is in the middle of the road and he has sort of frantically lose around you know um old mcdonald had a farm very well did you know familiar yeah yeah eio well the earliest version we have was actually old mcdogel had a farm eio and there's an even earlier version which is not about um a farm but it's old missouri had a mule hi hi hi ho uh and every country around the world has its own version of um old mcdonald and they're all on wikipedia of course so um in turkish it's ali

baba has a farm eio in swedish it's perlson has a farm eio and in syrbian it's which means one egg a day gives the strength to human organism wow they've just gone completely random i don't understand that at all every other country in the world it's about someone having a farm and they're just like don't eat your eggs when planes are actually just coming into land as a normal procedure the way it works is that they have to get ready miles before they even see where the airport is they got to get to a certain height and then there's a couple of things that they have to either see they've got to either have eyes on the runway or the lights that they can see coming from it to know that they're at the right height

and it's actually the computer on board the airline that makes them make a snap decision about whether or not they're able to land or if they're at the wrong bit so as they're getting ready to that moment the computer will just yell out in the cockpit decide that's all they get she goes decide and then they go yes we're doing it or they have to pull out wow that's a tv quiz show and now it's time to decide oh you wouldn't want to speak both but you've died in a blink that's amazing do they get warning is there a sort of i'm going to have to have to hurry you here your time to think i hope you've made up your mind because in a minute you're going to have to decide and then if they go for it it goes oh interesting decision we'll come back after

the break to see if you've made the right call and there is a problem with being in the center of america someone found out there's this massive problem that was generated for someone who lives quite near the center of the us in fact and this is to do with a company called maxmind have you read about this story about ip addresses okay so it's so weird basically maxmind is this company who about sort of just over 10 years ago started calculating the location of loads of ip addresses so you know with your computer you've got an ip address maxmind figured out whereabouts they all geographically and then it could sell that information to companies like google and facebook and lots of other people but often when you're trying to work out where an ip address is you

can't get it exact and sometimes it'll just say this is somewhere in america or somewhere in the us and so for all of those maxmind just default assumed that they were in the middle so they got the coordinates of roughly the middle of america and said okay all the ip addresses that we can't quite place they just are here and it turns out here is a rural farmhouse belonging to someone called joce taylor who now has 600 million ip addresses and it's so it's a complete disaster because basically if there's a troll online or if there's someone who's hacked your company or if there's someone doing criminal activity online and the police are tracking them down they chase up their ip address and they constantly find it's at joce taylor's farmhouse

and she's just inundated with kind of abuse and people writing her threatening letters and had no idea why for about eight years she was just like why am i being oh no what's happening to me wow until this journalist tracked her down are we definitely discounting the fact that joce is like a massive cyber criminal is that she's she's a criminal mastermind an 82 year old criminal mastermind it's possible that's funny oh poor joce joce and apparently the verne scholars refer to the novel as around the world in 80 days and the play as around the world in 80 days but with 80 the digits so that's how you can tell the difference i'll be honest i didn't get that from when you were reading that out i saw the fatal flaw in transferring this visual thing in front of me

to the audio media we were really hoping you were going to say around the world in 80 plays was what they called the play he wasn't that smarter guy you know people people claim he was you know you know mitten crabs is if you catch one is there always a string attached to another mitten crab on the other hand uh the cia they collected a load of jokes in the selviet union in the 80s that was one of the things they did and that got declassified quite recently we're not quite sure why they did it but it might have been a way to kind of gauge what people were thinking in the selviet union or maybe a way of undermining the government or stuff so they found stuff like there are two men waiting in a line to buy vodka the first man says i've

had enough saved my place i'm going to shoot goberchoff two hours later he returns to claim his place in the line his friend said did you get him and the man replies no the line there was even longer than the line here that's a good joke it's not bad is it a man goes into a shop a man goes into a shop and says you don't have any meat do you um no replies to sales lady we don't have any fish it's a store across the street that doesn't have any meat again that's good it works doesn't i think that's really good yeah were they planning on distributing the big book of cia jokes about your country feels like it doesn't it my favorite person to have sort of an olympic career and then a follow-up is a guy called uh ross rebagliati he was the first person ever to win gold at the

winter olympics in snowboarding which was in 1998 and it was really sad for him because he won gold and then he was drugs tested and they found cannabis in his system and so he was immediately had his gold rescinded he was put in jail for maybe importing it into japan i think which is where the olympics were and then within about 72 hours they then gave the gold medal back because they went actually cannabis is not on our list of banned substances as it wasn't back then um but he insisted that it was from secondhand smoke uh you know he hadn't smoked weed for almost a year and it was nothing to do with him he was furious but he has now gone on to found a company called legacy brands a cbd and cannabis consumables company and has a series of different strains of

weed named after him so that's that's his job now and sissy wasn't stoned then but is stoned all the time now i guess you can never guess what's going to happen can you because the the 1984 olympics promotion by mcdonald's about uh you could get a free item off the menu every time the us team got on the podium uh i don't know what you've got big mac for gold or something fries for some or something um they didn't expect the soviet union to drop out of the olympics so the bloody american national anthem was playing all the time uh and uh there was i think there's even a shortage of hamburger buns um because uh people got so many so you've got to be careful what you uh what you offer up i think yeah at any olympics saying that about team usa it's not

the right call oh you're right you want to make it team togo just be super cautious yeah i think the danish basketball team i think you're gonna make it quite nation specific jamaica winter olympics they had one year where it looked a bit dodgy quite a few burgers but otherwise you say one more thing um just that you can bite so i think you were talking at the start about how um audio stuff can also maybe trigger um weird hallucinations or change your brain makeup and actually they have now invented headphones which i think either on the market now they're coming onto the market soon which send electrical impulses into your brain and they cause it to release more uh like dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin like happiness hormones

essentially and they're called i think they're called nirvana headphones so they stimulate the vagus nerve in your brain apparently which then releases all those neurotransmitters and they'll do it in time to the beat of the music you're listening to so you could even be listening to the verb or something but you'd be over the moon oh unnecessary burn on the verb i love the verb but they're not upbeat yeah but i've heard that they've tried that but the drugs don't work so it's hey wasn't there a big clash in east berlin about updating the traffic light men because really that yeah the the east had particular traffic light men and they were called ample mention i think which is that literally means exactly that the traffic light man and one

of the things that was proposed is replacing all of them and people in east berlin particularly said no we really we really like these particular traffic signs it's sort of a something very recognizable very iconic about this half of the city and so those i think were rolled out and in fact this is not useful for anyone at home but we have one in a jar just here oh that's what this is right okay let's see it can we see it okay yeah yeah it's here so this is a little tin of tea this oh i recognize that yeah yeah and you'll recognize the stop and the go you know what his yeah the go man looks a bit like an old monopoly man kind of thing because that doesn't be yeah yeah people see lots of these right these are these are in berlin well it's a big souvenir

thing in berlin now yeah yeah but also on the traffic lights is the noticeable thing exactly where you see a traffic light go and you're like i mean they're all the souvenirs but they're all they were well they were kept that's the that's sort of the point yeah yeah they're really cool they're much more jaunty mmm i'm just not sure that show and tell is ever going to work as a podcast but it works when you had your own tie so maybe the american dairy association has a page on its website called famous cows of the world and it's a good read there are a whole bunch of cows on there but my favorite was elm farm ollie do you guys know about elm farm ollie well neither did i but it was the first cow to fly and also the first uh when i say fly i should be

clear the first clown to ride in an aeroplane clown so it was a clown as well as a cow it's a clown cow i must have had massive shoes had a red nose and huge shoes i've lost it it was the first cow to take a flight and it was the first cow to be milked mid-flight this was in Missouri in 1930 and it you know all these things have some kind of spurious scientific justification and so the justification for this when they paid huge amounts of money to take it up was they wanted to observe the mid-air and high altitude effect on animals in flight of their milking and of their milk and it turns out it didn't make a difference to the milk but oh there was a farmer called bunts else with bunts who milked her who then also became the first person to milk a cow mid-flight

so a huge sequence of first for elm farm ollie yeah it's good to be the one who's milking elm farm ollie because um if you if you ask you to smell her flower it's always going to be milk that squirts out of it into your mouth okay that's it dad do you want to try a better punch line to yeah i'd like to see you try it dad the master is smoking possibly told that has wonky shut down now it has yeah yeah has it yeah what no it had new management a few years ago i've definitely had it in the last year i can guarantee they don't do that kind of rude service anymore they don't do the rude service all their trip advisor reviews went downhill slightly after they stopped being rude to the customers because

that was part of the experience they're like three stars the guy was really nice to me he gave me my meal it was amazing i went there once and we sat down on the table it was me and three other people and then halfway through the meal literally halfway through the meal and we need this table now you need to go upstairs and they took all my stuff and made us sit on a much smaller table upstairs while they put other people on our table wow i had a meal there with top davis who is uh people will know him on tv as king gary and a few other tv shows and we went there and they put us on a big round table where there was an entire family sitting and we had an old grandmother sitting in between us we weren't even next to each other on the table oh it was wonderful great days wonkeys

anyway our podcast yeah back to the podcast do you guys know about the debonish fibs family no no well they're an extremely prominent family in a sense in that their names are all over park benches across the uk and so this started to be spotted about 10 years ago maybe a bit more and there are sort of park benches with you know there's plaques on in memory of and they're always in memory of someone debonish fibs so for instance in dartmouth park near where i used to live there's one that was in memory of winter debonish fibs and it said like to have everything just so and then the plaque was at a lopsided angle and there was there was another one somewhere which was in memory of barbara debonish fibs

whose wish was to have a bench plaque inscribed with her last words unfortunately her last words were and then it's a series of exclusives the asterisk asterisk out that's really funny currently scientists are trying to find out who killed the dodo with a ct scanner whoa there was more than one dodo though that's true but yes no that's true what do you mean though so do you mean like a specific one or is it i do mean a specific one there's a dodo in oxford's museum of natural history and uh it's it's a celebrity dodo actually although these days all dodo's are celebrities but um this is the one that louis carol may have seen when he was writing alice in wonderland and it might have inspired the dodo in that but scientists thought that it had been killed

some some way or that it had died of natural causes actually because they thought they threw it on a threw it on a bonfire or something i thought they destroyed it yeah well they still got the skull all right that's the main thing and so they they put the skull in a ct scanner and they found it didn't die of natural causes it was shot in the head with a shotgun so that is the opposite of natural causes um and what they're trying to do now they've got a little bit of the lead that kind of impacted with the back of the skull and they are trying to find out what country the lead from those shotgun pellets was mined in and then they're going to try and find out where the shot was made from that lead and they basically they're on the longest cold case ever where they're trying

to find out 400 years later who pulled the trigger wow oh gosh what are they going to do this person is great great great great grandchildren yeah exactly they're going to get a knock on their door where are you on the fourth of march 1596 it's just i was just looking into the quirks of iceland the country um i didn't know this beer was banned there until 1989 really it was banned in 1915 they had a referendum and they decided to ban beer and then in 1921 they had to change it a bit they legalized wine because spain threatened to stop buying iceland's fish if iceland kept on refusing to import spanish wine so it's a frimalism wine and then they they allowed very very weak beer but they didn't allow normal strength beer

and this backfired badly because people just started putting vodka into their incredibly weak beer and making a kind of horrible beer and vodka cocktail oh some of that some of the spirits that you get in iceland are unbelievable i went to there's a restaurant that specializes in slightly sort of quirky food and i ordered the fermented chuck uh and it comes in a jar sealed kilner jar with a rubber thing and a very very strong glass of well are we called it schnapps i don't know what you call it it's a very strong um pure alcohol thing uh and uh i said to the guy i didn't order the schnapps he said you're going to need it and because for the sake of the other diners you have to open the jar really really quickly and grab a little spoonful of this stuff

and stick it in your mouth and close it because it smells so terrible and the taste was the most disgusting thing i've ever had it burned back at my throat and i and i did take take the schnapps as a shot i drank it so quickly anything to make the taste of the fermented shot go away really thought you were going to turn around and say the amazing thing is it smells awful but the taste is no it smells awful and also tastes awful correct um hey one bit of royal etiquette which i think is um upheld in the royal family as opposed to being upheld by the tabloid press is eating etiquette which is that and it doesn't it makes sense so the queen is served first you would serve the queen first at a dinner and then when she stops eating really you're supposed to stop eating

as well and this has existed for a few hundred years and it was really difficult with queen victoria because this was the practice then as well but queen victoria thing about her was she was incredibly greedy she used to eat extremely fast like her advisors used to say stop eating so fast she got terrible indigestion she could eat seven courses in half an hour apparently and she was always served first and so the people who were served last by the time they got their plates they were sort of immediately whipped away from them again because queen victoria had inhaled her first course i gotta say anna we've been for dinner quite a lot of times and you will not let a plate go if there's any food left on it no matter whose plate it was yeah is this why you've never met the queen

because it's i did it once and i've been banned from dining with the queen since desperately trying to lick everyone's plates as they were taken away i had a quick look at some things that you could get sent to prison for in finland oh yeah in 2015 the police asked the members of the public that if they saw a pizza that was on sale for under six euros to inform the police the way that they saw it is it's impossible to run a business where you sell pizzas for less than six euros it's just the ingredients are too much it's completely impossible so if people are doing that it means that they can't be paying the tax on the pizza which means that they must be tax avoiders and so they asked literally asked people to say as soon if you see any pizza on sale for

underneath that price send us the menu and we'll arrest the guys that's so funny that is a bargain price for a whole pizza yeah it is unless you're in a shop in a shop it's the kind of normal price for a shop pizza that's a very very posh shop pizza really isn't it yeah but i mean there are pizzas around the corner that you can take away delicious for a fiver and i'm now wondering if it's my responsibility to be informing on them just tell the police in finland because obviously the taxes in finland are a bit higher than they are in the uk so probably it's more of a seven pound thing in the uk oh you feel bad if you got the whole staff and structure of the co-op sent to finish prison what are you in for i'm also in for selling this pizza there's the pizza wing

isn't there they're hard and criminals 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 did you find the horse hair yes so good so there's a look there's a look of hair from the horse you rode in the 1860 election called old bob and um old bob attended his funeral and for just $1,250 you can buy a hair of this horse one hair yeah actually yeah it's not a lot it's one hair a single hair yeah you wouldn't like if you open the envelope that could just fall onto the carpet and you've lost it if you're a mafioso and you don't have the resources to put a whole horse's head on someone's pillow i'm just thinking that you know as a middle-aged man who's losing his hair it shouldn't i shouldn't be letting it go

down the drain i should be saving this in case i become president or like the president's also something in the future i don't know surely this is our next tour match i've got just one last thing about sort of ingenious ways of catching poachers people who are trying to illegally catch all of these fish um during the early 80s to about 1998 there was a guy who worked for the california us fish and wildlife service and his name was terry gross and he was sort of sick of the fact that there were poachers that would go in the early morning to catch all this salmon when that was highly illegal so you usually had to stop half an hour after sunset and they would drive out at two or three in the morning and they would get away with it because the tracks that were leading to

all of these lakes were monitored by other poachers so if they saw a truck come down that they knew was one of the wardens they would say quickly get the boat in get out of there so they had plenty of warning so he had no idea what to do but then he came up with this idea of putting on a wetsuit getting into the water before the day ended and waiting patiently and what he would do is while they were fishing salmon he would loosen the glove of his wetsuit and as they were fishing it would hook onto his glove and he would slowly splash around and they would start going oh my god i've caught a massive salmon and he would go harder and harder and they're like this is the biggest salmon we've ever got they've got this on recording these words and they would slowly

come in and they would get to him and as they got right up to him he would say good morning gentlemen state fish and game warden you're under arrest and he would pull out he would pull out of his wetsuit a citation book and he would give them their fides and then he would go back in and try and catch more people and hire a glass mpr and this american life um looked into it and they found that there were plenty of these people that used to do this sit there for hours and get caught by a fisherman yeah wait but did they so did they have their heads under water while they were waggling their glove above the water no because it was so dark so they would they would sort of yes sit above and yeah but just in a nice little spot it's brilliant this guy's an amazing

guy that's real commitment to the job i don't know if i'd sin freezing cold water for a full day in a pond to catch a poacher i had a neighbour once an elderly neighbour who would sleep in his car to try and catch car thieves really and he and he called them waggling keys out of the window as soon as someone grabs them i was just thinking them that this guy who's pretending to be a fish basically he's lucky that they're not catching them with dynamite isn't yeah in the example in this interview they heard somebody going get the net get the net and then another voice goes get the net heck get the gun so one more thing about uh olympians who have other jobs you know the brian brothers the the tennis the tennis guys the tennis

we absolutely love the brian brothers so sort of best doubles partnership ever full time they've won a billion olympic medals and they have a second i don't know if i can call it a job so i don't know how much profit they make from it but they also are a band they have the brian brothers band and so bob plays the keyboard and mike is on uh the guitar or drums but he's not on the drums when the drummer of the counting crows joins them which he does sometimes so like the jit band and i mention it because everyone has to look up the 2009 song autograph which i'd forgotten about but is it features cameos from andi murray and no fact jokovic and i'm telling you i i wished to god it was this andi murray here because that would have been less awkward than what they make

andi murray the tennis player do it's it's about what a horrible jurid is signing autographs after matches and andi murray's little rap section in the middle includes the lyrics during wimbledon it gets really crazy my hand cramps up and my mind gets hazy and um look i'm going to leave people to imagine the rest andi murray's rap section is never the words that should never ever be put together another fun thing about ghost crabs is that they're very house proud only when they are sexually mature which maybe is the same for humans so when males are not sexually mature and if you get female house crabs they burrow into the sand and they leave these tiny little holes in the sand they're smaller than a tiny coin but they can go four or five feet

down which i wasn't as kind of cool anyway they burrow holes into the sand and they just throw the sand anywhere the sound that they've used to borrow they just chuck it all over the beach but as soon as they hit sexual maturity they suddenly sculpt the sand into a perfect pyramid and this is to sort of advertise themselves to ladies we think so a woman can look across a beach and she'll spot the sexually mature men by the perfect pyramids that are next to their entrances and you'll see you'll see the little entrance and then a little crabby footsteps footprints going to the pyramid do you think that if a ghost crab goes to egypt they look over and they go fucking hell there is a very attractive enormous ghost crab over there

yeah very intimidating trip very intimidating stag do for those males so you can find out a lot of things from ct scans of mummies they tried to they ct scanned an egyptian priest called nas yamun and they scanned his throat and his vocal cords and they could find what his voice was like so they did the ct scan of his um vocal cords they created a 3d printed vocal tract and then they kind of fired air down it and they could work out exactly what he sounded like um and it's basically people on the internet think he sounded a bit like britney spears cool oh i thought i i thought i know this one i thought he just went uh he goes like meah like that meah and you know how she goes meah meah meah

yeah oh james that's your that's your cat you're thinking of oh yeah sorry that's not pretty but yeah there was basically um they the sound did the rounds on social media and a lot of britney spears fans were very excited about it wow i'm some released material from 2000 years ago well the interesting thing is like nas yamun would have he was a priest so he would have done a lot of singing and chanting in the temples so basically if you went back to ancient egypt and you walked past a temple it would sound like someone's singing baby one more time wow he wouldn't have been dressed as a schoolgirl though seems implausible might have been there's probably a lot less chess players online than we actually think there are because they create fake accounts

and they build them up and up to be sort of well played chess players with high rankings and then they play themselves and defeat that person so it's sort of creating bogus accounts in order to defeat them and then raise your ranking most of it's just one guy the whole have you heard of sandbagging that's another cheating thing no so yeah this is where you play deliberately badly to qualify for a tournament that is actually a bit beneath you and then you win you take the brakes off and you you thump everybody that's that happens in golf as well people claim like you you play badly for ages until your handicap gets way worse and then eventually you go right today is the day that i'm going to try and win the tournament it's

extremely luck down upon yeah yeah they've got measures in place don't they i think they have actual measures in place now on the chess side to stop that so i think it's really you ever yeah i think it's if you ever achieved certain high scores they look at it and go well there's no way that you can now suck that much because you got to this level and if you if you won a certain amount of cash prize like a high cash prize well how did you get to that you must be good you must be sandbagging us in order to to do that so very embarrassing if you're not sandbagging and you are just having a really bad couple of times have you just got lucky one time yeah yeah it happened i think they had to change the rules or tighten them a few years ago because

there was a middle school so sad when you're sort of forcing 12 year olds to do this but in texas it's called henderson middle school and they entered a competition where you had to have a ranking under 900 and then they absolutely smashed it they were investigated and it turned out they'd lost all of their previous 28 matches and they're really good and someone worked out the chances of having lost them all being as good as they were and it was one in sextillion that they could have lost all 28 which is like if they'd been then playing chess since the start of the universe and everywhere in the universe it still wouldn't have happened probably so they were disqualified but 12 year olds come on okay i think it's not impossible that some people get

to a really good position on chess.com because they're only playing people who are deliberately losing in order to sandbag so they think they're incredible they win a big cash prize and then the next time they play it their deficiencies are revealed and then they get banned from playing because chess.com thinks they were the ones doing it it's absolutely minefield it's a vicious cycle other people who go down um sort of scavenging and and hunting around the lost rivers are the type it's tiburn is that the pronunciation is it the tiburn angling society yes the tiburn angling society it's just wonderful they they meet up once a year to report on the fish they found it's always zero so it's not the greatest angling society but they are obsessed with the

idea of daylighting which is the idea of bringing these hidden rivers back to the surface through destruction of the stuff on top of bringing the tiburn back to being what it once gloriously was and it's an extraordinary thing that they put together in around 2000 where they put a full report to show how they would do it where it would go it would demolish about one billion pounds worth of real estate unfortunately telling it's only Buckingham Palace that needs to go really it's Buckingham Palace that's part of their plan they want to get rid of it i've one more thing about Houdini's habits at home 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 had come 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 so i read a paper called Man and mongooses in indian culture by Derek Olodrick i'm not sure that's how you pronounce his name but i'm looking up afterwards and i found the oldest known story about mongooses and it's from 3 000 years ago there's a king who's having a feast and then a mongoose walks in and half of his body is made out of gold and he comes in and he rolls in all

the food of the feast and the king's like what the hell are you doing and he said oh well i once rolled in the food of a brahman like a really holy hindu guy and the brahman was so holy that he turned when he rolled in his food he turned half into gold and this mongoose is going around looking for another holy person so he can turn his whole body into gold right i don't know if you want your whole body turned into gold i'm pretty sure king might have taught us that didn't he yeah everybody hadn't come across each other king might have just didn't turn into gold did he yeah no no no he turned everything he touched into gold he didn't like get a gold finger and then no but what he but he regressed his leg and he had a gold leg i know he regressed it because he couldn't

eat but wait a minute what happened no no he he regressed it because you couldn't well partly because if you touched another person who he loved they turned into gold and that's based on the fact that people don't want to be turned into gold yeah what happened if with king might has touched himself do we know and is it in the story or they didn't do that in those days james it was a cleaner time i there was something about finland that was actually the original article i read and it's about um it's an amazing fact that i didn't know and i can't remember how the journalist lewis segwayed into it but i'm just going to segue into it by saying she also mentioned that finland's only monarch the only monarch it's ever had is this german guy who never visited

finland that's all right and they this is in 1917 they got independence from russia and they started off thinking we want a king uh everyone else has got or a queen um everyone else has got one where should we find one we obviously don't have a royal family here in finland because we're brand new and so they picked this guy uh frederick charles of hess and he was a german prince they designed a crown for him which i think you can still see it's on display somewhere in finland and then before he even had a chance to enter the country they changed their mind after a few months and he abdicated oh that's it that's did he abdicate from overseas as in he yeah he was out still outside god that side must have been good in those days when there were all

those new countries being formed and if you were if you were a minor noble in anywhere in europe whenever there was a new country you must have been there with your fingers crossed thinking oh maybe i'm going to be king at the you're sitting in the waiting room with all the other potential monarchs going in for their interviews i hope that bastard from schleswig holstein doesn't get it he's coming out looking all cocky really ace the practical the waving section of the interview here's one quick thing on forgeries um there is a forger or there was a forger called elmer de horre he was a hungarian um in the united states and he did forgeries of loads of people Picasso matisse and he did loads of forgeries of medigliani okay and he did so many medigliani

that these days it's impossible to compile a catalogue of medigliani's work because we don't know what is real and what is a forgery by this guy de horre and the reason i bring it up is because he has a collection of all of his forgeries and it's run by a guy called mark forgy no oh wow yeah he's got extremely fast internet as well hasn't he i like to have you guys come across freddy and truce overstegan no who were not today not he's not at the hotel here um they were part of the dutch resistance in fact and they were 14 and 16 years old respectively and they were killers cold-blooded killers and they called their kills liquidations which was kind of terrifying and apparently the 14-year-old

actually looked about 12 so it was quite easy for them to get away with killing because no one expected to be killed by a 12-year-old girl and the way they did it was they had various methods but they cycled around quite a lot i guess cycling was a thing for these resistance ladies and they would ambush collaborators so they'd be on two bikes and they'd have pistols in their bike baskets and they'd ambush them or sometimes they'd do a drive-by so freddy would be riding the bike and truce would be on the back and you know cycle past some collaborators and just shoot them up as you ride by off into the sunset and what was the liquidation bit or was that just a fancy they would just shoot them as opposed there was no melting down they didn't have like

a vat of acid in their cellar they dragged Nazi bodies cool let me get back what you didn't melt them down no we just we just did a drive-by and shot them well you you got to melt them down mate because i didn't look into it enough there are a few sort of modern loopholes for companies in britain that don't have a liquor license and i was reading about one place which was there was a new craft distillery in yorkshire that was being set up in a disused train station so they'd done it up and it was for it was going to be for gin i believe and it's called tapling and meaghan distilleries and by the time they were about to launch all the paperwork hadn't been done yet for their license but they had this big party that they wanted to promote

their drinks so what they had to do was they looked and found a loophole which is if you're on a moving train you don't need a liquor license so all trains that you buy alcohol on they don't need a license a moving train is exempt from it and the fact that they were in a train station and they had a parked train there they got all the guests on to the train and they took it on a two and a half hour ride just to one they just went one way turned around well not even turned around just drove back again and did a two and a half hour gin master class once it was in motion and that that allowed them the loophole of of having the party still if you had a bar which had a miniature train on the counter so it sort of came too chewing along

with your drink does that count and then you wouldn't need a liquor license maybe you have to be on the train so if you went to like what's that um what's that sushi place which has got the conveyor belt if you got a young sushi and you sit on the conveyor belt technically you don't need a license don't sit on one of the coloured plates you will be selected um I was looking at other ways that museums need to preserve their artifacts and one is from fires serious problem and it's a really difficult choice for museums because the main way to get rid of fires is with sprinkler systems but obviously if you sprinkle a whole art gallery then you've sort of ruined the paintings that way but so a lot of museums kind of don't do it and

that was a serious problem in Brazil you might remember a couple of years ago when the main museum in Brazil destroyed 90% of its collection because of a fire and they just didn't have the adequate protection but there is one place the Getty Museum in LA which has such cool fireproof systems so they have like they had the big wildfires last year and they were pretty much licking at the sides of the museum and the curators were completely chilled out about it because it's so well protected so it's full of like Rembrandt's and Manet's but they first of all they have a system where the oxygen can get sucked out of the rooms so that as soon as the fire got in there it wouldn't be able to breathe and so it would just immediately go out so it's like an anti-ventilation system

and then they also have around the museum a million gallon water tank and so as soon as a fire starts coming close they just start releasing water into the ground all around the museum like a moat it's great and so firefighters who are fighting the wildfires use the museum as like a rest area and a vantage point to look around at the rest of LA and go ah well I guess I guess the arts okay wow really clever that's really clever well just speaking of water um there was a museum in Spain which is the Museum of Underwater Archaeology which is called Aqua and they've had a real problem with leaks this year now hang on honestly they get all of their stuff is stuff that's been found underwater like statues

which are sunk or with shipwrecks or anything that's come from the bottom of the ocean and they have hundreds of thousands of things in there but they also have leaks in the basement and a lot of damp causing problems with the wall and they're really worried about it and they reckon that it's going to wreck all of the things which have been on the water for thousands hundreds of years oh no have you guys heard of at nuclear trains a twitter account no no this is a really cool one so it's a twitter bot and it's made by two scientists who are called Matt Allinson and Keer Little and what it does is it tracks trains which are carrying nuclear waste across the UK so these trains go I didn't know they existed actually is that sorry I didn't know there were

trains that had uh nuclear well right you it's not they're yet to tweet no no um well yeah I mean it's not it's not common knowledge but they sort of they have you have to transport radioactive containers and trains are not a bad way of doing it they're very tightly sealed um and these guys they're not pro or anti-nuclear they they genuinely are just in it for the trains as they say um and they have clarified that the radiation you would get because sometimes these pass along platforms you know they go through Brixton or whatever quite near passengers but they've said that the radiation you would get if you were on the platform one of these trains went by will be like you just eat a one banana isn't that amazing that

everyone on the platform has just eaten the equivalent of one banana but would you feel it would you feel full you don't everyone slips over on the platform yeah no they don't emit bananas they just get that much radiation yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah but that's quite dangerous because if you are such a banana lover that you're constantly operating on the banana eating cusp of getting radiation poisoning and you manage it right you know you're eating 350 bananas a day and you know 351 would tip you over the edge yeah yeah you're right yeah what happens then Andy if a train full of bananas passes by what is the radiation level in that at that speed that that kills you immediately right they have to transport bananas one by one don't they that's why they're

so expensive once they get to the shops do you know that this is one of my favorite totally random facts but you know Penny Mordent who was very briefly actually Defence Secretary last year and before that was international development secretary you know she's named after a Royal Navy frigate wow she's named after HMS Penelope that's so funny isn't that weird that's a really good giant frigate it's because she's from an army family and actually it was known as HMS Pepperpot because it was shelled so many so many times in World War II so she could easily be Pepperpot Mordent. Don't she do that diving jokes? Pepperpots is Iron Man's girlfriend yeah oh really yeah maybe that's why they didn't go with Pepperpot they didn't want her to be confused

why is she called Pepperpots it's a weird name it's because she comes from a comic book like all these characters that they often they often have quite funny names and illiterate names don't they yeah good point. I read about one plane crash or you know emergency landing in 2013 this guy called John Pedersen and he realized that his plane had had a little bit of damage and he wasn't going to make it all the way to the nearest airports this was in around Chicago and so he saw a long road and he thought well you know that's probably the best way to go I'm going to try and stop on this road but obviously there's traffic on this road so he doesn't want to hit any and what he managed to do was exactly time it so that when the lights went red and everyone stopped that's when he

landed in the middle of this intersection isn't that amazing wow that's his story and he's sticking to it and I was reading this article about it in the Chicago newspaper and they said that he landed and didn't hit anyone and he was in the middle of this intersection and then the lights changed and two cars just went didn't notice him and crashed into him what and then just apparently it says and then mysteriously sped off so they they kind of drove hit this plane and then thought oh shit I've just hit a plane and they just did a hit a run on this left the seat of the accident so I can't be bothered to fill the form in on this one yeah no one's going to believe that are they no I'm never going to get this sort of claim this plane just pulled out in front of me

people always think that pneumatic technology is going to be the next big thing I think there was a lot of excitement in the US about 40 years ago that it was going to be how we all disposed of our rubbish and so Disneyland I think was a pioneer of this right so their entire garbage disposal system is fully pneumatic so if you're in Disneyland you put something in a bin and then it drops down into a tunnel system and every 20 minutes it just gets sucked about 60 miles an hour to a collection point there are a lot of theme park nerds who are about to get angry at you because it's the magic kingdom of Walt Disney world in Florida not Disneyland I guarantee you're getting thank you for that correction I got to do a behind the scenes tour there once so I actually got to

see some of the the tunnels that those go through and you're just kind of walking through the backstage tunnels and there's just this tube next to you where every 20 minutes or so you just hear this so do you do you have to dive out the way every 20 minutes no it's just it's just a tube on a wall it's not like a transparent how big is the tube can you fit a human in it it's 20 inches diameter I think can you fit a mouse in it 20 inches okay so that's pretty big yeah I reckon yeah I've been to Disneyland and Disney world as well and the rides I don't really like them as much I prefer their universal ones the rides but if there was a garbage shoot I think then I would be definitely going for you could sell t-shirts saying why don't you get sucked off at Disneyland

like the rubbish for our pneumatic tube system I will I will argue with you for like half an hour that Universal's rides are terrible compared to Disney's but we do not have the time for that have you heard of Jebediah Buxton no I don't think so my favorite plaque plaquey in the UK lived in Derbyshire the label is mental calculator so Jebediah Buxton lived in the early 18th century I we think he was an autistic savant you know people who could do unbelievable calculations in their head so Jebediah Buxton was once asked after a church sermon what did you think of the sermon and he said oh I just counted how many words there were in it he just gave a word count that's so good I know he was self

he's completely self-taught not formally trained at all and didn't know much about anything except numbers but knew everything about numbers so he walked around the local area which is called Elmton was about a thousand acres and he could give its size not only in acres but also in square inches wow he was amazing sorry I have no idea what you just said because I was trying to count the number of words you were saying not as easy as it sounds is it it really isn't really is not if you get a seal and you blindfold it and you give it a pair of ear muffs then it can't find fish I'm not surprised yeah yeah I'm not surprised at all actually sorry I've misread this they can find fish oh if you blindfold them and give them ear muffs okay that's gone from being an incredibly

underwhelming fact to it being quite interesting and it's because they use their whiskers right and the whiskers can tell the movements in the water and this is amazing so when fish swim we've talked before that they have like lots of eddies and vortices and stuff like that which they leave in the water these seals whiskers can detect these tiny little vortices in a fish that swam past 30 seconds ago so it swam past 30 seconds ago and it can still feel where it was and then it can still follow the track of the fish to get that even if it's wearing ear muffs wow that is amazing can it tell sort of the time that's passed rather than up to 30 like can they be like oh 15 seconds ahead because they can tell the strength of the way they can't tell the future not the future

what I'm saying is they can count up to 30 but when they feel it let's say it's a wake that comes past them 15 seconds after it's been there can they know it's 15 seconds I don't know if they can count up to 30 I don't know if they know it's exactly 30 but I think they they will have a basic idea of time and will know that and know that the vortices will be stronger if it has gone more recently past I mean it's like smelling something you know you feel like getting stronger as you get closer don't you yeah you don't when you're trying to find something in your house where the smell's coming from you're not counting this you know your nose isn't saying that's exactly five meters away but you can tell that it's closer or further you guys don't do that

I think if you want to sue anyone you should sue the makers of Sherlock Holmes Baffled have you guys seen that movie no it's from 1900 it's the first ever movie with Sherlock Holmes in it and it's an American silent film and basically it's very much against the canon of Sherlock Holmes because what happens is people keep kind of stealing things from under his nose and then using trick photography they just disappear and then you just get a picture of Sherlock Holmes going oh what happened there why did they disappear and then they reappear in another part of the room and then they steal something else and then disappear again and it goes on like that for a couple of minutes and I just don't think that that's really I mean first of all he doesn't solve anything he just

stands there looking confused yeah he's baffled yeah well that was made in 1900 I believe right is that right James so there's another one which I'd love to see 1916 the mystery of the leaping fish and this was a movie where Sherlock Holmes was sort of lampooed by Douglas Fairbanks Douglas Fairbanks junior who was one of Hollywood's leading actors at the time he was a swashbuckling adventurer and he along with Charlie Chaplin they set up they set up UA United Artists and he was huge influence in Hollywood back in the day and he played basically the druggy version of Sherlock Holmes really bringing up that side of his character so the way that in the movie he was presented he wasn't called Sherlock Holmes he was called Coke Anyday E N N Y D A Y as his surname

and he had a bandolier of syringes that he wore across his chest so he was constantly injecting himself as the movie went along with cocaine yeah um he had a clock with the clock face it says eats drinks sleeps and dope instead of the numbers so he would know when to inject himself and um the idea is that Coke Anyday was trying to find all of these drug barons and once he caught them he would sample all the drugs that they had as he was busting them and Fairbanks hated the movie after it came out it was only a two-realer and um he just said this is horrific but that's one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes movies as well you say 1916 1916 yeah houses but that Dan that was the first year as the first full length Sherlock Holmes film but this was a

bit more serious because he was um because it wasn't a mad cocaine rob it was um he was played by William Gillette who was a distant cousin of the Gillette Razor family yeah exactly yeah um and uh William Gillette was a really interesting guy so he only played Sherlock Holmes in one movie but that was after he played him on stage about 1300 times he'd come up with a stage version of it and yeah and he and Arthur Conan Doyle were actually friends um they I mean Arthur Conan Doyle was probably pleased because he managed to work out a way of doing the character well on stage and it was you know respectful and all of this but also entertaining and when they met I really like this William Gillette um they were meeting I think on the same train and Gillette got off the train

dressed as Holmes and then he found Arthur Conan Doyle and he examined him through a magnifying glass and that was from that point on with they were firm friends he like Conan Doyle loved it yeah that's it's a risky move isn't it because he really is yeah yeah he might think you were taking the piss a little bit but we also we had um temperance bars in Britain which were super popular around the end of the 19th century again with this big push to stop people drinking and apparently for every little mill town there would be at least three temperance bars which is essentially like a I mean the cafe what is it like a milk bar like it's a cafe yeah I think that might step they used to be not not that long ago there was definitely one in Lancashire I know that much well there's

one left now and uh it's Fitzpatrick's in Lancashire you're absolutely right and the owner of the Fitzpatrick's in 2012 he'd just been on Harry Bikers actually and talking about the great stuff about non-alcoholic drinks like dandelion burdock and how great abstinence is and how popular the bar still was and then he was done for drink driving have you guys heard of the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the gregs but I can understand that okay gregs well no I've tricked you with my words this is the story of the only nuclear bomb that has ever been dropped on american soil by an american plane okay and it fell on the family who were called the gregs um they lived in south carolina parents three kids uh their cousin everyone was playing the kids were playing in

the yard next door to the garden right perfectly normal afternoon high above them in the sky there's a plane which is doing a training exercise with a real nuclear bomb where they have to transport it across the country um so training exercise there had been some kind of mess up with getting it sort of locked into its um its sort of um hangar thing you know it's hanging there above the bomb bay doors um so the captain sends a crew member to adjust the the locking mechanism the crew member uh can't quite get a handle these are huge bombs it looks like a you know it looks like a whale weighs about three tons the crew member climbs slightly up the side of the bomb and reaches up to grab something to get a handhold unfortunately what he grabs is the emergency

bomb release mechanism right oh and then does he fly down on it like in dr strange level so the exact well the bomb falls onto the bomb bay doors right which crumple like paper the crew member makes an x shape with his body and just about stays inside the plane okay the bomb is now falling towards the completely unaware greg family house it lands in their garden it makes a crater 15 meters across and 10 meters deep the fact no one is killed the family are all injured but they they you know they became superheroes no superheroes um the family's chickens unfortunately were vaporized but the but thank god the bomb did not go fully nuclear it kind of had the safety catch on but then amazingly they stayed the the crew was so apologetic they were so

mortified they'd done this and they wrote to the family apologizing and they stayed in touch for years with the crew this family the great even to the extent that one of them visited the family for a week's holiday many years later that's incredible that's incredible that must have been an embarrassing moment because i used to get embarrassed enough you know when you had to knock on your neighbor's door and say i'm really sorry i've kicked my football into your garden i am so sorry i have dropped my nuclear bomb in your backyard um in the vietnam war i don't think we've ever mentioned operation wandering soul have we which was one of the tactics that the us used against vietnamese soldiers which was to play ghost noises incredibly loudly out of helicopters and from u.s soldiers

sort of hidden in vietnam they'd have these big boomboxes and play ghost noises that doesn't seem like it would work because helicopters are extremely loud and it's not like you're gonna they're not like they can sneak up on you and then play this noise you're going to be first thing is you hear the helicopter and you're going to go why a ghost driving helicopters now doesn't make any sense you're so right the idea was that in vietnam the belief is that if you don't get a proper burial then your soul wanders the earth and so they actually recorded south vietnamese people they recruited south vietnamese people to record themselves shrieking and screaming and saying my friends i've come back to let you know that i am dead i'm dead don't end up like me go home quickly

really crazy and the vietnamese soldiers mainly didn't believe them and all it did was give them a target to return fire to so oh no that would still scare me i have to say if the four of us were out you know in a in a jungle and we were scared in a boombox had a voice of saying alex bell saying don't come over here i'm dead i get scared by that what situation why are we in the jungle then i mean what how badly wrong is our tour gone that way we're on foot in vietnamese jungle and why is it still alex bell yeah and why does it take a boombox and a helicopter and the jungle for you to pay any attention to alex bell alex if you're listening here's how you get us to actually upload the podcast correctly when you say there there are all these museums around license some

of them do sound i would say of limited interest so there's a museum there's an island called hi me hi me um and there's a collector on there who's collection museum whatever you like it's a lifetime of paper napkins which are organized by theme into binders and there's a photo of her online her sofa is covered in binders full of paper napkins i just does anybody else feel an overwhelming sense of sadness well there's napkins there to wipe your tears away so yeah that's so true place to have a cry um they have a museum of sea monsters but the way that they've done that is they have the stories of sea monsters um like any museum might do but the founders they phoned every single care home in iceland and they asked for all of the elderly residents do you know any stories

about sea monsters that have happened in your history or have you heard any stories and they collected all of those and they're all the stories that are in the museum which i think is a really good way of finding social history isn't it yeah so wonderful but that's the origin of um of grim's fairy tales in the first place isn't it the grim brothers didn't write them they went around and collected them they really mostly from women yeah there was a woman i think she was called daughter wilder who gave lots of the stories but they went around and particularly older women asked them for the stories that they remembered i mean really we ought to be doing more of that i think that that kind of gathering of stories is a wonderful thing so good for them that's great

yeah it sounds wonderful it sounds like an incredible filing system but done as an entire country where they're all dedicated to filing one aspect to social history yeah yeah it's just yeah it's incredible with the grim brothers i read a story which i really hope is true i always keep meaning to look it up which is when they were gathering the stories one of the brothers was trying to get a great story off um a sailor or some guy who um who knew bunch and uh he said what can i give you to give me your story and the sailor needed new trousers so the grim brother gave his trousers on the spot to this guy to wear and then gave him his story and he took it down sort of you know trouserless as he was as he was taking it just love i love that kind of i need your story

what do you need my trousers find go for it did that wait did the guy did the guy who was talking to not have any trousers on no he was probably just was he approaching a trouserless man and saying tell me your story i think a trouserless sailor there's another story there yeah wait was it the story of winnie the pooh i'm actually in Berlin there was a traffic jam this year that was in the news which was this is in february and this was created by one german artist called himself an artist called simon weckert who created a traffic jam by just pulling a hand cart so he was on foot and pulling a hand cart behind him carrying 99 phones so how google maps works is when it's giving you traffic updates it assesses all the number of phones in a certain

area and then assumes that those are lots of people in cars and then assumes that that means there's a huge traffic jam so google assumed massive traffic jam on this one bridge and it redirected traffic around it and this guy was just him on his own walking to the center of berlin he actually walked past google's offices just to do a sort of middle finger up to them freaky for the guys at google they must have oh my god the traffic jam it's coming this way it's an invisible one they're the worst that's hilarious they they claim to be supportive google a google spokesperson said whether via car or cart or camel we love seeing creative uses of google maps as it helps us make our work better oh yeah it doesn't sound like they really liked it and

that guy has been killed he's been disappeared won't find him on google maps anymore one thing that's quite similar which is about modern technology and slightly hacking it is the old teslas um which would drive you could set them to drive just underneath the speed limit wherever you were um they would read the traffic signs and so researchers at mackafee realized that if you've got a 35 mile per hour traffic sign and you've got some black sticky tape and turned the three into an eight then your tesla would drive at 85 miles an hour in nine wow these are the old teslas and new ones don't do that anymore i think possibly thanks to this little bit of work by mackafee but i just i mean especially as a 35 mile an hour traffic

signs are usually in places that need people to slow down it's yeah yeah and that's that's why we're still in the trialing stage really of the driverless cars isn't it like one smear on a speed sign and everyone dies have we ever talked about just that reminds me of the tree of tenore which is in um always in i think Liberia but somewhere up there and um it was the most isolated tree in the world and there was no tree anywhere for like i don't know a hundred miles in any direction and then it got knocked over by a libyan truck driver literally there's nothing else to and he just decided i'm just going to drive straight into that by accident that must have been like the scene in austin powers where the guy's being about to be run over by the steamroller and he's

shouting no from about 20 meters away very very slowly do you think the guy the truck driver was similarly i don't see anything else i think that's a really unfair analogy because in austin powers the idiot is the person who's about to be run over so that implies you're blaming the tree and the tree's gone to extreme lengths to escape traffic collisions it's so socially distanced that tree it really is i think what it is is there's something about people when they're driving if there's a massive area with nothing there at all but there's one thing then some reason you just kind of get drawn towards it like your brain just can't avoid it there there is a thing called target fixation isn't there where where someone is so focused on avoiding a thing that they keep

looking at the thing and aiming towards it accidentally the conversation equivalent is that thing which is in the meaning of lift where there's something you're trying to avoid talking about and so you can never avoid talking about it and i think the example that's given in that book is if you're talking to someone with one leg and you find your conversation is liberally peppered with references to long john silver or the last leg of the ua for competition it reminds me of um michael windsor who is now basal brushes pa jenny you're always you're always name dropping because you're friends with basal brush aren't you that's why i am friends with basal brush so the way he got the job was he rang up basal brushes creator son as basal brush

an audition for him during that you just just was in character the whole time did the voice perfectly got his mannerisms and he got the job from that phone call which is an absolutely bold move because yeah you've got the potential to really upset somebody who literally this guy sees basal brush as his brother that's how um that's how peter cellars as well got his first job peter cellars of inspector clue so fame and the goon show and so on he was getting nowhere and he was an impressionist and he called up the bbc and he did an impression of the the head of the bbc at the time saying to the person who's the producer picking up going have you got this peter cellars you're not an american it's peter cellars where's this peter cellars guy hey this kid's hard

i hear you've got to get him you've got to get him now um so yeah so he imitated it and the guy went oh i'm so sorry well yeah we'll book him and peter cellars later admitted that was actually me but the guy was so impressed that's hilarious that's actually how rory bremnus still keeps getting jobs he can do a very good impression of the director general of the bbc that's not fair rory bremnus great i don't know why i said that do you know vanilla ice is real name oh i feel like i should um oh gosh i can't remember it's a piece called rob rob van winkel oh yeah that's right yeah anyway apparently why on earth would you change that i mean that's a fantastic name and also wait a minute it scans perfectly doesn't it rip van winkel he wouldn't have to do ice ice baby

he's got you're absolutely right yeah he was called vanilla because he was the only one in his friendship group who was white and he got called that and then he had a dance move called the ice right i didn't i didn't know he was white i didn't know anything about him you're kidding he almost played london i think in 2019 or 2020 possibly yeah 2018 or 2019 on ice it's going to be his first vanilla ice on ice concert yeah and he sings a song where the lyrics are ice ice baby this guy has an obsession he's got a problem it's an issue actually um like crowley has something in common with rex lambert uh founding editor of bbc's list of the magazine is it that they were both insane uh i suppose so actually you'll get sued for that and this is about being sued as well so

alistair crowley tried to sue a writer called nina hamnet for libel because she called him a black magician um she said he was into black magic and he said that this wasn't true and he tried to sue her and he lost and he was declared bankrupt and then towards the end basically he became a big drug addict because he'd taken a lot of drugs before and then he became a real drug addict and he died quite young um but i was reading about nina hamnet and according to wikipedia she was a welsh artist and writer who was an expert on sailor shanties and became known as the queen of bohemia she sounds incredible isn't she um she was basically um like one of the main people in soho around the 1930s who kind of knew absolutely everyone um she had an incredible bohemian life

but actually when she sued crowley it became such big news that it really kind of wrecked her life and she became a bit of a alcoholic just walking around taverns in fitsrovia trading anecdotes for drinks sad if you take on black magic it always wins yeah um i was amazed about other people's connections to the occult around this time and people who i thought were just legit humans so the way crowley first got into this whole world was i think he joined an order which is called the hermetic order of the golden dawn and another leading figure in that was yates which as in wb yates and he was actually him and his partner more gone famously his sort of muse and also iin nesbit who wrote the samyard if anyone's read that um anyway yates like five

children and it yeah exactly wow it sort of makes sense when you think about it you can imagine someone who was into weirdo magic writing that yeah but yates was a chapter leader for this order and crowley didn't like him and there was this big rivalry going on about who should be ruling this chapel crowley or yates and eventually crowley invaded his chapel mid-sermon he launched what he called an astral siege on the chapel which involved kicking the doors down and he was wearing a kilt for some reason and a syris mask as inspired by egyptian mythology and he started casting spells and waving daggers around and the police had to come and break it up wow and they they fell out the big story of that it's called the battle of blithe road and the stories that he came through

and he started propelling black magic at yates and the others as he was coming up the stairs yates was using white magic and the white magic toppled him over down the stairs now that's what they say but when you read into it what it actually was is he was coming up the stairs and yates and his buddy who was a boxer was kicking him back down the stairs is that what white magic is white magic is some big guy kicking you down the stairs yeah exactly he's one of the gladiators this is white magic but this this order the idea was they wanted to discover a unified theory that explained the magical world so that they could bring endless possibilities to magicians that was why they were set up and that's why yates joined he wanted to use it for good um and so he joined crowley and he

had a mentor there and the name of his mentor alan benet wow yeah i mean it's not actual alan benet obviously i was summoning a demon yesterday um this year has had an exciting new naval battle which is great because you know not as many classic naval encounters as that yeah definitely i don't want to get old Jeremy carbon on your aster i promise this is a good one because this is the first naval battle in the caribbean for 75 years um and it's between uh venezuela venezuelan naval patrol vessel which was doing the rounds um defending the motherland and so on and it had guns anti aircraft guns that machine guns mounted on the deck lots of stuff on the other side was a portuguese cruise ship uh which included an 80 seat theater a sauna and a jacuzzi okay the venezuelan

patrol vessels as it said you're being very territorially aggressive or something they basically they were chanting around with it they approached they ordered it to come into port in venezuela and you know surrender and all of this they then opened fire and then they rammed the ship okay they rammed the cruise ship but unfortunately they didn't realize that the cruise ship in question the resolute was built for polo cruising and i had a one meter thick hull the venezuelan naval patrol vessel crumpled basically like a tin can 44 sailors had to be rescued unbelievably embarrassing wow yeah that must have really that must have really livened up that cruise ship cruise and if you look out on your left you'll see the venezuelan navy and venezuela is now owned by

thomas kuck is that right that's right yeah amazing you know that there's a lot of art that just sits out at sea on private yachts that often are worth sort of two to three times the value of the yacht itself they're such valuable pieces of art so for example um joe louis has a 200 million pound super yacht he is the majority stakeholder of totland hotspots the football club he is he's a very he's a billionaire in the uk and um he has a yacht and that moored and when it moored people could see through the window and they saw hanging inside one of the rooms a francis bacon painting that sold anonymously at christies for 26 million pounds and so there's courses you can take now to train people for the practical care of onboard art collection because everyone on

board doesn't know how to look after these you know sort of priceless pieces of art and they keep getting damaged when they're out at sea and you know someone will pour um someone will pop a champagne bottle and a cork might hit a priceless piece of art or in some cases there was one guy a jean michel basquiat who's an artist who has little bits of corn flakes that are hanging off the paintings and they were very worried that they were going to be ripped off thinking that maybe the kids on board had spilled their corn flakes onto the painting itself um so you sort of you can't spill corn flakes onto a painting that's hanging vertically on it i don't know dad you've got kids how how far does the food fly when it gets spilled exactly you very much care

well that the sealing fresco at the back of them is just small of cocoa pops isn't it yeah i think if you're putting cereal on your paintings then you shouldn't have an automatic right that it's taken serious yeah well apparently in this case it was a mistake he was eating corn flakes looking at his painting as he was laying on the floor and it fell on it and it became part of the art is is what they say in this article but then one of the more famous ones is that um some millionaire or billionaire owners came back onto their yacht and they've been told by that the captain had unwrapped a piece of art that had arrived for them onto the yacht and had hung the painting on the wall and this was a horrific moment to hear it because the piece of art that they'd unwrapped was a bit

of art done by Christo and Jean Claude and their way of doing art is they wrap things up so they've just wrapped stuff up and so effectively the captain had taken the actual art off put it into a room with all the hot pipes and then hung up this painting on the wall and you might know some of their work they did the the Reichstag in berlin they they wrapped the entire that's what they do they just go around wrapping things so yeah so there's courses now for teaching you how to look after art on the high seas very good so funny god i bet after that there was a famous dog he was called don the talking dog uh and he was called the canine phenomenon phenomenon of the century uh debuted in 1912 and he had a vocabulary that reached eight words um what words were they well

please don't say rough and i think it was a bit like that they were all in german first of all um he could say he could say harbin he could say kuchen he could which means cake and the first one means have uh he could say he could kind of say ja nine and he could say ruha oh come on i need a i need a recording of this or i will not believe well the dog is saying he was absolutely massive he was like he was when he came over to america so he was big in germany obviously like you're going to be big in germany if you speak german but when he came over to america there was a lot of kind of german expats there and they were really excited and so they met him on the coming off the ship a load of reporters and asked him for a quote which um his owner said he was too

seasick to give a quote when he arrived but he was very impressed by new york but whenever he went on stage he would kind of answer a series of questions um presumably the answers were always harbin or kuchen or something like that but the point was that he would make noises that sound a bit like it but according to um the journal science someone did an actual paper on it they said that really he's only just making noises and it's the people in the audience that are interpreting it as words they sound a bit like words but obviously he doesn't really know what he's doing and it helps that the german language sounds quite a lot more like a dog barking than sort of the spanish language i mean you wouldn't get away with a big romantic language and a dog trying to

impersonate that you're absolutely right when i don't understand a question or i can't quite um determine what the person said i give an answer that is uh in determinant as well so it could be uh it's sort of a mixture of yes and no or or i'm not sure so you know and because i don't know what the person said but i still want to respond because they're staring at me so i'll often say something like oh hey no and they and they go are you sure and i'll go uh so that's just a little hint there for some people you might want to it's a little little skill you can have that's sort of a halfway noise in russian you can say yes no yes no which means no dan yet means no right well and you see we have a term called oh yeah nah oh yeah probably heard of this one

that's right yeah yeah so when people say you go into the beach oh yeah nah and what does that mean does that mean yes on them well it means you might but you just see how you go oh okay and they might say to you oh are you into it have you seen this thing are you into it oh yeah nah you know you could be but you don't want to give it away so it's a wonderful response because and then you can't you can't actually respond again to that by law in new zealand so if you've received an all year nah you can't go look which is it because then you're just you're shunned i suppose you could just you could just say maybe i guess it's a similar word no because then you're really giving it a way that you're not sure okay yeah all right it's not all right yeah nah is is is the full spectrum

very non-committal country an entire country that's terrified of commitment that's actually that's actually an option that's actually an option on the upcoming election ballot isn't it it is yeah yes no oh yeah nah now even though it ends on nah the the year part has got to be strong oh yeah nah oh really the way you say it well just yeah there's different ways of saying it but also it meant no in the end the one you end on seems to be the dominant ask me ask me whether it does oh does it just mean no no great great should we get back to talking dogs and the breath actually can be a problem in some places like the edvard monk museum in norway they say that the scream is fading the scream which is his most famous work is fading

because of people's breath and that's because he used very cheap low quality paint he used cadmium sulfide paint smoke when he did his painting uh and it means that when you breathe on it it kind of gets worse and worse and worse and they're trying to stop people from breathing and that means they should they should replace it with the screen yeah the screen in front of the screen yeah very nice sorry it was too good and i didn't matter one of those ones i was afraid to breathe in front of it in case in case the joke faded to the car should we um we can stop there actually should we can't yeah let's do that that was a great one no no it's fine i was only going to talk about um taser tampons we could let's talk about taser tampons quickly and then we can move on

after that i refuse to press stop so some modern self-defense gadgets they're obviously it's still a bit of a growth area even though a lot of these things get released and they're not legal to carry see there is um a killer engagement ring with a particularly sharp cut diamond an unbreakable umbrella which wax just as strong as a steel pipe but weighs only one pound and eleven ounces i think my favorite is the pink stinger which is a stun gun made to look like a tampon it can deliver a 50 000 volt shock and can be used handheld or shot out to distances up to 14 feet so no that's that's a heck of a tampon i think i've seen that done in thailand actually um do me so no but you don't wear it as a tampon before you fire it at your

it's no no no it's it's it's to be hidden within your handbag and nobody would know not presumably among your other tampons yeah you don't want to accidentally get the wrong one do you yeah although if you've got enemies and they ask for a tampon in the bathroom that's a hell of a prank a prank 50 000 volt prank prank goes wrong man doesn't understand what a prank is lovely wow that's extraordinary those are all on the market we can yeah they're they're available somewhere and i cannot guarantee that they are legal in in the territory in which you're currently listening so please don't waste your money i got one last thing which is i was i like the idea of

the name center for north dakota so i just quickly looked into other names of north dakota to see if there's any fun names and i found there's a place called flasher which is great in north dakota place called zap uh and zap kind of the only major thing i could find that happened there was in 1969 there was a movement called zip to zap where the mayor of zap suddenly found two to three thousand partyers tearing up the streets and setting bonfires in the middle of them to have this big party and they had to get the national garden to push them out why was that called zip to zap i thought you were going to say the mayor zip wired into zap it sounded pretty fun no i think it was just a group of people that let's zip over to zap and have a massive party

is the uh i believe and then lastly a place called buttsville which is a cool name but that is weird there's a lot of butts in um in that part of the world isn't there because um butts like means uh it's like a raised bit of land or something so there's but yeah so in montana and wyoming and dakota's there's loads of butts you're not going to believe this in south dakota there is a place which was the original center of north america which was done by drawing two lines and it is called snake butt really yeah and they put an obelisk on it uh and they named it the approximate center of north america and um then in 1930 they changed their minds and decided it was in rugby north dakota but it was snake butt a confusing name because it's actually

really hard to work out where a snake's butt is really is do you know what i said i was having a look so i was going looking through some old books and uh maybe this is just me having sort of locked down brain but i suddenly had a look at one of the poo and i hadn't realized quite how philosophical it is so there's a wonderful bit where piglet and poo are sitting underneath the big tree and piglet says what if this big tree falls down and poo says what if it doesn't and i just thought it's a great attitude to life isn't it instead of catastrophizing and thinking what if this terrible thing happens i like that attitude i mean or am i being ridiculous and we know i have to say it sounds like poo is praying for an end to the pain there um it sounds like he's taking piglet there

on the assumption the tree will fall on them both no but i really like that why are we always worrying about the bad thing that's going to happen what if what if it doesn't and we just sit here happily and not worry about bad things happening to us