No Such Thing As A Fish - 356: No Such Thing As Potter The Great

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss double-thrones, rocking chairs and a load of old molluscs.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round our microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is whenever JFK flew in Air Force One, he was sat in a rocking chair. Wow, that's clever.

Is it so if there's any turbulence you don't feel it because you just rock and fall asleep? Really good point. Did he have a special porch constructed inside Air Force One which he could put his rocking chair on? That would be a great look. Now this was, well, surprising that he had a rocking chair on a plane, you'd think that's not very safe. Well, also I would think, you know what's really annoying for a lot of people on planes is

when the person in front of you kind of leans back, what if they were constantly leaving back and leaning forward and leaning back for the whole flight? Yeah, you're right, that would be terrible. Also, you'd be walloping your head into the chair in front of you. You would have to basically everyone in the plane would have to be in sync and going forward or backwards at the same time, wouldn't they? Yeah, well, that's apparently a thing that does happen, but maybe we'll get to that later. Oh, wow.

Wow, yeah, fact. Tantalising. So JFK, the reason he had a rocking chair is because he had back problems, big back problems, and this was a result of his years in the war, he developed these problems. And so a physician called Janet Travelle in 1955 said to him, why don't you do some swimming? But also, why don't you try it a rocking chair? And he tried it, and he loved it so much that he had it everywhere.

He got this one rocking chair, which he had in the Oval Office, he had it at his home, he gave it to friends. He had about 12 of them, and one of them was put on board Air Force One. And so any time he was flying anywhere, that's what he would be saddened. Very cool. Was it, do we know if it was rooted into the ground or was it slipping all over the aeroplane? And also, could he get a seatbelt on it? I've got a lot of questions about how this works.

I know, I had those questions too, and I'm afraid there's very scant detail of the, I guess, you know, that's that sort of, you know, need to know basis information. Maybe you had a normal seat for takeoff and landing and then went onto it for the cruising. I would have thought takeoff is the crucial moment when you won it. And you can really, because you tip right back, wouldn't you? Yeah, you want to have, you want a hamster wheel, really, don't you, for the takeoff? Yeah. You don't want the president to flip on takeoff, that wouldn't be nice.

These are a specific kind of rocking chair, aren't they? The thing called the Kennedy Rocker, he didn't pick that because of the name, they're named after him, the specific model of chair. But the really cool thing is, there are now about 40 airports in the USA, which have rocking chairs in them, just in the terminal buildings and, you know, looking out over the planes and the tarmac and all of this. And this is a huge trend and it's, it only started in the late 90s when there was an exhibition at Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

They had an exhibition called Porch Sitting and there were loads of rocking chairs. And then at the end of the exhibition, they removed them and people said, what are you doing? We like those. We love sitting in those chairs. So now they've spread across America and they're just everywhere. And those are Kennedy Rockers. Exactly. Yeah, they're known as, well, that's the nickname. They're Carolina Rockers. And yeah, they, they're perfect because they mean that you can just move them

wherever you need to. So if you just need to clean up and just very good for putting near a wall, near a wall plug for travellers. So yeah, they love it. Is it, what do you say you can move them wherever you need? Is that as opposed to normal chairs? Yeah, most chairs in airports aren't moveable. They're stuck to the ground, aren't they?

Oh, well, I can't believe they don't get stolen all the time. Yeah, but you're not going to be able to sneak that onto a plane. Are you? You're not going to be able to get it underneath the seat in front. Are you? His back problems were terrible. I hadn't realised what a horrible, painful life he had. And it's weird that he was recommended swimming

since it seems to be excessive swimming that might have made them a lot worse in the first place, wasn't it? So he got, he was a really sickly president. A lot of people say he's the sickest president, not in a cool way, that they've ever had. Sick. Yeah. There's a, there's been a bunch of studies done on his health recently.

And he was always in and out of hospital. I mean, who was it? Who was it who was in an actual wheelchair and had a stroke? FDR. FDR was in a wheelchair. Yeah. And who was the one who died like two days after? Yeah, William Henry Harrison.

He died after a month. Was he the sickest? Maybe. I don't know if that's an illness. You don't say, oh, God, I've just been diagnosed with having been shot in the face. He wasn't shot. He died of a chill. He went to his inauguration without wearing a hat.

That's a good point. All right. Well, that's true. That's a new illness, not long lasting. Yeah. I guess these neuroscientists haven't read up on all the histories of President's health, but he was sickly and he had this terrible back, which was made worse when he fought in the war, which he shouldn't have because he didn't pass the health test because of his health problems.

But his dad pulled some strings and in 1943, he was in the Navy and his boat was struck by a Japanese destroyer and so it sank and the crew had to swim for almost six kilometers in order to get to dry land. And not only that, but he swam while towing an injured crew member with him between his teeth. So he got hold of his life jacket and towed him between his teeth, six kilometers. And then the subsequent days, he had to keep swimming from island to island until they were rescued. And they believe that made his back significantly worse.

Well, it would. You would have thought. So it seemed like a bit of a sick joke that the doctor then said, have you tried swimming to fix it? That's a really good advice. That doctor, though, Jeanette Travelle, what I like about her is she basically invented deep heat, you know, that stuff that when you're playing football for me and other people doing other sports, like you put it on and it kind of heats the inside of you and it

supposedly makes you feel better if you've had a bit of a knock. Well, a lot of her research was about using these vapor coolant sprays to relieve pain. And that's basically what deep heat is today. So she did that. What is it? Deep heat. Well, it makes it burn so much. There's one that I have, which is used capsaicin.

I don't know if that's deep heat or some jelly. Yeah, but I think they use different chemicals. But yeah. OK, right. That's cool. So if you're out of deep heat, you could just rub some fresh chili into the affected area. Well, let's say, you know, I see your doctor first is what I'm saying.

I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I actually think Anna, you say the swimming was the bad bit of advice. I think the prescription of a rocking chair was the worst bit of advice, because rocking chairs seem to be more dangerous to presidents than anything I can see. So how many presidents, how many presidents, again, how many, there's a slight history issue here, more dangerous than assassinators, for instance.

Well, how many, how many presidents have been assassinated for, right? Yeah. For three of the four are very closely tied to rocking chairs. So, John F. Kennedy, the last chair that he sat in prior to that car chair was on Air Force One. He was in his rocking chair. That was the last thing that he was on, and he loved his rocking chair. William McKinley, another assassinated president, he campaigned the whole time in his wicker

rocking chair out on his front porch. That's where he did all of his pitching to be president. And Abraham Lincoln was sitting in a rocking chair when he was assassinated. What, the theater? Yeah, in Ford Theatre, he was sitting in a rocking chair. So three of the four presidents that have been assassinated have very close ties to rocking chairs. And I think that's something we've not been reporting on as a society.

James Garfield was actually on his way to open a rocking chair factory. You know, you can visit if you want, and if you happen to be in Michigan, the Lincoln rocking chair, and you can still see a dark spot on the back of it, which I think people like to believe is blood from when he was shot. But it's actually, I think more disgustingly, the hair oil from people repeatedly sitting in it in the early 1800s. So Dan, what was it you were saying before about, you gave us a tease or something at the start, didn't you?

Oh, that's right. Yes. There's a report that I briefly scanned. So I'm afraid no further details are the top headline here. But when people in rocking chairs see each other rocking next to each other, they will naturally sink the rock. They will make the rock go with the same rhythm. And I think we do that on bridges and so on, I've heard.

Yes. OK, so one of the reasons... Oh dear. Will you be taking questions, Dan? Is that like you will? This is the worst TED talk I've ever had. I did read the paper, Dan, and I read a few papers about this because it is really interesting. And it's basically like, exactly like you say, apart from the bridge part, which I've

literally no idea what you're talking about. But yeah, if you put two people in a room together with two rocking chairs, they will move and sink. And we're not quite sure why they do it, but there are some clues. And we think it's probably that you're seeing someone else do it and it's like the visual clues and you're subconsciously trying to get in sync with someone else because you're empathetic with them. And one reason we think that is because actually if you get autistic children, they don't do

it. So if you get an autistic child and a non-autistic child in a room and they're both sat on rocking chairs, the autistic child will not go in sync with the other child. Yeah, kind of interesting, isn't it? It's like when you walk in sync with someone, you know, when you're walking down the street with a friend and then you realise you're walking like a boy band or something. That's right. Just naturally.

And if you do that on a bridge, it can cause bridges to collapse. Oh, that's the thing. That's the issue. Did you guys read about the world's largest rocking chair? No. No. It's big. I mean, there have been a few world's largest rocking chairs. There's one called Big John.

These are all in the States, by the way. That was 32 feet tall, got the Guinness World Record. Very exciting. That got blown out of the water by a 42 foot tall one in Fanning, Missouri, which had to be welded to the ground because it was so clearly dangerous. Wait a minute. So that means it's not rocking? No, exactly.

It's controversy. But anyway, neither of those is now the world's largest rocking chair because in 2015, a place called Casey, Illinois built a 56 foot tall rocking chair. And so the others have had to rename themselves the former world's largest rocking chair. And does that one rock? Do you know? I think the Casey one does rock. And the Casey one is Casey.

Have you heard of Casey, Illinois? You know, I feel like I have, actually. I don't know why, though. I bet you you've probably been there, James, because it's also home to the world's biggest wind chime, biggest wooden shoes, biggest knitting needles and a 200 kilo pencil. Their entire tourist economy is based on having quite big things. And it's work. They used to be really the town used to be really broken.

Now they've got big things and they get tourists. It genuinely works. I've always thought, because obviously America has lots of these places all over it. If aliens did come to our earth after it's been depopulated, they'd think that America was populated by giants. There was a species of giants that lived in peace alongside the humans. And then also, whenever they come to the UK and we have all our muddle villages, they'll think that we are all tiny people.

I'm speaking of America. Have you heard about the 1901 rocking chair riots? No. Yes, I have. What a story. So this was all the fault of this guy called Oscar Spate. And he was like a wheeler dealer, wanted to make some money, decided to move some rocking chairs into Central Park, place them all over it.

So it was Central and Madison Park, in fact, place them everywhere. But the moment people sat in one, he installed henchmen, just so hiding out of sight, who would leap in front of you and say that'll be five cents, please. Or three cents for the less comfortable ones. And people didn't like that. And the more they complained, the more he installed more. And eventually it got out of hand when there was this heat wave, someone who was feeling a bit faint sat in one of his rocking chairs and he got yanked out from

underneath him by one of this bloke's henchmen called Thomas Tully. And a massive crowd chased Thomas Tully through Central Park and into a hotel shouting, linch him, linch him. He had to run upstairs in the hotel and lock himself in one of the rooms until they'd gone away. And then this mob marched through the streets of New York saying, you know, get rid of the chairs, sort of smashing rocking chairs all over the place, singing the Marseillais was big stuff.

One of the problems was that they'd removed all of the normal seats on this really hot weekend. They'd removed all the normal seats for repairs on the same day. So all was left was his rocking chairs. And so that's when it all kicked off. But they did try it for a bit afterwards. And there was one worker who tried to collect some fees, but was stabbed by an elderly woman with a hat pin.

And then he thought, OK, well, what I'm going to do is I still want to do this because it's a good business idea. And he got the idea from Europe, you know, like if you go to parks in London, you might find there are deck chairs that you can do. He thought, I'm still going to go with this. And so he thought, well, I'm going to get all my chairs in one little corner and then I'm going to hire them out to people. Right. And then we won't have the problem of people accidentally sitting in

there and us saying five cents, please. And he did that. But then basically, as soon as they saw that, all the unlockers started throwing stones at him and just like tried to get him out of the park. And eventually he had to give up. But the park commissioner, the head of the park commissioner, who was called George C. Clousen, who had kind of said yes to the thing in the first place, said, OK, this is kind of all my fault.

So he bought all the rocking chairs of this guy's spate and he put them in the park and wrote in massive letters, free on them. And so people were allowed to sit on them for free from then on. That's weird, because that would make me think I could just take the chair. Yeah, we already established that, but you're a massive rocking chair thief. I've just got a perfect spot at the corner of my bedroom and needs a rocking chair. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that due to COVID-19, the 2020-2020 Cricket World Cup will be in 2021.

And the 2021-2020 will happen in 2022. Amazing. So, yeah, this is just this is a fact. It comes from the Economist's world in 2021, which is a sort of guide to the year ahead. 2020 is a kind of cricket. For those of you listening who are not cricket fans, it's a kind of super fast, wizzy version of normal cricket. So normal cricket, we play it for five days, and often there's no result.

Usually it's raining and you just come back four days later and say, let's just call it a draw. But this one, it's like really fast. It's over in two hours, 20 overs each. You're done. Exactly. So they could have fitted in probably in 2019, but they should have done, but they didn't. And it was going to happen in Australia. And then obviously in 2020 with COVID, the International Cricket Council said

that's going to be pushed forward and India is hosting a 2021, which is now happening in 2022. I don't know what's happening to the 2022 Tournament. I mean, surely at some point, we're going to have to play two World Cups in one year. No, I think it's the reason that they don't rename it probably because they've already printed all the merch. Oh, I don't know. Must be, right? There must be loads of merch from 2020, which was printed and just not. I mean, what about all the?

Is it the Olympics that were going to be happening in Tokyo? Well, they're still that again, they're still calling it the 2020 Olympics. Are they? Oh, that's going to be a little nugget of confusion for historians in 200 years. It's also going to be huge anxiety for anyone who had the worst year in 2020 when they see that popping up everywhere. But it's happening again. Very triggering, very triggering number.

Yeah, cricket's been, well, it's been affected by COVID much like everything else on earth, hasn't it? It's probably the main one. I say it's the biggest sufferer. The main thing that seems to have happened to cricket, everything is always like, you know, cricket's had a tough old year, everything's had to change. There's the saliva rule, and then that's pretty much it. Basically, you're not allowed to put saliva on the ball anymore for very obvious reasons, which they used to do to shine the ball.

And what are they doing instead? Well, there are rules. So if that happens and the Empire sees you happening, he will have to sanitize the ball. Right. And then hand it back. They should have a sort of sprinkler system between the two wickets, which is like a wall of sanitizer that the ball passes through, like it's a car wash. That's a great idea.

That's such a good idea. So for the people who aren't into cricket, the reason you do this is you spit on one side of the ball, you rub it against your pants, and it makes one side shiny, and the other side not shiny, which makes it move in the air in a slightly unusual way, which can make it difficult for the batsman. That's why you do that. And these days, what they do, I believe, is you can do it with your sweat rather than with your saliva, I think. Wait, are you allowed to do it with your sweat? I believe so, but I haven't looked that up, but I think that's right.

Interesting. So if you sweat on someone, they can't get Covid from that. I think it's quite hard to transmit through sweat. I think so. It's harder. Right. Maybe it's not impossible. But if you're playing cricket in winter, do you have someone just sort of in a sauna and he quickly runs out?

That is one thing about cricket is it's very much a summer spot. Yeah. What you have to do, if you're the team sweater, then you have to constantly be getting into embarrassing situations and making awkward comments. So you feel really awkward and then you sweat more and then you've got, you know, you can wring yourself out on the ball. And actually, weirdly, and this is very ironic, someone with Covid would be sweating a lot because they'd have a fever. So they would ironically be the best person to have in that role. Right. Catch-22.

Catch-22 is a great name for a cricketing-based thriller, isn't it? Because there are 22 players in total. Oh, my God. Oh, really? Hang on. Surely that's going to be what they're calling the 2022-2020 World Cup. The 2021-2020 World Cup in 2022 is going to be called Catch-22. There was a 2020 World Cup this year in cricket.

Did it happen early? It did. It was the Women's 2020, Women's T-20. The final was Australia beating India in Melbourne and they had 86,174 spectators to watch that game, which is only 4,000 shots of the world record of any women's sporting event in history. Wow. Which was the 1999 World Cup in California. But Women's T-20 is absolutely massive.

It's big in the UK and big in Australia and India, but actually all around the world, it's really big. So the next T-20 World Cup, they're going to have teams from Bhutan, Botswana, Malawi, Myanmar, Philippines, Argentina, Brazil. And the reason that these countries have got really good women's teams is because if you think about it, let's say you're Brazil, for instance, and you're trying to bring cricket up and you're trying to make it popular, it's going to be so hard for you to break into the men's game because the main men's teams have been going for hundreds and hundreds of years and, you know, they're really entrenched at the very, very top. But the Brazilian women's T-20 team, they really do think that they have a chance to get into the finals and, you know, and maybe do something because the best teams, obviously still England and India and Australia are good,

but they might be able to get into those lower echelons. So, yeah, really big in lots and lots of countries. Coming in through the back door, we call that Father Women's Game. The first Cricket World Cup was the Women's World Cup in 1973, in fact. So, people tend to say the first Cricket World Cup ever was 1975, but the ladies did it two years earlier. And I just mainly like it because the captain of the women's team, of the England women's team at the time, and the instigator was called Rachel Hayhoe. Hayhoe!

That'd be brilliant if you're in the crowd and you wanted to chant her name. Hayhoe! Hayhoe! The first ever international 2020 match was also a women's game. Was it? Yeah, I don't really like to talk about it because England lost against New Zealand. Against New Zealand? We won this one. Hayhoe won. So, we'll just discuss this one till the cows come home.

So, it was started when she convinced her pal Jack Haywood who ran Wolves Football Club and he was really up for it. He said, because it's quite simple, I love women and I love Cricket. What could be better than the two rolled together? And so, he bankrolled the whole thing. And they came and Australia came over and the only other thing I could find about it in the match reports was that the Australian team in one of their off days went to Longleat and the tournament report said they had a confrontation with an inquisitive rhino. That's all that happened. The first ever women's cricket match was in 1797.

It's a long time ago. That was 11 married women of Berry versus 11 unmarried women of Berry. Were those the team names? They were the teams, yeah. They were the team names. It was always married versus single. Yes, what's that? It's such a single shaming thing in the olden days of sports.

Well, it's unmarried. So, can you have widows and virgins on the same team? Yeah. Are they separate teams? I don't know what the rules were but by technically speaking, by the look of it, it looks like you could. I bet this is a bit like, you know, cricketers who have dual nationality. I bet widows could actually play for the singles or the married.

They could probably decide. Yeah. Well, you could defect by just marrying sort of just a fan, right? Yeah. If you're on the unmarried team, you would want your best player to never meet anyone and get married to them, wouldn't you? You'd be always, it'd be hilariously always trying to kind of spoil all of the dates and stuff like that. That's really good.

I think this is a good subplot, maybe a B plotline for catch 32 when we write our sports based dramedy. The married women of Burry, by the way, they were so good. They were absolutely amazing. They were written about in Australian newspapers. They were so good. And they offered to play any other women's team in the world for any sum. That's how confident they were.

Wow. One T20 match that I discovered, which has led me into a whole area of cricket I didn't know existed, was the Blind Cricket T20. And then that's obviously just a subsection of general blind cricket, which is fascinating to watch. I've never heard of it. And it's really cool. There's 11 players on each team.

And the idea is that four of those players are completely blind. And they're known as B1. And three players are partially blind, B2. And the final four are partially sighted players, B3. And there's all these adaptions that they do to the sport to make it work. So if you were the bowler, you would be bowling a ball, which is significantly larger than a standard ball. And it's filled with ball bearings.

So it's got audible cues for you to hear it coming towards you if you can't see. And so if you're bowling as well, you have to yell play so that they know that it's been thrown. So you know that you're ready to get it. You can't be bowled out if you're completely blind, if it hits the wicket. So it has to be an LBW. And usually the bowling is rolled on the floor. So you can hear those ball bearings going.

It's really fascinating to watch. And they do T20 as well. And Pakistan is where I discovered this through their team. They won it, I think, in 2016. And yeah, there's lots of YouTube clips to watch. It's very exciting. Very cool. So is the ball rolled to make it go more slowly?

I suppose. Or to make it audible. I think it's the audible time. Also to make it a lot safer, probably. Yes. Probably don't want Joffa Ratch and Bowley, don't you? Even if it does have ball bearings in it, if you're blind. Yeah, exactly.

I think it used to be rolled along the ground until sort of mid 1800s, did it? I think we've mentioned that. Yeah, I think certain cheating Australians still have done that in history as well, but we won't go into it. All right, let's move on. Have you heard of the longest match ever? So the T20 was obviously a short format of cricket. The longest test match ever was 12 days long, and it still ended in a draw.

It was 1939. It was England, South Africa. It was called the Timeless Test, which used to be a format of cricket, where you just don't have to stop playing until someone wins. And the only reason the match ended was the ship that the English team were booked onto was due to leave South Africa. And in fact, it had already left. They were in Durban, I think.

It had already left Durban. And they said, oh, it's fine. We'll just get a train to Cape Town. Let's just keep playing a couple more days and see if we can finish the match. And they still didn't finish it. It was still a draw. And I think they ended the practice off. Yeah, I did read about that, actually.

And it was getting really close. England only needed 42 more runs to win the game. And they had two players left in. And so it was really getting close to a really exciting denouement. But they were like, no, we're going to have to go. And at one stage, they considered leaving the two players behind who was still in. And just everyone else going home to see if they could get over the line. That's so funny.

The longest, speaking of longest cricket things in South Africa, the longest six was also in South Africa. The longest six ever hit, apparently. And this was, uh... Can we guess? Was it Chris Gale? What? Can you guess how long it was?

Oh, I thought who it was. I thought Andy was going to regale us with all the crickets, as he knows. No way. I mean, I thought Chris Gale, probably, but I didn't want to play it, so... I can give you a clue as to who it was. James, this might help you. So this was one of South Africa's best players at the turn of the 20th century. Hansi Cronya?

At the turn of the 20th century. Oh. He is old. When you're saying turning the 20th century, you don't mean from the 20th to the 21st, you mean? Exactly. There are two... I think that's pretty ambiguous, to be honest.

You're absolutely right. It turns twice, doesn't it? It was the first time. That was, um... That was that guy Smith, wasn't it? Was it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're close.

Sinclair, you got the right first letter. Was it two miles? Can I just guess that as a distance hit? It's close. Times... It's because... Go on. Did they play it on the top of an enormous plateau?

And so they hit it... The ball was hit out of the grounds and then fell two miles. Oh, maybe he hit it onto a rhino's horn. And then it stuck on the rhino's horn and then he galloped across the world. That's good. That's closer. I can tell you that... I'm going to say it lands on the back of a truck and the truck drives off and it takes it 50 miles.

Dan's done it. He's absolutely nailed it with the reason. He hasn't gone far enough. It was 560 miles. It landed on the back of a coal truck on a railway track. I'm going to allow truck. And it traveled from Joberg to the Cape before being retrieved. And that counts as the lock of six in history.

The poor fielder. Do you know that there is only one person who has ever appeared in World Cups in two different spots in the same year? Interesting. This is only in 2003, so quite recently. It's a Namibian guy called Rudy van Vuren. And he appeared in both the Cricket World Cup and the Rugby World Cup for Namibia in the same year.

That is really cool, isn't it? Until you find out that he lost all six games of cricket by a total of 813 runs and lost all four rugby games by a total of 282 points. Oh boy. That is the equivalent of when Bart Simpson plays a dozen grandmasters at chess and loses to every single one of them. Still, if you didn't tell us that extra bit. It's still amazing.

I mean, it's still amazing. It's still amazing. Do you know when the first ever cricket match, international cricket match, was played in Albania by an Albanian team? Do I know when that happened? Yeah. It would be an old piece of information for us to have stored, unless we just...

Really? Was it one of the... It's not a classic, where were you when? Was it one of the turns of the 20th century? It was a bit after the turn of a century, yeah. Well, it was either going to be really recent or in sort of 200... I know, because Albania didn't exist until after World War One, did it? I don't think.

Well, okay. But it could have been what was what turned into Albania. What are we trying to guess? When the first cricket match was played in Albania? 2015. 2015 is when it happened. Oh, okay. 2015.

And what happened again? Sorry. Albania had their first international cricket match. It's the first time. And they played with... It was on the 24th of May, 2015, the Albanian Eagles versus the international lions. So not an official British cricket team. And the captain of the Albanian team was the prince of Albania, the crown prince.

And the of the British team, it was Tony Hawks, the comedian. He sets it up. Yeah. And the crown prince and his Albanian team won the match. They won by one run and they were all out for 49. And the trophy that they won was the Sonormen Wisdom trophy, which is the trophy of the cup. Isn't Norman Wisdom supposed to be really popular in Albania or is that...?

Yes, it is. He's incredibly popular in Albania for some bizarre reason. They love slapstick over there. And I say that as someone who spent a bit of time there. They love Laurel and Hardy. They love Chaplin. So Norman Wisdom fits in perfectly with that. Do they have...

Well, we have Wisdom's cricket almanac. They have Wisdom's cricket almanac. Oh, my God. Wow. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that in 1682, Russia was ruled by two half brothers, age 16 and 10. A special double throne was built so they could make proclamations together,

but it had a secret window behind it so they could get messages from their sister Sophia, who was literally the power behind the throne. Amazing. Brilliant. So cool. It is really cool. So how did this window work? Talk to us about this throne.

You'd open and close it. She'd put a bit of paper in. Kind of, yeah. So there was basically behind where one of them sat. There's a little kind of hole. And normally it's covered with velvet, so you can't tell whether it's a hole or not. But the idea is that someone could be discreetly hidden behind there, and they'd be able to kind of whisper things to the young czars,

or they could possibly pass little pieces of paper or stuff like that. Or if you wanted to distract them during a proclamation, you could poke them in the bottom, presumably, on the speech. It would be in the neck. Yeah, it would be in the back of the neck. Ah. Be stupid to put that little velvet window by their arse. You're not going to get it.

Right. Constantly going up the bottom. Shall I give you a little bit of background on this Russian history really, really quickly? So this is in 1682, there was a Tsar called Fyodor, and when he died, the country was in a bit of a shambles. He wasn't really able to rule. He'd sent the army into loads of stupid campaigns, and he'd left no heir.

And so it was up to the nobles to fill the throne. And you had two families, the Naryshkins and the Miroslavskis, who basically hated each other, and they had to decide who was going to take the throne between them, which family. So the Duma, who was the Russian parliament, they had to basically pick one. They had to basically choose who was the right horse, and they would say, we'll go for them.

The Miroslavsky candidate was Ivan, but he was quite sickly. So they decided not to go for him. They went for the guy from the Naryshkin family called Peter, who later would become Peter the Great. So Sofia was a part of the Miroslavsky family, like Ivan, but she was really strong. She got the army on her side, and she persuaded everyone to go with a joint rulership.

But so that meant that you had two rulers at the same time. And then she became in charge of Russia. She fired the head of the army. Actually, she hadn't executed. She replaced the head of the army with one of her favorites. She took over most of Ukraine. She took over Kiev in exchange for helping Poland against the Turks. It was just basically all crazy kind of Game of Thrones stuff,

until Sofia went a little bit too far. She tried to get the army to overthrow Peter. The army liked Peter, so they arrested Sofia, had her tried, and compelled her to take the veil so she had to become a nun. And then Peter became the emperor, and Peter became Peter the Great. He loved sending people to the Nunneries.

It was a real classic Peter the Great power move. So not only did he send Sofia there, he sent her sisters along there as well, at least two of them, maybe more. And he also sent his own wife to a nunnery later on, because he seems to have been bored of her, basically. So it's great to know me. He was terrible.

No, that was Ivan who was the terrible. Peter was the Great. Easy mistake to make. Well, Peter is not great, in my opinion. I think we need to rename him. He was a horrible guy. Peter the Dickhead, I think. He was someone who basically just killed people in the most brutal ways.

Disagree. I mean, what do you mean disagree? What was the Great bit? I mean, he'd had a very traumatic upbringing, and it was not an especially decent bit of human history. I don't think he was especially worse than many of his predecessors, to be honest. It was Tsarist Russia.

You accepted gruesome killings, but I want to hear about one of the gruesome killings. But also the great part was because he modernized the country, I think, more than him not killing people. Can we get some good bitching from Dan, though? Yeah, sure. Well, no, we've actually covered him quite a lot with his atrocities back.

We mentioned that he was very much into anatomy, so he would go to beheadings, and he would study the bodies of people that were killed. And when he had one of his ex-girlfriends murdered by having her head chopped off, he then picked up her head and explained about the windpipe and so on, literally in the moment to a crowd, like a TED talk,

just saying, interestingly, this is where this happens. And then he kissed her on the face, and then popped her down on the floor. That's a dickhead to me. That's not great. Just on Sophia, a tiny bit about her, she was known for being kind of shrewd and clever and skillful, wasn't she,

which I guess is how she wielded all this power. But she was not very favorably reported on in other ways. So there was a French diplomat called Foy de la Neville who wrote about her, who acknowledged that she was very shrewd. He said, as much as her waist is short, wide, and rough, so her mind is thin, shrewd, and skillful, which actually, when you look at it,

what is a thin mind? What is that? Don't know. But he did write of her, she is terribly fat, has facial hair, lupus on her legs, is at least 40 years old, and has a head the size of a pot. What a vague way of describing someone,

because pots are not a standard size. That's stupid. Yeah. It's like saying, I have a foot the size of a shoe. Wow. Maybe pots were all one size in those days. But that's one of the innovations Peter the Great had, of course, is the Great Pot Revolution,

where he introduced different size pots. They called him Potter the Great, actually, for a lot of his time. So this fact is about thrones, and this sort of weird double throne that they had. I didn't know that when you're becoming King or Queen in Britain, you don't sit on a throne, you sit on a chair, it's called the coronation chair,

and it's explicitly not a throne. So do we not have a throne? Is that what you're saying? No, they've got buckets of thrones, actually, but this particular thing. But it used to be not looked after especially well. So it's the oldest bit of furniture in England made by someone who's known, who's named,

who's someone called Walter of Durham. But it was in such bad nick that in Westminster Abbey, in the 18th century, you could have a go at sitting on it for a small payment. If you just paid a verdure or something. And it's even got carved into the back of it, graffiti from all the people who visited. So somebody wrote,

P. Abbott slept in this chair 5th to 6th July 1800. That's the official coronation chair of the whole country. What I find really weird about that is that all those bits of graffiti are quite old, aren't they? Like you say, they're from the 18th century, or even maybe a little bit after that, but they're from around then. But in 1914, the chair was blown up by the suffragettes,

as in they put a bomb there and bits fell off it. And so they decided to put it all back together. But they decided not to get rid of any of the graffiti. Isn't that weird? They thought all the graffiti was part of it now, but you would think that a coronation chair shouldn't have P. Abbott slept here. I like the fact that the coronation chair was specifically made

to, in order to accommodate the stolen coronation chair of the Scots, which does make you understand why some Scottish people aren't massively keen, but it was, so it was literally built so that underneath it, it could contain the stone of schoon, which is basically the throne of the Scots. And I had never read about when the Scots stole the stone of schoon back in 1950. I've never read the story, but there may be people who remember this.

So this was a huge deal. It was back in 1308 when it was taken back down, when Edward I, the hammer of the Scots, defeated the Scots, and he had the English throne or coronation chair built in order to sit on top of the stone of schoon. And in 1950, four Scottish students managed to break into Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day and steal it back, but it sounds hilarious.

So they broke in, and according to one of the guys, they went in and it weighs 25 stones. So it is quite a heavy stone, and they picked it up, dropped it, it's split in two, and the ringleader, for whom this presumably is the most precious thing he can imagine, said, I was absolutely delighted when I realised we'd broken it because it made it much easier to transport. Amazing.

And then they smuggled it back up, and that's the last time the border between Scotland and England has closed is in 1950, they shut the border in order to try and stop it from getting across, which is something. But it does come back now, right? It visits, it visits the throne. So yeah, it's now back in Scotland, but if there's a coronation, it comes back down.

So one of the students, Anna, died just last year. He was called Alan Stewart, and he was alive until last year. Oh, wow, really? Yeah, and it was really exciting. They buried it, actually. They took it to Kent, and they just buried it in the ground saying police are going to be looking for a stone, so we will hide it.

And then the Fuhrer died down, and he just subtly drove back down to Kent to collect it from where they had hidden it. But when they got there, there was a gypsy encampment right where the stone was, so he couldn't just dig it up. He just couldn't just march into there. So he had to sort of negotiate and say, by the way, can I dig up the stone?

There's two weird things about that. First of all, if you're going to break into Westminster Abbey, I think Christmas Day is not their quiet day, is it? You want to go on a Thursday, no one's in Westminster Abbey, don't you? How heavy did you say it was? It weighed about 25 stone. How many kilograms is that, do you know?

Oh, I don't work. Is it 2.2 kilograms change? It's 2.2 kilograms in a stone, something like that. That's pounds and pounds of kilos. Way more than that. Two big men. It's one extremely fat man. It's 160 kilos.

Yeah, 158.7, but yeah. I tried to lift 154 kilo stone when I was in Iceland earlier this year. What they had is when you're in Icelandic, let's say Viking, and you wanted to get on a ship, they would have all these stones, and whichever one you could lift up would tell you which job you were going to have on the boat.

So if you could lift the lightest one, then you could only be like a cock or something. And if you could lift the heaviest one, then you could be like one of the main rowers. And the heaviest one was 154 kilograms. And not only could I not lift it, I mean, I couldn't even push it a millimeter from where it was.

It's just so heavy. Well, imagine something four kilos heavier than the stone you couldn't lift, James. And that's what they had to lift. Surely, why would you want to be one of the main rowers on a ship when you can get a cushy job in the kitchen by failing to lift a stone? There must have been a lot of big beefy guys

saying, oh, no, I can't possibly lift that. That's really heavy. I think there's quite a lot of honor in being able to lift them. Because, for instance, when I tried to lift them and I had a whole load of Taurus watching me to see if I could do it, I must admit, I didn't feel like throwing it.

I feel like I was really going to try my absolute hardest. Well, you would have been useless on this expedition. I was just looking about the idea of people taking up the throne, people being handed to. And Albania actually offered up the throne to someone who was not Albanian. They offered it up to, no, but close to what I was saying earlier, C.B. Frey, C.B. Frey,

who was captain of the England cricket team. So we almost had an English cricketer as the head of Albania years before they even thought to play an international match and set up the Norman Wisdom Cup. Why? Have you just typed Albania cricket into Google a thousand times for this podcast? Do you know who the youngest monarch in the world is at the moment? You can't guess it.

Because he is the king of an area of Uganda. So he's not super famous. He's called King Oyo. He's 28 years old and he's from Toro, which is a kingdom in Uganda. But he came to power at the age of just three. OK, he now rules over 3% of Uganda's population. And at his coronation, he was sat on the throne

playing with a Thai car all the way through, kind of fidgeting. And at one stage, when there was a speech by the president, Musaveini, he started crying, jumped off the throne and ran to his mother's lap. He controls 3%. He's in charge of 3% of the population of Uganda. So Uganda is a lot.

Does he get another percent with every age that he goes? Yeah, that's how it works. It's a very weird political system they've got in Uganda, actually. The Queen is so close to having all of the UK. She's got 90-something percent. He was visited by Nelson Mandela when he was very young. And Nelson Mandela had to wait in the VIP tent

until he'd finished playing with all of his toys and agreed to come out and meet Nelson Mandela. But now he's a goodwill ambassador for HIV and stuff like that. So he's quite awesome, actually. Cool. How old is he now? 28, isn't he? And he said the reason that he ran into his mother's lap is because they tried to put a lion-skin crown on him

and he was scared of it. And then the next day after his coronation, age three, he had to attend a cabinet meeting. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that if an octopus's arm comes off, it will keep picking up food and trying to put it where its mouth used to be.

Wow, that's a massive arm, that is. When you send it round, yeah, I thought the octopus will keep picking up food, and I was like, how can it do that? It hasn't got an arm left, but you mean the arm, the disembodied arm picks up the food? The arm, the dangling modifier. Very badly phrased fact.

Had a week to think about it, and yet... A dangling modifier could be that arm, couldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, the arm itself will keep picking up food, and it's not the end of the world if an octopus's arm falls off, so don't worry about that at home. As we've mentioned before, they can regrow their arms. But this...

And they got seven more, we should point that out. They've got plenty to go around, and this was discovered in a study where there was an octopus's arm was amputated, and they realized for about an hour after they are severed, or more than an hour, then they still operate like a normal arm. So they'll recoil if they're touched or something scary is stroking them, and they will pick up food and then drop it in the mouth that doesn't exist. So presumably they'll pick up a bit of food and then turn around,

see the same bit of food there behind them picking up again, and continue in that comedy routine. You know that kind of thing where you have like phantom arm syndrome, where you lose your arm and you kind of think it's there? It's almost the opposite of that, isn't it? It's the arm has a phantom rest of body syndrome. It's that. Yeah.

So I really think that two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms, and the arms are sort of running independent to the other arms as well. They don't necessarily know what the other arms are doing. But so does that mean that if I was the octopus, I would just have an arm feeding me whenever it wanted to feed me as opposed to me? Would I be mid-chat and it's trying to force feed me some fish? It's really interesting. Well, they've done a lot.

No one really knew this until quite recently, and they've done a study quite very recently where they had like a maze. And when I say maze, it was like a tube with two bits going off like a letter Y. And they taught the octopuses to always put their hands down one of these tubes because that's where the food is and the other one was always empty. And what they found was that when they learned how to do that with one tentacle, and then they put another tentacle in, then that tentacle knew how to do it as well.

And what that tells us is not that they can't work independently, but that they definitely are able to work as a group as well. So if you teach your arm to do one thing, the other arm will also know how to do it. So they're not completely independent. They can act independently, but they also have, they can talk to each other. So they wouldn't just feed themselves without, you know. I'm actually surprised they had to do a study into that. I mean, surely obviously an octopus's whole body is acting as a whole body.

No, no, no. Well, not always. So this is the really weird thing. So they do, so they have molecules which stops the skin sticking to itself because obviously they've got suckers all over them. But octopuses are able to pause those molecules. If they want to grab another octopus, which they sometimes do, they're able to pause the bit which stops them sticking onto each other, right? But that is a glitchy system in an octopus.

Sometimes the off switch doesn't work. And so there is conflict between octopus central and octopus arm brain, sending different signals about whether or not they can touch another bit of skin. And so they will sometimes dance around an object for minutes on end while they're working out this kind of laggy computer system inside themselves. And they're just, you can't work out what they're doing and neither can they. Very frustrating. So weird.

Apparently some researchers say that different arms have different personalities. But they'll say things like you'll, so some arms will be more confident than others. So you'll maybe show it a new teddy bear or something. And the front arms are often a little bit more confident than the back arms. So they'll reach towards it, whereas the back ones will recoil away. That's amazing. That is incredible.

So if you sat at the dinner table with an octopus and you've got a pissed off right arm, but a really fun party left arm, you want to be on that side of the table? I should say I read this in a magazine called New Issue, which is brilliant. It's, my friend gave it to me and it's the big issue North. Is releasing this four times a year. And it's a beautiful magazine full of excellent long reads. So highly recommend.

Cool. One thing that's been in the news quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. And when I say news, I don't mean, you know, most news. I mean, the kind of news that I read. And that is the octopuses that have started punching fish in the heads. When you were saying about personalities in different arms. And it seems that some octopuses, they will look for fish with other fish. So the fish are trying to find food and the octopuses are trying to find food

and they all kind of work together. But sometimes if one of the fish doesn't do what the octopus wants to do, then he just punches them in the head and they just swim off. And the guy who wrote this study was called Eduardo Sampaio from the University of Lisbon. And he said that whenever he saw it, he laughed out loud and almost choked on his own regulator. And if you see the videos, it really is quite funny

to see an octopus punching a fish. And it's sometimes when they want a bit of food, for example, but also it can be for no discernible benefit. That's the other thing I said. It was, it might be discipline to say, stay in line and keep obeying me, but that's just a theory. They've got, it seems to be, they said out of spite, which is, it's just gorgeous. It's unbelievable.

It's kind of like they're the, you know, the villain in a movie and the fish is the stupid henchman who they keep on wacky. It's like the pinky in the brain almost. Do you know what bit of the human an octopus is most like? As in what small parts of the human the entire octopus is like? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

I'll say that. Like your hand because it's got lots of appendages. No, nearly. Eyeball. Yeah. It's kind of consistency. Yeah. It's actually, Anna, do you want to have a crack?

My, my mouth. You've been using it. It's, yeah. I mean, you have to see a doctor about the suckers in your mouth. Yeah. I'll give you that one. It's your tongue and the tongue is the most likely octopus because they're both muscular hydrostats, i.e.

almost every muscle that you've got as a human is attached to a bone and it's all, you know, you move by the bone of the muscle working together. The tongue obviously has no skeletal support. It's just muscle moving itself. And that's exactly how octopuses move as well. They, you know, they compress fluid into one section and that creates movement in another section. So you basically got an octopus in your mouth.

That's how they squeeze into tiny spaces, right? It's the same way that you can squeeze your tongue into a coke bottle and get it stuck there and an octopus can squeeze into a tiny space. I think there's something like if, and now I'm going to work in kilos, so James isn't confused, but 120 kilo octopus can squeeze into a pipe, which is about like smaller than an exhaust pipe. So you'll have an octopus a size of a human, the weight of a human,

which can somehow squeeze through a tiny pipe. I thought that it actually doesn't even matter on the size. It all just depends on size of beak and eyeball, because those are the only solid bits. Sort of, although if you've got enough skin there, fold it up. I think people say it's just dependent on beak, but you do actually have other substance to it that you need to fold up, don't you, when you watch them go through.

But yeah, it's basically down to beak size. Do you guys know the artist Hokusai? You do. For people at home, he's the one who did the wave that you'll see on lots of, you know... Japanese, right? The Japanese tsunami. Famous.

He once did a woodcut of an octopus giving oral sex to a fisherman's wife. It's a very famous one. And according to octopus experts, the animal doesn't look like it's enjoying it at all, because... The wife, however. Well, the wife does look like she's enjoying it. I mean, only search for this if you're not in work, like none of us is at the moment,

but don't search for it if anyone's looking at your laptop. And if you're one of our children listeners. Yeah, exactly. But the woman does look like she's enjoying herself, but according to... This was an article by Diane Kelly writing in Gizmodo. She says that the Northern Pacific giant octopus, which is what this is, when it's amorous,

when it's feeling horny, it will change its skin and it'll become a slightly different pattern. It'll have white spots on a red background. And this octopus doesn't have that at all. And also, that octopus always mates with their mating arm. I think we've said before that one of the arms is used for mating. But in this painting, their mating arm is actually hidden right behind the octopus.

So the octopus does not look like he's enjoying it at all. One little bit. More he looks like he's devouring the woman. Are you saying that Hokusai didn't do his research, or that just he's... Maybe he did, but he's trying to depict something different to what we think. It's something even darker than what you would have thought.

Maybe... I don't know, Hokusai. Kind of like your earlier stuff, where there was just a wave. That was really good. I think this is a bit of a... It's called something like... I can't remember. It's called something like the dream of the fisherman's wife or something like that.

So maybe it's the fisherman's wife's what she imagines, and she doesn't necessarily imagine everything to be completely biologically correct. Hokusai can't blame the fisherman's wife for not knowing about octopus morphology. No way. Was this the thing, James, that it was erotica involving sea creatures?

There is a subculture, I believe, online. I didn't search for this when I was doing my research, but my understanding is that there... I don't know of anything earlier than this Hokusai painting. A woodcut, sorry. Dan, do you have a fact about Albanian cricket in this section? I've been waiting for it for ages, and I just want to know. I'm holding on to it when the time is right.

I will lob it in. Just while we're talking about touching octopuses in a nice way, that's another thing that they share with humans. They get very, very huggy when they're high on MDMA, which scientists have discovered recently. So they discovered that octopuses, when they did a full genetic... What's it called?

When they mapped the genes of an octopus. Yeah, and they found that there was a serotonin thing that was very similar to humans. They were very surprised by that, and they thought, well, surely it doesn't respond, because when we do MDMA and any kind of drug, the serotonin levels go up and down and so on. They tried it on an octopus,

and they acted exactly in the sort of lovey way that we might do if we were on drugs, and they didn't expect that, because when we have octopuses in a lab, they often have to put them in different tanks, because they're very vicious. They like their isolation, and so they'll often eat each other, kill each other,

if they're in the same tank. But then they discovered once they were on drugs, they started hanging out with each other and hugging each other, and peace and love, man. Yeah, so it was a bit surprised. Very, very boring for the researchers, that experiment, because they also were very tedious to talk to, weren't they?

Six hours straight, just droning on about nothing. Irritating. Guys, I've got one fact about severed limbs, which this is about, right? Sort of severed limbs, octopus arms, but except this is a human thing. This is a story from 2005, and it's that. An American man called Clarence Stowers,

he found a severed finger in his tub of ice cream, right, that he'd just been served, but then he refused to give it back to an injured employee, so it could be reattached to the employee, because he wanted it as evidence in legal action against the store. And what happened was, he found a chewy object in his ice cream.

He thought it was an ingredient. He realized it was a finger. The employee had just lost his finger in a machine used to beat the ice cream. So his colleagues were rushing to help the man who'd lost a finger, but one of the guys at the ice cream parlor hadn't noticed and unknowingly served the finger up to Mr. Stowers.

I didn't think we even sold Raspberry Ripple, but fine. And then a week later, he repented, and he said, all right, you can have the finger back, which is obviously completely pointless by that stage. Oh, my God, wow. I'm so certain we'll do anything. The employee was pointless as well, wasn't he? There was a bunch of pointing going on, anyway.

Can you identify the man who ate your finger? No. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website,

nosuchthingasafish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise that we released over the years, so check it out. Otherwise, we'll see you again next week for another episode. Goodbye. Hi, everyone.

Just a very quick coda to today's show, if I may, where I'd like to clarify one of the facts. So you might remember it was the study, which I mentioned, where autistic children were put on rocking chairs, and they didn't sink up their rocking. Well, that study does exist, and it did happen. All of that's true, but what is very, very much not true

is the fact that autistic people don't feel empathy at all. That is not true. That is not a fact, and there's a very strong implication made by myself that that is true. So I just want to make it really clear it is not true that autistic people don't feel empathy. Now, a lot of people used to think that was true, but there was a whole load of work done in the last few years

that suggests what's happening is very much a two-way street. So what we think's happening is that the autistic child does feel empathy, but they display it in a way that the non-autistic person can't understand, and importantly vice versa. So it's called the double empathy problem. And if you think about it, it makes quite a lot of sense, because apart from anything else, communication

is always a two-way thing, isn't it? And neither person's perspective is more valid than the other person's. It's just some people experience the world in a slightly different way. One other probably much more obvious problem with what I said is that you can't possibly say anything is true of all autistic people,

because as we probably most of us know, autism is a spectrum condition, which means it affects different people in different ways. So that probably should have been a bit of a red flag when I said that fact in the first place. Anyway, just like to apologize for not making all that clear in the podcast itself. As you can imagine, I spent quite a lot of time this weekend

reading up about all the most recent theories on autism. But having said that, since doing loads of research is not exactly penance for me, it's what I absolutely love doing. I've also made a small donation to the National Autistic Society, who as well as helping families are involved in loads of the groundbreaking research

that I've been reading this weekend. So I hope that does clear things up a little bit. And if it doesn't, then there's a whole load of research out there that you can read yourself. And a good place to start is at autism.org.uk. you