No Such Thing As A Fish - 360: No Such Thing As May Pole Syrup

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss Polish dragons, turkey trots and leopard dentistry. 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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that's my fact, my fact this week is that in the 1910s animal dances including the camel walk, the turkey trot, the crab step, the chicken flip and the kangaroo dip was so controversial they were banned at the White House, condemned

by the Pope and warned against by doctors. Why were they so bad? Were they sexy? I bet they were sexy dances, they always are aren't they? I watched the turkey trot, you could argue there's a bit of sex in there but ultimately you just look like an idiot I think. I mean what could sound sexier than the crab step? It's very raunchy stuff, the chicken flip, there are all these, no the sloth squeeze

was another one. Yeah, the boll weevil wiggle, that was another one. It doesn't exactly sound like twerking, they're very tame from modernized anyway. They were tame, but they were sort of that moment where it felt like people were liberating and this was seen as people going out and having a wild time and they really did take it seriously so a number of US cities really cracked down on it and in Boston, John F. Kennedy's grandfather who was the mayor ordered it so that there was a matron and policeman posted it to every dance hall in the city and they would crack down on anyone they saw doing

that. They had people, just police forces out arresting whole groups, it was a bit of a mania. A lot of the reports at the time said they were to be fair to the people banning them actual imitations of the sex acts of these animals. Now it is quite difficult to believe that when you watch for instance a turkey trot which sort of involves jumping, hopping to one side and then hopping to the other side and then flapping your wings a bit, but they were meant to be kind of re-enacting sex between these creatures.

It feels to me that if that's the way turkeys have sex then we'd all be going hungry at Christmas because there would be not many baby turkeys around. Well as no doubt people would mention I don't think any turkey that we eat has sex does it? I think... Imagine if the turkey trot dance was someone extracting some semen from your penis and then putting it in a little test tube and then shoving it into your partner. It would be the turkey base instead of the turkey trot as a dance. I really like what you said about the White House Dan.

This is amazing that in 1913 there was going to be an inaugural ball for President Woodrow Wilson obviously very exciting and then it was cancelled because of the risk that people might start doing the turkey trot. He denied that but the ball was cancelled it didn't go ahead and so there was no chance for anyone to do the grizzly bear. He denied it probably because it wasn't true, Charlie that wasn't the reason. It was on the front page of the New York Times so the headline was Wilson banned ball fearing turkey trot and that was on Jan 13th 1913 and it was a big story but obviously he denied

that that would happen but it was a real story. It was from White House Insiders so I reckon he probably did ban it because of that. It was probably like I don't love spending all this money and he might have been specifically worried about his daughters who were massive fans of animal dances so he knew the underworld of animal dancing. So one person who intervened in this debate was the ex-president of the University of Missouri's medical school. He was a guy called Dr. S Grover and he claimed in 1915 that it led to insanity to do these

dances. He said, many of the cases of insanity developed in the United States within the last few years may be traced to modern eccentric dances. One tenth of the insane of this country have lost their mind on account of troubles which may commonly be traced to modern dances. One in ten! They also said that it would give you some kind of foot illness didn't it? It was like there was like a turkey trot foot or turkey trot in step or something like that

which would make you lame if you did this too much but then some doctors said it was good for you. There was a doctor called Dr. A A Brill who sounds like a really good doctor and he said that modern dances should be considered beneficial and they're soothing to the pop place as rocking is to an infant so like when you're rock and rolling you're also kind of being rocked like a baby. It's like everything, it's probably best done in moderation isn't it? I'm sure if you did dance for 14 hours a day you would actually get quite sore feet and

I think that's absolutely fair enough. I just think it's unlikely many people were doing that. Yeah. And it was, I think it was tango foot was the precursor to that which was a big scare. Really? And there was a really nice news article from 1914 which pointed out that no sooner has a new entrancing diversion come in than someone appears to forbid it and it pointed out that tango foot is the modern version of bicycle knee and automobile face which I think I feel

like we may have talked about those before. Also movie eye he said people used to tell us we'd all get movie eye from the cinemas and we haven't and it was quite a good article to remind you that whenever there's a new trend everyone always says this is going to ruin us. Yeah I always get Pokemon shin and Fortnite anus. We've got anyone binging us watch out for podcast ear lobe. Oh yeah. I don't know what Fortnite anus is.

Well the problem is people sit down playing video games for too long and they sit in the same place and it can give you problems like tiles and hemorrhoids and no no no I'm making it all up. Oh okay. I've just started playing Fortnite and I need to know if my anus is safe. You're allowed for no more than two weeks after that it's a problem. One of these animal dances survives today which is so exciting because I've never heard of the bunny hug or the there were others called the like the buzzard lobe.

There was one called the fish walk. Did you hear that one? I mean that is the one thing that fish don't do. Yeah insane but the one that survived into the modern age is the bunny hug because it kind of became the fox trot and the fox trot was coined and popularized around the same time as all these other dances and it was refined a bit and you know there are various sources as to who exactly came up with it but it's basically a slightly more neat version of the bunny hug.

But it's not named after the fox right it was named after a guy called fox that's what most people think these days. I didn't know that. Yeah there was a guy called fox who was like the guy who popularized the fox trot and they think although it makes much more sense if there was you know a grizzly bear jump in a bunny hug it makes sense that it would be named after a fox. All these dances were named after people the turkey trot was named after Sir Leonard Turkey and yeah.

Well the bunny hug there is a famous version of it being danced in a movie starring a man called John Bunny but he didn't invent it I think that just happened to be a coincidence. Oh really? Yeah he's one of the most well-known comedians of his day in America I've never heard of him but he's got a huge iconography. John Bunny. Not Jack Benny. You've just misread it.

Yeah John Bunny. So speaking of band dances have you guys heard of the cushion dance? No I haven't. This is the 16th, 17th century version of the turkey trot because it was a scandalous sexy dance and what it is is you run around the place with a cushion for a bit you dance around holding a cushion and then you put it down in front of a woman and she will kneel on it and then you give her. Give you a blow job.

No. You give her a kiss on the cheek and then you pick up the cushion and you dance around a bit more and it's very innocent and sweet. Is that as sexy as I thought it was going to be? No. I sort of assumed the blow job. I mean that's what you're led to believe by the description. It's completely innocuous dance but it was very scandalous at the time.

Oh god I'm blushing over zoom. This is so annoying. Take your camera down. Did the woman get to get up before you took the cushion out or was it a sort of tablecloth trick thing where you spun her off the cushion? No I think she's, I don't know maybe she gets the cushion then. I haven't actually got the full mechanics of it worked out. Maybe it's like past the cushion and then she gets to put the cushion down in front

of someone else. Who gives her Codilingus? No. Okay. We have to stop this. But there was a worry, right? I read about this cushion dance which they were saying that a story that in 1633 the idea is that it would lead to sexual acts and a couple were accused I think after maybe having

done this dance and taking it a bit further of having sex against the village Maple and against the Maple. That's going to be uncomfortable. Yeah. You're going to end up with Maple made this. The only reason they were found out was because apparently there was a bell on top of it which they didn't know about which was alerting the navel. No.

No. That's the story alright. If I had to write that up in a 16th century newspaper I would make the headline Maple Source. Okay. So it's like a pun on Maple Source. Oh. But it's the saucy thing happening up against the Maple. Did they have Maple Source back then?

No. They didn't. I guess. Wow. So you would have been going to a whole new 1633. Yeah. They had Maple Source. Really?

It's always called Maple Syrup. So I don't know why we're even talking about it. The animal dances were part of the ragtime genre really, weren't they? It was just part of a much broader ragtime era which is basically the first jazz or the precursor to jazz. It's the first time we started having syncopated ragged rhythm. And the story of ragtime is just, it's kind of cool. It's this Scott Joplin who's the king of ragtime.

He'd been born to a former enslaved person who used to play the violin for plantation parties so that's where he got his musical skill. And he died eventually in 1917 I think of syphilis. And he died really upset that he'd never been able to be famous for a serious music. And today he gets 200,000 listens a month on Spotify. Which is just such a nice thing to not be able to tell him. Yeah. And he will be, I guess he'll be able to earn 15 cents from those 200,000 listens.

But luckily at the turn of the 20th century that will have bought him a lot of stuff. Absolutely. So the problem is not that Spotify isn't paying people enough. It's that they're not paying people 100 years ago. Oh, I think we're just about guaranteed we still get to be hosted. Cool. The conga was illegal in Cuba for a while. I don't think it still is, might be.

This was due to a politician called Desiderio and as the second. And the reason was because it had come over to Cuba from Africa and they thought that it had lots of immoral gestures and semi-naked people doing the conga everywhere. Yeah. Like at weddings. Yeah, that conga. You know where you hold onto the waist of someone behind?

Yeah. Now we do the blow job. Nice. So it was banned by this politician, but then the politician ended up being put in prison like politicians often do in some countries. And the son of the politician called Desi Arnaz, he fled to America and then became like the king of the conga. Like he went around the whole of America touring, going on TV,

going to all the different cities teaching them the conga. And what I like to think is that when he went from one city to the other everyone just followed him and did the conga with him from, you know, LA to San Francisco to Seattle. You can see the king of conga coming from a long way away. He's on his way into town. I'm very impressed if you managed to make a living out of teaching people the conga because I would say it is at maximum my one lesson dance.

At least it's got a lot of applause and silence in it. 300 million people in America. That's a lot of lessons. Yeah, and you didn't even know you're supposed to take your clothes off, Andy, you're also going into lesson two. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that there is a type of pasta that only three women in the world know how to make.

Ooh. Will we have heard of it? Is it fusilli? It's not going to be spaghetti, is it? It's not going to be. They're amazingly productive, like they're kingpins. You will have heard of it because you've spent the last couple of days researching about it.

But I think the people at home will not have heard of it. So this is called sous filendeu, literally threads of God. And it's a Sardinian pasta. And it's made once a year for the Feast of San Francisco and there is basically a group of women who have always been able to make it and they pass the recipe down to their daughters who pass it down to their daughters

who pass it down to their daughters. But there are only three women left who know how to do it really. One of them is a lady called Paula Abrani and her niece and her sister-in-law all know how to do it. But her daughters aren't really that interested. They kind of know the technique, but it's really, really complicated and they're not particularly good at it.

And because all these three women who are doing it are all kind of, I wouldn't say old, but getting that way, you know, in the 50s and 60s. The people are a little bit worried that this might die out so we need to get more people learning quick. And we tried to teach Jamie Oliver but he just couldn't hack it. This is the weird thing about it.

It's that it's not even like it's a secret recipe. It's not something that they're hiding. They're constantly trying to teach it to people, including Jamie Oliver and after a few hours they're like, nah bullshit, I'm not doing this. Are we serious that Jamie Oliver has tried to learn it? Yeah, he tried to do it. He tried to do it for two hours and gave up.

So for the people at home, I'll tell you how to do it because I know how to do it. Basically, you get some semolina wheat, you get some water, you get some salt. You need it and need it and need it and then at just the right moment, this is the main difficult part, then you put it into loads and loads

of really, really, really fine strings. You get 256 of these filaments and you put them all together and then kind of mesh them all up and then cut it up and then that's your pasta and then you put it with some tasty sheep's broth and some pecorino cheese.

Bish bash bosh. That's basically a hello fresh recipe that I've given you there, isn't it? What a bit Jamie Oliver at the end and he's a pucker. It's like, that is the thing if you do get a hello fresh and it is the Su Filandao

meal, it will take you exactly 48 years to do this. Although it wouldn't be, it would be one of those annoying recipes because that's just the prep. So it would say cook time 12 minutes and then at the very end it would say prep time 10 years.

And lifetime. So actually lots of people know how to make it. It's just the fact that only three people can make it. Yeah, it's really, really difficult because you just need to get it at exactly the right moment. It's the elasticity of the dough that you need to get perfectly right because if you don't do it perfectly

you can't make these threads thin enough and you can only do it from playing with the dough and just knowing from generation on generation and generation and knowledge to knowledge to knowledge just knowing the exact moment to do it. But the other thing is it's given an impression that it's much harder to learn

after two hours. I think it's fair enough that he didn't master it in two hours. This has been a generational thing that's passed on. Because if you're Jamie Oliver in that time you could have made eight of your 15 minute meals. It's an efficient way of cooking. I did read

because these women, as you said, James, right they're in the same family. So one of their male relatives is currently one of the Luke Skywalker figures who is in the process of learning how to make it to their Yoda. He's obviously also I guess Sardinian.

He's called Leo Gilsemino and he's Aussie. He's Australian. I don't know when he moved to Australia or when the family moved but they've given him a little master class and he has the certificate but I think he's still in the training zone.

So basically it's kind of a tradition where they have these kind of matrilineal or matriarchal cuisines from daughter to daughter to daughter. But because they're so worried about this dying out, they have recently said okay we're going to let men do it as well.

And they are trying to teach more and more people. I actually read this article in the BBC. I think it was in 2016. So it could be possible that few people have picked it up since then but if they have they won't be nearly as good as these three women who absolutely smash it every time. Because they don't have the special sense.

You know we've done how we have more than five senses. Is the special ability to feel pasta? I don't think that's an X-Men character we're going to see covered up in future Marvel movies. Actually I just thought of something

which is that you know how we were talking about maple sauce earlier on Andy? Yes. Well the related food, maple syrup is also was traditionally a thing that passed from mother to daughter to mother to daughter. Because in the first

people's tribes of Canada the men would often go out hunting and the women would be in charge of all of the planting and stuff like that. And the maple syrup came in that territory. And so as a woman

you would go to your maple grove and you would get the syrup every year which would give lots of energy to your tribes. But you would pass on the knowledge to your daughter and you would even pass on your groves to your daughter as well. Wherever your grove of maples was

that would be yours through generations, through generations, through generations. So there are quite a few of these kind of metrolineal cuisines around the world. That would be you pass on the knowledge of you make a hole in the tree and wait for the stuff to come out of it. Did the women tell the men it was a really complicated process?

It's the equivalent of the conga king passing it on to his conga son. He's next in line literally. There's a hole in the tree for the stuff to come out. Because actually there's more to it with maple syrup. You've got to concentrate it a little bit.

You've got to lose some of the fluids. You have to leave it out overnight so it freezes and all the water comes to the top and then you skim off the water and then you boil it to get rid of more of the water. That's what my mum told me anyway. Just on pasta shapes.

Do you guys know the tortelloni, the little wrapped up parcel thing? I think I call it tortellini. That shape is supposedly based on Lucrezia

Borgia's naval and you know Lucrezia Borgia of the famous poisoning aristocratic Borgia family. She was staying in Italy and the innkeeper was so excited to have this beautiful aristocratic lady in his inn that he crept up to the keyhole

and have a perv. But all he could see was the navel. But what a navel, and he rushed down to the kitchen to recreate it making pasta form. That's a terrible outie she had, isn't it? It's an absolutely fucked up umbilical cord

coming right there. And also the next day he went up and saw her husband and invented the Bologna sausage. Didn't he? Do you know why pasta has so many different shapes? No. Well, I think

people think they know or the theory is that the reason it does and it is a ridiculous number so there are more than 300 pasta shapes and I think 1300 different pasta names and it's partly because it was such rivalry throughout Italy.

So some of the earliest Italian gills were pasta guilds the Vermicelli and the macaroni and you'd have lots of little different localities trying to rival each other's pasta quality with their own pasta and so you made it into one into a bow tie and then you'd make your own spiral

to be like, oh, spirals are better than their bow ties and it was very heated and they used to get so I mean they got so competitive that the Pope had to step in a few times I think between pasta guilds and he ruled in the 1400s he ruled that pasta making

illegal pasta making would be punished by a fine relashings of a whip because if you're not allowed in the guild that's allowed to make that twirly pasta then you're going to be beaten. I didn't really appreciate until we did the research for this episode how busy the Pope's life actually is

he's just constantly banning pasta shapes or turkey trot dances the guy's furious calling out stuff. There was actually with what you were saying with these guilds it went a bit further in the Renaissance courts there was this one particular

pasta shape which is which the idea is that it's imprinted with the coat of arms of the royal families that would eat it so you would have these pieces of pasta that would each have the coat of arms to where you were eating on your plate which is pretty extraordinary

I love that cause they're all very there's this great book called the Encyclopedia of Pasta I don't know if you guys read about it in the course of this research what's it about? Oretta Zanini De Vita is her name

and she's went round Italy just asking every local person from a different town city village about the story behind a different kind of famous local pasta and she created this Encyclopedia so it's a real first hand Encyclopedia and it's got all the stories about how the shapes came about

there's the Ave Maria pasta which is a great little one it's not anything to do with the shape it's about the timing of what you cook it for so you chuck it into the boiling water and if you say a Hail Mary that's how long you cook it for, the Ave Maria

and there's apparently a whole trinity of different pastas with the different lengths that you say the prayer to that will be the perfect cooking doesn't feel like a particularly long amount of time to cook pasta to say the Hail Mary

I don't know how long it takes to say a Hail Mary follow Grace a lot, it's with the Dressed Out Mugs Women and Best of the Fruit of Thy Womb Jesus Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray to us in us now at the hour of our death, amen Do you upset that quickly? I think your pasta's very authentic It's going to be the most annoying priest

as he's powering through the entire sermon I had to go through a lot of confessions in my time and had to get through a lot of Hail Mary I love Hail Mary Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Andy My fact is that every hour the buglers of Krakow have to climb

272 steps, play five notes then walk back down again and this is a job that you can have if you're a bugler and you live in Krakow they have this church called St. Mary's Basilica and since 1392

on and off they've been doing this thing where every hour there's a bugle call from the top It's called St. Mary's Fanfare It's only got five notes in it so actually it's not it goes up and down a bit and it takes about I don't know, half a minute to play so it goes up and down but only on those five notes

and you play the tune to each point of the compass and then you stop and then you go back down again and then the next hour you climb back up again but actually don't you stop the fourth time you do it, you stop halfway through I read

that's because in 1241 there was a bugler who was like telling about some Mongols who were attacking the city and he was shot by an arrow halfway through his bugle and so in honour of this sky they kind of stopped the last bugle

well, that's the story but there's a lot of stories about Krakow which we might get to in a bit but go on Well, it's first recorded in 1928 and from 1241 there's obviously quite a gap before anyone wrote it down

and it's first recorded by an American author who may have been locals may have played a trick on him but it might also have been an oral legend before that it's just that there isn't much written record but there was actually a trumpeter who did die on duty in 1901

about 20 years before this guy wrote the story down and he had played the tune three out of four times because he did it to each point of the compass so he did it three times but then he died of a heart condition before he could play it the fourth time so that might be where that sort of fed into local myth

and yeah Yeah, that must have been such a weird moment for the town when you're waiting you're so used every hour to hearing these four and you're like, what? How did it go? Wasn't it even do you say the first mention of the bugler

is 1928 or the first mention of this legend is 1928? The Mongol thing the bugle thing's been going for donkeys, yes I read that the bugle thing even they only used to do it once a day until the 20th century and then suddenly they decided to torture this guy by ramping up to once every hour

They're in a squad so I think you have to be a fireman by the way to have this job it's part of the conditions for entry these days so the reason this is current now is because they just announced they're recruiting for a new one and they've had their first ever application from a woman

for the position so great social progress is being made now If she gets it If she gets it for the audition process It's insane in order to become a bugler for the church

you need to go through a whole process of doing chin ups deep fitness test they have a medicine ball tossing thing that you need to do and you need to scale a 20 meter ladder at an angle of 75 degrees to ensure that you're not afraid of heights I would have thought that all these things if you're a fireman you probably would already

be able to glow up ladders wouldn't you you would have I gotta say I have been to crack off on a stag do once and I think I might be right about saying this is the square is basically just a load of bars all the way around there basically when I went there just full of stag do's

so that seems to be the only people who are enjoying these bugles Is it Market Square? I remember hearing it when I was in crack off Market Square was the biggest medieval square in Europe I think UNESCO heritage

was one of the very first places to get UNESCO heritage I think It is beautiful, it's really big and really cool and this St Murray's tower is quite famous because it's got two towers that are slightly different heights and I know Andy is going to tell me this isn't true now but

I'm going to tell the story of why this happened so they had the church there and there was a guy who was in charge of crack off at the time who was called Duke Boris Laus the modest okay and he's like we need some new towers here not too big

because I'm modest but we need some new towers here we need two new towers and they tried to find the people to do it and they got two brothers one of whom was going to do one tower and one who would do the other tower one of the brothers did his tower and then the other brother did his tower

slightly bigger and the brother with the shorter tower got really jealous and so killed his brother for doing such a bigger tower and then he could have made his tower back to the equal height but then he felt so guilty about killing his brother that he didn't do it anymore

are you going to tell me that's not true either Andy? no way no it's probably not true well crack off has a lot of... doesn't make up for killing your brother if I was murdered but then I found out that the person didn't actually go through with the stupid bet we had it's still not okay to murder you

no you're right but there are great stories of crack off and I'm James the only reason I'm not going to tell you that your one isn't true is because the only other one I know is about of crack off is about the dragon under the hill

and it's a medieval story of crack off and the dragon loved eating virgins they all do don't they it's the whole species and there was only one virgin left after this huge virgin eating rampage that the dragon had been on

anyway this poor cobbler filled up a sheepskin with sulphur and salt and then left that outside the dragon's cave anyway the dragon eats it and it's so full of salt that he drinks so much water at the dragon that he explodes and dies and then the cobbler

is rewarded by getting married to the king's daughter who happens to be the last virgin in the city it's the story and the dragon's bones now hang out of the front of vavel cathedral which is in crack off it's the big cathedral there

the bones hang from the door all the bones are they not the realness of the bones some bones some bones are there they think they're quite I wish they'd studied them so they're not allowed to take them down right because there's this idea that if they fall down then the world will end immediately

so they're hung up by these chains which are constantly checked which is kind of a shame because apparently the bones belong to some creature from the Pleistocene a mammoth or maybe maybe a whale and we just won't know because the only way of checking them involves the world ending at which point

I suppose you can't check the bones it's a real catch 22 they've done an awesome statue of this dragon it was first put up I think in 1972 and they decided on to have it breathe fire huge like a flamethrower and it used to do that every 5 minutes

or so but actually they've started a new service whereas you're walking by you can text the dragon and ask it to breathe fire and it will do it on command so it can actually go every 15 seconds if it needs to 15 second intervals between breathe fire

Polish leaders of Krakow have had fun names over time I realised looking into the history of Krakow like particularly like the 1200s where the Duke of Krakow was called Tanglefoot that was in 1210 and he died and was replaced by spindle shanks

I think there was someone in between spindle shanks replaced him and actually spindle shanks ended up getting killed by a German girl that he was trying to sexually assault so well done well she killed him so well done well it was a bad start to the story

but you know it was a happy ending I thought those shanks would have been killed by Voldemort by the sounds of him this one enemy was Henry the bearded Tanglefoot and spindle shanks were on the same side and then Henry the bearded was their enemy and eventually became Duke of Krakow

it was great it does sound like a JK Rowling plot doesn't it like King Zygmunt the old because him and his wife Bonne Sforza brought super vegetables to Poland super vegetables in the 16th century that's what they're famous for

I mean James I don't want to quibble but all vegetables, super vegetables well they brought she was Bonne Sforza was Italian and so they brought a lot of vegetables that didn't grow naturally in Poland and they brought them over but that's what

they were famous for, tomatoes I suppose you wouldn't get tomatoes in Poland but you wouldn't get them anywhere in Europe but she brought them over did they market them as super vegetables is that how they got them selling that's what they're known as now like Polish super vegetables I guess

their daughter was called Anna Jagiellon and she was the last female ruler of Poland and she was basically part of the family where she was like the youngest daughter and everyone thought that she was like an old kind of sister who would never get married kind of thing and then suddenly

everyone else in her family died and she was going to be the ruler of Poland and suddenly she became the hottest ticket in town and Ivan the Terrible wanted to marry her and Henri Valois in France wanted to marry everyone wanted to marry her all the Habsburgs

wanted to marry her and stuff I think this would make a great kind of 1990s teen comedy of you know like an overlooked girl suddenly becoming the hottest girl in class kind of thing I think you'd need to rewrite the bit

where sort of all her siblings were brutally murdered or died in horrible ways for the teen comedy audience but she's in the poster she's surrounded by super vegetables and she's looking to the camera and going I like it she eventually married a Hungarian prince called Bathory

but they didn't really get on very well he refused to learn Polish and so they spoke through an interpreter for the rest of his life and then eventually he died and instead of taking over herself she pushed her nephew who was called

Sigmund the Third Vassar who became actually like one of the great leaders in Polish history there's your sequel but he was actually the one who moved the capital of Poland away from Krakow to Warsaw so thumbs down from this episode

because we do the Warsaw episode in 100 years he's a hero I'll buy it with a way for Americans you call it Krakow just in case you've been wondering all this time what we're talking about but we call it Krakow thousands of Americans just going

everything we've said they're like that's so weird they have that in Krakow as well I found a thing which is that America is running out of buglers and they desperately need them they need them because in 2000 at the beginning of 2000 a new law was passed

that if you were an army veteran and you had died you were entitled to a military funeral and so what they would do is they would have to send out three people to be their present and do a few military regalia type things one of which is they would have to play

taps on the bugle just being that song I'm murdering that song but it's the classic American tune now the problem is they don't have enough buglers to go and play this song so what they've had to invent is a ceremonial bugle

and the ceremonial bugle has inside it a sound system with the song pre-loaded so what you end up having is these people playing the song but what they're doing is once they press down on one of the buttons it just plays the song through a speaker system that is at the top

of the bugle and they just pretend that they're playing it because that's the best way in order to commemorate the person who's being buried Dan I read about it it seems like it's this little black box that you shove into the end of your bugle and then you just press a button on it and then you just hold the bugle

it's really bizarre it's quite controversial isn't it because some people are like well surely you should have a proper bugle at a funeral but then other people say well you know what there is a shortage like Dan says so if we don't do this we're just going to have to have a boombox

with playing the tap so that's going to be even worse but then the other argument again is that you know when Dan really murdered that tune a few seconds ago that's kind of part of it so it's not really supposed to be perfect note for note when you play the

taps it's supposed to have emotion in it because the person who's playing it is quite upset and so the notes are supposed to be slightly off and a bit shaky and stuff like that and you obviously don't get that with the recording it'll get used to it it's like do you remember when

Taxi drivers first started using sat nav and it was really disappointing and then you realise that it's actually fine it is a bit like that you're usually being taken three miles around the houses and that's part of the ritual and the tradition it shows the emotion in the taxi driver that you're being charged

because he's not going to ask exactly where this you're going to be going to I accidentally researched you know the band the Bugles who did video kill the radio star the Bugles exactly I only realised that about an hour into my research

I spent genuinely an hour looking at every song they did to see if a bugle had ever been played by the Bugles and as far as I could find it hasn't but it doesn't matter anyway because that's not what they're called but the Bugles did have a member called

Trevor Horn so they'd get one thing out of it which is still not the way to do it okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna my fact this week is that when the conservationist Amy Dickman booked a dentist appointment

in Namibia she neglected to mention to the dentist that the patient was a leopard how did the appointment go do we know? it actually went quite well yeah it was a series of appointments in the end as often happens with the dentist and

it was on the BBC website a while back I think and it was an interview with her and she was saying that she works in various African countries with threatened species she was in Namibia and she found a leopard that had got into a farmer's trap because farmers trapped them to stop them

killing their livestock and she saw it had a broken canine so she anesthetized it and she called the local dentist and just booked an appointment and then she said she arrived and there were obviously lots of people in the waiting room who were frightened enough already because they were in a dentist waiting room and then a leopard gets carried through

and apparently the dentist really took to it after a while and she explained it's okay I've anesthetized it so it's not going to wake up and eat you and so the dentist was like brilliant and they had to make a specially hard tooth for the leopard because obviously they do much more tearing of their food than we do so he

plotted using titanium and steel and silver to make this tooth and it was basically okay except for one scary moment at the end when it went up missing the big end apart from when it better face off apart from everyone died and that's the end of my story

there was a moment where it had to go back for repeated fittings and on the very last appointment he thinks there was a dodgy anesthetic and all these crowds had gathered around to watch at this point because they've got quite a name for themselves for having this leopard in the dentist so the crowds of people in the room

the dentist said I'm pretty sure the leopard just blinked at me and they said don't be silly it's anesthetize 30 seconds later it had a massive roar and then climbed up off the table she said the crowd she's never seen a crowd disappear from a room so fast they jumped out the windows and stuff and they had to chase it around

and anesthetize it again she then pointed out I'd only ever really worked on cheaters which apparently who knew had very prominent veins so very easy to vaccinate to anesthetize difficult to catch though a cheater one of the things they had to do as well

so the line had got up and sorry the leopard had got up and it was walking around and the dentist was too freaked out and didn't want to help with the grappling of it and they were all freaking out and some of them ran out onto the road and by chance the vet

was walking down the road and they're like vet get here and out and the vet was like what's happening we've got a leopard that's awake and he ran in and helped hold down the leopard and they re-anesthetized it but like just total coincidence as they ran out that this guy was just probably going to the shops

and suddenly there was a leopard crisis you wouldn't believe it in a film you'd be like what are the chances he's walking by at that moment not realistic I think anesthetizing the animals is one of the main problems of these kind of veterinary dentist isn't it because you know anesthetizing animals is just a difficult thing to do

I was reading about one in 2004 which was a jaguar called Hebalba who needed five root canals and they gave it anesthetic but unfortunately the jaguar went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing because it reacted badly

to the anesthesia and so the dentist who was called Nameak said that they tried a quick yank on the cat's testicles and he was awake just like that and the jaguar completely recovered yeah dentists do that

that's normal isn't it yeah you swallow you rinse, you spit, the dentist gives you a quick yank down there and then you go so you get the sticker isn't it I have my testicles yanked I miss him it seems like you have to

have nerves of steel to go into this kind of dentistry the animal world dentistry I was reading about a guy called Peter Emily he's 82 years old and he's a pioneer in this territory he says that he's operated basically on everything with a mouth

so he's done kangaroos he's done ferrets he did sycreen roys he's done a river and in this article he was operating on a lion's head so you can imagine if that line wakes up on the lion's mouth

can we just say that as a dentist most of the work he does is head based isn't it oh yes true my point of saying that though is at the very same time someone's down at the other end removing the lion's testicles so it was it's a scary procedure

yeah if you woke up that's one pissed off line and then as he's doing that procedure they bring in next to him a black leopard which is just laying perpendicular on the table next to this lion and I asked would just rip his head off why did they decide to take the testicles and the teeth out at the same time

it's a two for one offer my dentist had one of those yeah I have to say no complaints in this case they were using them to grow stem cells so it was two different things happening from two different people it wasn't

in order to help out with the tooth I guess if anesthetising is hard which it is and I guess you don't want to do it too often so I suppose you sort of take what chances you get while you've got a knocked out lion so there was a guy, a zoo dentist in the UK called Peter, another Peter actually Peter Catege of Paint and Zoo

he is again one of the only zoo dentists in the world and in 2008 he did an operation on a gorilla at Paint and Zoo and it took about 10 people to remove the gorilla's tooth because you've got people positioning the gorilla you've got people monitoring the anesthetics

activity happening around and there was this huge you know 300 pound gorilla sitting in the chair completely dead to the world and he's having to operate on it and he said Peter Catege was interviewed and he said people often ask me if it is fun working on gorillas and tigers

it certainly is not fun it is very hard and serious work oh what a killjoy he's having fun why don't you just sit next to him and I'm wedding tell us about the gorilla not fun oh my god what a cool job

wow it's actually horrible moving on in terms of dentistry it's not even just the teeth that they have to deal with so this guy that I was talking about Peter Emily he also works on bird beaks as well

and he's pioneered a speciality which he calls ortho beaks and beak braces right I think he's the guy who does bird braces for beaks if you've got I think the condition is called scissor beak technically as in you know when you get a faulty pair of scissors

you can imagine the two bits not a faulty pair of scissors sorry a functioning pair of scissors but the two bits don't crash into each other like a beak should they slide over each other and so that's what scissor beak is so he has braces for birds that they have to wear

and eventually it wrenches them back into place but they do get bullied at school they just say if it's a cross build they're supposed to be like that oh no do you think he's ruined loads of cross builds they're just called bill rat

if anyone has a pet rat they sometimes perform dentistry on their owners oh did they this is a thing that people let them do I find rats quite gross as I think a lot of us do

what they like to do is inspect each other's teeth for spare food so they often get food stuck in their teeth and their mate will have a bit of dairy milk stuck in its tooth so they'll go and lick the food off and if you own a rat and you show it your teeth it will lick between your teeth

and lick the food out and who needs a toothpick when you've got a pet rat and people have been doing this I mean how many is this a comment I have a friend who had a pet rat because you know them I don't think that they will have done that

what are you saying James is this rare enough that we can make fun of it and shame the people who do it or is it very common and we should be careful is it so common that I need to rethink my friend's group they also have rank teeth anyway rats sorry no offence to rats

but they grow faster than human nails so they have to be constantly gnawing so you need to give them stuff to chew all the time and they grow in spirals at an 85 degree angle so if their teeth come out of their mouths and they don't gnaw enough then they grow in this big spiral and when they're chewing

the masseter muscle which is the muscle that controls their jaw is positioned behind their eyeballs so if you watch videos of rats chewing they do a thing called boggling at the same time which is when their eyes boggle that's Dan's favourite band isn't it the boggles sorry what is a boggling

sorry Anna it's known as what you think their eyes pop in and out of their heads as they chew can I give you guys a fact about just general dentistry you know how we all love nominative determinism

well I have got off it a little bit I have to say after reading this fact and I think that it might not be true because I read that the first woman to qualify as a dentist in England was called Miss Fanny Payne and I think if nominative determinism was real

she would have been a gynecologist Fanny Payne there should be something called nominative anti-determinism or something where they've gone the wrong way so she qualified in 1914 there were a few dentists before her because

a few people qualified in Scotland before that female dentist I should say but like in the 19th century really you only had male dentists and then there was Fanny Payne and there was another woman called Lillian Lindsay who became the first female

to qualify as a dentist in the whole UK because she did hers in Scotland and it was so looked down upon that when she tried to join the National Dental Hospital in Great Portland Street the Dean who was called Harry Weiss

Harry Weiss Harry Weiss yeah that's what causes the Fanny Payne he was called Harry Weiss Harry Weiss and he refused to admit her because she was a woman and then when she really insisted

he would only interview her on the pavement outside the school because he didn't want her to distract all the other dentists who were inside but yeah eventually they did and now I think it's more than 50% of dentists in Europe I think people are trying home dentistry now

are they? and our big advice is not to is this a coronavirus thing? the economist reported on various dentists saying that they're very worried because a lot of their patients are saying they're doing things like using needles to burst their own abscesses in their mouths

they're using knives and forks to take their teeth out and nail files to cut down broken teeth I've actually been doing this myself at home and it's a real nightmare because I've been having to yank on my own testicles when I'm finished 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.qi.com or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our website you can find all of our uploads as well as links to bits of our merchandise that's it we will be back again with another episode we'll see you then guys, goodbye