No Such Thing As A Fish - 377: No Such Thing As The Mole Street Journal

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

James, Dan, Andy and Anne discuss mole-ologers, beard-botherers, actors' special rings, and textual deviants.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where myself, Andrew and Dan Shriver are joined by none other than our very very very good friend and colleague Anne Miller. Now you all know Anne, she's been on the podcast many many times, but the one very important thing to tell you about her today is that she has a brand new book out. That book is called Mickey and the Trouble with Moles. It is an amazing children's book all about this secret group of animal spies. The amazing thing about this book, well actually two really cool things about this book. Number one, there are secret

codes hidden in the book that you can solve while you're reading it. And number two, even more excitingly for me, I have a cameo in it, page 106. I'll admit it's not a huge cameo. It's just one of the characters alludes to someone called James, but I am assured by Anne that that refers to me. So this is very exciting for me the first time I have ever been in a work in fiction. But guys honestly I can't tell you enough how great this book is. It's called Mickey and the Trouble with Moles. Stephen Fry said of this series of books, they're brilliantly funny, ingenious and deliciously addictive. And if that doesn't sell you on

them, I don't know what will. Apart from hearing Anne on this week's episode of Fish. So with no more ado, it is time for this week's No Such Thing as a Fish. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anne Miller. 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 is Anne. My fact is that Moles borrows have special kitchens where they keep up to 470 decapitated earthworms to eat later. Wow. 470. It's very specific. That's the most they've found. There could be more. Absolutely. It's like a giant larder, right? Yeah. Where they can go into for a nighttime snack. Yeah, they need to eat a lot. So they eat about 60% of their body weight and worms every day and their borrows are really intricate. They have special rooms for sleeping, for giving birth and for storing their food. So it's kind of like having a kitchen or a larder or a pantry but it's, well, it's not to

my taste but it works for them. Yeah, I think 470 is quite a lot though. It's like they're panic bot earthworms, isn't it? Yeah, that's pandemic purchasing, isn't it? They know solids going on. Hang on. They've got special rooms for giving birth in. They can't use those very often. Well, we have those as well, Andy. And you wouldn't put earthworms in the same room, Andy. It's very health and safety problematic. Completely, completely, completely. But all I'm saying is that if you've only got a certain number of rooms in your home. Oh, but they've got loads. Yeah. Oh, okay. To have a specific maternity unit room in

your house. I don't have that in my house. I've got a kitchen and a living room and a bedroom. But if you were a mole, like, so moles can dig up to 20 meters a tunnel a day. So you've got a whole borough of them and they're all digging. You could probably add an extension on pretty quick. Whereas if you're adding it to your house, Andy, imagine it would take you more than a day or two probably. Yeah. Especially if it was just you. The neighbors would have a few issues, no doubt. I love the way that they catch the worms. One of the ways they do it is they dig a tunnel and the worms just fall into it. That's how they get so many. Just wait for it.

Of course. Exactly. Imagine you're a worm just kind of going around your daily business sort of burrowing in the soil and suddenly just fall into a massive hole of your enemy. And then you get put in a larder with all your dead friends. You see all your friends say, yeah. But here's a quick question. So I was reading that they stored the worms and there was a suggestion in what I read is that they've immobilized the worms with a bite to the head. So they're still alive. They're not dead yet. They may be brain dead, but they're sort of fresh because they're still living. So is that right? They're not actually dead in that larder.

Yeah, I think it's more like putting them in a fridge, but it's like a living fridge. Yes. So the worms aren't going to go off. They can eat them later, but they also can't get away. It's very clever. I think they can get paralyzed by, like you say, I think they can get paralyzed by being bitten at the back of the head, which kind of stops them being able to wriggle around. But I think that moles might also be kind of poisonous or venomous as well. There's stuff in their saliva. I think there's many different types of moles, but yeah, I think the saliva can do stuff as well. I think that's right. And I think shrews are the same. And there's this kind of toxin called

blarina toxin, especially in shrews, but I think in moles as well. And if they bite humans as well, then you can get a little bit of a bit like a bee sting or a wasp sting. You might get a bit of swelling around. So they are quite, you know, they're venomous. Well, just on being bitten by moles, moles are really, really strong. And there was a belief in the 18th century that if you held a mole in your hand until it died, your hand would acquire healing power, right? Okay, so if you just kind of cup it in your hands. Now, the problem is they're so strong. There's a mole expert called Mark Haber, and I read an interview with him, and he said that moles are stronger than people. He said that if you picked up a mole and help,

yeah, don't shake your hand, James. It's true. If you pick up a mole and cup it between your hands, even if you are really strong, like even if you're a manual labor or something, it will be able to burst open your hands. I know what you mean, Andy, but I don't want to be one of those 7% of men who think they could beat an elephant in a fight. But I do think that I might be able to beat a mole in a fight. But well, you'd have a really hard time finding one, though, because we very rarely see moles, because they're pretty fast and they're mostly underground. And actually, in 1967, there was a guy called Peter Stafford, who won the wildlife cameraman of the year prize. He took a photo of

some mole and it's young in a burrow. And for 40 years, that was the only photo we had of moles in their burrow with their young. And then the reason they got changed was in 2012, Springwatch were like, well, this is a challenge, let's film the moles. But they got Peter Stafford back to help them do it. So he is like the guy for filming moles in their burrows. They're very mysterious. Have you guys heard of mollology? No, no. So this is a thing that's been coined by a guy called Jesper Ehrman. And he's a archaeologist who basically made an application to the Danish cultural agency to say we want to use moles to help us do our archaeological digs. And the idea was that if you have moles burrowing down into potential sites where you believe there to be

hidden cities, in the digging, the stuff that comes to the surface might have shards of pottery, or have little elements of these bits of archaeological brick or whatever. And so he's dubbed it mollology. And they do the work for him so they don't have to sort of desecrate the area and potentially ruin ancient sites. They may not think that like ancient Egyptians were just all eating earthworms and stuff, is that? But that's happening in the UK as well. There are moles basically working at a site in Cumbria. It's an old Roman forge that's protected, so you're not allowed to dig there if you're a human. Moles are not bound by such rules. And so they're a whole team of human volunteers whose job it is is to go through the mole hills

and find out what they've basically turfed up as they're digging. And so far the moles have found pottery, beads, and my favourite, a decorative bronze dolphin, which makes me think they're like, I'm not putting that in my burrow, I can send that up. That's really good. Yeah. I prefer their original name sort of circa 450 to 1100 AD. Well, you're very old school then. Yeah. And I would appreciate it if for the rest of this segment we could refer to them by their original name, which was, and it's very nice, the idea Andy, as you say, of holding a mole in your hand because they used to be called wands. Oh, you had a wand. Yeah. W-A-N-D. And a wand eventually turned into a wand. So they became a wand. And the mole hills used to be called a wanty-tump.

They did not. They were not called that. Damn, is that back in the day you would be making a mountain out of a wanty-tump. All right. That's fantastic. Let their name before they were cool as well. Dan's got the original mole hill data. Another thing about moles is they got really fast reactions. So the star nose mole actually has the Guinness World Record for being the fastest eater on the planet. So it can basically locate a snack, eat it, and then move on to looking for its next one in 230 milliseconds. The average, the fastest one was 120 milliseconds. And for a comparison, it takes humans 650 milliseconds to respond to a red light traffic light. So they are fast. They are fast. They look insane, by the way. If you've never seen a star nose mole, give it a

Google. It's the most alien-looking creature. It's a sort of, it's like it's halfway through eating an octopus, and it's just stopped with the legs hanging out. That's what's on its face. The rest of it is very mole-like and then suddenly alien on the face. It's very magical, actually. That organ on the front of their face is 12 times more sensitive than a human clitoris. Wow. I don't know what to say about that. And it's a lot easier to find, as well. That's so good. Oh, so, mole-catching. I'm sure you guys have been reading about the massive feud in the British mole-catching community. Okay. No, I don't like this. There are three British bodies. It's so stereotypically British, devoted to catching

moles. There's an association of British mole-catchers, there's the British mole-catchers register, and there's the guild of British mole-catchers. Splitters. Well, they had this huge feud in 2016 because Anne Chippendale, which is the name of the woman who is in the association of pro-mole-catchers, she accused Louise Chapman, who's the head of the British register of mole-catchers, of being an embarrassment in quotes. This all happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal for no good reason. No idea why. Not the Moles Street Journal. Why? I think I've got better things to report on. Clearly, they just wanted a bit of sort of exotic colour from weird backwards Britain, and so they just wrote about this mad feud they were

all having. And there's this huge debate about whether you should check a mole trap every day, because that's more humane, or whether you should check it only a few days, which is, you know, could leave a mole in distress, but might also, you know, you've got to drive 50 miles to get to your next bloody trap. And so there are there are eruptions in official pro-mole-catching circles at the moment. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I'm not actually a member of any of those. I prefer the underground stuff. Well, you are going for it, James. This is... Look, I've been away for a week. I feel like if I don't, then you guys are going to replace me in the daily full-time. Speaking of and said earlier that they had really good reactions, and that's why we have the thing

called Whack-a-Mole, that game, you know, where the moles kind of pop up and then you whack them. So this was invented in Japan in the 1970s. It was called Magura Taiji in Japan. And in 1976 and 1977, it was the second highest grossing mechanical arcade game in both of those years. It was absolutely massive. It was huge. Really? And for people who don't know it, the moles pop up like these little furry things, then you hit them with a mallet, and every time you hit them, you get a point, and then they drop back down into their holes. But a lot of people in video game academic circles refer to Whack-a-Mole as the first violent video game, basically. So, you know, when you're talking about how maybe Grand Theft Auto is turning us all into, you know, carjackers

and stuff, they really can shake it all the way back to Whack-a-Mole, which was the first of these games. Right. That's really interesting. I've played Whack-a-Mole like at Seaside fairly recently, not in the last year or so, but it wasn't moles. It's always like sort of cylinders that sort of pop up. So maybe that was an attempt to sort of separate it from cruelly bashing the moles, even though it's still called Whack-a-Mole. I think maybe it was. Because if you think about it, like, you know, Whacking moles, people say, oh, video games, they don't make you do that, but we have three societies in Britain dedicated to catching moles. So that's evidence for you straight away. I think we need a follow-up of which arcade they visited as children.

But yeah, there are some others like Whack-a-Banker and Whack-a-Wardon, kind of like new versions of them where you can attack some people with unpopular jobs in the future. Right. The Versailles Palace in France, famously, has its own mole catcher, and it has had for 330 years, okay. Well, they certainly had in 2012, which was when I read an interview with the Versailles catcher, Jerome Dormion, and he signs off all his text messages with mole catcher to the king, completely ignoring the fact France no longer has kings. They literally dealt with that situation. But basically, Versailles obviously is so neat. The gardens are so pristine and the lawns are so gorgeous that he has to keep 2,000 acres free of moles. How does he do it? Does he have like a

little mole guillotine or? Genuinely, he uses a guillotine style trap. No. Genuinely, he actually does. Wow. And he is very lucky to be in his work because in the old days, he wouldn't have had a chance because from the 1600s until 1812, all the mole catchers came from the Liard family, all the, you know, royal mole catchers. And there's a story that the last one was a bit of a bit of a rake, bit of a scallywag, and basically turned the official mole catchers residence at Versailles into, you know, a knocking shop. It was a brothel. And one day, as Napoleon was walking in the gardens at Versailles, a prostitute came out of the mole catchers house and propositioned him and said, all right, burn apart fancy a good time. And as a result, the family was stripped of its

ancient privilege after 150 years of mole catching. Wow. Yeah. What a, what a roller coaster. What a mole coaster. What a way to lose your family inheritance of so many years though, just one prostitute. Every time someone asked you to repeat the story as well, it was something cooler. So I really love reading about moles, but also obviously there's moles in the human world. But in terms of the word mole, meaning a double agent, that pretty much comes from John Le Carré's books. And he has sort of said like some of the words he took from the world of espionage and some of them he made up himself. And there's a bit of confusion over which ones are which because obviously things are secret and which things are coincidences and which things are definite.

But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, they basically say it was very rare to use it to mean espionage before the Cold War saw writings and they cite John Le Carré as one of the very first people to use that. And as well as coming up with the word mole, he also came up with honeydraft that came from Le Carré. That wasn't something we used before. And he also had to run the past any character names had to run them past the foreign office to make sure he didn't accidentally dub in any real active agents, which I thought was kind of cool. And then in the BBC interview, they asked him if he did the same thing with jargon and he was sort of like, no, but I try and you know, I have more fun making up my own words. Well, so Anne, you've written a couple of

kids books about espionage in the animal world. Did you have to run and you've got friends in GCHQ, I know that happened to know that. So did you have to run those names past the... I'm not allowed to comment on that. And is there a honey trap in your book? No, there is not. It's for children. Okay, cool. It could be an actual trap of honey. If you're trying to trap Winnie the Pooh, for example. Yeah. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1800, a wig maker in London patented mechanical whiskers.

Great. Yeah. Amazing. Are we talking cat or human? Human, which is nice. Oh yeah, not the cat food. No, not the cat food. God, this is a semantic nightmare, this one. Basically, this is from an article by an expert on beard and wig history, a guy called Alan Withy, who discovered in his researches a patent that a London wig maker had taken out and it was in a time when beards were reasonably fashionable. They hadn't had huge heights,

which was later on in Victorian times, you know, the mid-19th century. This is the year 1800. But there was a London wig maker who had made a contraption or patented at least a contraption, which had fastenings made of a certain elastic compressed steel or springs. It was basically so you could attach a beard to your face with metal and make it look really convincing. Yeah, it would make it kind of almost flap a little bit in the weather, wouldn't it? Right, okay, yeah. Well, that was the worry, wasn't it? Because people who were obsessing with trying to wear fake beards were taping them to their face or gluing them and if a big gust came,

their beard would fly off mid-chat and suddenly a naked face would be talking to everyone and that would not be seen as a good thing. I spoke to Dr Withy this morning and what a great guy he is. And he said that it was almost like you could buy this wig and then it came with like optional extras. And so he said that the mechanical whiskers were almost like the go-faster stripes of the wig world. So you would buy your normal car, but you would add the go-faster stripes or you'd buy your normal wig and you would get these extras that went alongside it. Cool, right. That's so cool. He's an amazing guy. I'm so excited that you got to talk to him because

his website, his blog on beards, and he's got a book out as well. It's just fantastic. And one of the best things about him is a man obsessed with beards. He doesn't have a beard. Well done. I spoke to him on FaceTime today and I could tell you that he does have a beard though. Well, he's buckled then. He's buckled. Well, during lockdown, decided to grow a little beard. Fair enough. Looks very cool. What kind has he got, James?

Well, for him, like during lockdown, the rest of his hair kind of fell out. He doesn't know why, but the one, the bit that's left is kind of a mustache with a goatee beard at the bottom. Okay, yeah. By the way, his website, we should just say, it is Dr Allen. It's Allen spelt the Welsh way. So that's A-L-U-N-D-R-A-L-U-N dot wordpress.com. And like Dan said, it is an amazing website with everything you would ever want to know about beards. It's incredible. Yes. So does he have his beard if it's a mustache with just the goatee bit at the bottom? Is that a bit like Iron Man's, you know, Robert Downey Jr.? Is it like that? So not like yours, James,

connected, but... Yeah, I think that's right, although I can't obviously remember people's faces. So I think... For the listener, James can't remember any faces. So I'm questioning this whole Oh, Dan, you're just alike as you've been scooped on your research. But that's supposedly called an anchor, that type of beard. Okay. And I think, James, you have a goatee, which the way you have it, that might be a circle

called the circle beard. Is that right? Yeah, there's so many different types. And he brings up all these old types from the 19th century, particularly, you know, some beards were called soup strainers and others thai ticklers. And I mean, is the Piccadilly weepers. But I obviously, I don't know if you could tell this is a video call. I currently have not got a beard, apparently in the 1800s. It was also quite fashionable for women to fasten their hair under their chin to imitate the look. So I might try that next time I'm hitting the shop, see if it goes down well.

Exactly. I spoke to Alan with you about this, and he said that he found a few kind of advertisements for women to buy hair products for their beards, but they were usually like, you got ringlets instead of sideburns, they would kind of get those growing down or sometimes would even draw whiskers onto their faces because they wanted to follow the latest fashion. I mean, it must have been an amazing time, maybe the best time ever for beard owners, the 19th century, because people just went tonto for them. So the really big era of beard fashion was kind of that middle of the century. And supposedly it was starting with Crimea, the Crimean War. Soldiers grew beards because it was very, very cold and he just

wanted a little bit of, you know, facial protection. So that then all the obviously 1856 Crimean War ends. Soldiers come home, they're conquering here. Well, I can't remember who won the Crimean War. Anyway, the soldiers are home. That's the main point. And they've all got beards. And that's an argument. There's a book from 1854 actually called The Philosophy of Beards, which said that beards could keel sore throats, or that if you shaved off a beard, you might get rheumatism and lots of other ailments because you don't have this protection anymore. I've read that book for a little while. And it's not the whole thing. Alan with these read the whole thing, I'm sure. And the author of this book says, you might be thinking,

why don't women have beards? If beards are so great, and the author is saying beards are really, really great. Yeah. And he wrote, well, look, women naturally have longer hair, but also women were never intended to be exposed to the hardships and difficulties men are called upon to undergo. So I think the idea is that, you know, the men are out hunting mastodonts or whatever it is, men are out hunting. And you need a beard to hide behind if there's no bushes. Exactly. Exactly. I love this as a man who clearly hasn't heard of a scar. There is a theory that came out quite recently, isn't there, that beards evolved so that if people punch you, it kind of lessens the force. Do you see that? That's amazing. So this was

quite a recent study. And the scientists, what they did was they took a skull. And obviously, you can't get a skull with a beard because it's a bit late for growing a beard by the time you're a skull. You can't really do it. And so what they did was they took a load of hair from a sheep, and then wrapped it around the skull to kind of be almost as if it's a bit like a beard. And then they pummeled the skull with this iron rod dropping down with different weights to work out how much of a force it could take. And they worked out that actually the one which had the sheep's fur on it could take a lot more force than the one without. Right. I mean, that's an amazing experiment. But also, what a bunch of weird perverts these scientists are pummeling a

skull wrapped in hair with a rod. Also, you don't see many boxers with beards, right? Like, you figure this new research would change literally the face of sport. I wonder if it's in their rules. Like, you know, they're very sort of like, what kind of things you can have if you're a cyclist, if you're a boxer, maybe it's like, you can't wear a beard. It's like... Oh, yeah. Or maybe it's like a real woossy thing. It's all looking in with his beard, softening the punches. Giant six foot beard. That's a cushion all the flow. Well, that was the thing with beards, wasn't it? It was like that they were supposed to be like a side of manliness. And apparently that was because they were almost seen as a waste product, a beard. It was like the exhaust pipe

of sperm production. So if a man was making lots of sperm, then this was almost like a waste product of the sperm making would be the beard that came out. And that was the theory behind why, you know, the more masculine men would have beards. Well, I didn't think you would say anything of this podcast more disgusting than your weird sheep experiment. The exhaust pipe of sperm production is pure nightmare. For me, it was the stardnosed clitoris earlier. But back to sort of spies and espionage, I read a really good thing. There's an argument that prisoners shouldn't be allowed to have beards because if you escape and you've got a beard, if you shave it off, it's a pretty good disguise. But if you're a clean shaven,

to make yourself look different is much more elaborate, it would take much longer. Wait a minute, can you not just grow a beard then the other way around? Have to be hidden for quite a while, I think, if you escaped and you come in with your beard. They catch you 10 minutes later, unless you're making a lot of testosterone. Yeah, you can't just go into a phone box and wait in there for a week and then come out. Famous convicts, Burmy Pete, actually managed to avoid recapture every time he escaped. So one really interesting thing, actually, on that, which Dr. Withie said to me, which is that it's quite easy to know about posh people's beards from the olden days,

because lots of people had paintings and stuff like that. But what did normal people have in their beards? Did they wear beards? Did they have different styles and stuff like that? No one really knew, because we don't have those kind of records. But what Dr. Withie decided to do was to look at prison photographs, which they did have from the 19th century. And what he found was that they kind of like to have this, this beard that you don't really see anymore, which is almost like a chin strap. So it comes down the sideburns, it goes down the bottom of the chin, underneath the chin. And there's no mustache or anything like that and nothing on the cheeks. I tried to look at other people who had it. I think Henry Thoreau, maybe, or Stormzy, if you can think of either

of those two people. It's that kind of beard. But you don't really see it around anymore. But that was really, if you look at the prisoner photographs from that time, they all had this kind of beard. So it seems like if you're a lower class person, that's the beard you would have had. But if it's really thin lines, that means presumably it's quite a lot of upkeep to have that. So you would probably have taken quite pride in that. You just let it grow and it became bushy. That's deliberate. That's kind of what Dr. Whithy was saying. It is strange because you actually have to work at that. You can't just let it grow and that's what it does. You actually have to put some effort behind it. So yeah, it must have been a fashion.

That to me seems a bit also like protection, because you know that fact about cravats coming about as a result of wearing a bit of scarf around your neck might disguise where your actual neck is in war and if a knife was coming. Imagine if you had a very bushy beard, just in front of your neck if you're in prison. That's almost like, where's his neck begin? You know, you'd be slashing with a knife and you might just trim the guy as opposed to cutting his neck. Did he manage to cut his throat? I don't know. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact is, we know who the most significant male actor currently working in German speaking theater is because he wears a special

best actor ring. The most significant male actor in the German speaking region, which is, let's be honest, Germany and Austria. He must like walk into a party with, you know, like when someone just gets engaged and they kind of have the hand in front of their face the whole time, so everyone can see the ring. He must do that his whole life. He must write and it's a real sparkly ring. It's got 28 diamonds on it. So it's a real fashion piece. And the story behind this is that it's called the Ifland ring and this was in dedication to a great German actor from the late 18th century called August Wilhelm Ifland, who was a brilliant director, dramatist. He was a theater director. He sort of ran most of the theaters in Germany at one point and the story goes

because it is a bit of a murky story that this ring was created and was to be handed on to the next person who the previous owner deemed to be the most worthy actor working in German theater that day. So you would receive the ring upon the death of the previous owner of the ring and once you got this ring you had three months to make your decision about who would be the next person to inherit it. Now they wouldn't get it until you yourself died, but they would then, once you died, open a vault where inside on a bit of paper you will have written who you think your successor is and they get given the ring. But what happens if you're one of those actors who has a couple of really good movies at the start? Like who's the guy who we talked about the other

week who became a wrestler, who was in Scream and Cockney Cox? David Arquette. Well if you're like David Arquette you're like well what a great actor he is and then he goes downhill very quickly. You're right, it's absolutely mad that it's you pick the most significant person working within three months of you getting the award. When if you're young you might be living for decades. Yeah, what if it was like Macaulay Culkin for instance? Like the guy got his ring, let's pretend Macaulay Culkin is a German, but they got the ring and then they thought Home Alone and Home Alone 2 are killer movies. He's the best actor he obviously is in the world. Let's give it to him and then 30 years later you die and it's just this guy who's living with Pete Dockety.

But do they have a backup plan? Because if you get it and it doesn't pass on until you die, you know you can't guarantee that unless you picked someone like Macaulay Culkin who was young then you can't guarantee that you'll outlive them. So is there like a list, like a sort of like a line of succession for if your choices are available? It sometimes happens, you're right. So the previous holder before the the current one was Bruno Gantz who played Hitler in Downfall. That was maybe his most famous role in the English speaking world and he intended an actor called Gert Wost to get it, but Wost died in 2014 when Gantz was still alive. So he had to change his mind and re-nominate and as a result he nominated the new film.

Yeah and that's happened a few times. By the way Gantz, when we say Hitler in Downfall, for anyone who hasn't seen that movie you probably have seen a very iconic scene from it because it's become one of the most memed movie scenes possible where the subtitles are changed with Hitler having a meltdown if you can picture that great meme. That's from that and that's from the great most significant German actor of his time one person ago. Do you think that's what got him the nomination? It was the meme, you know, like this is just as such an impact all around the world. It has to be you. But I mean so you know that has happened before Gantz had that happen. There was a guy called

Albert Basserman who was given the ring in 1908 and he really didn't want it and he named three successors and all of them died before he actually died himself. So he thought it was cursed and he wanted to give it away so he actually didn't nominate his successor. It was done by a team, an Austrian team who decided who the next actor was. But he was he was quite a cool actor, Basserman. He was nominated for his role in an Alfred Hitchcock movie that was made in 1940 called Foreign Correspondent and during the filming he had to have his dialogue spelt out to him phonetically because he spoke virtually no English. So he was memorizing his lines from a phonetic translation and he memorized them and delivered them so well he was nominated for best

supporting actor. That's very cool. Basserman tried to destroy the ring by throwing it into a fire. Into a volcano. Well this is insane. It was at the funeral of the third person he'd nominated who had subsequently died who was Alexander Moises. I don't know how that's pronounced exactly but the story goes that he threw it onto the coffin of Moises at the cremation and it was sinking into the flames when the director of the Viennese theater reached in and grabbed it and he said this ring belongs with a living actor not a dead one. And so as a result there was a kind of a vote. He gave it to the

Austrian you know federal theater body and they had to they had to pick because he said I'm not picking anyone more. It's so incredibly Lord of the Rings though and I also read that the Ilford ring was one of a set of seven originally which definitely adds to this and then I started looking into the Lord of the Rings. I just found this potential origin story. I think it's not completely it's well I'll tell you the story because I blew my mind and I hadn't heard it before which is there is a ring a place called the Vienn Hampshire. It's a national trust property and it's a massive chunky gold ring. It's so big it can only be worn on a gloved thumb. It's ginormous and it's inscribed with Latin that says Sinisianus live well in God so they found

this in a field in 1785. It's a ring it went in the display but then a few decades later they found a tablet a sighting gloss to show a little way away and this one contains a tablet which said that a Roman wanted to let them know someone had stolen his ring and he wanted it back and the tablet said among those who bear the name Sinisianus to none grant health until he brings back the ring to the temple of Nodans and the bit that makes this really exciting is they contacted a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University to help them work out who this god was and that was one J.R.R. Tolkien which I thought was so cool. So you can see that ring one of another mysterious rings at the national trust property although they do say it's not completely sure it was connected

to the tablet they were a long way away but the story if that's true sounds like it very that's such a great Lord of the Rings connection and they do think of the of the seven two do still exist so we've got the one that sits on the most significant actor's hand and a second one is in a private collection but it's suggested that that's either been lost or destroyed so we could be down to the last ring. And someone tried to throw it into a fire and this is definitely Lord of the Rings. You know it's a shame I think Bassamon would have rather it had burnt in that fire because the successor that they picked would have absolutely devastated him because Bassamon was married to his wife who was called Elsa and she was Jewish and during the height of Nazism

he was told that he would need to divorce her if he wanted to continue performing in Germany. He said absolutely not and he and Elsa went away to Switzerland to live instead. He was very against it so it would have killed him for the fact that the ring was passed on to Werner Kraus who was part of what is seen as the worst propaganda movie that Nazi Germany ever made about Jewish people. That was the successor of the ring really just horrible. Yeah actually you were just saying about Switzerland and Andy said that basically the only German speaking places are Germany and Austria well of course you did forget about Switzerland which is where Bruno Gantz is from who played Hitler he's Swiss and in Switzerland they have their own ring they have the Heinz

Reinhardt ring and that is for whoever's the best Swiss actor and actually in 1991 Bruno Gantz won that as well so for a short amount of time he had both the best actor in Switzerland ring and the best actor in Germany. What incredible. Oh my god he was you know he was in he was meant to be the lead role of Pretty Woman he was meant to be Richard Gere. What the Julia Roberts. Yeah I'm sorry. Yeah I've been a very different movie wasn't it? Richard Gere court Hitler. But actually you know this guy that I just mentioned the Nazi Kraus he actually tried to be the first person to give the ring to a lady because he thought this shouldn't be just male dominated and the lady that he wanted to give it to was Alma Seidler who is a brilliant actor at the time

and they said no because she was a woman and so as a result since the 1970s a new ring has been created which is the Alma Seidler ring which is given to the most significant female actor in German speaking theater and we're on our third most significant actor as of this year to hold the ring. Yeah there's a suggestion that Jens Haase who's the current holder of the Ifland ring might give it to a woman isn't it? Yeah he better do. We don't know of course. Yeah he's really suggested he will so I hope he does because otherwise that's just all talk isn't it? Yeah and actually the ring has been with a woman for the last few years at least because Jens Haase apparently keeps it in his daughter's underwear drawer. Does he? For safekeeping yeah. It feels like a small victory for feminism.

It doesn't feel like safekeeping if you've told everyone exactly where you keep it and you've put it in your poor daughter's bedroom a 28 diamond ring. Can I just say for any for any criminals listening because I know you do listen to this podcast we know what you look like you've got that little beard going around for any criminals listening he has moved it from the daughter's underwear drawer now it's not there anymore it's somewhere else. Well that's what you would say that's exactly what you would say if you hadn't moved it from your daughter's underwear drawer. Okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that countries can now send propaganda to individual enemy soldiers on the

front line by text message every time they turn on their phones. Wow. And by countries I mean Russia. Although I suppose anyone could do it but this is an article in The Economist from the last couple of weeks and it is about a thing called pinpoint propaganda and it is something that's happening on the front between Russia and Ukraine and apparently a Ukrainian soldier might turn on their phone and they'll get a message saying who is robbing your family while you are paid pennies waiting for your bullet that kind of thing. It's pretty direct then it's not subtly saying hey have you maybe considered retraining? Yeah they got straight for the money. I think in warfare probably direct is generally the way to go. Well they really do go for it so this has been happening

for a few years I think it was 2017 that the first examples were received by Ukrainian soldiers and they they said things like they'll find your bodies when the snow melts or nobody needs your kids to become orphans and they also they look like they're coming from your comrades sometimes which is very creepy. Yeah except you could quickly ask them why'd you send me that weird thing about my wife and kids? I got one from you so I sent one back. And this article basically was all about how mobile phones are a problem in warfare so for instance if you're a country and that you know there's a front in between you and another country and you want to know where soldiers are you can scan and you can look for mobile phone signals and people might be told to turn the phone

off but there was a quote by Lieutenant Colonel Reuven Habel who is in charge of NATO troops in Lithuania and he says that it's just turning on your phone it's like a fire in the dark. It's basically it just lights you up exactly where you are and they'll know where to attack. That's so interesting is that's like just like the equivalent isn't it a First World War having a glowing cigarette which can be seen from a really long way away at night. I guess interestingly though if you got a text message you would report that to your superior and say we got to get out of here they know exactly where we are. Yeah but what if you're defending your own territory you can't then say we got to get out of here. Yeah that's

that's why I should not be put in charge of militia. We can't do this Commander Shriver we just can't do it no no guys let's just get out of here they know where we are. They've heard about England we've got to go all of us now. Yeah but phones but phones are such a huge security breach because yeah there's geo-tagging on stuff the the army had to deny a case recently that somebody gave away information because someone on Tinder was asking them too many questions and they gave away information about planes they completely denied it and also there's things like you know if you send a photo to somebody well that can be geo-tagged even if you even if you've turned off the geo-tagging if there's a time stamp on the photo and you can sort of tell by the light you can sort

of work out where you are in the world so you can also work out where trips are moving so there's tons of these risks that sit on phones and obviously the really big one is location trackers and there was that really problematic story recently where fitness trackers got well they didn't even get hacked they released a heat map showing where the people who use fitness trackers were and a lot of them were in US bases abroad and a lot of them ran around their base for their exercise to basically lit up all these areas in deserts and everyone was like oh wow wonder what's there literally drawing a ring around the the base that's amazing wow well what if you were smart what you would do is like you know in world war two they would make fake cities wouldn't they so they would set fires and

put lights just outside the city so the bombers would come over and bomb the wrong place what you would do is you get your soldiers to run a kilometer away in a shape a bit like a military base and then trick them yes and then all call home with like sort of some elaborate lighting setups it's a different time of day and like completely throw everyone off where you actually are and what you're doing yeah and james you you got this fact from the economist didn't you and i was reading an article about propaganda in the economist might might very well have been the same article this was an article about all the different terms that have emerged in modern day related to propaganda so in russia for example there's a term which is propagandan which is basically

a propaganda condom it's an insult to journalists in russia who are elastic with the truth and it's a portmanteau of of propaganda and the russian word for condom which is sort of derived from the english word for condom but it's gandon so propaganda and gandon together propagandan so you would say of the journalists there who are just peddling basically state propaganda that they are a propagandan the propaganda condom wait are they the condom or are they the penis they're the condom so what what is the penis if they are the condom no no it's not really it's well i suppose the elastic with the truth is kind of a thing but it's like condom is just like a silly insult but they are the barrier between i guess the truth so the penis is the

penis or possibly the sperm cells are the truth and they're preventing the truth from getting through to the people if you imagine like a sperm exhaust and then there's a barrier who's the beard okay propagandan that's great yeah if you want to use that this is all come a very very long way from early propaganda techniques i didn't know this thing which is that during the first world war germany and britain both had their own propaganda newspapers which were in french so if you see what i mean they were for people who spoke french and occupied belgium and occupied france and and french-speaking prisoners of war so the german one was called the desert desert then but the british one le courier de laire was a floating newspaper it was

distributed as a leaflet from hydrogen filled balloons and it was just released to drift across the battlefields and slowly release bundles of papers as it went so there was a really clever fuse which burnt down and every five minutes it burnt down another notch and it released another bundle yeah i think i think they invented that because it used to be people dropping them out of planes and then two people two people got caught with a lot of propaganda leaflets and then sentenced to hard labor and they're like okay well this is risky so then they developed the balloons to just you'll do it without people and they can completely deny it and be like oh it just floated into your land sorry there's no one obviously operating it it's a bit more difficult

to know exactly where your papers are going to end up though right then if people are actually like if i'm a paper boy like i used to be i couldn't use this as my technique for delivering newspapers in bolton could i know exactly and in fact james you're so right because they had to have a weather man in the early days to consult and if the if the wind was blowing towards france you tied the newspaper and if it was blowing towards germany you would actually just out and out propaganda sheets for enemy soldiers so they had to they had two different bundles and they had to pick which what if you said the wrong one's the wrong way and you like radicalize the wrong group you'd be like yeah problem we've accidentally turned all the french into german soldiers night man

and propaganda much older even than the 20th century during the civil war in england there was quite a lot of it against the cromwells and actually a bit afterwards they were still really bad-mouthing the cromwells after the monarchy came back in and there was a book called the court and kitchen of elizabeth commonly called jone cromwell the wife of the late usurper and this was a propaganda cookbook and it kind of looked on the outside that it was jone cromwell's cooking recipes but actually in between all of the recipes there was just a load of like sexual slander about the cromwells and what they used to get up to and all that kind of stuff and stewart orn who is the cromwell museum's curator i read this on atlas obscura he said that

it would be a bit like today if you were to buy a cookery book that was supposedly written by michelle obama but the first third of it was an essay by donald trump saying how awful barric obama was oh don't give him ideas trump will do that now but what's so great though is that especially americans are very bad for this they're writing recipes where there's like a really long backstory before they tell you the recipe so a lot of people skip over those sections it's probably the best place to hide something because everyone's like where's the ingredients for brownies i don't want to know yeah you're right you need to you need to put the propaganda in a place that someone's going to read so it's like first set your oven to oliver cromwell was a shagger

270 degrees pick your moments yeah i i read a little bit about that james and the other thing that i really like was that all the recipes in it were even they were picked to target the cromwells they were quite basic recipes if i can put it that way designed to say that all the cromwells had been terribly common you know eel pies come on guys um sorry that's not rhyming slag for eel pies but you know they were just kind of scuzzy recipes and not for classic people i think i did a lesson there's a recipe a day on twitter and i'm pretty sure the day trump left her recipe of the day was bitter orange tart which is very well played i feel like it would fit into this everywhere nice um joseph starlin of russian fame more importantly of starlin fame i would say

you're absolutely right he had a plane which was used pretty much solely for propaganda purposes it was called the maxim gorky named after the famous writer and um it was an incredible machine it was one of the largest planes in the world in fact it in the 1930s it was the largest plane in the world there were only two built for that specific model and get this it had a cinema on board a library it was exclusively used for propaganda this plane well no no it seems like it was often used for watching movies as well and reading books we don't know what movies will play and we don't know what books you can borrow for like no come on andy right so starlin doesn't need the propaganda you're not going to talk starlin into going for communism by playing

him a video you need to get the propaganda to the people outside the plane okay i'd say 60 to 70 percent of its function was for propaganda it had some leisure center facilities attached it also had its own leaflet printing and dropping capacity so it could print them in the air pretty cool that's cool it also had a this is what i read it had a giant radio attached to it so it could just blare out propaganda as it flew overhead how long was this plane flying it did fly pretty low because it did these cool flying exercises and that actually tragically led to it crashing because it was flying with several other planes tiny ones which were designed to point out how big the maxim gulfy was and then you know they would do cool maneuvers around it and unfortunately one

of them crashed into it and then it crashed that is terrible but the idea of having really tiny planes next to your plane to make it look bigger is quite amazing it's like those crabs that stand next to the ones with small claws to make their claws look bigger but like in here have you guys heard of the sexual deviance pamphlets get out of them Ben i've been riding them for five years who made you the head of hr at qi i don't have to answer these questions done these were these were used during world war two and it was basically one of the ways to promote propaganda and change the mood of soldiers is that you would suggest that the wives and partners and and husbands and so on of people back home were sleeping with other people so yeah so you

know one batch was dropped on the french front which had images of british soldiers taking advantage of all the french women while they were there so they'd suddenly be like those british bastards and then other leaflets had the french draft dodgers doing the same thing but to french women while you know the hard working soldiers were out there they weren't that the actual that you know it wasn't the actual people right it was imagine a leaflet with your wife darling that could be anyone's exhaust 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

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we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye