No Such Thing As A Fish - 394: No Such Thing As A Fourteen Humped Camel

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Live from Tunbridge Wells, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Canyons, Kanye, Space Invaders and Spies' Masqueraders. 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, this week coming to you live from Tumbridge Wells. This bit was actually meant to be coming to you live from Tumbridge Wells, but um, full disclosure, we forgot to press the record button. So we actually missed the start of my intro, but that doesn't matter, let's just do it again and we'll seamlessly edit into the room. So close your eyes, picture that you're sitting in the assembly hall in Tumbridge Wells, the lights have gone down, and the four dorks are about to come on stage.

Here we go. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Tumbridge Wells. My name is Dash Shriver, and I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshensky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. And with fact number one, and that is my fact, my fact this week is that the guy who invented space invaders really struggles to get past the first level of space invaders.

This is true, this was invented by a guy called Tomohiro Nishikado, and he's an amazing inventor, but he's terrible at video games, and so much so that when he invented it in 1978, he kind of tried to make it easier just so he could get to the end, and they all went, no, that's a terrible game. He does sound very cool. He invented the game, but he also designed the artwork, he did the sounds, and he built a customized computer to run the game on, so he did everything. And when he first released this game, there was a little process where they showed it

to people and so on, and it didn't get good feedback. They thought, this is not that great, and then the game was released, and it just exploded. It was really massive in Japan. All these stories started coming out, so there was a story in Japan, soon after the release, a 12-year-old boy held up a bank with a shotgun, and he didn't want any notes, he just wanted coins, and he did more coins for the arcade. Did that not happen? Did that happen?

I think that possibly did happen, but there was a whole raft of stories where they were talking about the fact that there was a hundred yen coin, there was a shortage of them in Japan because just too many coins were being used, and I think that was a rumor. I think it might be true that in some small areas they did run out for a short amount of time, but then over the years that has come into, they completely ran out of hundred yen coins in Japan. It broke the economy, didn't it? It's what caused the downturn of the Japanese economy in the 90s.

The first ever world championship in any video game that was a really big one was Space Invaders. It was in 1980, there were more than 10,000 participants, and the winner was a 16-year-old girl called Rebecca Heinemann, and Rebecca Heinemann is really, really interesting. She had quite a difficult childhood because she would like to find out that she was transsexual, and she had to live in a dumpster for a little while. She got kicked out of home, but she put all of her energy into video games, and she didn't realize how good she was because she didn't really have the self-worth. This is what she says.

She started playing in the regional heats, and she got bored really, really quickly playing against this guy, and she said, I got bored so quickly, I started talking to him and saying, how's the weather? What's it like here? This is while she's playing, okay? And slowly people are getting knocked out, knocked out, knocked out. She's still just chatting away. In the end, she got to the very, very end of the game, and they said, what's your score?

They said 88,000 points, and she says, is that good? And it was so good that it was double the amount of points that the runner-up in the competition got. Wow. And she then refused to post her score because they thought it would intimidate other players. Wow. Wow. Isn't that amazing?

Did she go on to become a game designer? A programmer, yeah. That is actually, I'd say that's more scary if the score is redacted, but if I was playing tennis against someone, and I said, oh, how'd you do in your last match? And he said, you don't want to know, I'd be more, actively more frightened. Yeah. I'd assume it just spelled out a rude word, like boob or something. Yeah.

88,000. Yeah. And I think that Andy's tennis, just shit. What? I've got a tennis score. This is a distraction. The other day, Dan told me a funny thing about when he plays tennis, which is that he imagines that he's on center court, right?

He imagines he's on center court, and he's got this great crowd cheering him on. And that's how he psychs himself up for the game, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, really exciting. Okay. The next time I played tennis, I tried this out, okay? I thought, right, I was on center court at Wimbledon, and I lost the crowd. I genuinely, within five seconds, lost the crowd, and they were hostile because I'd hit a ball the wrong way, or I don't know, hit a ball boy or something, and they were on

the other guy's side. You played tennis against Andy as well, haven't you, Anna? And I think you won redacted love, redacted love. That was too sexy. Anna actually did win very, yeah. Do you like the way you say Anna actually did win, in case people were thinking James was joking there? Ace Invaders was made by a company called Taito in Japan, and the company Taito was

founded by a Ukrainian Jewish businessman in 1944. He was called Michael Kogan, and they originally sold wigs and hog bristles, okay? Then that company almost went out of business, so they decided to become the first company to sell vodka. Sorry, can I ask, were they selling wigs and then wigs for pigs? Is that what that was? Pig wigs. Why was there hog bristles?

I suppose if you're making wigs, hog bristles is kind of, maybe they use the same machine? It's like for people to make their own, either you can buy a wig, or you can make your own wig out of these hog bristles. They also made floor coverings, so maybe they're the same stuff that they're making carpets with. They also make wigs and pig wigs. A doormat made of hog bristles sounds like an extremely luxurious one. Yeah.

But one made of two pays, sounds a bit weird. Oh, God, yeah. Anyway, then they became the first company to make vodka in Japan, and that did okay, but not that well. Then they went into peanut vending machines, then into perfume machines, and then into video games. Wow. Yeah, very cool.

Finally landed on it. Sorry, did Nintendo start it off with... Love hotels. Love hotels, yeah. Yeah, they did. Which are hotels in Japan that you rent by the quarter of an hour. Is it Vox that you play Tennyson? It's a very nice, very nice.

You know, you rent them for a quarter of an hour, or... Or three minutes. Or three minutes. You know, Kanye West, the first ever music that he created, the first ever beat was for a video game that he created as well when he was 12 years old. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So he said, the first beat I did was in seventh grade on my computer.

I got into doing beats for the video game I used to try and make. The main character was a giant penis. It was like... Himself. Yeah. It was like Mario Brothers, but the ghosts were like, vaginas. You have to draw in and program every little step. It literally took me all night to do a step, because the penis, you know, had little feet

and eyes. Hmm. That's the first ever music he created for a video game based on the walking penis with eyes that was eating vaginas. How did he know how to draw a vagina? I don't believe he knew what a vagina looked like, 12-year-old Kanye West. That's true. And his penis has feet and eyes.

Christ knows what the vagina was. We're going to have to move on in a sec to our next fact. James, you're learning Russian. Have you heard of the game Repka Siloma? My kind of learning Russian doesn't really go into playing video games. Okay. Well, it's a Soviet-era arcade game where the aim of the game is to pull a mechanical turnip to demonstrate your strength.

I know the game... I know the story it's based on. Ah, it's based on a story? Yeah, there's like a famous story in Russian literature and I think it did come over to Europe a bit where there's a big turnip in the ground and everyone's trying to pull it and there's like a big pile of the farmer and the farmer's wife and the farmer's kids and then the dog pulls and the cat pulls and in the end it's just like a little mouse pulls and that pulls up the turnip and that's communism.

Wow. Oh! I've just understood this game and communism at the same time. That's great. It is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that during the Cold War there was a Soviet spy in London who contacted his handlers by throwing a copy of Men Only magazine over a garden hedge. This is from an article about the National Archives who sporadically released spy papers

when enough time has passed and this was a batch of papers released in 2015. It was about the Cold War and Klaus Fuchs was a German physicist who then came to work in the UK but he was a spy as well for the Soviet Union and his way of meeting his handlers or saying he needed to have a meeting with them was to buy a copy of Men Only magazine right on page 10 we need to meet, walk along a street in queue in South West London and then just truck Men Only magazine over the garden hedge and then they would pick that up and discover it but there must presumably have been some people who saw a man throwing a magazine over a hedge for no reason and didn't know what was going on.

I think he was lucky that Men Only magazine in those days wasn't the sexy Men Only magazine that it became. What is it? No, in the early days this was in the 1930s it advertised the first article advertised it as we don't want women readers we won't have women readers so that's one thing. I think it retained that founding principle throughout to be a pen. But it didn't have naked living women in it, it had the occasional heart. Dead women actually didn't know, it was actually much sicker.

Women who had been dead for hundreds of years as in painted by famous painters so they did have a few of those but they didn't have penups as we know them today and in the second issue they had some letters from readers someone said it looks like a guidebook to the British Museum and the other one said I find you too respectable for words. I don't know this magazine is it still going and B is it kind of like Playboy is that what it became? As far as I know it's not still going it was kind of became big in the 70s when it was bought over by a guy called Paul Raymond who ran nightclubs in Soho and then he turned

it into much more of a sexy magazine did become kind of a little bit sexy before that but that's when it became proper top shelf stuff. Okay right before that it had kind of it had sort of like Jessica Rabbit type pictures in it didn't it quite sexy cartoons of women. This is an example on the front page it had the names of the people who were writing in this edition. One of them was Charles Darwin's grandson who was a gulf writer for another one there was Sir Alan Patrick Herbert who was an independent member of Parliament Foxford University.

The old independent member of Parliament system which was very interesting because you had you had MPs for a city but then also for the university right? No doesn't even make it into that shit boring version of Men Only Magazine sorry. They also had a one of the articles was building better brains so it was ways to improve your memory which is a thing called pelmanism and the way that you would kind of make your memory better is do you remember that game where you put like cards turn them all over and you turn two over and you have to match them up and if they don't match you turn them back over.

Pairs. Yeah it was telling people how to play that game basically. The game for five year olds is that building a better brain? If you're four years old. Fox practically single-handedly showed the USSR how to build an atomic bomb didn't he? He was such a successful spy and when he was finally caught he only served nine years. He served nine years in prison and then he was sent back to East Germany where he was married to a communist official.

I didn't realise they did arranged marriages but it seems like they did and he then gave Atom Bomb making lessons to the Chinese so to be fair he wanted global nuclear equality was his defence in court and I think he might have been his principal. He thought that we were safer if we all had it right the whole mutually assured bullshit thing. What I love about this fact is it shows the real lo-fi spying abilities. We always think of the James Bond this pen can do this and all that stuff but actually there was just so much stuff where it was a bit crap.

Have we ever on the podcast mentioned the Jack in the Box? No. Oh my goodness I love this. This was just such a simple lo-fi thing. This was imagine you're a spy there's two spies in a car and you're driving along and you're being tailed and you think I need to get out of here because they're going to get me. The Jack in the Box was a little suitcase that sat there in the car and the idea was

when you took a sharp corner you'd open up the suitcase and a new inflatable spy would pop up and you can open the door and just throw yourself out, slam the door and they'll just be going well he's still in the car and you just roll away to safety. That was the real thing. Does he still drive it? The inflatable you. I think you need to be in the passenger seat so I think you're throwing the... They did use that a few times didn't they?

Yeah. I was watching an interview with a woman called Jono Mendes who was the CIA's chief of disguise in the 1980s. What a cool job. She revealed so many things like the Jack in the Box and things like lying doggo. I don't know if you guys know about this. This was a fake dog that they made for agents in Moscow and the reason they did it was they sent a couple to Moscow, couple of spies and they sent with them a huge dog, some sort

of breed of dog and they got this couple to drive in and out of the embassy just doing routine stuff in and out of the embassy with a dog in the back of the car and the dog would be sitting up or lying down or wagging its tail so the security there would see this dog every day. They also sent with them a fake dog which was hollow on the inside. They got a wig maker to make them a fake dog that looked exactly the same as their other dog so when this couple of spies needed to smuggle somebody into the embassy they would curl up inside this fake dog and it would go through security.

A Trojan dog. Security would just go oh Robe is asleep today looking cute. I don't know how big is this dog because most I think it was like a big deluxe dog wasn't it. It was super fluffy so. Wow. What would you do if someone came over and started like tickling your chin you'd have to go.

And they love you and adopt you and you just have to live out the rest of your life. Do you want to know another lo-fi spying method. This is a CIA thing. The CIA have a facility in Virginia which teaches you all the complicated spying stuff like how to crash a car how to parachute how to use a speedboat and how to commit suicide apparently that's just one of the skills they teach you I guess if you're caught and you know you can't give away secrets but they also teach you how to go to Starbucks and this is one of the other methods they have for spying.

So one professor once by would give all of his people he was running a Starbucks gift card okay that was not just a present because he would say if you need to see me just buy a coffee and then every morning he just checks in with all of his Starbucks gift cards he's given out and if one of them has any money removed on it he knows that that agent in particular is trying to contact him and he can just arrange a meeting and then the next you know they meet up the next 3pm at the statue or wherever it is they've previously agreed. Yes.

It is cool those hacks those hacks are amazing there was a hack that was used by a big problem when people were trying to track down all countries trying to track down Osama bin Laden was they were trying to find him via the internet and Al Qaeda were very good at not using the internet so one of the things was how do you get an email to someone without sending an email and going through all the traffic can you think of how you do that? Thanks. No. Did Brian Blessed have his printed off or something and he would read his emails that way?

So he the way that he used to tweet because he set up a Twitter account was that he would have tweets sent to him his a friend of his would then print out the tweets and would call up his agent who would then write them down and fax them to Brian. Brian then read them from his fax call his agent his agent would write them down send them back to this guy and then they would be tweeted it was about a 4 day process. What's amazing is that was quicker than using WhatsApp yesterday. But we're not saying Brian Blessed has got anything to do with Al Qaeda. Well maybe we are.

I don't know. But he's got the beard for it. Here's the thing. You couldn't hide Brian Blessed anywhere. It's ridiculous. You need a big dog for that. So just with the email thing what they would do is they would be an account and what they would do is they would go in and they would write an email and then they would save it

as a draft and then someone else would go in. They would open up the same account because they all have the details and they would find the draft never goes across any information highway. The Secret Intelligence Service were the forerunner I think to MI5 and MI6. They were just after the First World War during and after. The CIS. The CIS. Yeah.

Secret Intelligence Service. They had an office in London which was disguised as a company called the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company which is their cover story. We just make fire extinguishers. Weirdly that is still a fire extinguishing company today so I don't know. I don't know whether they keep in the cover up. Is that what you're saying? I'm not sure what I'm saying.

If you need to buy a fire extinguisher you can get one from there. But anyway everyone knew about it. London taxi drivers all knew. Take me to the spy building men. Take me to 54 Broadway which is where the office was. Even German intelligence knew all about it and they positioned an agent there disguised as a blind match seller who would just stand outside the building openly watching what was going on.

A blind man. Did he ever strike a match and someone rushed out of the building and extinguished it? Just to prove they're doing their job. I don't know. We're going to move on to our next fact very, very shortly. Just one other lo-fi thing that the Americans used to do during the Cold War is dip dead rats in Tabasco sauce and then leave them lying around. First of all they'd find a dead rat and then they'd have a taxidermist hollow it out and

stuff all the stuff inside it that you want to pass to your agent in let's say Moscow. So he's asked for a toothbrush, a bunch of rubles, whatever. You put it inside the dead rat and then you leave it on the street and this is because they did a bunch of research that showed them that the one thing no one will pick up and dispose of is a dead rat. So no humans will touch a dead rat. Problem is animals touch dead rats. So to deter animals from picking it up they just dipped it in a hefty vat of Tabasco

before dropping it on the street. Imagine if you're pretending to be a big dog and you see that rat on the floor and you're like shit in character I'm going to have to go for that. Okay it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 1930s Yemen it was forbidden to walk backwards or to give a horse a human name. Wow. Yeah I thought for a live show a bit of a light one I'd do a fact about Yemen so...

I've got a question right off the block Santa. It was illegal to give a horse a man's name. A person's name. Yeah yeah yeah but there's some grey area there surely. Yeah I don't know if there was like a catalogue of the big book of... Some names are clearly horses names like Dobbin and some names are clearly human names like Tony. Yeah. So what I think it is you can't call your horse Tony right?

You can't call your horse Tony but I'm presuming there's a grey area of names which could apply equally to... Like Mr Ed who definitely... Thank you. I was struggling and struggling and just you know spooling it out and trying to think what are these names? Mr Ed is a perfect name. I started to think Mr Ed might have been a spy inside a horse.

I've got some good news for you Andy. Yeah. In 1930s Yemen it was illegal to play tennis. Oh. Get me there. Yeah look a lot of stuff was forbidden in Yemen in the 1930s. It was a strange place. It was a very insular place.

It didn't really open up to the world until the 1960s and the imams kept it completely cut off from the world and there were a few travel writers who weren't there in the 30s. One of them was a guy called Norman Lewis who then wrote a report of what he found. He found you weren't allowed to point at the moon. That was very dangerous because superstition. You weren't allowed to contemplate women. I don't know if that meant with your eyes or if you even just thought about... I imagine that's what Kanye West was doing when he was 12 years old.

Contemplate. Yeah singing, whistling. You were allowed to wear a watch but only if it wasn't working. Really? Yeah you could wear it as decoration but you couldn't like use it to tell the time. Wow. How interesting. This is all thanks to Imam Yahya who was the Imam at the time.

And especially band music and singing. Really frowned on that. Right. So all music and singing apart from religious chants were banned. You could accompany the religious chants with a tambourine but I don't think you could play a tambourine unless you were doing a religious chant at the same time. And singers had to perform in locked rooms with the windows stuffed with cushions. Wow.

Because you know it was illegal so this was the only way you could perform. And this Imam basically he was just after the First World War wasn't it? He'd taken over and he was just trying to stop modernity from coming into the country. And he did so by micromanaging everything which meant that basically anything that happened he had to know about it and he had to have his say so. Yeah. Norman Lewis the guy Anna mentions thinks that he was probably the third or fourth English person ever to go to North Yemen.

Wow. So Britain had a colonial territory called Aden. That was the city which was I think it's about 1960 something from 1839 Britain owned that but you weren't allowed to go to North Yemen and this was the way you got permission to go. Kind of like getting Brian blessed to reply to your tweet basically. You had to write to the envoy in Aden and the application was then carried by sea in a traditional Dao boat. It was taken to the port of Hodeida then it was taken by horseback to Senaar

which was the capital in the north. It took up to two months to get a reply from the Imam saying whether you could go to North Yemen or not. It was usually just hashtag no wasn't it? Norman Lewis went and he thought he had his permissions. He thought he had the papers all in order. He got there and it turned out they were expecting someone else and he and his colleagues was just sent away. I think he thinks they were expecting. They thought he was someone who they'd also put to come and deliver quite a lot of weapons.

And they were very disappointed when he was just some travel writer. They retracted the permission. He was just very quickly on Norman Lewis amazing travel writer but also I'm surprised he got turned away because he's one of those people where I think he could slip into any country and just be a part of it and not really cause a fuss. He famously claimed that he was the only person he knew who could walk into a room full of people and leave at some time afterwards without anyone ever realising he was actually there to begin with. That's easy to say though isn't it?

It's easy to say oh I was there yes. Oh you didn't see me that's because I'm so good at not being seen. I have done that multiple times normally at parties. I've gone I've left I've left no trace on anyone's mind. Yeah you're the Norman Lewis of your day. He had some other jobs before he became an explorer and travel writer. One of his jobs apparently was as a wholesaler of umbrellas he bought up from lost property offices. Oh that's a great idea.

And he tripled his money on them. He made an incredible profit. He was supposed to be a medium. His parents wanted him to be a medium. And he was a large. Well his father was a was a medium right claimed to be a medium. Yeah because when he was married to someone called Anestina Kovaya who was a daughter of a mafia lawyer.

But when her parents came to visit his parents for the first ever time it was all going very very fine. Sunday lunch was happening and his father slipped into a trance and began to communicate with the spirit of her dead sister. It's a very awkward dinner with the in-laws isn't it. That's wow. I mean was it with their permission or with their encouragement or was it just. It was just like literally past the spuds please.

No wait a minute. I'm giving a B. A B Brenda. Is it Brenda? I like that's not really a mafia name is it. Wow that is yeah that's pretty intense for a first meeting. Well one more thing on Lewis. He went to Havana.

He was sent to Havana by Ian Fleming. Pretty cool. Yeah in 1959 and he was meeting up with a guy called Ed Scott who was one of the models for James Bond. Okay so that's already a very exciting James Bondy espionage meeting that's happening between Norman Lewis and Ed Scott in Havana. Not only that the meeting was observed by Graham Greene who then used that meeting scene in his novel our man in Havana.

Really? Wow. That's one of the most intensely literary espionage meetings that's ever happened I reckon. There were fewer people back then weren't there. There were only about 10 people in the world. I think on that trip he also met Ernest Hemingway right. Oh really? Yeah because a lot of people said that Lewis was like

you know he should have been more well known because he was such a great writer but whenever they said it to him he was like well I met Hemingway when I was in Cuba and he looked exceedingly sad and I thought how lucky I am to have got as far as I have but no further. He was like thank god I'm not famous because Hemingway looks so sad. Wow. Anyway who's for a game of humps or eggs? Humps or eggs?

Humps or eggs. Okay. I went to look at the world records that are owned by people from Yemen and one is the most eggs balanced on top of each other and one is the most humps ever on a camel which is higher. Is it fried eggs? Scrambled eggs? Eggs and shells. Just eggs and shells unboiled on top of each other not allowed to do any tricks

they've just got to balance through gravity. Or humps on a camel. Or humps on a camel. Okay anyone for humps? This isn't going as well as I thought it might do. Anyone for eggs? Now I feel like I've primed them for that one. I'm going to go for humps because I feel like you can just

you can grow random humps right whereas defying gravity is hard guys. See could you possibly imagine balancing three eggs on each other? I can but I can also picture a camel with 14 humps. What are you going to do with all them humps? That's more impressive in a way to me that Dan can imagine that because I'm tapping out a camel with four humps. Okay but that's still more than three. You thought the maximum eggs was three though right?

Yeah I think maximum is going to be eggs but I think it is going to be three. And you think maximum humps is four but you still think eggs is going to win? No no no sorry. I think the maximum I can imagine is four but I know that that's an insane thing to imagine a camel with four humps and I think the most any camel has ever had is two. Anna? Anna's got her head in her hands for the listener at home.

I don't care. I think it's not... And we have a winner, Alice Shinsky. You were basically right. The maximum eggs is three, the maximum humps is four but then you somehow went for the opposite answer. Wow. Either way I don't think it's going to revolutionise Saturday night TV James.

The maximum humps is four. Where were the extra humps? They were on the camel. Okay. You know, underside, coming out of the arms. They were on the top. This was a guy called Dr Bernhard Goethe-Meck. He was a German zoologist but he was in Yemen

and he noticed or a farmer told him that his camel had grown four humps. It sounds like the start of a joke doesn't it? And it was sold for $10,000. Wow. And how did the eggs... How does that work? The bum on the head or side on side? It's one on top of the other and they're in the basic egg way you would think

which is the fat bed at the bottom. Then thin, fat, thin, fat, thin. Wow. That's impressive. So who was the genius who thought I'm going to set up a competition? The competition of humps versus eggs. That was me. That was my idea.

Yes, I used to wear genius. Yes, I did. Not lightly. Well, we need to move on to our next bag. Can I quickly then give you... The Queen of Sheba is from Yemen, possibly we think maybe. She's in the Bible and in Quran and in a few different holy books. And she's like this legendary person who met with Solomon

and asked him lots of riddles. So can I give you one of the Queen of Sheba's riddles? If it's humps or eggs again, James. Go on. What are the seven that issue and nine that enter the two that offer drink and the one that drinks? God, is it some kind of complicated sort of entering a club?

Oh, I'm throwing a party. Well, this is already unlikely, isn't it? I invite seven people. Nine people say they're going to turn up. Two people turn up. Only one of the only other drinks. And only other drinks. It is.

The answer is the seven that issue are the seven days of menstrual impurity. The nine that enter are the nine months of pregnancy. The two that offer drink are the breasts and the one that drinks is the child. That's the... I can't believe you didn't get it, guys. It's a fucking weird party. Why are you not programming BBC television change?

I don't understand. There's time for our final fact and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that on the official tourist website of the Mont Blanc area of France, you can buy an excursion into Pussycanyon for 69 euros. This feels like a fact presented by Kanye West, April. So, I was organising the trip to France and I did my usual loads of research

and I was like in, I don't know what brought my mind to I saw Pussycanyon, thought I might want to go there and I looked it up and it turns out that, you know, it's a funny sounding place with a funny sounding number of euros. And I'm not trying to say any more about the world than that. Just out of curiosity, are they... Is that deliberate or is it...? No, no, no.

It's not? No, no, no. Because a lot of places do that, right? Like, they'll just do some sort of like tourist trap. That's a genuine thing. I think so, because you could also buy a more expensive one for like 74 euros. I mean, who's going to do that if it's 69? Yeah.

By the way, James, thank you for the hardest to Google decently fact of the entire show. I know. Very, very difficult. So, yeah, it's a town. There's a town called Pussy and the town has a canyon in it, Pussycanyon. It's named after a Roman person, we think, called Pusseus.

He lived inside a cat when he was spying on it. And not really much has happened there over the years. The Nazis entered Pussy in 1944 and burned the village down. I'm sorry. The Nazis just got a big laugh at our show. I don't know if that's what got the laugh. That's really pretty much the only interesting thing that I could ever find that happened there. Did this persuade you to enter it?

No, I'm not a child. I see. It was too expensive, wasn't it? Too cheap to fork out the 69. Because you can't do quite fun stuff there, it looks like. It's a canyoning destination. So you can do slides down rocks and abseiling and waterfalls and cliff jumps. So it's worth going into Pussycanyon, it looks like.

It's mentioned in the Bokov as well. In one of his books called Transparent Things. He writes, there's many a mile between condom in Gascoigne and Pussy in Savoy. Wise words. Dirty old man. Wow. So I got into reading about the Alps and about Mont Blanc. Oh, yeah.

Because this is all in the Mont Blanc area of France. Mont Blanc is a very interesting place. It's so interesting that in England in 1852, there was a show on in London called The Ascent of Mont Blanc by a guy called Albert Smith, which was just a guy who'd climbed up Mont Blanc. That was it. But the show ran for six years on Piccadilly. Wow. Yeah.

And it sounds insane, it sounds so good. Mont Blanc's making fun of tourists. There were some Bernard dogs let loose in the aisles of the auditorium in the interval. So he provided this. Were they dogs, Andy? Or are they CIA agents? It's impossible. I'm now doubting every dog I've ever seen.

Yeah. And he did 2,000 performances of this show just about going up Mont Blanc. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Wow. Was this back when James was in charge of programming the theatres? There's a lot of reasons that people have climbed Mont Blanc in the past. This is from a book called Killing Dragons, The Conquest of the Alps by Fergus Fleming.

In 1818, there was a Russian count called Mazewski, and he decided to climb to the top of Mont Blanc to improve his poetry skills. Oh. There's a guy called John Oljo who climbed to the top so he could see a better reflection of the mountain and the lake. Okay. There was a guy called Conte Henry de Thie who wanted to cheer himself up after a failed affair.

So he decided just to go to the top of Mont Blanc. Okay. And there was someone called Edward Boutal-Wilbram who went because someone had told him not to. Just on something on the word Pussy. Oh, yeah. So Octopussy. Pussy.

Octopussy. Not Octopussy. Pussy Glor. So Pussy Glor played by Anna Blackman in the movie Goldfinger, I think. So the name Pussy Glor apparently comes from the fact that Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, had an octopus called Pussy. What? And it was a pet octopus that he had.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this was when I think he lived in the Caribbean, right? Yeah. So he lived by the sea, and there was this octopus that used to come up every day, and they used to give him bits of food and stuff, and then it would hide away, and then it would come out, and they would kind of pet it. Pussy, obviously, because of octopus.

And then, unfortunately, one day, the housemaid mashed it up, cut it in olive oil, and et it out of a coconut. Wow. And Fleming wrote it in a paper called My Friend the Octopus, and he says, that's the worst of pets. Something always happens to them. Wow. That is an understanding boss.

I don't want to sound like I'm on the wrong side of history, but the maids fucked up there. Cock in the pet, yeah. On a black man, she became an actor because of an amazing teacher she had called Irene Cockin. And it was Irene Cockin who introduced her to poetry and plays, and then convinced her father, who wasn't kind of, her father was, I think, from London or something, and he thought that the family didn't have enough elocution and wouldn't be able to get into theatre and stuff.

But it was this teacher, Irene Cockin, who talked her into going for it. Do you ever do a double act of any kind? What, Pussy and Cockin? Pussy and Cockin, yeah. You wouldn't, why would you put it that way around, guys? Oh, yeah. Because we don't know about branding. That was so good.

I find, there's so many interestingly rude named places in France, which I didn't realise at Pussy Canyon. There's a place called Anus. Do you think that's how they pronounce it? Oh, how would they pronounce it? Anu. Come on. Anu.

But to be fair, they know it's rude because it's in their society of rude names, right? Well, that's the thing. It is in their society, but also it happens to be located, the Anus, in a town, Yon, but it's called, so it's Yon Burgundy, which sounds very suspiciously close to Ron Burgundy. That just, yeah, made me smile. Only France, surely, would notice that it had enough rude place names that they have actually formed an association of rude place names in France. The Association des communes de France, au number lesque.

And it's got about 40 towns in it. And all these mayors meet up every year in a different one, in Arnaque la Poste, which means postal fraud, or Bousier, which means to cock up Montetan, which means my nipple. And the horsey, horsey village of Marielle rejected membership. So it was asked to be a member, and then got a new mayor, who said, actually, we want to be taken seriously now, so we're not going to get involved in this. They were supposed to host it, turn it down. And Marielle means smart ass in French, so...

That is it. That is all of our facts. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we could be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on our Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast.qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are on there. Go check them out. And also the tour dates for the rest of this tour. So do check those out. This was one of the dates. It was Tumbridge Wells.

And thank you, Tumbridge Wells, so much for having us here in your city. Our first of the tour. We really appreciate it. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye!