No Such Thing As A Fish - 411: No Such Thing As Cristiano Ronaldo Eating Pistachios

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Live from Manchester, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss postcards, pistachios, postcards and a glamorous guillotiner. 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 this week coming to you live from Manchester! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshensky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that theories for the origin of life on earth include primordial soup, primordial sandwich, primordial soup and sandwich, primordial pizza, and primordial

mayonnaise. Is there a primordial salad option please? For a primordial vegan, yeah. So this is, I was reading about the origin of life, and I think a few people might know about primordial soup, that is the idea where you might get a puddle or something, and there's loads of molecules in there, and somehow they self-arrange, and then those self-arranged molecules manage to replicate and they make life. Now there's a lot of problems with primordial soup, so people have come up with other theories,

so how do these molecules get in the right place? Primordial sandwich is you've got two rocks, and they kind of squish the molecules together. Primordial soup and sandwich, you've got the soup, and you've got the rocks, and that's all kind of all together. Primordial pizza, you just have a rock and the molecules are on top. Primordial mayonnaise is like a load of fat bubbles, and they're kind of the molecules grow in the fat bubbles, and for all I know none of them's true. Because we all know God made us, so is this one person just kind of just tossing all this

shit out? Yes, it's me. Lots of scientists have talked about all these different things, but I'm the one who's kind of put them together in a jovial little sentence. Have they called them those things? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're real names. I didn't think you had the imagination to call it primordial pizza. Okay.

Is there one that's most likely, you know, what are we getting? I think at the moment, yeah, kind of the soup and sandwich is quite liked by people. So it's not soup and sandwich, per se, it's a soup sandwich. It is a bit, isn't it? That's also quite as appetizing as soup sandwich. No, very sorry. So it sounds like it's a sandwich floating on some soup. Primordial crouton, if you will.

Yes. I thought it was a soup in between two bits of bread. That's what it is, unfortunately. Oh, what? A soup sandwich. Oh, that is, that's fucking out there for a theory. So the idea of primordial soup, which was the first one of these theories, it was thought of, first of all, by two people, actually independently, a British guy called JBS Haldane

and the Russian scientist called Alexander Operin, and the interesting thing about him, he came up with primordial soup. But then later in life, he edited a book that contains at least 113 different recipes for actual soup. It makes you suspicious about the primordial soup theory, because it sounds like he's just really into soup. Yeah. He's biased.

He's just pushing his next career. Yeah. It's such a weird switcheroo to go from proper organic chemistry stuff to editing a cookbook. Yes. It would be weird, apart from it was in the Soviet Union, and all sorts of weird stuff was happening. You see, they had this kind of propaganda cookbook that they would give to all, well, all married couples would get one, basically.

You know, it was the right kind of Soviet food that you should be eating. And at the time, they'd just done Sputnik, and they were kind of pushing themselves as scientists in the Soviet Union as best scientists in the world, and they thought, well, our cookbook should also be really scientific. So we're going to get our best scientist who's this guy Operin, and we're going to say you're going to edit it. That makes sense. That's interesting.

Yeah. That's like that Michelin bloke who makes foam shit. Absolutely. Okay, Blumenthal. That's the Blumenthal. Yeah. Is it like him? Yeah.

He basically does chemistry, doesn't he? It's like if Professor Stephen Hawkins did a cookbook. Right. Okay. I thought you meant the actual Michelin man when you said that, and it really threw me for a second. A lot of marshmallow-based stuff. That cookbook, by the way, it was called The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.

Yeah. That was its name, and it was published in 1939, and as you said, James, it's all kind of like 400 different recipes, all good Soviet fare. But unfortunately, because it was the Soviet Union, the book kept on being purged, and so there were all these like strongly radical changes in direction, so it used to be a very internationalist book, and then that went out of fashion, and so they just cut all the international stuff. It's borscht.

Every page borscht. Yeah. Kind of, yeah. And then there were lots of quotes from Stalin all the way through the book, and then Stalin died in 1953. Cut. All Stalin quotes gone. Really?

Yeah. There was at least 113 different recipes for soup, because I read through the book, and just searched for the word soup or borscht, or we all know whatever, and that's as many as I found. There might be more for all I know, but yeah. Wow. And yeah, this was a really important book, like you say, it was The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, but sometimes just known as Kniga, just The Book.

That's how famous it was, this book, it was just called The Book, and everyone knew what you were talking about. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Wow. The thing, it's a sort of a thing that Einstein said, which was, he said that his second best idea that he ever had was to boil his eggs in soup, because then you're saving up on some washing up, you're using one less thing, and you know, that's a thing that I think...

Is that good though? It feels like you get like an egg's come out of a chicken's bum, right? Yeah. Well, not technically, actually, interestingly. Okay. We're close. I'll tell you later. It's come out of the same place as the feces come, right?

That's a good point. And so do you really want that in your soup? That's a very good point. When you boil stuff, it gets rid of all the stuff in it. Yeah, but you're not going to do a shit in your hines, are you? It's like... Good. That could take off as a saying though.

You've really shat my hines today. Actually, there is a thing called yellow soup, which is basically poin soup, which was a delicacy in China back a long time ago. So I think it was in the fourth century. There was a Chinese recipe for yellow soup, very popular. It was put forward by a doctor, and he said this guy called Guihong gave this recipe for broth that involved drying and fermenting a healthy person's poo and stirring it into a broth, and then you give it to a sick person, and it makes them better.

And of course, the good thing about that is... That could work. It bloody works. Yeah, really. Well, with fecal transplants these days. I mean, sorry. Could we just row back on the whole, it works thing. This doesn't sound like that would have worked.

It probably didn't work. He had the right idea though. I think he was on the right track. Yeah. Yellow soup? Wroth a try, I would say. I don't boil it too much, otherwise you might lose the microorganisms for the transplant. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you should have called it brown Windsor. But that was already a soup. Is it? Brown soup was a really weird soup. It was this sort of mythical soup. It wasn't mythical, it was real, but it wasn't in many places. It was just sort of a horrible, cheap soup that was in lots of restaurants,

around the turn of the 20th century. And it kind of had a posh name, so it sounded classy. But it was basically leftover meat, and the ingredients were... Sorry, was it called brown soup? Brown Windsor. Brown Windsor, sorry, posh name. Because brown is not a posh thing, but once you put it next to Windsor... It's not gruel, that sounds like gruel.

It's not gruel, it's definitely soup. Hmm. Yeah. What do you think it sounds like? What a spectrum we're on now, between gruel, soup, broths, stew, you know. Well, I had gruel. Have you had gruel? It sounds like porridge, doesn't it? It's like porridge.

That's why I thought it was. What do you mean by having gruel? What are you talking about? It's not what I think. Oh, you were living with Mr Bumble. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, God, that sounded so rough. I can't believe how badly you bullied Oliver.

That was harsh. Yeah. Did you ever get that second helping that you wanted? I had gruel, and I'm not sure that many people have gruel. When did you have it, and what was it? I went to this party where the table, you had to play a game, and on one side of the table was really good food, and on the other side was gruel.

And so it was like the worst kind of food. And if you lost the game, you moved down a seat, and you went all the way down. And I had a partner who desperately wanted to go to the good food, as everyone else did. But I'd never had gruel before, so I was like, Surely we got ahead that way, and I kept making us go that way,

and she threw an entire glass of red wine all over my shirt. Whoa. Yeah, you know, like in the movies. That's an overreaction. Did you get to eat taste it, though? I did, and you enjoyed it? It was horrific. Oh, it was the worst thing I've ever tasted.

It sounds like Brown Windsor. I thought you were going to say that you kissed a gruel and you liked it. The room's been divided. I'm just soup. Could, maybe, cure malaria. Which is a big deal, because it's a big old killer. And this was discovered by some school children. And this was in a study that was authored by school children.

It's the only study I've ever found authored by school children. And it was a really short time ago. There's a parent at a local school in London called Jake Baum. And he also happened to be a professor of cell biology. And he decided it would be fun to suggest a class project. Where all the kids brought in a vial of the soup that their mum made them. Or their dad made them whenever they were sick. Whenever they were ill.

And then he'd suggested that in their science class. The science teacher must have hated this parent. He suggested they spin out all the soups in the centrifuge. Which I guess the school then had to invest in. And then test them on a malaria parasite. And see, because soup, traditionally chicken soup, is supposed to make you feel better. There must be something in it.

It's this old wives thing. And they did indeed find that five of the soups reduced the growth or the sexual development of the parasites by over 50%. Which is exactly the same as malaria drugs. Wow. Isn't that incredible? So what do we have to inject ourselves with this soup? We would, but the problem is.

So this was published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood in 2019. But none of the parents had written down the ingredients of any of the soups they sent in. Oh no. So we have no idea. Just inject any soup into yourself, just in case. My soup has got paracetamol in it. That's hilarious. Do you know in 1782, if you were in Haymarket in London,

you could pay your very own money to go and have a bath in some soup? Oh yeah. This was a thing in the 17th and 18th century in the whole of Europe, not just in the UK, that people just seem to bathe in soups. Wow. Really? It was supposed to be good for you. It was supposed to be very healthy.

Instead of just normal water, you were getting some of the vitamins into your body. What flavour? Any particular? Veal or other broths. So that could be literally anything. Yeah. Would you rather a bowl of soup that had a chicken's pooey egg sitting inside it, or a bowl of soup with Andy sitting inside it?

What flavour is the soup? Wow. Tomato, let's say. Oh no, I don't really like tomato soup. Okay. It goes great with Andy though. I get your point. Yeah, definitely.

That's weird, because I've never, you know, you read novels written in the 19th century, 18th century, and never once have any of the characters been described as bathing in a tomato soup. That's because it's so cotidious. It's like everyone was doing it all the time. It's like why even write it in the novels? God, it's like referring to cleaning your teeth. But the other thing is that at the moment in the unison spa resort in Hakone in Japan, you can go into a ramen bath.

So it's still happening in Japan. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently the collagen in the pork broth is supposed to give you healthier skin. Hmm. You would not eat in that spa restaurant afterwards though, would you? You piece is vicious. So we do need to move on though to our second fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the world's oldest postcard was sent by a writer called Theodore Hook. He sent it to himself. Wow. Yeah, Theodore. What did he say? Wish I was here? Yeah.

So it was sent in 1840, and it was sent in London in Fulham, and it was a postcard where you could see people who were working at the post office around a big inkwell, and the idea was that that was satirizing the post system. So he sent it to himself, so that means the only other person who's seen it would have been the postman, right? Yes, exactly. And you'll see there's something you bastard. Yeah. Is that the idea?

Yeah, exactly. And it was, you know, there wasn't a big laugh here, but back in the day that was huge satire. I would have had people on the floor. So yeah, and so there was other postcards thought to be the oldest, and then this came up in an auction, and it sold for including commission in VAT, 31,000 pounds, 750. Wow. So it's, yeah, a really expensive item. And I think partially as well, because Theodore Hook was quite an amazing prankster of the 1800s.

He achieved what is known as the Burner Street hoax, which was one of the greatest hoaxes that London ever had. Folks where he said to his friend, I bet you I can make one single house, the most famous house in London, and they bet some money on it, and he said, go for it. And he managed to do it. So what he did was he sent out thousands of letters to people, workmen all over the country, and said, can you arrive on the morning of this day, August 27th, in order to do something to the house? So this one woman opened up her door on the morning of August 27th to a chimney sweep.

And she said, I didn't order a chimney sweep. And she turned in away. Then another chimney sweep came, and she turned him away. Ten more chimney sweeps came, turned away. Then carts carrying large deliveries of coal came, turned them away. Then cake makers delivering large wedding cakes. Then doctors and lawyers came. There were vickers.

There were fish mongers. It was just getting bigger and bigger. And eventually the Duke of York came along. There was the Governor of the Bank of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury came along. Yes. And you know, there's a lot of what's real and not real in this story through the passage of time. Imagine opening your door and seeing the Duke of York outside.

I think we can all agree. Bad news. But this was 1809. Maybe he was just delivering some pizza expressed. This just sounds like when you're at home in the middle of a Wednesday and all of your neighbors are out, and then the postman knocks on the door, and he goes, can you take number 10s? Can you take number 12s? No, he was a crazy guy.

The thing was that they randomly chose that house, didn't they? Literally, they just went through a phone book if there was one in the day, or whatever the equivalent was, and went, let's just choose that house. So she had nothing to do with it. She had no idea. She was absolutely befuddled. And so this was 1809. So this was a number of years before the postcard was sent.

And so by this time, when the postcard went out and it saw that it had Theodore Hook's name on it, it was assumed he must have been sending it to himself as part of a prank. We don't actually know that he sent it to himself. That's the assumption. But it is correct, because it would be weird to receive the first-ever postcard, because you wouldn't know what it was, really. It would be a baffling thing to experience. You're right, yeah.

But you'd figure it out. No, this is 1840. You'd go insane. I know what you're saying, but this is just the one-off he sent it to himself. So someone else must have been the first person to get a postcard, right? Oh, yeah. They all ended up in his islands back in the day. They were populated by postcard recipients. History of the postcard is amazing, because they were invented in the late 19th century,

and they sort of, you know, there were various stages of innovation. The biggest innovation came in the divided back period. Sorry, it was known as the divided back period, which is where, finally, for the first time ever, you get a picture on one side, and then the back of the card is divided into address and message, right? Before that, one whole side had to be for the address and the stamp. It was serious, and then the message had to go on the other side next to the picture. Nightmare.

Once you got nice picture postcards, it took off like nothing had ever done before. It was incredible. In 1910, in the UK, 800 million postcards were sent, and the population is a lot lower than it is now. That is a lot of people postcards per person being sent. I think it was 25 postcards per person per year, around about that time. I think a lot of people were doing a lot of postcarding as well. It wasn't everyone was doing that.

It was like some people were sending three a day, four a day, stuff like that. It makes sense, right? You had like four or five posts every day, didn't you? Yeah. So you could send, I could send you a postcard, and you'd say, what the fuck are you doing in my soup? Yeah. And then the same day, you could send one back,

like saying, I'm just having a nice time, thank you. Whatever. I'm here for my health. Yeah, yeah. So it was, we know the exact date. March 1st, 1907, was the official birth of the modern postcard when they put that singular line down the middle that separated message from it anywhere in time.

Yeah. I would go there. The reason that they did that, of course, is because what they thought was, if you put the message and the address on the same side, then in the post office, they would just get distracted by reading all of the messages. Yeah. Or there might be some sexy messages in there and they get embarrassed. Yeah.

But it's scandalous. People objected to postcards back in the day because of this idea that the postman or woman could read all of your dirty secrets. And in fact, aside from that, there was lots of other controversies. So they were thought of as killing the art of writing because, you know, they're short form. They were basically the text messages of their day. There was an article written in 1884.

So quite soon after postcards had taken off, saying, who nowadays writes letters? We all dash off hasty notes or horribly scribble a postcard. The epistolary art so dear to our grandmothers is becoming extinct. And that's 150 years ago. They were whinging about that and they haven't shut up. Well, it was true. Winky face.

You know, you could get postcards made of moss back in the day. Oh, for fuck's sake. Sorry, just a little moss fact here. Some were made of wood, but Birch bark. Canada had leather ones and Ireland had cards made of peat moss. Wow. How do you write on that? I did process the peat moss in some way to make it

that you could write on it. That makes sense. How? I don't know. But nonetheless. They banned those in America, I think. I'm not sure about the moss ones, but definitely the wood ones they banned in America. You could only send paper or cardboard ones.

That's because they jammed the post machines. So they had leather ones. They had wood ones, like you said. And the thing is about the wood ones, they tended to have really terrible jokes on them. So, like, you might go to an exposition about wood or something and get a wooden postcard. And it would say,

the exposition is more than oak A. Right. It's ash tonishing. I would spruce up and come. You will not regret it. Is that you will not regret it? You know what it wasn't. They missed that one.

Lazy. A trick missed. Well, that's what you get for going to a wood symposium, I'm going to say. We do need to talk about the source CC side postcard. I'm sorry, we have to. What is it? The source CC side postcard is a great institution

of the 20th century, which is just a slightly rude postcard with a slightly funny or saucy... saucy. You'd recognise them. They're always, like, bucks and women bursting out of red swimming costumes with a very 50s style with a raunchy, rude comment underneath.

Okay, cool. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Saucy. Saucy. I've never said the word saucy so many times in my life, but I love it. And basically,

one artist in particular, Donald McGill, was one of the great artists of this. He did about, sort of, nine a week until he died. It was incredible. But there was trouble because there were CC side censorship boards which assessed the sauciness of the postcards and banned them if they were too rude. So there was a blackpool board

that you had to submit all your postcards to before they could go on sale. There was another on the Isle of Wight. And the members were things like there was a solicitor, a vicar, a bank manager, and Mrs. Gloria Swanson of the Blackpool Hotel and Boarding House Association. And they would sit in judgment over the postcards. And if you had one, for example,

there's one of a girl talking to a bookie at a race course, and she's saying, I want to back the favourite, please. My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways. Okay? That's... I think that's a good joke. But Mrs. Gloria Swanson, absolutely not.

Banned. And these kept going until the Isle of Man Committee lasted until 1989. Wow. 1989. But then he got cancelled, basically, didn't he? Yeah, he did. In the 50s, really, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah. When they properly just clamped down, he was found guilty of breaking the Obscene Publications Act and, you know, fined and... Incredible. ...destroyed, very sad. And then went bankrupt. And also, the other weird thing that we should mention about him

is that he only had one foot. Okay. And he lost his foot, his other foot, in a rugby accident. Ah. Which I didn't know was even possible. But, yeah. Just on the sort of censorship thing,

that was a thing not just for postcards. I'm sure I must have mentioned it on the podcast a long time ago, but the lead singer of Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant, I think his name is, he used to work for Marvel, and his job was whenever comic books came in, he would have to cover up the cleavage line on women that were acceptable in America,

but not here. I mean, that was, you know, in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. Yeah. It was good work if you could get it. Pretty good work. He wouldn't say no to that job. It was a 15-year-old intern.

Yeah. He'd be loving that. Do you know, the other amazing thing about postcards is that back in the day, it was the source of, sometimes, allowing you to see... The source. Very nice.

Thank you. Thank you. ...allowing you to see an image that you would otherwise have never seen. So newspapers, back in the day, let's say in American newspapers, largely completely text-based. So if it said something like,

an accident, train, crashes, or something where you might rubber-neck it, you know, it's like, I'm curious to see a disaster, a photo would be taken, and it would be printed onto these postcards, and people would send each other these postcards just to show them a news event as opposed to having anything to say.

So it became a huge source of being able to just... Source. Being able to see everything that was happening in the world prior to newspapers allowing us to do that. It was basically Twitter, wasn't it? Yeah. Or text message, that kind of thing,

it was just like people sharing information. It was quite weird, though, when people used to send, you know, postcards of burning buildings and screaming car crash victims, and then they wrote on the back, wish you were here. It was an odd time. But there was, like, political stuff as well, wasn't there?

The, like, the suffrage movement, there was a big battle of postcards of that, so there were a lot of anti-suffrage postcards where they would, like, mock the suffragettes and say, you know, if you're a suffragette, you'll never get married, all that kind of thing, and then there were pro-suffragette postcards where you would have, like, really iconic women on them

and try and push people in that direction. And often both types were made by the same company. Right. So, uh... Both ways. We're gonna have to move on and say it, guys, to our next round. I don't think the suffragettes would have approved

of that, Joe, can't they? Not sure I approve of it. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that the first man to kill people by guillotine was briefly so fashionable that French people would dress up as him. Mm-hmm.

It's called Charles-Henri Sanson, and he was the chief executioner to Louis XVI, and then he was the executioner of Louis XVI in a very weird job switcheroo. It was like, undercover boss. It's like... Well, that went wrong. Yeah, and French Revolution,

obviously that was a time of great social change to put it mildly, and he was very famous during the period known as the Terror, and he had this uniform. It was stripy trousers, tricorne hat, green coat, quite dashing, and he was just so fashionable in Paris at the time that he became someone people dressed up as.

Yeah. And fashionable because of his awesome stripy trousers and tricorne hat, or because of what he was doing. I think because the guillotine is a thing. I'm not so sure, actually, because he was really, really fashionable, like you say. He wore blue trousers to start off with,

but they were so worried about him being so fashionable that they banned him from wearing blue trousers, and from then on, he was only allowed to wear green trousers. And they said, the blue is the colour of the nobility, you're not allowed to wear them. Right. You think if the French Revolutionary Committee

were telling you off for dressing as the nobility... Pre-pre-revolutionary. You're kidding me. Oh, okay, that's fair enough. Right, I see. It's not fair enough, it's bad. I don't approve of Louis XVI, all the French Revolution.

No, we know what side you're on now. But the early days of it, there did seem to be a bit of colour coordination going on, and the colour being red. So the account that I read was you had the person who was about to be killed had a red t-shirt on. T-shirt? Yeah.

Cool. They had some converse, didn't they? It's not fashion. Is it in Star Trek where all the red people die, or am I... Ah, yes. I'm so far out of my comfort zone here. Yeah, so he had a red t-shirt on.

He had Nike cap. Can we just give it some time-appropriate names? So what did they wear back then? Just no T, I think. Ah. Okay, so... Wow, that's very panicky to pick that up. The t-shirt was invented in the 20th century.

It's a very anachronistic thing to hear in t-shirts in the French Revolution. People are going to think that happens when it's sort of a stream. Or did I just bust a time-traveler? What colour were his jeans? So he had a red shirt on, and Charles...

Is that his name? Charles? Yeah. He had a cape on, which was red, and the guillotine itself was red. So red was very much the... Domino theme. Domino theme. I guess it doesn't show the stains.

Was the guillotine definitely red pre-execution? It wasn't just... I think this was for the very first, yeah, execution. I guess maybe they were just trying to hide the gore. And unfortunately, when they did it, it was because this was new, and they had huge crowds that came to see it, because everyone was so fascinated

by all of these public deaths, the crowds were really disappointed because it was really efficient and quick and over like that. And they were like, ah, we brought sandwiches. We're going to be here a while, and it was just like, ah, it was too efficient. People rioted. Three people died in the riots

about how efficient the new guillotine was. Really? Yeah. The worst thing about that one, so that guy who was killed in the first guillotine, he was called Paletier. They decided, okay, we're going to stop hanging people because we think everyone should be killed exactly the same way,

because where the French Revolution, it shouldn't be that the nobility get a good way of dying and the other people don't. So everyone's going to be killed with a sword, with an axe. And then this guy, Sanson, decided, well, actually, my axe isn't good enough for that. I won't be able to get through enough people, so we need a new way of doing it.

And so they came up with this idea of the guillotine, but this guy had already been found guilty and was already sentenced to death, and he had to sit there and watch it be built because he couldn't be executed until it was built. Did he have to go through the kind of brainstorming meetings with them, saying, what about this? I feel like you'd like steal a screw or something, wouldn't you?

But Sanson, the executioner, he was part of this extraordinary dynasty of executioners. So six generations of his family performed this role. Great-grandfather, grandfather, father, all six of his brothers, all six of his brothers were also executioners in different bits of France. Mad, it's really bizarre.

And they called them just by the name of the town they were the executioner, so they didn't even call them by their first name. They called them Rime or Olion or Atom. It's just bizarre. And when you read it about his life, he mostly had a series of protracted workplace disputes with his bosses,

who were either the royalty or the revolutionary committee. So he was saying, look, I'm broke. There are so many people to be executed. My working conditions are bad. I need a budget increase. He was asking for a budget increase from the Minister of Justice, which was days after he had executed the previous Minister of Justice.

That's when you've got leverage. Absolutely. Yeah, he just had all of these disputes, like running, irritating disputes. He once sued someone for libel for saying that he was boorish or brutish. Wow. There's also a weird thing,

which is I don't know if this is the original moment where this idea came about, but there's a lot of question about at what point, once the head is removed from the body, does the person actually pass away? And there were all these experiments of, like, trying to get people to blink posts. Talking to the dismembered head.

There was a theory, I think. I remember reading when I was a kid, even, that they stay alive for like seven or eight seconds. Yeah. So there was this thing with Charles Henri, which is when he had executed a woman who was called Charlotte Corday. Someone, a carpenter, jumped up

and grabbed her head, and he picked it up and he slapped her on the face. So a horrible thing to do, a poster beheading. You don't mind, I don't think, at that stage. Well, this is the thing. Apparently, she did. Because apparently, witnesses reported an expression

of unequivocal indignation on her face after she was slapped. And everyone thought, oh, maybe you actually last a bit longer. You last long enough to be annoyed by something. But yeah, for a while afterwards, there were a lot of studies into

if that's the case, because of Charlotte's original guillotine invented in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Yeah. So, good. Well done.

Are we saying that that's good? Because I would say, because it's in Yorkshire, it's bad. Debate. Debate. Off with his head. Oh, no. It's a job of the heads of people in Lancashire, wasn't it? It was called the Halifax Chibbit,

but it was a mechanism for doing the same kind of thing. And Daniel Defoe wrote about it, and he said there was this rule, right, that if you could pull your head, so there was a pin that got pulled and that dropped the chopper. But if the order was given to pull the pin and you managed to pull your head

out of the block in time, you were then free to run as far as you could. The executioner was entitled to chase you because of this system. But if you got across the river, you were home, not home dry, home very wet, but you were free.

You were not going to be executed anymore. And so that apparently was a rule they had in place. It seems like a bad rule. You could spot people who've done it because they'd always have a bald patch on the top of their head, wouldn't they? It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in Sicily, the pistachios are guarded by the military police. Not a very stressful occupation, I would guess. Well, they're a very dangerous industry, turns out, sort of. They are very valuable pistachios in Sicily.

They're called green gold there. They're different to all pistachios in the rest of the world. They're farmed in a place called Bronte. And they're thought of as much better and richer and deeper flavor than any other pistachios. They only constitute about 1% of the world's supply, less, but they're the best.

And so, people keep stealing them. And loads of pistachio farmers were complaining, saying, literally, people are rocking out with guns and, you know, holdings at gunpoint and stealing all our pistachios. There was one person who said they'd had a story of someone, like, repelling down from the air and scooping pistachios off trees.

It keeps happening. From, like, a helicopter. That would have to be, yeah, like a big blimp above or something. Yeah, I think from the helicopter. And I don't know if, like, you've had to pay for the helicopter. You're going to have to pick a lot of pistachios from our sale to compensate. I find it incredible that there is a version of pistachios,

which apparently is even nicer than pistachios, one of the nicest things in the world. Like, it's... I can't imagine how good... Because I'm sure I've never had one of these Bronte pistachios. Yeah. I'm sure that I'm one of the 99% in the pistachio world. I think that's the 1%. That's why we rioted all those years ago.

The people who tasted those pistachios. How good must they be? They must be incredible. I actually don't... I don't think pistachios are that great, so I'm not as excited as you, but still wouldn't mind tasting them. But they're worth a lot, aren't they? Like, one single bag could be worth up to 33,000 American dollars, and that is...

What bag? Not a supermarket bag. Like a Santa sac kind of cake. I don't normally buy them in Santa sac. A big old bag, yeah. That's a lot. How much did you sell? 33,000 American dollars, I believe. That's incredible.

Bronte, so this place, Admiral Nelson, Lord Nelson, was the Duke of Bronte, and he was granted the title by the King of Naples and Sicily, because he helped to put down a revolution against the King, Ferdinand I. So he never visited, but he was the Duke of Bronte, and he was very proud of that.

He always signed his name, once he was given that, Nelson and Bronte, which is all just Bronte. And Bronte, did you say? Not and Bronte, but there's a connection, because ten years after Nelson died, there was a clergyman called Patrick Bronte who thought, I want to posh up my name a bit,

and he changed his name to Bronte, and then fathered the Bronte girls. Did he get it from the pistachio place, then? Via Nelson, yeah. He wanted to make the name Posh and Cool. That's amazing! Did not know that, if it weren't for pistachios, he wouldn't have Wuthering Heights?

Yeah, yes. Very good. And if we didn't have Manchester, we wouldn't have Jane Eyre, because that's where Charlotte Bronte started writing Jane Eyre in Manchester. So thank you all here. I thought I'd win more of you over with that one, but, um...

That's cool. They're all from Yorkshire in this room. There's actually... Pistachio theft is a problem all over the world where they make pistachios, anyway. So in America, they have a nut theft task force, which stops nut theft in the California area. In Turkey, apparently,

they have nut vigilantes who try to stop people from stealing their pistachios. And in Turkey, they don't repel from blimps or anything, or from helicopters. You just ram a tree with your car and knock all of the pistachios out, and they just gather them up and shove them in your car. That's clever.

And in Sicily, it's the carabinieri police force who guard them, and they do helicopter patrols as well. Do they ever have to fire shells at the thieves? I find the carabinieri so weird that... If you go to Italy, there are two police forces, and they just accept this. So there's, like, the normal police. We've got about 40, haven't we?

Okay, sorry, there are two types of police. So if you've got an emergency, you can either call the polizia or you can call the carabinieri. And I can't really work. And one's 112 and one's 113, I think. And this journalist was asking Italian and the Sicilians, and they didn't really know which was which.

Well, you just pick one. And it's just a hangover. It's from pre-unification even, and the carabinieri were like the royal guards, and now they're just a hangover. But they've got these really weird rules, so they didn't used to be allowed to have facial hair for quite a long time, I think,

and now you can have quite strict facial hair. They had to ask permission to marry if you're in the military police force. And then once you ask permission to marry from your boss, then they do a full-on background check to see if you've got potential spouse to make sure they're appropriate. Frankie, I think that's the best one to ring, isn't it?

If they're that strict. No? Yeah, you don't have to ask. I want you to send a police officer, but can you tell me about your spouse a bit first? Yeah, that's very good. I don't think people are calling them the day before their wedding just to say, I think you're really good at it, and I've got some doubts, actually, so...

Wow, yeah, Pestatio Theft is a big, huge deal. So this year, in June, I think this was in California, who was arrested for allegedly stealing £42,000 of pistachios. Wait, nice. It's like one and a half bags. Yeah, and it's a problem because you turn up dressed as a truck driver, looking like a truck driver. Dressed as a truck driver.

What if you haven't bought that Halloween costume yet? You sort of look plausibly like... Wearing a T-shirt, for instance. And so now drivers have to have thumb prints, photo ID, the whole deal, and some people have hacked into trucking companies' computer systems to place fake orders for pistachios, and then someone turns upon the day and says,

I'm here for the pistachios that have been ordered, and they drive off with all the nuts. And that's a perfect crime. And the idea is basically that there's no kind of barcodes on these things, right? There's just tons of nuts, and people eat the pistachios, and so that's kind of destroying all the evidence. It's a perfect crime.

Just back to Bronte for a second. Not the sisters, the area with the pistachios. There's an amazing thing when you're looking at photos of it, that you suddenly notice this giant mountain that is sitting in the background of the pistachio area, and it's Mount Etna. And Mount Etna is given a lot of credit for the reason that the pistachios are so good,

because basically the trees are growing out of the kind of volcanic slabs that have been laid down over the passage of time. Which is genuinely really good for soil, like lava has all these minerals in it, which over time make it much more fertile, so it's true. Yeah, but it's still an active volcano, and up until very recently, I think it was in,

it was either this year or last year, it had these huge explosions, lava explosions. It grew in height by 100 feet. What? Yeah, because of all of, it was literally like when you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke, it was shooting a column. You know what a volcano is?

Hang on, James. I need to hear a bit more about this Mentos Coke situation before I can visualize it. Sorry, do you mean it grew 100 feet just temporarily while it was shooting it out? No, no, that column, like a Mentos in a Diet Coke. It shoots like meters upright, and this is what this did. This was like hundreds of meters into the air,

this column of stuff, so it grew in all the ash kind of sat on top of lava and dried up, and it grew. But it does an amazing thing, Mount Etna, which I didn't realize volcanoes do. It blows smoke rings occasionally, like a really skilled smoker doing those, you can see these beautiful plumes of perfect rings coming out the top of Mount Etna.

That's great. There's not just the pistachios. I'm still not going until I can do that Gandalf ship. Then I'll visit Sicily. OK, I've got an economics quiz for you all. Oh, great. Yay! Which is better value, shelled or unshelled pistachios?

Well, I would say probably, it's more fun to open the shells, and it actually means you don't shove millions of them in your face, so you kind of eat a bit less. But presumably the shells aren't worth as much, so it would be better to get unshelled. OK, good theory. I'm going to say shelled as well,

purely because I think it's the pure form, right? And all sorts. The pure form, yeah. I guess. OK. I'm going to say it's impossible to answer that, because you haven't told us what they cost, respectively. I can't tell you what's better value, unless you tell me how much it is. I'm sorry, I just want to allow myself to that theory.

OK, let's say shelled on pistachios with the shell half the price per ounce, right? OK. But you only get half as many, because half the space in the bag is shells in empty space. So this is by a website called Wonkblog, which is very good, by the way, on these sort of nut-related questions. The problem is, the price is roughly equivalent per weight,

but it's labour, it's how much work you're doing to take the shells off the pistachios, and so it depends what you earn. So if you're on, you know, ten pounds an hour, the cost of shell on pistachios is about four pounds in labour to remove the shells, if you're doing it for a certain time. But if you earn, you know, 40 quid an hour,

that's way more per bag of shell pistachios, because you are having to do the work. OK, so there's that thing about, is it Cristiano Ronaldo? If he drops a tenner on the floor, it's not worth him picking it up, because it would take him longer than he's earned that amount of money. Also, someone else might kick the ball away from you

in the time that you went down to... It's not a good strategy on the pitch. I mean, what's he doing on the pitch anyway, Cristiano Ronaldo these days? Ronaldo would be the worst person in the world to buy shell on pistachios, because it's just not worth his time taking the shell off. It's assuming that shell removal is labour,

and some people will call that a hobby. So... There's a place in America called Pistachio Land. So that's really cool. According to their website, there's a summarised farm tour around the orchards, a candy kitchen where they produce their own pistachio treats,

a geocache location, and a pokestop for playing Pokemon Go. That's their four things. The website's really good. It tells you why pistachios are so good for you. Some maybe slightly dubious claims. They say that they're cholesterol-free, which I think they are, so that's good.

They have antioxidants, so that's good for you, very fashionable. They say that the colour green is associated with health, hope, renewal, and alleviates anxiety, which feels like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? It does, unless you're seeing it on the executioner's trousers heading towards his neck. Cool stress.

Did you know that pistachios are good for penises? In what sense? Well, they were originally called the penistachio, weren't they? In what way? There was a study where they gave a bunch of men 100 grams of pistachio nuts as a diet, so you would eat them in one go for three weeks, and they found that their penises got better.

Now, here's the interesting thing about this. Yes. I've not written down what that means, so... LAUGHTER Presumably, the scientific paper didn't say the penises got better, so you've already... So, I've written that. I've written, Good for Your Penis.

Again, I've kind of just not written anything else, so it's going to remain a bit of a mystery. I have a lot of acronyms. Apparently, your IIEF score is better, and your PCDU parameters are better as well. But there are side effects in patients with ED, so watch out for that. That's a rectal dysfunction, I suppose, the last one.

Oh, yes. So, it's good for your penis, good for your nuts? LAUGHTER No? Yeah. It's a mystery what that means, but... But it's good news, it's good news. If you want a good penis...

I don't know if it means morally, I don't know if it means in action, I don't know if it's like at quizzes, I don't know what it... Well, babe, penises. Did you say good at quizzes? Good at quizzes. I remember when we took you to the pub

and you were playing the quiz machine. Never again. Extraordinary, they had to clean the buttons so much after this. We need to wrap up in a second. Do we have anything else before we do? Well, they're dangerous, aren't they, pistachios? They can explode. And they can suffocate you.

But not like as a sort of mercy killing, that kind of thing. They don't grab a cushion and they don't do that. How can they do either of these things, not under their own steam, either of these things, surely? Well, kind of, I suppose. So, yeah, basically they're taking out oxygen from an area and releasing carbon dioxide.

So, if you are in like a big truck full of pistachios and it's hermetically sealed and you're there long enough, then you'll suffocate. So, that's kind of them by themselves, isn't it? Definitely, I think so. Yeah, and they have this kind of fat in there and they have this chemical reaction. And that chemical reaction gives out heat.

And if it gives out enough heat, if they're enough there, they can explode. So, they're dangerous. It would be an elaborate plot. It's an amazing sort of murder mystery. You need a lot of them. If you have them in your pocket, they're not going to explode. That's safe, yeah, yeah.

Although you might end up with a bad penis if they don't explode. That's true. It's not just like saying that flower, is it like every time your wife receives some flowers, you say, you know, they can suffocate you if you're shot in a room with a million of them? To be honest, the problem is, the florists never have enough space on the little carts, right?

I'll tell you one more thing. Yeah, go for it. So, pistachios used to be red in America, which I didn't know, they were dyed, because they were pulled from Iran. And then there was the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. Oh, yeah. Big deal. There were trade embargoes.

So, no more imports from Iran. And America started its own pistachio industry. And this was all in the time of President Jimmy Carter, who set up this pistachio embargo. Very exciting. But he, of course, is a peanut farmer, if anyone remembers that. Jimmy Carter is a peanut farmer.

He was and is. And there is a statue of Jimmy Carter in Georgia, which is of a four-metre-tall peanut, but it has the teeth of Jimmy Carter. It's the second-tallest peanut statue in the world. And... Second-tallest.

Second-tallest. Yeah, it's not the best, but it's nearly there. And this is my favorite detail about this. It's just a tall peanut with Jimmy Carter's teeth. It's really weird. But it has a large hole in its rear end, and that, allegedly, was cut by the Secret Service

to ensure that there were no explosives or assassins inside it. Oh! But why would you cut the hole to work out if there were no explosives or assassins inside it? If there's no hole, there are probably no assassins inside it. The peanut's bum.

Also, if you were going to put a feature of Jimmy Carter on a peanut to make sure people knew it was him, is the teeth the... If you see it, you're like, Oh, Jimmy Carter. Oh, hang on. No, it's a big peanut. I don't know.

I don't know which body part you'd put. I don't know any specific body part of Jimmy Carter very well. I just know him as a whole. So... The largest pistachio in the world is advertised as being a pistachio land in America.

But I found that there is a pistachio-shaped museum in Turkey which has a larger pistachio. And so I wrote to pistachio land to tell them that their pistachio isn't the biggest pistachio in the world. No reply. Jesus Christ.

I was so hoping to go on a trip there. It's not ever happens now. Yeah, your face is just there with a cross over it. No, you out. No, it's just a big knot with James' teeth. OK, listen, we need to wrap up. That is it. That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. CHEERING If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. I'm James.

And Anna. You can email our podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account. No such thing as a fish.no. Or you can go to our group account. At no such thing. Or you can go to our group account. What's happening?

405 times you've said this. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, which is thegoodpenis.com. CHEERING No such thing as a fish. All of our previous episodes are up there.

All of our future tour dates are up there. Do check it out. Thank you so much for watching this. It's been so much fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye! CHEERING