No Such Thing As A Fish - 416: No Such Thing As The Turin Towelette

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss bear toys, bare humans, and a museum that is barely there. 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 Dublin! My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Azur Hamsamuri, and Jayne And once again, we have gathered around that microphone with our four favorite facts of the last seven days And in that particular order, here we go! Okay, calm the fuck down everyone! Starting with fact number one and that is James Okay, my fact this week is that in 1954 it became illegal to bathe completely naked in East Germany So nature has started going to the beach wearing nothing but a tie

So just before, well what, we've actually said this before, Hitler banned natureism in the Nazi government but almost immediately unbanded because it was so unpopular and then it kind of became part of the Nazi tradition that you know, we're going to allow people to be naked if they want to be nudists if they want And so when East Germany became a country and they wanted to be away from the fascists and with the communists they saw natureism as like this fascist symbol from the past and so they decided to ban it and there's a whole load of stories about what was happening with the natures who just wanted to get along with the get off and the East German police really were not happy about it at all That's rough, nudity being taken down by fascism

Unless you've got a swastika tattooed onto your penis then I don't think they're related and it's not better than just they are Oh my god, I imagine that Because really by the time you see the swastika on the penis it's almost too late isn't it? Yeah And one of the reasons why the East Germans didn't like natureism is because of the main guy who was in charge of German natureism He was like the leading light of German natureism really He was called Adolf Koch

And Adolf Koch was an anti-drinking, anti-smoking, pro-homosexuality, pro-sex outside marriage He was a pacifist, he was very modern day woke but obviously the communists did not like him one little bit and so he was almost like the face, I hope the face of natureism and they really didn't like him and that was one of the reasons they stamped down on it But they couldn't right because in the end Germany is this strange anomaly of country which I think makes them kind of the only sane country in a way where they're all, not they're all but more of them are much more comfortable with natureism and nudity than any other countries

and it's going down a little bit but yeah and it was started in Germany end of the 19th century It was by this guy called Karl Diefenbach who moved himself and his entire family and I'd like to know what they thought of this into an abandoned quarry and where he lived with them naked and he was taken to court and then I think he was for being naked and then people agreed that it was okay and the thing then was it was to emulate ancient Greek sculptures which were considered so beautiful and shapely so people would come to nudist parties in the poses of Greek sculptures

and then they'd sort of paint each other and compliment each other and sounds lovely Wait, sorry, hang on, their costume was coming in the pose of a... You know like that discus thrower, you could have a discus You can't arrive at a party just holding a position You have to be wheeled in That's a lot of commitment to a party as well You're naked and you're just not moving the entire party Germany does have this thing of being quite passionate about the...

They call it Freikorpo Kultje which means free body culture and it's a really big thing there So there was a thing about 20 years ago there was a resort on the island of Rügen and there was a bit of the beach that was a nudist bit of the beach and there was a bit which was the non-nudist bit of the beach and the resort hired what they called Hurschenpolize or Panties Police

Their job was to ask people who were nudists who had strayed into the clothes section of the beach to please go back to the nudist section of the beach but their other job was to approach clothes people in the nudist section of the beach and say get them off Oh man, surely they'd say go back to the clothes section I think they basically gave them a choice You can keep that or you can stay here but you can't do both

That's amazing I haven't written this down so I don't know the details but wasn't there a story of someone robbing either a shop or a bank and as they ran out they leapt over a fence to try and integrate with the people around there but it was a nudist camp and the police came in and spotted him immediately In nudist resorts the shoplifting is genuinely very low

because where are you going to put it? You're only going to hide things that are very thin Absolutely You can steal some cigarette papers but that's it really And no one's smoking those cigarettes That's like Cape Dagde which is a French holiday resort which I didn't know about but it's a full on naked town and in the summer the population reaches 40,000

which I guess is just mostly visitors but it's quite odd because the visitors don't wear any clothes so everyone's naked but there are lots of shops and the post office and banks and stuff like that and all the people who are serving them in those places are fully clothed So it's very surreal for lots of naked customers and then just in uniform bank teller giving them their money that they can't keep anywhere But yeah there's very little crime

and they refer to the clothed people that you can see on the opposite bank as textiles That play is Cape Dag I think it's having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment because it's turned into a very sexy place and swingers are starting to turn up and the nudists are a bit put out about this because A, naturalism is not about sex or sexiness

it's about being natural and feeling your body in nature I don't think it's a completely incomplete Venn diagram though So the nature is genuinely saying we're not swingers and the swingers are turning up but the other thing is that the swingers turn up and wear sexy clothes and the nature has taken this Oh really? Yes and what we're saying most of the shops are weirded clothes shops

but they're selling kind of SNM fetish That sort of stuff Exactly Which absolutely is not what naturalism is really it's about kind of innocence and being freed from these constraints Anyway, I've got a speech I'm giving afterwards Can I ask a very stupid question? This is genuinely a stupid question

but if you were a naturess would seeing someone in clothes be the equivalent of a sexy magazine? I think Is the opposite of what... is like their playboy just, I don't know They go to clubs actually and they watch people wearing heavy tweeds

dance around the cold There was a bit of a moral panic back in the East German days what I'm talking about now so there was a moral panic that people who were clothed and were walking past the German naturess were having their clothes stolen

and being thrown into the sea and there were a few reports and we think it probably didn't happen but they were just fake reports that it was happening Wait, clothed people? So you're a normal clothed person just going about your business in Germany and then suddenly a load of naked people come along

they grab all of your clothes they rip them off and say this is a naked place and then they throw you in the sea Wow They throw you in the sea? Yeah Genuinely, that was one of the reasons

why they tried to panic because this kind of moral panic came and it was in the newspapers that this was happening and everyone was like oh my god, I'm just going to be walking down the streets in Berlin and people are going to rip my clothes off we need to stop these naturess now

Good identity parades you'd have at the end of all that, wouldn't you? I recognise that swastika right there Can you ask him to do the salute? Oh my god There was some small justification to being paranoid about it being co-opted by

well perverts So in the 1930s when the movement started to take off there were fewer than 10,000 members of the Natureism Society in the UK but the second issue of Sunbathing Review which was the euphemistic name

for the nudist magazine sold 50,000 copies and there was a small suspicion that some of the people buying that were not actually nudists they just wanted to see loads of naked people which makes sense and photographers for that magazine

used to ship models to nudist beaches take photographs of them and then leave But that was a big thing, wasn't it? So around the world now the article that I read there may be more now but there's four nudist libraries

in the world today So a nudist library it's a combination of two things one is it's a library about nudity so it's just got magazines it's got books anything that is about nudity so the magazines that they have

are not Playboy or anything to do with sexuality but in the 60s and 70s there was a boom when a law got taken down to say that nakedness could be represented in magazines and a lot of magazines with nudity

were printed and so this is a library that has all of that but you are allowed to be naked in it as well it's a nudist-nudist library Here's one thing that happens to nudists This is according to Stefan Duchenne who is the new co-president

of the International Nudism Federation He was interviewed recently about nudism and he said that one thing you can get if you're a nudist is you get phantom clothes He said after decades of...

this is the article after decades of living as a naturist Duchenne still sometimes reaches to pull up his non-existent pants after using the restroom How is that? I see it I see that

That makes sense Do you know when I was looking at this fact I think I typed in something as simple into Google to kick off as naturism history and one of the first results was naturist cleaners

which is the UK's leading naturist nude cleaning service I cannot believe this exists Naked people come to clean your house and it's a professional cleaning service I feel like I would have to hire another cleaner for whatever they'd sat It's like

Oh my God, no, no, don't sit there Don't sit there They don't arrive at your door naked though That's a really good question I don't know if they do That's illegal, isn't it? So they must arrive in maybe a trench It's not illegal

It is actually It is here in Ireland Is it? Yeah, Ireland hosted the 2014 34th International Naturist Congress despite it being technically banned by law

Yeah You've proved You have a series, a selection of secret coves that Irish nudists go to And it's all done See you all after the show Yeah

So is it, Andy, is it if we were back in London is it legal for us to just walk around? It's legal According to the website of the Great British Takeoff from last year They are very, very clear

on the front page By the way, it's perfectly legal They say, by all means, tell the neighbors but there is no need to warn them even if you're overlooked So long as you are not revealing yourself with the intention of upsetting people it's fine

Yeah I was intending to delight people Yeah, it's that By the way, the Great British Takeoff last year's they gave you some ideas of what you could do They're basically saying take your clothes off in your garden

They say you could sunbathe, read sit in a hot tub you can have a barbecue and you can kick a ball around throw a frisbee Do the other ball around Do a jigsaw puzzle or listen to a podcast

Oh Oh So if anyone's listening to this one in the net Hi to you Take a photo right now and send it to us Right now

Do it You can do that on the street in a shop or whatever because in your garden obviously I can do anything in my garden In theory, it's legal Tesco can't kick me out Tesco is a private company

They can do it like I have a property I think the police would take an interest if you were just walking around the centre of town Okay, but a hospital not private NHS

publicly funded if I walk into a hospital butt naked for no good reason they can't do anything about it I think you'd have to wear a mask Yeah Alright, look, we need to move on

to our next fact It is time for fact number two and that is Andy My fact is that in 1998 one-tenth of everything sold on eBay was a beanie baby

One-tenth 10% So if I bought a handbag one-tenth of it would be a beanie baby That's right It would almost all be handbag but the strap

and one of the pockets would be bean This is a fact about beanie babies which for a while everyone was insane about But any younger listeners who missed out on the beanie baby craze they're just little stuffed bears full of plastic pellets

That's it But that was the difference because every bear prior to that or any stuffed animal was completely stuffed to the hilt and there was no bend but these little beans

meant you could move it and you could do things It was almost like it was alive wasn't it? because it could move around in different ways Exactly It wasn't like it was alive

it was just floppy it was a floppy teddy and to be fair I hadn't actually realised until researching this fact that that was the innovation You know, because you grow up with beanie babies

you think it's always been like this was there ever a time before this kind of vibe but yeah before that teddy bears were just like buff in fairness

constipated It's Taiwanese who invented them he was the guy who invented them he did say the whole idea was it looked real because it moved he thought these look like actual bears Yeah

So in 1998 64% of American adults owned at least one beanie baby That is ridiculous I saw that and I didn't believe it In 1997 64% like you say

owned a beanie baby 48% of Americans in 1997 believed in global warming 53% trusted the media and 15% had a passport That's compared with 64% who had a beanie baby Well, why?

You don't need to leave the country when you've got these lovely beanie babies to identify you They started off so Taiwano James just mentioned he was the man behind them and he had limited success with them really He released a few

and they were doing alright and then in 1995 two years after they launched he discontinued one of them there were problems with the factory where they were being made overseas so he thought, right, sod it we'll just kill off lovey the lamb

and suddenly people were desperate for lovey the lamb and he realised we're not going to say there are problems with the supplier we can't get any of these And we also won't say we killed it off That's true

It's true Yes, you're right He said specifically it's been retired so that suddenly created this huge demand for lovey the lamb and that became the entire business model behind the beanie baby

There were hundreds and hundreds of different models by the end which were being brought in, phased out It was incredibly hard to keep track of where they all were and to have a full set But it's almost weirdly responsible as well for the fact that we have eBay now

as in we had eBay at the time but in 1998 eBay had 30 employees there were half a million users on it so the 10% of it was 10% of half a million users What is that? What is what?

10% of half a million That's not what you came for You didn't come for a maths test down Good point I apologise So your worst nightmare is someone giving you a percentage question on stage of one in 500 people

Even though it's really easy because there's so many people here I can't work out what it is in my head It's a nightmare You're not the CEO of eBay You don't need to know these numbers Anna, you are one sick puppy It's 50,000

Ok, let's move on Of course it's 50,000 We all knew that But so... Thank you But so... When eBay went public here was the thing

they were so desperately clinging on to this fad helping them because that was bringing in such a huge bit of revenue that even in the risk factors section of their annual report it was noted their absolute dependence

on the continued strength of the beanie baby Wow They were like this has to keep going and it did and everyone Ty Warner and the owners of eBay

all became billionaires Ty Warner's genius was in marketing obviously this false scarcity bullshit which by the way we're all falling for again with that weird word game that everyone's obsessed with

aren't we now So... Oh one a day suddenly I really wanted You know what I'm talking about So he had some other weird marketing tricks Ty he wouldn't sell beanie babies

to big stores like Toys R Us or Walmart he would only sell them to kind of small shops and he made the stores that he sold them to promise not to sell more than a few to a single customer

so you know you reached a limit and you know he'd monitor the stores really obsessively and they'd be under strict instructions so like not discount any if you discounted a beanie baby

you got all your supplies whipped away from you it sounds kind of terrifying and shop owners would call him and beg for stock and the only time he'd give them what they wanted is if they had a private chat with him

about what customers were responding to and what they were liking about certain ones Wow it's like gangster it's very it is a bit mafioso, yeah yeah

there was a scheme Allegedly I think he was in the mob anyway there was a thing in Illinois in 1998 where there was a police force small police force in a place called Kankakee, Illinois

right they said that if you have an illegal gun but you hand it in to us you will get a free teeny beanie baby it goes no way

special small beanie baby that have been made they got 40 people handing in guns in exchange for a beanie baby but they were huge yeah the resale value of the teeny or any of the beanie babies

was massive and there was okay yes he went with the independent stores to begin with but one big decisive moment for the company was when he paired up

with McDonald's for the Happy Meal and so he did the Happy Meal and they were teeny beanie babies and they did 100 million of them and they just went so quick and it caused chaos for McDonald's

McDonald's were saying that people were ordering 100 Happy Meals and saying keep the food we just need the babies they did television adverts

over the worry that massive crowds were coming and the safety of the employees were in jeopardy they were like please stop it got to the point where people were calling up

to order things and the people were answering the phone by saying good morning McDonald's we have the moose and the lamb but then surely you want either the beef or the chicken usually

it's going to be confusing I have a tangentially related gun fact since Andy mentioned guns yeah cool Ty Warner was called H. Ty Warner right that was his full name and the H in his name

he said just didn't stand for anything but the reason he was called Ty was because he was named after Ty Cobb who was a famous baseball player so then I just got distracted reading about Ty Cobb but I found some weird similarities

Ty Cobb's story is amazing he was a baseball player at the turn of the 20th century so it's not too dark anymore but basically his mum we'll be the judge of how dark it is I think the people of Dublin might be the judges

you're going to be traumatised Ty Cobb's mum shot his dad dead when it's okay it was a long time ago Dublin's surprisingly up for this story so far more than a hundred years

when the dad had suspected the mum of cheating on him and so he crept outside her bedroom window to catch her shagging another man but she thought that he was a burglar so she seized the gun that he'd given her as a present

to protect herself and shot him dead through the window bam Ty Cobb's life slightly ruined but he did he did always credit his career success to his dad watching over him

and making him successful it's probably a good time to promote Anna's Netflix stand-up special which will be out very soon no, I'm calling it that's funny don't give someone a gun the way it's related is that

Ty Warner also credited his dad with his career success because he used the inheritance from his deceased father to found the company that's why I told the dark gun story shall we go dark? shall we keep going dark?

this is according to the new book so this is the great beanie baby bubble by Zach Bissonette which a lot of, at least the stuff that I've been reading has come from and he said that when Ty Warner saw the guy from beanie babies when his father died he waited for five days

to tell his sister so that he could clear out his father's antiques collection to take for himself? yeah, his employees don't speak well about him I do because he's still alive and I don't want a billionaire to sue us I think he's ace

although he was done for tax evasion, wasn't he? yeah, he was was it a hundred million dollars which was in a secret Swiss bank account and every time he was asked on the tax forms do you have money hidden overseas he would tick the no option

and he did that for years and years and years he had a rookie era basically the Wall Street Journal had said that he didn't really have very much money not as much money as he said and so he took out a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal saying I've got fuckloads of money

I'm just another story very quickly that I just love all these fights over beanie babies and there was a divorce that got taken to court and during the divorce proceedings one of the sticking points which the judge got frustrated about

was the fact that the couple couldn't decide how to split up their beanie baby collection and in the courtroom the judge ordered them to actually split them up in the room by pouring the beanie babies onto the floor and getting them to each pick one

one at a time like you pick a football team yes exactly like a football team and this is my favorite paragraph in the article is I don't agree with the judge's decision to do this it's ridiculous and embarrassing Francis Mountain said moments before squatting

on the courtroom floor alongside her ex-husband to choose the first from a pile of stuffed toys we're gonna have to move on guys to our next fact yeah should we do it okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact

my fact this week is that due to the interests of its production coordinator Michigan State University's planetarium not only dedicates itself to space science education but also houses the world's only moist towelette

museum and this is it here the moist towelette museum showing a picture to the audience here it's basically what it is there's this big planetarium at the Michigan State University and their production coordinator

a guy called John French just opened the door to his office put up a sign and started displaying I would say Dan can we explain this like maybe describe it to the people at home because it doesn't really look like an office it just looks like a filing covenant we're only think so on the left

the photo that we can see here is his computer and his desk and what he's done is he's set up two cabinets that should have probably relevant things to his job on it but he's emptied it and he's just covered it in moist towelettes and he had this idea

when he was at the planetarium in Texas and he took a cabinet that had the Mars rover on it and he put his moist towelettes on it and he said I noticed that more people in the cabinet when it had my moist towelettes on it than when it had the Mars rover

maybe I'm onto something and I guess no one had a choice in the matter but he now runs the only museum that has it and it's fascinating he's got a thousand of these things and people all over the world send it to him and moist towelettes are incredible

the variety out there that we have of them is it's not that much actually I mean there's specific ones that you can wipe on your fingers for when they're blackened by a typewriter there are ones that you should use called Radiac Wash to wipe away

when you're radioactively contaminated Wow! If I'd been contaminated by radiation I'd hope for a little more attention from the authorities than a moist towelette That's very much the final thing we do after the big shower

There was just an ass to a desk walking through Chernobyl A moist towel, anyone? Dan, this is the most punishingly dull area of I think we may ever have covered the moist What? This is incredible! Well, I've been captured by it too

I found myself getting deep into moist towelette world because there are interesting very interesting elements to it For example, did you know that 6% of moist towelettes are used on cars? Unbelievable That's interesting Wet wipes, 6%

used on cars, you wouldn't have thought that I wouldn't have thought that Like guys give it a chance, this is a fascinating thing French has been doing this John French for 20 years and he's even found the holy grail of moist towelettes

which he's the moist towelette that Christ used at the last supper The Turin towelette Everybody has his finger marks on it No, he found, so he's only got it John French has a website

I highly encourage you to check it out He can't reply to everyone who gets in contact with because he is inundated And there is an address and if you'd like to send your own moist towelette to him, do send it unused He does have one which is used

But it's a celebrity one It's a celebrity, so if you're a celebrity you can send it to the audience tonight Who was it? Elvis? Do you mind if I take this one? It was donated by Tom and Ray McLeodsy So I don't need to tell you guys who they are

But for any listeners at home they host NPR's car talk show and the moist towelette they sent him was used to clean off some grease from a car once So one of the 6% You can understand why he made an exception for that incredibly famous towelette

But so on his website what he says is the holy grail of moist towelettes They're just not sending it For fuck's sake tell us what this is So it's a series of Star Trek moist towelettes which have the image of Captain Kirk and Spock on there

I've seen them, I've seen the photo on his website and yeah, they look impressive Well they just have a photo on the towel It's on the packaging We don't have that kind of technology Come on Anna, calm down Class alive

Anyway, so I knew it was a good idea to do this fact tonight I can feel where Do you want to know something about the history of moist towelettes then? Of course, altogether now Yeah Great Someone said no

Get out Wrong room You do not belong here Look, the reason they became the phenomenon they are today and the reason we're also excited by them is because of a guy called Arthur Julius and the Colonel

So Kentucky Fried Chicken brought us moist towelettes and this is in 1958 and he invented it and it was quite a big deal The idea that you can have something that stays damp for so long and

that doesn't disintegrate when you're cleaning stuff Absolutely So he struck a deal with KFC struck a deal with KFC to provide a free wet wipe with every KFC meal

which works because they're finger licking good but even licking your fingers sometimes isn't enough and that's where they took off It's quite amazing how moist they keep It's extraordinary They advertised it KFC advertised it as what your tongue doesn't get

the wet wipe will Someone just commented that's my tinder bio In the last 25 years KFC has given away nearly a billion wet wipes and those wet wipes would reach halfway to the moon

Overall, the amount of wet wipes of this company nice and clean have made in America is 150 billion and that would go to the moon about 30 odd times Really? Wow But the thing is about the Mice Tail Acts

is they make so many of them and basically people flush them down the toilet and they turn into fat birds By the way, the fact that you've been cheering them so far is disgusting because they are basically the bad guys of the modern day They make fat birds basically and the biggest fat bird in the UK

was quite recently found in Liverpool It weighed 400 tonnes and it was 250 metres long Wow And if you add that one to one that was found in Birmingham in the same year, those two fat birds alone would weigh more than the giant statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro

Wow But no one has suggested a switch There was also a 2020 study in Ireland by Coastwatch and they said that wet wipes are the main cause of microplastics in the sea These tiny little bits of plastic

and it's because little threads come off the wet wipes and they end up in the sea There's a teenager called Fionn Ferreira He's an Irish teenager and he's developed a technique to remove this microplastics and this original fact was about planetariums

and he also worked as a curator at Shulls Planetarium in County Cork No Wow So there's something about planetariums and wet wipes were they just kind of drawn together Well, just one extra coincidence

Hang it, there's a link The first ever use of the word wet wipe phrase wet wipe was in 1966 and it was from a NASA study This is really cool It was a study called Effective Diet and Atmosphere on intestinal and skin flora So basically they were trying to work out

how's it that was sarcasm and I heard it It was a study It was a study trying to work out the influence of space flight what it would do to the microorganisms on your skin and they got I think 16 men and they studied them I think in space like conditions

I don't think they actually sent them to space and they were kept in one environment for 42 days and they were being kept without doing much washing and their microorganisms on their skin were being studied like areas including, I'm quoting here eyes, nails, umbilicus

anal fold, you name it The umbilicus Belly button Belly button guys I'm quite on NASA here But what's anal fold Do you not have one? Ass crack

Is that what it means? I can't believe I'm having to do all this translation from this side of the room Is that genuinely what NASA calls our butt crack anal fold I'm afraid so But this, the way they were allowed to clean themselves in this study was as follows and this is where we get the phrase wet wipes from

only wet wipes were allowed and were limited to 3 a day for hand wiping following eating and defecation That was all the cleaning they were allowed to do 3 wet wipes a day Would you poo once a day and eat twice a day or vice versa

I think the number of times you poo depends on how much you eat a day That's a good point I would go for 3 nil but on alternate days I love that Guys, we're going to have to move on very soon to our next fact

Shall I quickly just tell you one thing about Planetarium One of my favourite ones is in Moscow Moscow Planetarium, I've been there, it's really really good They have a really really massive dome and what is cool about it is the outer dome is only 8cm thick at the top

goes down to 12cm at the bottom, it's really really thin and that means that if you shrunk it down it would be thinner than an egg shell If it was the size of an egg If it was the size of an egg That's amazing and the reason I bring it up is for you Andy really

because it has a load of insulation so guess what it's made of It's moss OK, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna My fact this week is that 72 years after the first

Miss America contest the runner up was still claiming I won it, hands down So this was 1921 and at the time it was called the intercity beauty contest it was in Atlantic City and the official winner according to the Miss America history

it was a woman called a 16 year old girl called Margaret Gorman and also Miss Virginia Lee who was about 20 21, a bit too old almost for Miss America and so it was between Virginia and Margaret

everyone was saying they're the two best whatever you're supposed to be good at and then when the contest had ended before the results were announced and this is the first ever Miss America suddenly Virginia is disqualified she was disqualified for being a professional

and before the contest that it was amateurs only What is a professional in this context where the criterion is just being fit That's a huge misconception and B I think everyone else had won local beauty contests

and then been upgraded to the national beauty contest whereas she just had modelling contracts She was a model I think is the point and also one of the judges of the competition ran the magazine that employed her as a model discovered and anyway she was quite bitter about it and she always claimed that

they told her even years afterward look you won it really but they said we can't give it to you so this other woman won it so that's the controversial start to Miss America It was quite an interesting event wasn't it because these women were brought on

with King Neptune who was a one-handed inventor brother of friend of the podcast Hiram Maxim so Hiram Maxim who invented the machine gun his brother was this guy he was dressed as King Neptune

he only had one hand because he had lost it in a mercury explosion in 1894 and he'd invented smokeless gunpowder Thomas Edison referred to him as the most versatile man in America It sounds pretty versatile if he's invented gunpowder

and simultaneously pretending to be King Neptune at a beauty contest but yeah and it was basically in order to stop people going home from Atlantic City because it was a big resort and people would go home at the end of the summer

but they wanted to keep people there so they had this extra thing to try and keep people there it was all part of the Fall Frolick so it was a whole big festival where they had lots of other stuff on and actually it was inspired by the baby parade which was really popular and had been since about 1900

fit baby in a pram and people judged it and then what would they do with it was there a talent round it was more like you looked at them and you put them in a nice bonnet and you wheeled them around and actually baby was a stretch

because I read in one newspaper article about 1928 that the baby parade you had to be between 6 and 12 years old the following year a three year old won it wow interview sections in the pageants you know there was the swimsuit

round until very very recently in one of them anyway in 2011 there were samples of the Miss USA questions which just to be really clear Miss USA is completely different to Miss America anyway the questions in 2011 included

asking whether evolution should be taught in schools which is frankly a poser I mean you could spend hours talking about that in your answer can evolution protect the burning of religious books but to be fair contestants were also asked if they could make the sounds of a cat, a police siren

and a slot machine a slot machine amazing it's quite nice because when you read about the history of Miss America from the start women have just been really skeptical about it and the biggest controversy was back in 1938

well in fact in 1938 Miss America contestants were banned the interview round was very hard then what do you think about the annexation of Austria do you think Chamberlain might have actually been right to declare peace in our time given that that gave Britain vital time to rearm

in the anticipation of an inevitable war next year it was slightly too early for the Chamberlain question but yeah idiot no in 1938 Miss America contestants were banned from spending time alone with a man for the week before the pageant

results were announced and that was because in 1937 and this is a huge deal Miss America but the winner of Miss America instead of being there for the ceremony when the crown was placed on her head was absent because she'd run off with her chaperone for the week and the crown had to be placed on an empty chair

oh wow it's such a good story just give it to someone else wouldn't you well no they had to stand by their principles and their principles were that Beck Cooper had won wow and Beck Cooper didn't give a shit the only reason

the only reason she'd entered was because her family kind of wanted a holiday in New Jersey and they were kind of against the contest but they were like come on our daughter's not going to win look at her and genuinely they were like you'll never win so it's fine and she did win and they had a chaperone for the week

like a driver to drive them around the event the week before the event and she liked him she started flirting with him and she ran off with him ohhhh nice genuinely it was in the contract and this is Miss America

where they would say that you had to pledge a vow to not having been either married or pregnant in order to enter the competition like they were so stringent on the idea that you had to be this pure person and there were countless examples again just the fact that the women who did enter it buckled the system

when they won a lot of them just saying you're not playing up to the thing that you're expecting of me but they did have all these clauses that you had to do as you were going in they still do I can't be married there is Mrs. World

genuinely Mrs. World which is for married women but they had a huge row last year because at the prize giving one of the contestants punched the winner and ripped the crown off her head saying you're divorced like genuinely

this happened and the winner said I'm separated, I'm not divorced and so wow if the marriage is broken down that far if you are divorced are you allowed to go back into the Miss America or that's Miss annulment you're thinking of

which is completely different there was a controversy in Miss World in 2013 this was Miss Uzbekistan Uzbekistan officials said that they left a few things off her profile namely the fact that the country has never held a Miss Uzbekistan contest

and they had literally no idea who she was she just rocked up and she went yeah I'm Miss Uzbekistan and they went alright that's awesome that's big brain time how did she do it did they keep her in or did she they kept her in yeah she didn't do particularly well

but she stayed in the competition that's so good Miss Uganda contest in 2014 you have to milk a cow and this was when Musevani President Uganda 2014 sent the army in to run the Miss Uganda contest

because he decided they weren't promoting the right kind of values he was like he doesn't have the right priorities but so their questions have all been quizzed on farming techniques you know which udder do you pull which seed do you sow which udder do you pull which udder do you pull

there we go Miss Navajo you have to know how to butcher a sheep properly miss where Navajo like the Native American people there's one question that once someone got in 2012 they were asked what are you supposed to do with a sheep's head

any ideas depends really what your interests are I suppose is that the ventriloquism act that comes up later in the talent round let's say if you want to cook it I'd curry it sheep's head yeah you can't taste any of it in the end can you

not in the Navajo people because this is all about there you have to know all about the Navajo customs from history Julian no you wrap it in aluminium foil and put it on the fire can't be that old a tradition

if it involves aluminium foil and a couple of wet wipes and you're done no they got the person who answered that question even though they kind of got it right because that is the modern way of doing it they got booed because they answered in English

and you're supposed to answer in Navajo but they can't remember the words yeah the Navajo for aluminium foil I want to talk about the outrage of beauty contests leading to people feeling pressured to have plastic surgery you know work done when they shouldn't and the worst thing

is that they didn't remember just gone it was a contest in Saudi Arabia and it was the camel beauty contest where 40 camels had to be disqualified because they'd had Botox and facelifts oh those humps look suspiciously

pert to me it's a real issue there's 66 million dollars worth of prize money up for grabs but you are not allowed to enhance anyway the camel's heads next humps, dress or posture

and dozens of breeders did how are they manipulating the camel's looks they gave them Botox to inflate their body parts they also had rubber bands that inflated their body parts in ways that I don't understand to be honest for this prize money I'm willing to dress up as a camel and go to Saudi Arabia

I think you think a lot of yourself if you think you dressed up as a camel will be more attractive than an actual camel I do! James, I back myself on this one in a camel beauty contest where you're looking for something with two humps a nice long face

and Andy thinks, nah, I could just dress up as a camel and win it I've got a nice long face and I think the humps I'll sort something out we got to wrap up guys James, do you want to love one more thing in or are we... I can if you want

there is this thing in China where they'll be given a job and they'll be saying, oh come over here it's like a modelling job and then they're told to pretend to be like Miss America or Miss Brazil or whatever and there was someone who was from Brazil who was pretending to be Miss Chili

someone from Ukraine who was pretending to be Miss America and the reason is that they take them to these like tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere and they say they're not going to know what Miss America is supposed to look like so I'm just going to put a sash on you and we're going to pretend that we've managed

to fly in all of these beauty contest winners from all around the world it's like amazing I'm going to start on the fittest camel in Saudi Arabia 2022 alright look we need to wrap up that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening

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 at Shriverland Andy you can be found on at Andrew Hunter M James

at James Harkin and Anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can get us on our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish dot com all of our previous episodes are up there big fans of that URL there

Dublin just to say you guys fucking rock we love coming here so much thank you for having us for everyone listening at home we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye