No Such Thing As A Fish - 430: No Such Thing As The Assistant Honcho

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the letters A (for Airport Complaints), B (for Birdman Cults), C (for Crafty Caterpillars) and D (for a Dodgy Dewey).  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's hardly any fresh water on Easter Island so the indigenous people drank straight from the sea.

That's why they're dead. They all immediately died, they landed there, a thousand years ago, all died, no they didn't die, this is the amazing thing about it. So Europeans first got there in the 1700s, 1722, they noticed that the indigenous people there, the Pacific Islanders who travelled over there hundreds of years earlier, seemed to be drinking straight from the sea. Very confusing, haven't thought about it again for 400 years and then scientists looked into it and they realized that actually fresh water kind of emerges on the shore.

So the fact that there's no fresh water or very little fresh water because the soil is super porous and so it rains and the soil just sucks it in straight away, no streams or anything but the rainwater goes down into the earth and then travels out to the beach underground and then it reemerges like just at the shoreline so when the tide's out you can kind of go and scoop up some of that you know water which is in the very shallows of the sea and it's still salty, don't get me wrong, I think it would taste like shit. Yep. It would taste like salt.

It all tastes like salt but it's not salty enough that it dehydrates you to death. So it's like a river but it's underground kind of right? Yeah. How did they survive long enough to experiment with that to not be wiped out? Like that's extraordinary right? I thought initially that it would just be a body of water that was consistently there. You're telling me a tide has to go out and then they find the water? Yeah, although the tide does go out most days.

Yeah true but it's annoying having to wait 12 hours if you're in time at wrong. I think like this morning I had to wait for Starbucks to open, that's annoying as well. That's the rain, it's the same doesn't it? We can empathize in a lot of ways. I guess you know if you're thirsty and you're really dying of thirst and the only water that you can see is the water on the shore of the sea maybe you give it a try? Yeah. And also it's a 1200 so they didn't know anything.

It's very far away from over, can we just say how far away from stuff East Ireland is? The nearest inhabited island is 2,000 kilometers away, South America is 3,500 kilometers away so it's in the South Pacific isn't it? And it's just so far from everywhere. It's kind of halfway between Chile and Australia, isn't it really? Because when I went to South America I thought oh well just pop over to Easter Island for maybe a couple of days, that'd be really cool. And then I looked about how long the flight was going to be and I'm not going to get there

and that's the amazing thing isn't it? How do people get there? How do people end up there? Well we know it's the Polynesians right but like how did they discover the island? What were they doing? There's a lot of origin stories, there's a lot of archaeological, like everyone has a different idea that they bring to the table but no one can decide. Your idea would be the Aliens one I suppose Dan.

Is it an Aliens one? Of course it's an Aliens one. Yeah. Your mate Dan, Eric Von Daniken, is this the one you're talking about, James? Well it's just the, that's the famous one right? Yeah, yeah. Wow. He thinks that a race of superior intelligent creatures got shipwrecked effectively on Easter

Island, taught the locals how to make the statues, started making a load of them for their own amusement, then got picked up before they'd finished all of them which is why some of the statues are not finished and then just left again. His basically theory is that if there were ever any really amazing structures made where white people weren't there, then it must be aliens. So you could be pretty sure that he would think that. He's not my mate by the way, can I just quickly, he's our specifically not to be associated with me so.

But yeah Andy, about the statues, that's the famous thing right, isn't it, the statues, the big heads on Easter Island. And there's a thing about the big heads that they tend to be clustered near the areas where you can get this water. And so some people think that maybe they were kind of a marker to tell you where the best place is to get a little bit of drinking water. Oh, wow. Yeah, they've recently realized that the positioning of the statues coincides with particularly

these areas of freshwater springs and even inland it coincides with places where you be able to get a well and get some fresh water. It makes sense. If you're going to signpost anything as a bunch of rural islanders, you probably signpost water, don't you? But that's such a big signpost. That's the thing. It's an amazingly, it's so much effort to go to flag there is water here.

But it was kind of their thing though, wasn't it? Like there's a thousand of them on the island, you know, and they'd make it up in this hill bit where they used volcanic rock and ash that it was called tough and they would carve and then they would drag down and slide down with an amazing sort of hit rate of not damaging them as well, which is pretty extraordinary given their size. You know, there's people who've gone and visited and seen broken ones, but on average, it was said that they could just bring them down these giant structures and walk them to where they needed to be.

And some of them would be, as you say, would be facing water. Some would be facing inland to protect the land. Some there's seven in particular, which were meant to represent seven different Polynesian tribes that had come over. So that a group of people facing the direction of which they all originated from. We don't know if that's true. That's just a theory on the island. The big question is when they were transporting them down, did they slide from the top of

the hill on the Moai like they were sledges on the on the Moai? They're called Moai, the statues. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you meant did the statues slide on? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. They might have been the statues might have sledge.

That's one theory. Well, they might have been put on log rollers. Well, Dan said walked. Didn't he? And the other theory is that they walked into position that you put a big rope around them and just stroll them like when you're trying to move a heavy bit of furniture, like a fridge. Yeah. You lift one corner and move that and then you put that down and the aliens go, I pivot.

Yeah. The other thing about them, which I think you found out recently, James, I mean, you weren't the original person to point it out, but there's as much of them underground as above ground. Yes. Unbelievable. They're not heads. They're just statues of entire bodies. But apparently over hundreds of years, soil accumulation and various bits of erosion and

stuff buried the bodies. Isn't that incredible though that they didn't bury the bodies themselves? So it's not like they hid it. What the erosion has happened that all of them just seem to have a head left. Yeah. That's quite amazing. It's like a kid been buried and sat and his parents have left him there. We haven't talked about the most interesting structures on Easter Island.

I would say. Oh, yeah. Which is their chicken houses. Do you guys read about these? No. So they've got great chicken houses. They're called Haare Moa and they were almost impregnable to robbers because obviously there was a time of long decline on the island.

You needed to protect your protein wherever you could. So chickens is kind of vital. They should have really pivoted completely to chickens, I think, but I'm not going to give them advice. Look, they've clearly been through a lot. Anyway, these chicken houses will really get two meters high, up to 20 meters long, made completely of stone. It's a huge can of stones, basically.

And they are quite mysterious because the other thing about them is that human skulls have been found inside the chicken houses. Whoa. Are we thinking that chickens actually were eating the humans? That's what I'm thinking. Well, do you think the chickens made the massive heads because they thought human heads are so delicious? If we make some massive ones, then that will bring us more.

I think that's it. Yeah. I think theory, and again, it's so much theorizing. I think it's that they were chief skulls and that they were believed to have a fertilizing power at these skulls to increase the egg yields. So pretty goth to just have some skulls in your hen house. I knew you'd like those hen houses because they're like dry stone walls, aren't they? Yeah.

They're very, very similar. And you said how they're impregnable. The interesting thing about that is they're made like dry stone walls. So they're made of loads and loads of stones going all the way around. But one of the stones, you can pull out and use it as a door, but unless you're the one who built it, you don't know which stone it is. No. And so you can get in and get your chickens out, but no robber can get the chickens out.

That's fantastic. So good. I'd love to go to Easter Island and only photograph the chicken houses. I would really come back with a slideshow for my family. There were 1,233 of those chicken houses and only 887 stone heads. I think we're concentrating on the wrong thing. I couldn't agree more. And do you think they should have pivoted to chickens because of the other thing that

formed the basis of their protein diet, which was rats? Oh, another good reason to pivot to chickens. I do. So many reasons to pivot to chickens. They've done some studies recently, some analysis of the teeth of skeletons and it shows that their sort of protein was rats and they ate loads of rats, although apparently Pacific Island rats are slightly tastier than European rats. Who's studied those?

You can actually just read this in New Scientist or something. So I don't know how much all the researchers have gone to compare them. I'm still not going to Kentucky Fried Rat, that's all I say. But as you say, Andy and Dan, the theorizing is out of control. Yeah. We know almost nothing. So pretty much everything we've said so far is just based on a few bits of evidence and we piece stuff together.

The stuff we know for sure is stuff that's told from living memory. And so the stuff we know for sure is actually about the cult that followed the big head cult, which is the Birdman cult. And we do actually have information about that. And this is another theory about who knocked down the head. So basically, Westerner's arrived and sometime after Cook went there in the late 1700s, then the head cult was replaced with this Birdman cult. So they just tore down the heads because they were like, we're the guys in charge now.

But the cool thing about the Birdman cult was how they elected their head poncho. Do you read this? Did you say poncho? I said poncho. Oh, good. Oh, I heard poncho as well. It's weird because head poncho is a phrase, but head poncho isn't a phrase. That's why we were surprised to hear it.

It's almost a better phrase. I'm the head poncho here. Especially if you've got a really awesome poncho whenever you get the cut head. I think it would need that. Yeah. Is it just for your head? Are you wearing a poncho for your body and then you've got a head poncho on top? Yeah, double poncho.

This is what they wore on the islands. Because I know what a poncho is and that's why I like the phrase, but I don't know what a poncho is really, some guy. You never hear about poncho when not preceded by head, do you? You never hear about the second poncho? No, you never hear about the second poncho. Vice poncho. Yes, I'm the assistant poncho.

Well, look, the head poncho competition in the Birdman cult was to elect the Tangata Manu, who was the bird man of the year, happened every year. And essentially it was the first person to find the first egg that was laid by the sooty turn every year and the way they did it was. Did they go like just whispering his ear like a little bear? What's that sooty turn? You were the honcho last year, sooty. It sweeps turn now.

Maybe all the statues are hollow inside. Matthew Corbett. It's a massive Matthew Corbett who comes along and with incredibly strong arms. They're the finger puppets of the gods. That's what they are. That is a Fontanican book I absolutely would devour. Sorry, they're trying to find the egg. Yeah, it does feel like we have wandered off course.

They're trying to find the egg of the sooty turn. And the way they do it is the main competitors would either compete themselves or they'd elect a hopu, which was someone who competed on their behalf. And what they had to do was they had to climb down this cliff. They'd have to swim a mile out to sea, very rough seas, a mile out to sea and land on this island. And it was the island where all the birds came and laid their eggs every spring. They wait there for a few weeks on this island and then eventually the birds would arrive.

The first one to spot the first egg would signal back to the main island and say, I've got the egg, you win, master. And then the reward, here's where it gets really exciting if you're the first one to get the egg is you get to shave off your eyebrows and eyelashes and your head. Your hair, not your head. And you took a new name that was adopted as the name of the year. And then you danced and sang your way to the royal residence where you had to live in total seclusion for a year.

And that's what you get. Sound quite good, actually. Living in total seclusion for a year. Yeah, and people bought you food, actually. Did they? Yeah, it's a dream. But the food was rats. But, but nice rats.

All of the statues were knocked over at some point after first Western contact. When the first sailors arrived, which was 1722, there was a Dutchman called Jacob Roggeveen. He visited on Easter Day in 1722, which is why he gave it the name Easter Island. They were all standing. They were all fine. He didn't know. There are no descriptions of any that have fallen over. And then a couple hundred years later, they're all knocked over and it would have taken

a huge amount of effort to knock them over. The people clearly decided we don't want these anymore. Yeah, I think they felt. Well, this is one of the many theories. Let's get so many theories out of it. But this is the theory, I think, on the side of the kind of more mythological side is that they were idols to the gods. And because the island had been so ravaged in terms of the deforestation that they'd done

and so on, because that's the main thing, isn't it? There's hardly any trees that are left anymore. And so they couldn't make canoes to go and fish. And so they ran out of food. And so it was anger and they knocked down the statues to say, fuck you, God. That's quite angry because I can imagine being angry and having a pen in your hand and throwing it to the ground and stuff. But actually to be so angry that you knock over a massive statue and then another

and then another hundreds and hundreds of. When they lined up like dominoes, you only need to get one over originally. That would be amazing. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. Some dude was just leading over and chatting up the girl. Mr. Bean went to Easter Island. OK, it is time for fact number two.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that last year Dublin Airport received 13,569 noise complaints. 12,272 of those were made by one person. One single person. We don't thousand a year. Yeah, it was averaging basically 34 a day roughly. That's basically presumably every time a plane takes off. I think so. Yeah.

We don't know who this person is, by the way. They've they've kept them anonymous. I don't know why. OK. But it's something that they've done before many times. They've doubled their amount of complaints that they previously had done. So this isn't like they just popped out of nowhere. Right. They've been complaining for years. Weirdly, obviously, due to the pandemic, you know, flights have been down,

but the complaints have been going up. Yeah, they did kind of pop out of nowhere because they came along, I think, in 2018. In 2018, there were 628 complaints in 2019, 3,147 in the first six months of the year. And then not that many since then, but some. And then, like you say, this last couple of years, they've really picked up again. Is it someone who's erected a tent on the runway? Just how I was wondering, or someone who's only set up an automatic system that every time the noise goes over a certain volume, so that that is possible.

Now, what this did happen in Heathrow in 2015, Heathrow found that some people had automated software that could generate complaints. And they found out because when the clocks changed, they didn't change the clocks on their system. So they started complaining about flights that haven't taken off yet. Oh, wait, that's so cheeky. They were what they were. They would they would find out when a plane was taking off

and automatically their computer would just send an email. That's I think that is I think that is cheeky, because I think it's got to be you've got to have the noise. You've got to have experience. I think that's that's what Heathrow felt as well. Do we know if they bother to make each email different? Like, did they write a thousand different words? Sir, dear madam, hello, further to my previous email.

I mean, all this one, were they all clones of each other? This person, they haven't said. Yeah, I imagine it's pretty much the same email that would come through. Well, this person doesn't actually live that close to the airport. That's the number. You know where they live. They live in over there. We're on garbage, about 20 miles away from the airport.

And the interesting thing about that is Dublin Airport are actually quite good neighbors. If you look into it, as far as I'm concerned, they seem to be. And they'll offer to buy your house, for instance, if it's too much on a regular basis, especially since they got their new runway. But this person is outside of that distance, but they can't be helped by any of these systems.

So that could be why they're complaining. A flight path can be, you know, devil's it. If you like, if you like West London, it's so much of it's under the Heathrow path that you get so many planes a day. It also does seem that you do get these individuals, like these singular individuals that make it no mission to do it. So the heroes, I call them heroes. So the same thing happened for Reagan Airports in Washington in 2015.

They had 8,670 noise complaints and 6,500 of those were from a single person as well. Yeah, it's just some heroes, as Andy say. There's a secret society. There's a masons for complainers somewhere that we don't know about. Do you think that these people have time to go to a secret society? To me, I don't think they do. My noise complaints are just ridiculous sometimes

in terms of when you read the headline, you think, how's that possible? My favorite one that I've read recently, a Canadian city made a noise complaint against an American city. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So this was Windsor, Ontario, and they were making a complaint against Detroit. And it was because, yeah. So the Detroit River is there's a one kilometer of waterway between Windsor and Detroit.

And they were having a festival on the riverbank with, they said, on Windsor side, the sound system facing directly towards them. And so they received all these complaints from about one thirty to two thirty in the morning when the music was still playing. And all the complaints directed on the Windsor side to their council to say, we want you to write to Detroit's council and officially log this as a noise complaint. And they did. Yeah. They got a city got an official noise complaint from another city.

That's great. Yeah. And this imagine if this was the Franz Ferdinand moment for the civil war between Canada and ironically, that's the music they were playing. I was looking at the history of filing sound complaints. I think the earliest I could find the earliest official sound complaint, which resulted in, you know, action being taken was in 1302. This was in the UK. And it was a petition by a bunch of friars.

And it's just so fun because it's just exactly the same as we would say today. Exactly the same kind of complaint. So they requested that this courthouse, the courthouse of Cattisall, should not be rebuilt to the damage and nuisance of the friars. Their complaint was that when it rains, people who are going to the courthouse seek refuge for themselves and their horses in the church of the friars while the friars are saying mass, which actually does sound quite annoying. Yeah. And so it's quite hard to shout mass over the noise

and the press of the people and especially if they take in a vow of silence or something, that would be really. Yeah, they can't shout them down to sit there swearing at them. I read another study by Manchester Met and this is going back to the airports. This was complaint data at Manchester Airport from between 1998 and 2000. And they found what we found, which is that there is a subgroup of serial complainers out of all the complaints. So they described.

Is that like cornflakes, not crunchy enough? Where can I address my complaint about that joke? I think if people are complaining about our jokes, then they would be serious complainers because a serial complainer is someone who makes more than 50 complaints a year versus a normal complainer, who is someone who does less than that. But they profiled serial complainers. And they found really interestingly that a serial

complainer would tend to send all of their emails between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. And then again in the morning from 7 a.m. to about 8 a.m. So they do it just before they went to bed or just before they got up. Whereas a normal complainer would do it at any time of the night. So they might do it at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. So what that suggests is that the normal complainers are actually being woken up by the planes and got off for God's sake and send in an email

versus serial complainers are doing it just before they go to bed. Maybe after a few drinks, I don't know. And then first thing in the morning when they remember, oh, that was really annoying last night kind of thing. Wow. I can. You sort of understand the late evening one where people are stewing. You know, I've got to complain about this. I'm so like, well, early morning, I don't get at all.

I wonder sometimes it's like you want to send an email at nighttime and you're like, if I send it now, people will think I'm drug sending it. So I wait till the morning and I'm going to send it then. It's a schedule send. They schedule a send. Well, let me reread the draft that was for you. I'll write an angry email in there, but I normally end up not sending an email or instead sending an apology.

What's sending an apology instead of the annoying email? Level the noise. Thanks, Andy. Keep it up. Turn it up. I can take it. This fight was about Dublin Airport. Yeah. Most famous Irish airline. Erlingas. Come on, Andy. Ryanair. Yeah, Ryanair.

It's got to be Ryanair. I know Erlingas is a very famous one. I only named the national carrier. I'm afraid I say that against priority. Sorry, Ryanair, Ryanair. Really interesting thing is that Ryanair is founded by a guy called Tony Ryan. Right. He's really famous. He leased.

He owned a leasing company first. And even today, Ireland leases about 40% of all the airplanes in this guy at any time. So most of the smaller airlines don't own the airplanes that they own. They're leased from someone else and a lot of that's from Ireland. And this was all goes back to this guy called Tony Ryan. He decided he wanted to set up an airline and it's called Ryanair, but it's not named after him. Isn't that amazing?

He wanted to call it trans-tipperary airlines. But his friend and someone who he set up the business with called Christy Ryan decided he wanted to name it after him. And so Christy Ryan said, I know I want to name it after me and call it Ryanair. And Tony Ryan said, you can't name it after you. He said, well, I'm going to do it anyway. And then in the end, they decided to call it Ryanair. But Tony Ryan is the really famous guy who everyone.

It is not the Ryanair. That's so interesting. Because online, it always clear. I thought it was wasn't named after Christopher and it was named after Tony. Because, yeah, it always says it's named after Tony Ryan. But secretly, it's the Christopher. That's very funny. Oh, my God.

I was reading a very tiny bit about noise on planes. So because obviously we're talking about noise when you're on the ground from an airplane, but it's huge when you're inside and they do a lot to try and fix it, make it better, make it more manageable. One of the things that affects is your food on a plane. They found in research when you're eating food, the noise can it can mess with your taste buds. And so British Airways in 2014 released a little thing called sound bites. So the idea would be that the food that you ordered on the plane,

you could go into the system, your little entertainment system, and you could find a track that plays a curated bit of noise to listen to while you're eating that meal to match the taste and help you out with the food. I've been to the fact that, you know, Heston Blumenthal's place and he plays music sometimes to you when you eat a certain thing, you have to wear headphones and listen to the sound of the sea while you eat some seafood and stuff. Yeah, exactly. So it'd be like Verdi would be playing, you know, while you're eating on the airplane.

It's a pasta. Exactly. It is that. If you're on your way to Easter Island, just the sound of rats screaming. I've got a case study for you. I'll go on. OK, you live in a seaside flat, right? Yes. In Italy.

Oh, lovely. Lovely. So it's a block of flats and then you're maybe. It's flat. It's not one of those. Which coast? Oh, it's in the Bay of Poets. I think it's called.

Oh, yeah. So there are four brothers who own the flat next door. Right. They install a lavatory and one of their rooms. Yeah, it's fine. But it's right next to the headboard of your bed and it's so loud. Yeah. Whose side are you on?

Look, I'm the person. Well, you live at the flat. I live at the other flat. So someone's taking a shit next to your head every day. Pretty much. Or every night. I think I might consider moving, flipping my bed around so that my head bod isn't right there.

This is the thing. The couple said of a home is so small, we can't rearrange the furniture. OK. So this get this. This happened in 2003. Yeah. The couple who owned the flat, which I put you all in and said, the noise is intolerable.

They took it to a judge, got thrown out. They went to an appeal court. The appeal court judge said, actually, that is bad for your quality of life. OK. The brothers fought back and took it to the Supreme Court. Wow. This year in 2022, 19 years after the original complaint. Oh, my God.

And they've been holding a shit in all that time. It's been settled. On whose side? In favor of the couple who owned the flat. And they, the brothers have had to pay 10,000 euros almost. And it's what do they do now? The brothers. So outdoor WC.

I don't think they could sound. I don't know if they could sound. Maybe they have to use their Lou move the Lou. I don't know. Anyway, put lots of Lou roll down before you do a number two. I think it was the flush. What's the problem? But the adrenaline newspaper said in far less time than this case

took Albert Einstein wrote the theory of relativity explaining the whole universe. It's hard, though, isn't it? I mean, that you could see both sides. Yeah. I think you're going to have a place to you've got to have a tie. Lou. Yeah, yeah.

But also you've got to be able to sleep somewhere. And these are small places. Yeah. Is it four brothers? Yeah, it's a bit of the story that no one's picked up on. What? There are four brothers living together for 19 years. I think that's a bit odd.

I don't know. It's quite a good life. Yeah. Right, good life. Move out. Why hasn't one of them got married? Yeah, what is happening with that family? I think they're doing it deliberate.

Is that what you're saying? They've clubbed together and deliberately said that they'll devote their lives to torturing this couple. I don't know. I just think when it comes to courts, when it's four brothers living together for 19 years, I would think something weird's going on there. Yeah. I'm going to leave you guys alone.

OK. I'm with you. Well, no further questions, your honor. The prosecution rests. Four brothers. Sue me a favor. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson

was better known as a baker than as a poet. She thought it was a really good baker, a really bad poet. A probably an unknown poet. People didn't really know that she did poetry and people did know that she did baking. If you don't know who Emily Dickinson is, she is probably one of the most famous American poets in her lifetime. Didn't really sell or publish anything, just one or two little things.

People didn't really know about her. She didn't want anything to be published, but what she was famous for in her area was making loads of cakes, loads of delicious things that she used to give to all the children all the time. And so there's a new book that's come out called the Emily Dickinson cookbook by Eileen Osborne, and in that she says she was better known as a baker than a poet, although there is another book that I've seen which is about Emily Dickinson's gardening.

And in that book, it says she was better known as a gardener than a poet. So it kind of feels like whatever you write in the book about, you can say that. She basically wasn't known as a poet. I think that's what I was saying. But what's amazing, though, is like she's known for the gardening, she's known for the bakery, but actually she was kind of a recluse for most of her life, wasn't she? So I think kind of is a weak way of referring to what was extreme recluse.

But so how do we know about her gardening and her bakeries? Hang on, guys, she hang on. She had some pretty public experiences in the baking sphere. And I'd refer you to the 1856 Amherst cattle show where her round loaf of Indian and rye bread won second prize. So before we say she was a recluse, just think about that. She was living in the public sphere in the blaze of publicity, to be fair, her sister Vinnie was one of the judges for that competition.

So slightly makes me think she actually wasn't a very good baker. Your sister's in the competition. You still can't buy first prize. Come on, mate. She used to make gingerbread, really good gingerbread, and she used to lower it down for neighborhood children. So she loved children, Emily Dickinson, and they kind of the people in the area in the neighborhood

kind of knew about her. This she was a recluse, as you say, later on in life, post this great competition triumph thing. But the children knew about her and they'd run to her window and then she erected a kind of basket, which she lowered down on a string. And one of the people, one of the boys remembered her later on doing it and she'd do it and make it like a game. So she'd do it very, very gradually and gingerly, gingerly.

Brilliant. So it's not to let the domestic servant know, because otherwise domestic servant Maggie would be very angry. And then the kids would have to creep through the grass and then grab the gingerbread and leave her alone. Maggie's getting ideas above her station. If she's stopping the lady of the house from giving out free gingerbread. Well, you know, that's good to know what side you're on.

I was giving the local children gingerbread. I just think lady of the house is a little bit. She was the lady of the house. Maggie hasn't made gingerbread for the children. She's made it for, you know. Was she giving away gingerbread that Maggie had made? Yes. So why is Emily Dickinson getting the credit for all this baking

when she's giving away someone else's gingerbread? Sorry, right. This boy said I don't know if Emily Dickinson had made the gingerbread or if Maggie had made the gingerbread. But she seemed to be afraid of Maggie telling her not to. So you're right. I think Maggie is getting ideas above her station. Stopping Emily from giving out a gingerbread. Actually, if Maggie had made it, I'm now come background to her point of view.

And I think she's getting ideas at her station. Like she's correct to be irritated about this. It was actually quite a good spot for literary figures. This Amherst place, because you had not only Emily Dickinson, who obviously found out that she was amazing after her death, but you had people like Melville Dewey was there. Was he from the Dewey Decimal System? Yeah, he was. Yeah.

Where did he live? He lived from number one to number 121.04. He would. So he came up with the system while he was an assistant librarian at the Amherst College in 1876. Looked into him a bit. Terrible human. Yeah, I think he's a terrible human. We're not supposed to use the system anymore, I don't think. Wow, really.

I believe he's been cancelled. He's been cancelled, but we've cancelled the system now. I think we've cancelled the whole system. It's a hell of a system to cancel. Robert Frost, the poet, was from there as well. Noah Webster was from there as well, of Webster's Dictionary. Yeah, he lived there and he started writing it there. So not all these people were born there, but they did huge chunks.

And then he went to Baltimore and then he went to Chicago. And then he would. Yes, I wanted to see how long you'd get. What was your next one, Denver? Yeah. Go on, what would be next? I didn't have one after that. An American place beginning with East Virginia. Yeah, that's not a place.

There's Virginia and there's West Virginia. I meant the East of Virginia, obviously. She was such an interesting character. So, I mean, first of all, she was really funny and fun. I think that people, because they know of Emily Dickinson as this person who only ever wore white, which she did. And she never left a house. She was picturing a few other things.

Like, in fact, I think in the only picture we've got of her, she's not wearing white. Again, sorry, when I say only ever, it's weird because picture in black and white, so she's wearing black, I'm assuming, but it's just gray. This is after she became a recluse. About the last 20 years of her life, wasn't she? She became a recluse. But she was very funny. If you read her poems, they are kind of witty or dry or pit-takey.

I always thought like one of the best opening lines to a poem was one of my most famous poems, which opens because I could not stop for death. He kindly stopped for me, which I just love as a bit of, I don't know, it's humorous, it's dark. And it's an excellent poem. But I think she she did think about publishing a lot. She knew she was great. It wasn't like she had no idea she was great.

She wrote to all these famous writers and publishers who said, please let me publish your poems. And she would say, oh, no, it'd be dreadful being published. I'm not nearly egotistical enough for that. How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog to tell your name, the live long June to an admiring bog. So she had it in her mind. She was quite like Lady Doth protest too much about it, I think.

Wow, just a quick reminder. Andy's new novel will be out by the time you listen. I'm regretting it for you, admiring bog. She wrote to a guy called Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking if she could possibly or if her poems were good enough to be published, I should say. And he actually thought that her poems were too eccentric to be published at the time, but he told her to avoid sloppy dashes,

which if you've read any Emily Dickinson, it's just dashes. It's almost all dash. It's just dash. Yeah, right. It's like half of Morse code, her poetry. Right. I would say go back and ignore the dashes, because that I remember when I was younger, that really put me off

because it seems so jerky. But then if you ignore them and pretend they're normal punctuation. Just quickly on the Higginson man who reviewed sort of looked over her poetry. So he said her writing was, I'm quoting it so peculiar, it seems as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird tracks in the museum. OK, this is interesting. Amherst, again, like great literary womb, all of this,

had these bird tracks in stone, which were the first dinosaur tracks ever found. And they were found by a 12 year old ploughboy called Pliny. Really? Weird. And so he was called Pliny Moody, amazing name. And this was 40 years before the word dinosaur was coined, really. But they were known, they were nicknamed these tracks as the marks of Noah's raven.

That was what they were called this lovely sort of evocative phrase, the dinosaur footsteps, Noah's raven and Emily Dickinson wrote the thing with feathers and dinosaurs have feathers. Oh, my God. Is that where we're going? What I'm saying is it's all connected. Oh, my God. Is that your favorite one of her poems? I don't really have one.

I don't I didn't know very much about her at all. I think there's one that you would like if you ever heard it. All overgrown by cunning moss. There we go. Amen. Amen. She's a genius. What was her hit rate in terms of we now know that she wrote about one thousand eight hundred.

That's what she left behind poems. How many of those have been published? All of them. Yeah, but there's an incredibly weird story. So the ones that you are talking about have all been published and we can see all of them. Yeah. And I would say everyone I've read I've enjoyed. Yeah. But so OK.

Her sister found them all after she died, Lavinia Vinny. And she destroyed a lot of paperwork, but corresponded and stuff like that. So there was this mad argument between two sides of the family. It's all a bit complicated because her brother was called Austin Dickinson and her brother had a mistress called Mabel Loomis Todd. Right. So some of the poems went there. Some of the poems went to the family of her brother. And basically the two halves of Dickinson's literary estate were in different hands.

Neither family owned all the manuscripts and neither could produce a complete Dickinson. One side sold them to Harvard for about half a million dollars in modern money. So then Harvard have claimed ownership of Dickinson in general. And for, you know, for a while, people have asked permission to Harvard to quote lines of Dickinson. So basically it feels like Amherst could be a good setting for a soap opera. Yeah, they shagged on Emily Dickinson's dining room table for the first time. Sorry, who? Who's who say sorry?

Yes, that should have been clear. Austin and Mabel, who he was having their fair with. OK, with an Emily and the Vinny knew it seemed like a bit of an opus. I know the dining table. Hey, we've got it in writing firsthand. So it's Austin and Mabel. Yes. OK. And it's so weird because Emily never met Mabel, but, you know,

they were having a fair of 13 years and Mabel would come round to Emily's house, which was next door and they'd have sex on the dining room table. And Mabel actually played piano for Emily once and Emily listened from behind a corner in the house and sort of delivered her a glass of sherry at the end to say, well done, lovely playing. Just very quickly on the the recluse and all wearing white and all that kind of stuff. Martha Nell Smith, who's like one of the main scholars of Dickinson, she works at the University of Maryland.

And she says that actually a lot of the image that we know now of Dickinson is kind of Victorian propaganda and that I'll kind of say paraphrase what she says. She says, you know how right now, if you have a rock star, you kind of have this idea of sex, drugs, rock and roll, wearing black, all that kind of stuff. Well, in the late 19th century, the idea of a woman, a poet would be someone who had a secret sorrow, someone who was reclusive, someone who dressed in white. And she reckons that a lot of the stories that we hear now are quite exaggerated.

I mean, obviously she did stay in the house a lot, but a lot of them are exaggerated because that was our idea of a poet at the time. That is really interesting. I'm the sex, drugs and rock and roll. I mean, to be fair, people used to accuse her, not accuse her, but say it was all about her lost love or she was spurned in love. And immediately after she died, like the 1890s, people are saying, well, she must have been cheated on by some bloke.

And actually, I think she might have shagged someone in her house. So we say she was over which table Anna? We think that I can't remember why he was cool, but someone came to visit as a great admirer and had a little dalliance, maybe. She was actually, she was quite sociable for a recluse. She was like, you know how hermits we always, we've done, we talked about hermits before and they'd have people visit them constantly every day. And she did sort of think it was Webster and he was like, nice arse, nice boobs.

Nice. Anyway. OK, it's time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that as well as a caterpillar, which avoids predators by pretending to be a bird, there is a bird which avoids predators by pretending to be a caterpillar. You could pretend to be a caterpillar who's pretending to be a bird. Yeah, you don't have to do any disguise. You just. Yeah, exactly.

You just say I'm a caterpillar. Is it because that does sound like it's come up with this and it's walked into the room full of birds and thought, I've fucked up. So these are these are two separate species. One of them, actually, we have mentioned before, I should fess up. We it's called the North American Walnut Sphinx Caterpillar. It's not a walnut. It's not a Sphinx, but it's it screams like a bird, which is the way it avoids predators.

Weird Nelly Furtado version of that. Yeah, it's like it makes the alarm call that a bird would make if it had seen a bird of prey. And so the other birds that would be eating the caterpillar think, oh, God, there's a better prey and just one extra detail on it. The report on Audubon.org, great bird website, says that the insect can be, I'm quoting here, as loud as a freight train from 50 feet away. Slightly have my doubts about it.

It depends how close you move the caterpillar to your ear. So, you know, if you put the caterpillar right, right down, like shove it into your ear and right next to your ear drum, it'll be the same as a train all that distance. I see what you're saying. I thought what they were saying here was that if you have a freight train 50 feet away and you have the caterpillar 50 feet away, it feels like that's a pointless use of the word phrase 50 feet.

Yeah. OK, so anyway, the bird just quickly is called the Cenarius Mourna bird, and it lives in the Amazon. So it's probably not going to come across this caterpillar anytime soon. And the chicks imitate poisonous caterpillars, specifically the chicks. They have these spiky orange feathers and it moves when its parents are away. It moves in this weird, slinky way. And it looks genuinely exactly like a poisonous caterpillar local to the region. It's it's insane. Yeah, it's absolutely insane.

And it does this right at the beginning. So it's only the first 20 days that it mimics this caterpillar. And it's yeah. When you see pictures of it, it just looks exactly like this caterpillar. And when even the mother comes back to feed them, so it's because the mother has to go away, do all the foraging that they're open to predators. It's only when the mother comes back and makes the actual like bird call, like that they go, oh, OK, now we can give it up.

Because if she comes back and doesn't do that, they still pretend to be the caterpillars. It's absolutely incredible. I would bring if I was a predator, I would bring back one of those caterpillars and I would make the caterpillar do a bird call and then trick the chicks into thinking that it was their parents. Yes, exactly. But they sort of like it's not even just the look. They're the same size as the caterpillars as well. They're 12 centimetres long.

I mean, it's yeah, it feels important when it comes to camouflage. They make themselves look like an elephant, but they're 12 centimetres long. No one's going to get tricked by that. The caterpillar, it looks like, is from the family Megalopigidae. And you might have seen that this caterpillar or a related caterpillar on the Internet, because he's got very bushy, sort of blondish hair. They're actually pointy kind of venomous bristles that they have. But they have been known as the Trumperpillar,

because it looks like Donald Trump's hair has fallen off. That's so cool. I didn't realise they were in that family. And have they evolved to disguise themselves as Donald Trump to escape? You know what? They do look like the ones that they disguise themselves look a bit like that Donald Trump hair one, right? They're quite kind of bushy and blond.

Yeah, it's just the colour difference. Like these ones are orange, but they both look a bit quiffy. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a thing called Batesian mimicry, isn't it? The bird is definitely doing this because it's where a harmless species looks like a noxious species, so predators avoid them. I think that and a type of owl are the only two that do the Batesian mimicry. There's an owl that burrows underneath the ground

and when it feels like a predator is coming in, it hisses like a rattlesnake. It's got like a tss, kind of rattlesnake thing. OK, there's a caterpillar called the Biston Robustum caterpillar and it can make itself look like a twig. OK, that's a standard camouflage. Yeah, but it can also make itself smell exactly like a twig. Isn't that cool? So not only will like a bird going past will see a twig and not go and eat it.

If there's an ant that goes past it, it'll walk along the twig and then it'll just walk along the caterpillar and think that it's on a twig. And the reason that we know that works is if you put the caterpillar on another twig that smells different, the ants will notice it. So it'll only hide it on this very specific thing. And they hunt by pheromones or they, you know, they detect things through pheromones and through smell. So does it have to smell like the twig of a particular plant?

The one that it's on. Yeah. So it needs that plant identification app, presumably to work out which tree to get up to. I just got that app. It's a change in my life. Really? Because I find it's not very reliable in my garden, I must say. I've uprooted everything. You've bought yourself a horse chest and not sent and you lie on branches.

That is so cool. Yeah, they get their smell probably by eating bits of that plant. So that's OK. Right. And have you guys seen the Great Porto? No. Such a good bird. It's basically big animals that are camouflaged. They kind of cool it to us in a way, right? And the Great Porto is a 60 centimetre tall bird that disguises itself as a tree branch. And it's such a great life because it just stands on a tree.

It has exactly the right colourings to look like sort of broken up bark. And it has to stand at a bit of an angle because, you know, a branch will branch off the main trunk at an angle. So it leans forward a little bit, points its beak right upwards so that it just goes up in a straight line. The only problem is it has these giant eyes which glow. So it's really great. So what does it what do people think that is?

So it just closes its eyes. It has to close its eyes the whole time. But then that's not very useful for catching prey. It can't tell also if someone's approaching it. Exactly. If someone's approaching it or someone's nearby and it closes its eyes. Yeah. Well, that's the problem.

But how does it tell if the coast is clear? Because it's only one. So when it closes its eyes, its eyes open. If God closes one eye, it opens another. It's got a tiny slit on its eyelid. And it's actually able to move this slit around, depending on where it wants to look. So it can just peer through. That's 60 centimetres.

Yeah, I would describe myself as two rulers. You're going to make yourself transparent. Well, I wouldn't rule that. Oh, yeah, but if you're camouflaging, you want to be a transparent ruler, don't you? Yeah, yeah, I would just like grow the word shatterproof on my chest. Shout boing over time. They just eat unsuspecting, you know, school teachers. Humans camouflage, don't we?

Yeah, from time to time and war and war in World War Two. In fact, there was at least one American soldier who had put lace doilies on his helmet to camouflage himself whenever it was snowing. There's a piece of furniture. No, because it's white. It's already a teapot. Yeah, that's very clever. That's what you put a doily on, isn't it?

You put it all over the back of an armchair, I think. Yeah, yeah, he's not mimicking anything. He's just trying to hide himself. There's a German disguised as a teapot sitting in some of the brits' barracks. Closer, closer. So, that chair's moving. That'd be ridiculous. That's incredible.

Yeah, I saw that picture on Reddit and I thought it couldn't possibly be true, but I found it in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1945, so it definitely did happen. So it's just to blend him with the snow, basically? Yeah, yeah. Definitely did happen. We don't know that it definitely did work, do we? No, we don't. This picture was in 1945, so we certainly got towards the end of the war.

That's good, that's amazing. I was reading about a trend in parent stuff, parent clobber. A trend of, you know, baby carriers, slings. Like a papoose kind of thing. Like a papoose, yeah, yeah. But there's a growing trend for ones aimed at men to have them in camo coloration, so that men feel less uncomfortable carrying the baby around. Like full camo gear, so you feel like you're in jungle warfare,

but actually you're just taking your baby to the shop. So no one's going, what baby? It's for men who still want to play the field a bit, maybe chat some people up, disguise the baby, yeah. Yeah, they're in bars, camo, shouting out women. Yeah, pretty single and free and easy to live in. What's that? Oh, it's my pager.

Pager. And these chatting up is quite a long time ago. Chatting anyone up. I think we've established he's been in pretty old school. He's a doctor, that's it, he's a doctor. He's still using pagers. It's quite Piers Morgany, isn't it? Was he the one who kind of said,

oh, I can't believe this celebrity man is carrying a baby? It was Daniel Craig, I think. Yeah, literally James Bond himself carrying a baby and Piers Morgan was going, he's actually doing it in every Bond movie, you just can't see it. Do you remember a few years back when Trump set up the Space Force? Oh, yeah. That was, they did the official uniform of the Space Force. It wasn't his idea, was it?

There was a caterpillar on his head who was whispering the idea to him. That would explain. Oh, for what? Well, yeah, when they released it, they got mocked a lot for it because it was camouflage gear. Oh, like jungle camouflage. Yeah, jungle camouflage with Space Forces. Whereas what you should wear in space, I guess,

is one of those kind of kids pajama sets that has a black sky. All the constellations on it. Who attacked you? Well, I don't know, look like a Ryan, maybe? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said

over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing,

or our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. Also, check out our upcoming tour dates. They're happening later this year. We'd love to see you there. Otherwise, do come back next week. We'll be here with another episode.

We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.