No Such Thing As A Fish - 434: No Such Thing As Robinson Two-Soe

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Puerto Rican primates, epicurean pirates and painting princes.  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 Covern 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 4 favourite facts from the last 7 days and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number 1, that is, Andy. My fact is that the first man to use the word avocado in English was a pirate.

Avocado! Avocado! That just sounds like you saying it normally, Dan. Wow, okay. This is a guy called William Dampier and he was an explorer. He lived from 1651 to 1715 and he was lots of things actually. He was a hydrographer, he was a scientist, a writer, a naturalist, royal navy captain and we have a picture of him, it's in the National Gallery, it's the only 100% genuine

portrait of a British pirate. Does he have a pirate on his shoulder? Yep, I patch, he's biting a gold doubloon and sort of making someone walk the plank. No, I don't think he is, I think he looks like a normal man. But he was a pirate and among lots of other things and he wrote this account of the avocado pear tree and that's in the OED when you look under avocado, his entry is the first one. He gave a little report about the avocado and said how nice it was. How many entries are there for avocado then after his one?

There are loads, because the OED sort of gives, they give a load of different citations. Yeah, it's about five or six. But I think there's only one definition, I'm not sure you've got like the verb avocado and then... This isn't the definition, this is the citation. He actually has over a thousand entries in the OED. Of all the things that he has in the OED, I looked at them all where he's the first citation, so the first example we have, he was the first person to use the word thundercloud, which is quite good, to frape the verb.

Facebook. Is it a frappe? He used the word meaning to bind tightly. Soy sauce as well, which is my favourite. Chopsticks. Chopsticks, which is my favourite utensils. And a lot of this is because I guess he was travelling so much. And you know, he was writing reports on his travels and so he was coming into contact around

the world with a lot of words not previously known to English, so that's part of the reason why. Well, I think that maybe even more amazing thing about him is that he had a great recipe for avocado, which involves smashing it to pieces and adding sugar and lime juice, by making guacamole. Such a hipster. He gave us guac. Although the tragic thing about him is, he wrote so much about guacamole that he was never actually able to afford his own pirate ship, because he just spent so much money on frappes as well.

So he always stopped renting those ships, wasn't he? He couldn't burn anything on the walls. So these words, he wrote quite a few books, but he had a very, very famous one, which was A New Voyage Round the World, which was a book that was so influential that Darwin took a copy of it onto the Beagle with him. And you know, is it this one book where we get a lot of these? Most of them are from that. I mean, that's pretty crazy.

I think that was his main book. I think he wrote lots of other random stuff, but yeah, that was his big one, wasn't it? What is it? It was really popular, 1697, and it was when he'd gone round the world for the first time, was it? And then he went round another two times. And it was full of food recipes. He was a foodie. He was a big old hipster foodie, barbecue, kumquat, tortilla, and he included recipes

of what was the best thing to do with them. So he really recommended Flamingo Tongue, if you're ever in the market. He said it's very good. It's lean and black, and it's neither fishy nor unsavory. Yummy. He also had armadillo, which he said tastes a bit like lan turtle. If you're not sure. Oh, like lan turtle.

No, I can picture it. Yeah, yummy. Prickly pears, right, which is a type of cactus. And he said that it turned his urine so red that it looked like blood. Okay, but I actually have some prickly pear candy at home. So I tried some yesterday and I'm yet to experience any red urine, but I thought I'd bring you all some. Oh, no, a bit of urine?

Or it's just a small vial James is getting at. I've got some prickly pear candies that I thought you might want to munch on if you feel like it. Oh, my God, they're delicious. And they're very red. They look a bit like Turkish delight, don't they? I'm a huge fan of the show and tell element of the podcast now. I really like James's experience corner. That's good for the listeners.

They taste a bit like fruit pastels, don't they? Yes, exactly like that. I'm really excited because I got these at Christmas and they've just been sat there because I didn't really want to eat them because they're made of cactus. Finally got an excuse to show good. He also used to eat sea turtles, but he had a preference for the ones that were grass fed.

Grass fed sea turtles. Is that an ethical preference or you know, you don't want the ones that are grain fed and kept in cages? Yeah, exactly. No, he just said that they're the best of that sort, both in largeness and in sweetness. So quantity and taste. And it's just quite amazing to imagine that this guy who was a pirate.

Let's remember. Was going around. Can I get grass fed turtle? He wasn't a very good pirate at first. His first act of piracy was an absolute disaster. So it was like the British government was giving him permission to take over Spanish ships, wasn't it? He was a bit more of a privateer,

a sort of licensed pirate than a Blackbeard. The Spanish would call him a pirate for sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. From their perspective. The Spanish would call him a lot of things, wouldn't they? Well, he and his fellow Buccaneers, they attacked a Spanish fort. That was very exciting.

They managed to take it over, but the townspeople had left with absolutely everything valuable. So it was a complete disaster. And lots of his voyages were failures, actually, financially, but he was always making observations, writing down recipes, and it was basically long distance book research that he was doing. It's not what you've sent him for, is it? I haven't got you any gold,

but I've come back with a Delia Smith-esque tone. So, well, Delia Smith actually used to be a pirate. It was a mercenary. She was a soldier of fortune in the 80s, but a lot of that was recipe collected, yeah. Another thing that William Dampier did was he was the first British sailor to reach Australia. He got there way before the first fleets got over there.

And weirdly, he has a few moments that we don't really give him the sort of acknowledgement for. There's this weird passage in his book where he's in the Galapagos, and he's looking at the turtles there, and he's saying, oh, they look a different breed, and I wonder if that's helping towards their mating and so on. Just writes a few random lines,

just sort of suggesting that there's sort of evolutionary benefit to the way that they're shaped, without naming that specifically. Oh, so he says these suit their environment because they look like this. Exactly, yeah. Which is just so Darwinian, and Darwin had the book. Nice.

He became very famous, which is, once his voyaging days were over, he went to dinner with Samuel Peeps. He lectured at the Royal Society, and the last bit of Galapagos travels is based on his journeys in part. Did he meet like a tribe of giants and all that stuff? That's the second book of Galapagos travels,

not the final one. A bit more normal, it just contains talking horses. Well, he was in South America, and he did see some horses there. He said, here they have several horses, but what is most worthy of note is a sort of sheep they have, which inhabitants call Conira de Terra. The creature is four foot and a half high,

and they're frequently ridden by two of the lustiest men of the area, he said. And he's almost certainly talking about llamas, we think. So he's one of the first people to see llamas from the West. And cool. What a life. It's very difficult when you read about him, because he was in many ways quite a bad guy.

Oh, he is a Spanish person talking. I've been talking to some of my friends in Madrid, and they do not go down well there. As anyone in that period, it was nuanced to say the least relationship with the natives that he met at various places and wrote some pretty awful things, for instance, about Australian Aboriginals.

As a leader as well, he was pretty widely disliked. So we should say that the thing maybe he's most famous for today is that he was also responsible for Robinson Crusoe, essentially, because Alexander Selkirk, who we think Robinson Crusoe was based on, was on his ship and hated him so much, or thought that he was very bad at maintaining the ship, and said, I think this ship's going to sink.

I'm not going to get on it until we fix it. And I think it was Dampier who said, no, the ship's fine. We can sail this ship. So was this halfway through a voyage, do you mean? Halfway through a voyage. So basically, they were going around Cape Horn, and this guy, Selkirk, said, don't go around Cape Horn. It's a terrible place to go around.

There's always storms, it's high winds, it's like the middle of hurricane season or whatever. We can't do that. And then they went, well, we're going to do it anyway. And so by the time they got through, all of the ships were a little bit bashed, and he was like, these are going to sink on the way home. Get me off here.

Get me to wherever the nearest island is. I want to go to the nearest island. And so they sent him to the nearest island. And as he got there, the other ship started to go away. And he's like, I've changed my mind. I've changed my mind. And they were like pretending they couldn't hear him. And so I was like, what, what?

Sorry. We love it. And I read Robinson Crusoe a year or two ago, and there's no mention at the beginning of it that he was a really annoying backseat driver. And it's very sympathetically presented into Facebook. Well, to be fair, he had a very good point, because the ship sank shortly afterwards,

and most of the crew died, and the rest ended up in prison. When the backseat driver turns out to be right. That's really frustrating. But didn't Selkirk then get picked up four years later on another ship that had damp year on it? Yeah, he did. Oh my god. So imagine that.

He's like, finally someone's got it. But then when he got back on that ship, he realized, and he was like, no, I want to be marooned again. And they eventually talked him around. As in he genuinely was. Yeah, that sounds like a joke, but yeah, he genuinely did say. Set me off. As they picked up Selkirk, they managed to find a Spanish fleet,

didn't they? And they managed to get a load of treasure from them, a load of booty, which meant Selkirk got a load of money, and he could retire when he got back to Britain. So he came home. He was very rich, but he couldn't quite readjust to society because he'd been on this island for however long, being a Robinson Crusoe guy.

And so he went to Scotland and spent 15 years living in a cave. Oh my god. Which feels to me like a missed sequel to Robinson Crusoe, doesn't it? Yeah. Robinson Crusoe lives in a cave. I think it's got all the promise of a disappointing second series.

I have to say. I like it like Robinson Crusoe. Yeah. Which is what I would call it. Nice. I like it. Well, you write books now. Thank you.

So Dampier, the first person in the OED to mention the word avocado, as we say it today. But before that, they had different ways of saying the word. So we kind of get it from the Spanish word. People would say Aguacarta or Aguacardo and stuff like that. You can see online a big list of all the early times when people mentioned this fruit. They start in 1562, go into the 17th century.

And in 1660, they talk about this poem that was written by Abraham Cowley, which mentions avocados. But they don't say what the poem is. None of the places say what the poem is. And that really intrigued me. I'm like, why are they glossing over this? So I found this poem. A fragrant leaf, the Aguacarta bears.

Her fruit in fashion of an egg appears with such a white and spermy juice it smells as represents moist life's first principles. I'd say that's a completely flawed description. Are we sure they don't want the avocado? I've never got white juice swelling out of my avocado. No spermy juice in your avocado. No, am I not leaving it long enough to ripen?

They had different types of avocado. So the one that we eat now is a hash avocado most of the time. Right. And this was an old kind of one that you would get. Some of them were white and egg shaped. I think the main crime there is rhyming swells with principles. That's what offends me the most apart from the spermy juice. Do you know there's a hash avocado board

with the official authorities on hash avocados, which is the ones that almost everyone eats today. And they have huge amounts of data on their website about avocado consumption, US based mainly. So is that why that guy was following me when I went to my local organic shop to buy some avocados? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Would you say it's very spermy?

It's quite spermy, very spermy. Too spermy. They released a bit of research recently that they found that avocado shoppers divided into several distinct tranches. There are people who buy no avocados first of all. They're not really interested in those people. No, quite.

They're moderate shoppers. Then they have mega shoppers who buy a lot of avocados. But above them, there's a top tier ultra shoppers. Wow. How many do you have to be going through to get to an ultra shopper level? I think it's achievable. I go through six a week.

Stop it. We do about the same in our house, yeah. I think you guys might be a new category. No, so ultra shoppers in America spend $100 a year on avocados. Oh, I spend way more than that. Well, there we go. Ultra shoppers go to the shop 183 times a year

and one trip in seven, they buy an avocado. Okay, well, I have a avocado, so I don't go to the shop. Oh my God, is a avocado named after avocados? I don't think so. Avocado, all these others avocados, isn't it? Why does everyone use this? That's avocado. It's all replacement products, isn't it?

We didn't have your pint of milk as an avocado. We didn't have a pint of milk. What you've got is a bit spermy. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's a Puerto Rican island where monkeys roam free, but the humans have to eat their meals in cages. It's like Planet of the Apes.

It's like a reverse zoo. Is it like Planet of the Apes? It's like both the things we just said. Yeah, it is like Planet of the Apes. The apes keep the humans in cages in Planet of the Apes. God, I always confuse it with 2001, a space odyssey. Sorry, I haven't seen Planet of the Apes. Sorry, we're getting sidetracked.

Yeah, so this is, it is like a reverse zoo, sort of, in that it's an island called Decaio Santiago off the coast of Puerto Rico. And it's a research center. It was started in the 1930s. Basically, it's full of monkeys, and humans are not allowed to go there unless they are researchers. And it's part of the discipline of it.

You really can't disturb the monkeys. It has to be like they're living completely wildly. They're resus macaques. And so, if you're going to go and eat a meal, you can't just do it out in the open where you could get in their way, if they want to, you know, cross your path. So they sit in a cage and eat their meal.

It's pretty funny. And the reason for it as well is because this is such a deadly island to humans, if you go there. The reason it's a deadly island is because the monkeys there have herpes, a kind of herpes. Sorry, it's a deadly island because the monkeys don't have herpes. Darling, I'm about to tell you there's good news and bad news.

Like what's the good news? The good news is I didn't catch it from a person. Does it count as cheating? It's not from a person. Well, that brings me onto the bad news. I have a question. How am I going to catch herpes from a monkey? Do I have to use the same toilet seat as them?

Or what? Well, no. Why is it dangerous? It's dangerous because they might use you as a toilet. So that's the problem. They can transfer herpes via their urine. So if it makes contact with you, they can transfer it by their feces.

And you know, resus macaques love to throw feces at people. So, you know. So if you do happen to catch herpes and you need to go to your partner and say that you've got it, you can say, I caught it off a monkey throwing poo at me. Exactly. There's a legit reason. Someone right now, I bet,

is dealing with this dilemma on the way home. You better hope you just film holiday to India because like me and you, Andy, once both held a koala, didn't we? And they're riddled with chlamydia. Yeah. So that would be a reasonable excuse for that as well. You could come home with all the STIs after a tour,

the lame adults, the local animals. And the gonorrhea is from a millipede that I met in San Diego. Really nice legs. Really nice legs. Just to wrap up, the reason that the cages are in place is because for that reason, if you're eating your food, the monkeys will desperately want to try and get it off of you. And so the cages are to protect you from getting herpes

while you're eating your meal. Okay. The story of how they got there is amazing. It's really cool. So they were brought over from India in 1938. And it was for scientific purposes, wasn't it? There was a scientist called Clarence Carpenter, which is a great name,

who was responsible for bringing that, wanted to study their social groups and such like. But the second one war was about to break out. So this ship with 500 monkeys on it, this must have been, I want to see a movie about the journey because they wanted to go through the Suez Canal, but they couldn't because tensions were high

and the war was close to breaking out. So they had to go around the southern tip of Africa instead. And it turned into a much longer journey. The voyage lasted way longer than it was meant to. It lasted nearly 50 days. And he was on board with them all the time. He was. And have you seen the one photo of him on board?

No. It's sort of, he's wearing a bathing suit. It's quite odd. I don't know if he was going for swims in the Pacific on the way over, but yeah, Clarence Carpenter. Begging for herpes. I love, that was a movie. I'd love to see it as sort of like a William Dampier

pirate sort of trying to take over this ship that just turns out to have 500. Oh wow. So we've got the two stories kind of weaving in and out of each other and it ends with a pirate attacking the monkeys and catching herpes with the most ambitious crossover in movie history. Gandhi was very much against them, wasn't he? What against them taking the monkeys?

Against them taking the monkeys. In Life magazine, there's some articles when it was established. And in one of them, they talked about Gandhi preaching against the exportation of India's sacred rhesus monkeys. Yeah. And eventually they banned it. But not for quite a few years after Gandhi had died. But yeah.

They used to have people living on there. So the first caretakers of the monkeys were this couple called the Tomolins. And they kept one of them as a pet called Pijita. And yet the rest of them, well, I don't know what's better, being a pet of two humans and stroked constantly and fussed over by them or just being led to live your life. Don't know.

Left to live your life. But anyway, they- That's a really philosophical question, isn't it? Isn't it? Are you happy with servitude or would you like freedom? Yeah. Yeah. When you put it like that, it's actually quite easy.

I know, but the bars of the cage are made of gold. And you know, there's a nice bed in the cage. And yeah, but then on the other side, freedom. Yeah. Who of us can say what bars surround us? Well, it's, you know, what compromises we make. I can say what bars surrounds me most nights. So I think the monkeys all had this conference, this chat,

and they nominated Pijita. But Michael Tomlin sounded quite fun. He would apparently regularly swim the one kilometre channel back to the mainland would drink a fifth of vodka. As you don't know, what was a fifth of? Well, that's what Eminem says in that stand, is it? He goes, I just drank a fifth of vodka.

Dare me to drive? I think he says that. Who says that? Eminem? That's what he thinks so. So it's obviously enough that you're going to be drunk. I can't believe this guy, Michael Tomlin, is cooler than we are in that he gets Eminem slang.

He's on a monkey island. He's way cooler than we are. What are you talking about? I think American listeners will be writing in droves very shortly. We'll play exactly how much for this. Just so we're clear, in the UK, we don't use the Pascima. And this wasn't the 1930s.

Anyway, apparently it wasn't even vodka. People just said that because he was Russian. He actually preferred rum and coke. So anyway, he'd swim over and then swim back, presumably hammered to the island where his wife was looking after the pet monkey. These days, there are 2,000 Reese's macaques on Koa Santiago. But also, I find this so creepy,

almost all of them have tattoos. Sorry, that's not the creepy bit. It's a bit creepy. It's a bit strange. But they haven't chosen to get a tattoo, have they? That's even creepier, arguably. Is it? I don't know what's creepier.

What are they tattoos of? Scientific stuff. Does my heart run? Yeah, sorry, I forgot. Scientific stuff. Yeah, like a... Equals MC squared. And the speed of light in the vacuum is...

Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. No, sorry, that's not the creepy bit. The creepy bit is that the island is also home to a collection of 3,300 monkey skeletons. Oh, okay. You mean the dead monkeys? The dead monkeys. Well, yeah, obviously they're the dead monkeys.

But what they didn't do is bring in the monkeys and say, what would they like around them? What kind of furnishings could we have? Like get a fish tank. Skull, often a skull. No, you never have the dead fish in a fish tank. No, you never have a giant dead fish swimming in and out. But it is creepy.

Okay, so the question is, why did they not take away the skeletons or bury them or whatever? And I guess, well, they still need them to study them as in such a long running research centre now that you can study generations going back and you can obviously study the bones of the monkeys that lived there before.

But I think it would be creepy if they had a cool mausoleum full of all the monkey skeletons. But they don't have that. No, it doesn't. Yeah, I don't think mausoleum makers are allowed on the island. I don't think that research project's gonna get funding. But that's a good scene for the Dampier Monkey Movie where that's where the treasure's buried.

Yeah. It's like at the Goonies, you know, the cave. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So anyway, some food for thought. Yeah. Yeah.

I wanna see these sick tattoos that the monkeys have. Einstein with his tongue out on his bicep. They do, I mean, it is a really important island because they do discover stuff. We haven't just done monkeys there and sort of forgotten about it. And I think it's sort of like a rite of passage if you're a monkey researcher.

I reckon if you said to your monkey researcher mates, hey, I'm doing a Chiosantiago research project, then you'd be the coolest kid in town. So some stuff they've discovered recently is that after any kind of trauma, scientists now think that we probably age by apparently up to eight years. And this is based on...

Oh, my God. It's a spurious link, but that's what scientists do. It's this is based on Hurricane Maria, that awful hurricane in 2017. It killed a lot of people in Puerto Rico. Didn't kill any of the monkeys, but totally destroyed the island. So all the trees are blown down.

There's no shade. The average temperature on the island rose by eight degrees. Oh, wow. It's rough. Because they take blood from the monkeys all the time for scientific reasons, they had the samples before that they could compare to the samples afterwards.

And they looked at like lots of markers in the blood and the immune system and the proteins. And they found they showed signs of aging by about two years just from that hurricane. Wow. Because they were stressed about it. What in humans live much longer? In human years, apparently.

There's another monkey island, which is in Liberia, which is a bit sad because it was a monkey island that didn't have any natural resources. So the monkeys there had to be fed daily by the researchers. So they would bring bananas over every single day. But then in the 1990s, there was the war. And as a result, the research unit fled.

And these monkeys were just left on their own. And so they had no one to feed them, except one guy called Joseph Thomas, who for the last 40 years has been going twice a day to this island with bananas and feeding these beautiful monkeys who come into the water to him. And he knows them by names like Mabel and so on.

Mabel and so on. Mabel, Edith, Prudence, Aggie, you know, all the way. Did you hear how Joseph Thomas was recruited for the job? I don't think so. So this was in the 70s. And this was another research island. It was set up by a woman called Betsy Brockman. And she was trying to find a vaccine for Hep B.

And she actually did come away with a vaccine for Hep B. Although she's since said it's actually a bad idea to test on animals. But at the time, she set this research island up in the 70s. And I think it was her who recruited Joseph Thomas because she went to him and said, I really want to learn to play tennis. You're good at tennis.

I also need someone to help me on my monkey research. And they made a deal where if he taught her tennis, he would work on her monkey research. Now, I know that sounds great. He's not a very one-sided exchange, yeah. I'll tell you what, we'll do a deal. If you do all this work, I'll also let you do all this work. It was basically that.

You know, there is an island where you've got lots of potential tennis partners you can go to. Monkey tennis, anyone? I've been to a monkey temple in, what was it, in Nepal. And that's another place where there's just monkeys everywhere. They're just kind of running around and stuff. And when I was there, you kind of, you have to keep hold of your stuff all the time

because they saw a monkey stealing someone's mobile phone and their bag and then running to the top of a huge building. And then the guys who were kind of in charge had to come with a big stick and prop him. And then someone climbed up to get the mobile phone and stuff. Do you know, this is something Ethan, our fellow researcher, told me yesterday that they know that mobile phones are more valuable than, let's say, something less valuable.

I don't know if they know an iPhone is more valuable than a Nokia, but they did a study at another monkey temple. Do you think it would be completely safe if you went there, Anna, because your phone was made in 1983? I've got nothing desirable for the monkeys. You actually wouldn't recognise your phone as a phone. They did this amazing study over, so they filmed monkeys for 270 days in Bali at this one temple.

And they realised that when monkeys take something off you, they negotiate with you for food in exchange for it. So they take your phone and then if you give them two bananas, they give it back, whatever. And by watching them, they realised that, you know, the higher the value of the item, if they're still on a phone rather than a camera case, then they'll barter for more bananas.

Wow. That's really clever. It's really good, isn't it? That's incredible. Terrifying. Have you guys heard of Snake Island? Oh, yes. Where is that? Off the coast of Brazil. And it's called Ilha da Coimada Grande.

And it's completely dominated by a special kind of snake, a special kind of snake, a particular kind of snake. They're golden lancehead pit vipers. Oh, gosh, they sound scary and dangerous, maybe. They are dangerous. They're venomous. Their venom melts the flesh that they bite into. And they evolved venom to incapacitate and kill the seabirds

that land on the island. They are not nice snakes. They can climb trees, which helps them to eat the birds that they love to feed on. And on this island, there is about one snake per square metre. Wow. What? So, yeah. Oh, my God.

A lot of them will be in the same square metre, though, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Even so. It's not one every square metre, but nonetheless. They're not perfectly arranged like on a chess board. They play with huge island wide game of snakes and ladders. Yeah, yeah, it's very hard to win. It just sounds completely terrifying.

Why would you stay there if you were a bird? My great. I don't think they're reading TripAdvisor. I think, you know, I'll risk it. Like, they're just flying and they end up there. But get back. Tell the others. I've been to a rabbit island.

Have you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Near Hiroshima. It's like just an island full of rabbits. Wow. It's not a research island. There's just loads of rabbits there. In Sydney, where I live,

there's, we used to have a rabbit problem down in the northern nature of Palm Beach and used to drive down at night and you'd put the headlights on of the car at high beam and you would just see what were in the daytime, empty fields, just packed like they're at Glastonbury watching. It's really, honestly, it's quite scary because you walk down the street in these,

in this Japanese island and the rabbits just follow you because they used to be in fed by tourists. Oh, no. And so you sort of turn round and there's 20 rabbits behind you and you kind of walk a bit faster and you turn around and there's 30 rabbits behind you.

That's really, really scary. That is a good horror film. What STI did you get up there? Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 14th century Italy, if you wanted to insult a nearby city,

you would send all your prostitutes to take part in a running race around their walls. I didn't have any prostitutes. Well, you've just been in a war, probably with that city. You probably picked up a few on the way, is the truth. You didn't know I was into that.

So I saw this in a book called Running Through the Ages by Edward Sears and we're talking so middle ages Italy. You've got loads of different areas owned by different people. So you've got Papal States, you've got Sicily, but then you've got places like Florence,

Pisa, Siena, Luca, Milan, Genoa, all those kind of city states, you would say. And from around the 13th century, for about 400 years, we seem to have this really odd tradition of whenever you're battling with another city or you've beaten them and you want to celebrate that or you just want to stick it to them,

you would have a running race around their town and it's so weird. And there were lots of different versions of this, but one of the biggest insults was you would get a load of mules or donkeys and then you would get all your sex workers either from your city or ones that you picked up through the war

and you would just get them to race around. Fine. It did sound a bit like, because armies, as you say, they would gather the sex workers and they would bring them along for the battles even. You know, if the armies were facing off, they would have them do races sort of in the front

and they said, that's why they're here, darling. Do you think this is all fake news? I do. This is not happening at all. The wives turned up to surprise their husbands one day. We came for the races. Shit. The point of it, as far as I can tell,

is that it was a big collective screw you to the other city that you're... That's it. Yeah, yeah. And so they would do loads of different things. So one of the things they did, they would gather outside the city, so you gathered outside the opposing city state,

then you would find the oldest tree in the area and you cut it down, which is a symbolic castration, apparently. I know. And then they put the tree on a wagon and wheel it up to the city, like just really up close, like, look, that was your tree.

Look, this is your penis. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then they would go to the stump of the tree and they would start minting coins on the stump. What? Okay, so I know. This is completely...

The base of your castrated penis. We're going to make coins. And then basically, what they were saying was, we're going to change the currency that you operate in. We're minting coins. And some of the coins would, I think, depict a picture of someone minting a coin on your tree. Yeah, but it was this whole...

They'd show... I think they'd show them being vanquished, wouldn't they? Or they'd show humiliating scenes for the enemy, these coins. But the tree thing does imply that there's a lot of explaining to do when you show them the tree in the city. There you go.

I'm saying, this is your oldest tree, guys. And they go, oh, is it? Okay. We couldn't tell which was your oldest tree. We counted the rings. We think it's pretty old. It was your tallest tree, but that might have been a different breed.

Actually, that was... Shut up, shut up! And then one of them says, okay, so, and then you have to say, no, but metaphorically, it represents us castracing you. I don't know how upset you're going to be. Also, are you yelling to the top of the guys or what? It's a hell of a complicated conversation.

Sending messages on paper, aeroplanes over the wall. Look, forget the penis thing. We're talking about the coins now. It doesn't matter about the penis thing, all right? Move on. All right, raise the prostitutes. Yeah, at least the prostitutes. Well, the thing with the prostitutes

is it was slightly more literal in that they would often race around land in the city even. And so that you're basically saying, we can do what we want around here. You know what? You think that you are in this place, we can run our prostitutes. I read an account of the prostitute races

not being just for when you're sieging and at battle. You would do it in generally around town. So like, there would be kings who would use them to do it as a display just to show a sort of minority of society doing something a bit derogatory. Humiliating. Yeah, just to sort of push the point of like,

I'm the king and I'm running this place. And what's interesting about it is, so there was one that was done where the race would end up at St. Peter's Square. In Rome. Yeah. And so it was done there. This is in the 1500s.

You don't get that these days. So I don't know if you've been to St. Peter's Square, but. The Pope is not going to like that. So this is 1503. And it wasn't just prostitutes who were part of the race. It was, you know, elderly people were in it, children were in it as well. They would all be naked,

but the prostitutes would be wearing underwear. It's very odd. Underwear, very racy in those days, wasn't it? Underwear, I think. More racy than having your genitals hanging out. I believe because a lot of people didn't really wear underwear. I'm going off memory here,

but a lot of people didn't wear underwear, but prostitutes would wear them because it's, you know, a nice bit of scantily cladded saucer than nude, you know. 00:33:28,160 --> 00:33:28,720 Yeah. Can't be. It depends on context.

It does. But, you know, Adam and Eve, just innocent, pure, first people alive. Adam and Eve wearing a kind of, it's called thongs made of leaves. Suddenly sexy. Yeah. And that was the problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Using the snake as a garter. Yeah. That's a sexy thing now. Well, it depends if it's one of those pip diapers. Yeah. Everybody's fucking melting.

So they weren't even hot. They were just naked. Not even half naked, because they were there. People do seem to be described as half naked a lot doing it. Sometimes. And it's all too, it's all just about insulting and humiliating, isn't it?

And I read quite an interesting description of why this was so common in Italy, these, this taunting. And it's because, obviously, Italy wasn't Italy the country. Until extremely recently, it was just loads of city-states. And so warfare was quite different to a lot of other places

because it was just city-states against each other. So it wouldn't be this, like, lots of action on these big battlefields and seizing lots of territory. It was pretty much just sitting there besieging a city. So you just sat doing nothing for months on end. So you had to think of other things to do to make them feel bad.

Like a sports day. Is it sports day? Egg and a spoon race. Bring out the prostitutes. They should do a sack race, because you're trying to sack the city. That's where it comes from. That feels like a trick you play as a besieged city.

Persuade them all to climb into sacks. Oh, right. It was at the original Trojan horse. That's the Trojan sack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 5,000 sacks. Been left out in front. The other really interesting thing

in the source that you sent round, James, was about the ripples. So I didn't know if you get, like, the word rippled that we used today. So rippled is in, you know, like, rude and raunchy, a bit of a rippled joke. Rippled, back then, were people in, like, low people in the army, seems like.

And they would do these races with the prostitutes, or I think they were sort of pimps as well sometimes. So they were, I guess, tasked with sourcing the prostitutes sometimes. And they seemed to do kind of all the low stuff that other people, like, the knights wouldn't want to do. So they would have to drop their pants in front of the enemy and shout swear words.

Well, it's very hard to drop a suit of armor. It's like don't grieve. You have to do it all on the shoulders. So annoying going for Lou. So they'd shout swear words at the enemy and they would, they'd scale up the walls, the responsibility was scaling up the walls because they didn't really get given many good weapons.

And the pillaging, a lot of the pillaging, which is a bit un-gentlemanly, the ripples would do that. They were kind of like your first, they were like cannon fodder slash first line of attack, right? Yes, yeah. But yeah, really interesting. And I did find it really interesting that they would be the pillaging

because the knights couldn't really pillage because you were a knight, so you couldn't really do any of that stuff if they could go in and they'd grab a load of stuff and then just gamble it away, wouldn't they? Yeah, which I'm surprised because I think what it smoothed over, because I know that knights returned from warfare

with a lot of stuff that they'd stolen. I reckon they had a sharp word with the ripples after they'd done the pillaging and said, all right, hand some of that over, right? I'll show you right now. And surely. The ripples were nicknamed the knights of shit. They were just, yeah,

they're just absolute base grunts in the army, yeah. Darling, I've got a job. I'm a knight, isn't it? You're a knight. You definitely put the end of that in your business card. The word knight would be very big. The Yipang Palace is in China, and there would be people, soldiers in armor

who would kind of be sieging the palace and the people inside the palace would taunt them Why do you think they might do that? To come towards the gates? Is it because they're taunting them to get to the point where they pour the boiling oil on their heads? It's close to that, actually. Okay.

It's quite close. So the people inside are taunting the besieging. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is getting them close, right? Okay, so it's either going to be like spikes come up through the grounds, or they're going to then say, the tree is actually that way.

You've got miles to run. That's good. The wearing iron armor. Oh, it's a magnet. It's a magnet. What? The gate. I kind of thought that was a joke.

The gate is a magnet. No, not strong enough to what sucked them in. This is what the stories of the times say, that their gates were made of lodestone, which attracted iron, and so whenever the soldiers came near it, they would kind of be all over the place. They couldn't move properly and stuff like that.

And so the people in the palace would go, ah, fuck you. You can't even come close, can you? God, so could you wake up in the morning one day, go outside your castle? Yeah, and a nighttime commando army who tried to take over and just plastered around the home. Every morning you just scraped the nights off the door, yeah.

It's not sticking them directly to it, which was actually your comedic version of that. Actually, it just makes it more difficult for them to run around. Oh, wow. Would it feel a bit soupy? That's a suggestion. I mean, but no, this actually happened. You know, when you put two pencil rubbers

and your face and it's like a weird force in between. But there's no way this Chinese propagandist who was making this up without a musical or whatever, there's no way they actually had magnets strong enough that an entire army starts crumbling. I gotta say, I didn't think lodestone was a real thing. Well, you can get magnetic magnetites, for instance. What Chinese people would call lodestone in these accounts,

we think probably was magnetite. Oh, okay. But it's interesting, then, if that came out as a rumor of being truth, because then if you were approaching the castle and you had your armor on, you might take it off thinking, I don't want to get sucked up all the walls.

You'd start just feeling a bit awkward about whatever you were doing. You know, when you can't move anything right, you know, just because you're feeling embarrassed. So you'd start thinking, oh, well, this is probably the magnetite making me move awkwardly and then move more awkwardly. What?

Like a placebo effect. Like a nocebo. Yeah, like a nocebo. Although I do like Dan's version better, which is you're worried about it. You take your armor off and then you just go tight. That's clever. Oh, you must have read that story,

but if anyone didn't read that story a few weeks ago at Hadrian's Wall, it was one of my favorite few stories in years. Please look it up, because you need to see the visuals. But basically, archaeologists were digging around at Hadrian's Wall recently, and they found this volunteer actually,

volunteer retired biochemist called Dylan Herbert, found a 40 centimeter wide block of stone with an engraving on it, which is a flawless cock and balls. Like it looks stunning. The best a 12 year old boy could master. And underneath it, it has the word secondenus cacor, which is slang secondenus the shitter,

just perfectly written there, 1700 years old. And that's there, secondenus, that's how he's remembered. And the BBC article reported that the experts who uncovered this believed the phallic image alongside the quote adds to the force of the written insults. Undoubtedly. Imagine that secondenus, like we don't know anything about this person, right?

We know one thing. That is the most successful bit of insulting in history. That's the dream of when you insult someone. Poor guy. The guy, actually the guy who found it, sorry, it sounds so fun finding it as well. This old guy said, only when I removed the mud did I realize the full extent

of what I'd uncovered, and I was absolutely delighted. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that a member of the Romanov royal family, Prince Rostislav Romanov, lives in Hastings as a painter. His friends and wife refer to him as the artist formerly known as Prince.

Brilliant. That's very funny. It's a wonderful little gag. It doesn't work, does it? Because he's never been a prince. Well, the Romanovs were gone a long time before he was born. But they were, absolutely. But he and they still are trying to sort of suggest

that maybe one day they can return, so they're keeping the titles and they keep it alive. Okay, so is he technically a prince? Does he style himself as a prince? Yeah, he does. I think he does interviews as a prince. He talks about the royal family in exile. They have, as part of the Romanov surviving family ahead,

who would be the heir apparent to any return that would be made of the family. So yeah, I would say he is a prince. So he was born overseas from Russia. All of the Romanov family had to leave, and as a result, none of them have ever lived within Russia. Apart from the ones who were brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks, of course.

Yes, yeah, they're still there. It's still leaving, isn't it? Nowadays, he finds himself living in Hastings, where he is an artist. You can go on his Instagram account. I quite like his art, actually. It's pretty fun. And yeah, and he does interviews occasionally

to talk about his relationship with the family and what's going to happen one day and how they might return and so on. Is he plotting a comeback? It's worth a try? I would say it's actually not worth a try. I have to say, I would not be wanting to invade Russia right now, I don't think,

as an artist living in Hastings. I wouldn't back my chances. Well, here's the thing. There are attempts occasionally to bring them back into power. So we were just talking about monkey islands. Someone actually tried to set up a Romanov island. And this was the Pacific Island of Kiribati.

And the idea was that they wanted to take over this island, turn it into a sort of a resort. But they said, could we revitalize the royal family and have them rule over here? So they tried to have monkey island. It was a Russian MP. Yeah, he was called Anton Bakov. And he was quite critical of the Putin government.

And Putin said, Bakov! Yeah, and he wanted three islands. They were uninhabited. So they would have been a great place to kickstart the whole Romanov dynasty again. And the islands were called Maldon, Starbuck, and Millennium. Starbuck. I know.

I don't know why. I mean, maybe they're... Moby Dick thing or the restaurant chain. You would think Moby Dick thing. And also, can we just pick up on Anna calling Starbucks a restaurant chain? Says a lot about your standards. Oh, Anna's taken me to a restaurant tonight.

Oh, great! I wonder which one. Just seven coffees for dinner. Yeah. Do they have? No, he wanted to make kind of a micro nation. But I think the Kiribati government refused. They said, that sovereignty is not for sale. Well, he was also talking to the Gambia,

and apparently had support of Yaya Jameh, who was in charge of Gambia at the time. And that was to construct some artificial islands off the coast of the Gambia. Do we know what his plan is after... I see that that bit is easy enough. You go to a tiny island where no one lives, and you declare yourself a czar.

How are you going to then go from there to ruling Russia? You've got to have a base. I would argue that perhaps his long term might not even be to take over Russia. It's just to have the Romanov Empire back. Oh, it's a bit sad. I imagine if you called back the Romanovs and showed them some crappy little rock in the Pacific

and said, this is what your empire is. He also bought some land beside the Vatican in Montenegro. So he's trying it in loads of different countries. Okay. Nice. I like that. It's like risk, you know? You just plot yourself, and it looks like nothing's going on.

And then suddenly a couple of moves, and you've taken over the world. I don't believe you ever won a game of risk. Dan is playing risk control and negotiating for three uninhabited islands in Kiribati. Yeah. Prince Philip linked to the Romanovs. Yeah. In fact, so linked to the Romanovs,

because when his parents got married, Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was at the wedding, and his great aunt Ella became a nun. Prince Philip's great aunt Ella became a nun, and after her death, became a saint. And they were always rather proud that they had a saint in the family.

I think it's fair enough. Yeah, that's quite a skill. Do we know what were her miracles? Saintly moves. I don't know what her miracles were. No, no, no. That's all I know. But Philip was used recently, wasn't he, just before his death,

for a blood sample to confirm the identity of what was it? It was... Bones of the Romanovs were contested, and the scientists were trying to work out whether they really were the Romanovs family. So they were in Katrinberg, and they were attacked by the Bolsheviks, and they killed all of this family,

but there was two of them who were supposedly breathing when they took the bodies away, and there's a suggestion that those two had escaped. Now, when they found the bodies, they found all of them apart from these two bodies, and they tested them, and they realized they were the Romanovs,

so that kind of gave fire to the conspiracy theory. But then they found another two bodies nearby, and that's the recent test that they did, and they found that they were related to the Romanovs. Because one of the supposed princesses lived for many decades, didn't she, and always insisted that she was the surviving daughter? Oh, there was a poem, it wasn't there.

Anastasia, so... Yeah, you don't want the kids' film. I actually didn't know about that film, but Anastasia was one of these two people, and there was a hoax of someone called Anna Randerson who claimed to be her... Yeah, that's it. That's who I'm thinking. And she got really famous, I think.

Yeah, she did, yeah. But it turned out she wasn't. No. It is strange being descended from defunct royalty, isn't it? It's a very, very strange life. There was an Oscar in Newsweek saying that London is actually the hot destination for most... Yes, heaving.

It's heaving with awesome words. Throw a brick. Well, I guess it's because they're like... We happen to have retained a royal family. Most of the other countries sort of haven't, in Europe. And it's also one of the really flashy royal families. I think British people don't appreciate how high investment the British royal family is compared with the other European royal families

or cycled, cycled, or African families. They're so humble, yeah. They've got a little cottage. But there are only about half a dozen monarchies left in Europe, I think. And the British one is the sort of biggest ticket one. It's a biggie. Yeah, it's a biggie. And people have been coming here since people started deposing royal families.

It obviously became very trendy from like pre-Second World War and then under communism, of course, in Eastern Europe. They didn't love having the kings and queens there. I think King Zog of Albania was stationed at the Ritz for a long time after he was forced into exile. Speaking of Zog, there is a crown prince of the Albanians today. That is Lika Anwar Zog Reza Badawin Mziziwe Zogu.

And this is the person that should the Albanian royal family ever come back, he will take over. It's quite a good name, isn't it? I'd love to see him turning up at, you know, customs basically and opening his passport and then opening the next wing of his purse. Do you think he has a concertina thing? He has to wind that little handle.

But it's really interesting because Anwar, part of his name, is named after Anwar Sabat. And Reza is named after Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who was the last Shah of Iran. In Iran, yeah. And so he's basically taken all of these names from all the different deposed people and then put them into his name.

Wow, like he has his parents have. He basically lives in Tehran or anyway, capital of Albania and he has a little royal residence. It's quite a nice house, but it's not a mansion. It's not a palace. And when he opens his gate, he has a little yard there. And inside the yard, it's all the unwanted statues from the last, you know, 100 years that they got rid of

when communism fell. So there's like a statue of Hodja and a statue of Lenin and Stalin and stuff like that. It's funny that he's got them as the... Well, they're like, who's gonna want these? And they looked at his name and they're like, oh, he'll want them. And it's kind of, that's kind of sad, isn't it? Because in a way, he's the final statue, you know,

he's sort of purposeless. One day he'll just walk through the garden and freeze, won't he? Oh, my God. That's a nice fairy tale. That's really good. Yeah, I really like, do you know of Princess Kamatari of Burundi? So she moved to France in the 1970s and she did this because her father was assassinated

and then the king of Burundi was assassinated in 1972. So she fled, she went to France, where she became the first ever black supermodel in France. And there might have been others, but she was really the first one who was going on the front of magazines. Super famous. Yeah, and so on.

And she says that obviously it was her connection to the royal family that got her the gig because the magazines at the time were basically only putting on blonde hair, blue eye models. But she was brought on as a princess. So she said, you know, I could have been black or blue or a crocodile. They would have put me on because I was a princess.

And then people thought she was so beautiful that she became an actual model. So she did that for years and years and years. But then she moved back to Burundi because she thought, you know what? I'm going to run for president. So she set up a big campaign where she was going to try and become president of the country.

And I love that one of her priorities as the presidential candidate was to bring back the monarchy. Well, that's good if you're open about it, I think. Yeah, so if you're obviously campaigning for it. I was just wondering what the weirdest fate of a descendant was. And I was reading about the daughter of Romanian King Michael I who had to abdicate in 1947. She's called Irina Walker.

And in 2014, she was done for staging cockfights. Really? That's her like now. Oh my God. So when you say staging, you've just been putting them on. You don't mean like fixing them. No, but I think they're very often fixed. Yeah, that's another level of illegality.

Not only were you doing a cockfight. It wasn't even fair. She's very successful at it, it sounded like. She used to charge spectators $20 each. She lives in Oregon. She lives in Irrigan in Oregon. Brilliant. Stop it.

Good stuff. And what's her name? Irina? Irina. Irina in Irrigan in Oregon. And yeah, she charges people to watch Rooster's fight with knives attached to their legs. And the winners will get up to 18 grand. The Greek royal family, they were abolished in 1974. Okay.

So they were exiled overseas. And one of the princes, Prince Nicolaus of Greece, was discovered in 1995, working under a pseudonym as a production assistant for Fox News. Really? The channel. And yeah, so he'd been working there as this production assistant.

And the only reason he was outed is because they were doing a story about his brother, Prince Nicolaus' brother, getting married. And they saw their standing as one of the groomsmen, their production assistant. That's amazing. What are you doing here? Oh my God, that's incredible.

Yeah. I was reading about Crown Prince Otto of the Austro-Hungarian 00:52:02,080 --> 00:52:03,440 He would have been the Crown Prince of it. Okay. Is he current? Is he alive? He's not.

He died in 2011. At the age of, I think about 99, he was really at old when he died. So the Austro-Hungarian Emperor was dissolved when he was, I think about seven years old. But he was officially the King of Hungary in Bohemia, Grand Prince of Transylvania. That's a good one.

It is a pretty good one. His name was Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatis Ludwig Guy N. Pius Ignatius. This is that Jacob Riesmug. Can I just say Maria in there is a weird one, isn't it? This is. I noticed that.

I think I didn't read the full thing when I was... I just can't be pasted in it. And when you read it out, it's like, surprise to me. Well, maybe that was their excuse as well. Also, I didn't fully read this, but we... But also he had Karl Max in his name. Karl Max.

Oh, really? Yes, yeah, yeah. But he, so he was, you know, seven years old, the Empire is dissolved, which he's the Crown Prince of technically. So, and he had to kind of rebuild his life. And he, you know, he learned seven languages. He became an MEP, which I find interesting.

Really? God, that was a fool from grace, isn't it? You're going to be Prince of an MEP. That's a big ballot as well, isn't it? Yeah. When you've got all of his name on. He actually got the votes of about 17 different candidates because they thought they were very good people.

I'm going to vote for Maria. And I love this bit of his history and in his life. So he had a really interesting life. He helped organize the Pan-European Picnic of 1989, which is a little known bit of the end of the Cold War. And it was on the border between Austria and Hungary. So you've got, you know, free market west on one side and communist design on in the east.

And thousands of people came and sort of gathered there to have a kind of cross-border picnic, as it were. And then actually 600 East Germans just moved into Austria. They just sort of fled across the boundary. What, like during the picnic kind of thing? Like, can I borrow your ketchup? Oh, I'm here now. Oh, sorry.

I was just running away from my wasp. 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 were said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shrybland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast.ky.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website. No such thing as a fish.com.

All of the previous episodes are sitting up there waiting to be listened to. We've also got links to the final leg of our nerd immunity tour up there. Go see if we're coming to a city near you. And if we are, come along. It's an awesome night, and we'd love to see you. Otherwise, come back next week.

We'll be back. Another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.