No Such Thing As A Fish - 446: No Such Thing As A Ninja Wearing Clogs

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Live from Glasgow, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss spiders in space, chickens in clogs, and famous physicists in films. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week and I'm coming to you live from Glasgow! My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number one and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1907 a man named Charles W. Aldrieve won a huge bet simply by walking 1,500 miles on water. I've gone for the mysterious fact! Was that a bet with Jesus?

Was it a bet with Jesus? Yeah, who got further? No, this is the guy here. So just for the people in the room, this is him, Charles Aldrieve. Aldrieve was such a hero. He was nicknamed the human water spider and he basically had a career which just evolved going around walking on water and crowds absolutely ate it up and this was 1907 and there was a big bet and he stood to gain $5,000 which was obviously way more at the time. He was walking from Cincinnati to New Orleans and he had to do it but every step had to be on water and he had these special shoes which were massive obviously, about four feet long. Apparently it took him five years to learn how to turn properly. Really? It was a full, he was well trained.

It was described as kind of like walking through mud the way that he was propelling himself forward. So he had, as the listener will have to picture it, but it's a sort of like a long boat of a shoe and he would wear a Wellington boot before he put his foot in and then he would put a sort of watertight sort of elastic around it so that water couldn't get in. So if he flipped over, he couldn't get out of there. It was just, he was stuck. Very dangerous. But he was a very dangerous guy, like he was a showman so he used to do things like take a stick of dynamite out of his back and he would light his cigar with the dynamite and then chuck it into the water and giant shooting 20 metre tall foot waves would go into the air on the back of it. Cool dude. He was incredible.

It was weird that he was so into this very specific trick for his entire life, like three decades basically. So he claimed in 1898 he was actually going to walk across the Atlantic Ocean which would have been a much better fact if he had actually done it. I mean it's unbelievable he thought he could do this. He was planning to walk to Paris, I think because he wanted to walk to the Paris Exposition or something but he said he was inspired to do this when he was giving a demonstration of his walking on water shoes on a beach in Florida and he got sucked out to sea by a current and the boat that went to rescue him capsized so they couldn't rescue him and everyone was like, oh god we've lost him, he's gone forever.

And he's like, I've already done half a mile, I might as well do the rest. Well he went, he got dragged out to sea, you know, a mile or two and once the wind had died down he was seen mounting the horizon and walking back towards the beach on the sea and he thought, god if I survive that I reckon I could do the whole ocean. His idea was that he would walk along the water and whenever there was like a big swell of a wave he would let it bring him up and then he would kind of ski down the end of the wave and then just wait for them to come. But you say it's like, you know, it's an impossible thing but someone has done that.

There's a guy called Remy Bricker from France. I bet he was indeed bricking it for most of the film. Sorry he was, but he walked from Tenerife to Trinidad on boat. It was 1980s, it was 1988 and he survived. Remy Bricker, the French guy, he survived by eating plankton, he claimed. So the Guardian said that. If a blue whale eats plankton it kind of just opens its mouth and just lets it go in. Is that what he was doing?

Exactly, it was. He was French so he probably cooked them very brilliantly as well along the way and he had these polyester skiing floats. He was doing the same thing basically. He did suffer extreme hunger and vision problems as he tried to cross the Atlantic. He did 40 days. But then Remy Bricker said, OK I've done the Atlantic on water. I'm going to go for the Pacific.

And when asked why, I just love this answer, OK, it's so French. He said, in this life I have flesh and bone. I know our time goes very quickly. In eternity our time is one second. In this one second I will use my time to realise my dream. And one second later he drowned. Well he failed, he absolutely failed. Despite the fact he was sponsored by an American sauerkraut company called Stuffler.

What, despite that? He was dragging 22 pounds of sauerkraut with him as he tried to cross the Atlantic. You need something to go with that plankton on the side. You've got to keep the microbiome healthy when you're out at sea. In normal life he is a one-man band. You know the guys with the... Remy's literally one-man band. Yeah, he's actually, in French, an homme orchestre.

That's the French for a one-man band. I mean, you've mined it there, but just to be clear, he has lots of instruments rigged up on his body, does he? We all know the one-man band. We're just saying that mimes don't work with a podcast. True. Because he's French, I think I was thinking the mime would work. Why is he not combined the two?

Why is he not bringing the band with him on the water? I think if he can't bring a simple thing like 22 pounds of sauerkraut as he walks across an ocean. I guess there's some, like, similar skills, isn't there? Like, it's lots of moving around and moving your legs and stuff. Yeah. He didn't make it like you say, but it was because on the first day, Storm wrecked the catamaran that he towed behind him.

So all of his food and all of his bed and all of his supplies just went down. All that stuff. He was towing a whole catamaran. The interesting thing about... Well, not a hot... Well, it was a catamaran in the case that it had two bows, right? Yeah. But the interesting thing about that is when Aldrie was going to walk over the Atlantic,

he decided, like I said, he was going to ski down these swells, but he reckoned that when it was really calm weather, he would tow a boat with him. So there would be... There was a boat nearby that would kind of follow him with supplies, and he thought that what I would do is when it's calm, I'll just tow the boat. It doesn't need sails. That's brilliant.

In 1898, he walked from New York Harbour to Governor's Island, which is where the army base was. And the New York Journal reported that when he arrived at the army base, the commandant felt the wonderful thigh muscles of the man who had made so wonderful a trip. Ooh! That... That...

Glass goes out for it, but... That feels a bit like an excuse, doesn't it? Well, you've made such a wonderful trip. Your thigh muscles must be wonderful as well, and so that feels a bit of a pretext. I wonder, because it's a military base, right? Do they think he was the sort of advanced arm of an attack, I wonder? Well, that was the thing, though, wasn't it?

People were doing this already. They were trying to make boat shoes and go out and walk waters, and someone had an idea that what if we created an army battalion that could walk across water? That we would lose everyone. And that's why it didn't happen. But it was... Yeah, this guy, Robert Kjellberg,

he trained some soldiers to wear a heavy backpack and fire a rifle while walking on water. And he toured the whole of England. He was known as the Water King, and this was a huge, huge thing. It wasn't a huge thing. He was known as the Water King. He wasn't the Water King.

Oh, look, it's the Water King. It would definitely have the element of surprise, I think. Exactly. The Water King! Yeah, especially presented like that. There's another thing where you have these kind of round shoes that ninjas are supposed to have used to walk on water with. So they're probably about the size of a dustbin lid.

And you strap your feet to them. And the idea was that ninjas could get across moats and things like that. And I've been to ninja school, and that's what they say. Okay, well... Yeah, okay. You've been to ninja school? I've been to ninja school, and that's what they say anyway. No, no, no, no, obviously.

When did you go to ninja school? Well, I was in Kyoto. Okay, that checks out so far. So, what qualifications did you do ninja GCSEs? I did, but I'm not allowed to show you the certificate. Wait, that's spies. That's different. No, I am... Well, look, I did do that thing.

I think I might have mentioned before that they taught me how to throw ninja stars. Oh, yeah. And they taught me how to throw chopsticks so I could kill a man. Really? Wow. All right. Have you spooked it?

Let's do it. Are you volunteering? Who's got chopsticks? Come on. Dan, you stand over there. I'll see you in Wagga Mamas after the show. Anyway, the point that I was trying to make is that they told me this in ninja school,

but there's some new research. Some old ninja documents. Hey, Huckin, you're late. I'm not late. I've been here for 45 minutes. The other thing they teach you how to do is to walk backwards while there are drawing pins on the floor. What? Is it the walking backwards thing?

Do you just keep your feet, your soles of the feet on the ground so you push the drawing pins out of the way? Like a moonwalk, basically? It's not like a moonwalk. You kind of walk backwards, but you sweep your back foot, and they also teach how to walk very slowly so no one can hear you walking. It was like curling, but backwards.

Exactly. I feel like we've gone off the point of this. I'm loving this. I'm loving it. The amount of shit I got when I said I'd been to clown school for a short course. This is all my Christmas is at once, you know? Anyway, so they sent this at ninja school,

and there's been some new research, and they found old ninja documents about these things called Mizugumo, and they found the word sit next to them, and what they reckon is they weren't actually used by ninjas to walk on water. They were actually like little boats you would sit on and paddle along.

Obviously. Why didn't they draw that conclusion when they first saw these round things that go on water? Why did they assume there were shoes before they assumed they were boats? Because the ninjas spread the myth that they can walk on water, you know? Oh, it's a clever bit of PR.

They're good on PR. Very good on PR. Just on the elephant in the room, Jesus of Nazareth. Has he caught that very often? We've all been dancing around it. Obviously, the Jesus walking on water thing on the Sea of Galilee.

In 2006, there was a suggestion, and it was published in a proper academic journal called The Journal of Paleo-Lymnology, the study of ancient lakes, obviously, which suggested that there was ice in the Sea of Galilee. It's more of a lake than a sea, I think, and so it has this rare property

due to the salty and fresh water that feeds it, and it has this rare property where you could have these bits of ice forming, you know? Like, part of it freezes over and part of it doesn't. Really? I mean, it's in the Middle East, isn't it? Yeah, but it gets cold sometimes, you know? And the suggestion is that spring's ice could have formed and made it look like Jesus was walking on water.

So do you think they said to Jesus, can you do that trick again, walk on water? He's like, ah, give me a few months. Yeah, it's more of a Christmas miracle than anything. Sorry, memus. Oh, never mind. But I saw genuinely, on the way here today, I saw a duck basically doing this in a pond.

It looked like it was walking on water, but actually it was just standing on a stone that was near the surface of the water. But it does make you think, doesn't it? Well, on that note, we should move on to our next fact. Thank you, Andy. Yeah. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that zebra spiders chase laser pointers exactly like a cat does. So this is a very exciting fact. This is a discovery that basically zebra spiders, which are jumping spiders, are really similar to cats in quite a lot of ways. Come on, mate. It's a disappointed kid you've got if they've asked for a pet cat.

You come home with a microscopic spider and say, they're really similar. I had it on a podcast. I didn't know what these spiders were until you said zebra, and then I looked them up, and they're basically, you know the tiny ones that sort of jerk in their movements. They're here, then they jerk, then they jerk again. And they're very, well, they pounce, right? That's a big thing.

And this was noticed by a scientist. She was in her lab and she was, had these spiders that were falling off her roof. And then someone said, hey, have you seen that if you use a laser pointer that you can actually get them to chase it? And she tested it out with another colleague, and that's what happened.

And they thought this is absolutely amazing. And basically what they think is like a cat, that this is something that I need to attack, kill, and eat. And so when they see the green laser pointer, that's what they do. But they can't because it's a laser. But it's really cool, isn't it?

Yeah. This is, by the way, the Strummer Ed Young article who we had on the podcast not too long ago. We said that we do raid his articles. And once again, we have plagiarized his work. So thank you, Ed. Sorry, Ed. The fact ninjas have been in.

You'll never notice. The thing I thought was that these astronomers' lab needs a clean. Really? Who's got spiders falling off the ceilings of their lab? And also, you're supposed to be astronomers. You're not naturalists. Did they miss an eclipse?

You know, they're just coaxing spiders around. I think part of it was also to work out what jumping spiders can see with their eyes. Yeah. Because their eyes are a bit like telescopes in that they're kind of a tube, and there's a lens at both ends. And you can work out what a telescope can see

by working out the different lenses and the different distances and stuff like that. And they worked out that most jumping spiders would be able to see the moon. Yeah, which is amazing. Yeah, that's really cool. Because they're small. So it doesn't sound amazing.

I wasn't amazed. If it makes you feel better, anyone who doesn't think it's amazing, I wasn't amazed at first, because I thought, well, I could see the moon. But it's much harder to see the moon if you're always hiding here. How many legs have you got?

They're 5 to 9 millimetres. Exactly. That's tiny to see the moon. But I just don't think of what can see the moon. And now here we are thinking about it. I mean, moths can see the moon, can't they? Yeah. Ah, but can they?

Yeah, they can, because then they think lights are the moon. And they're pretty small. Come on, I think this... They're just probably just bragging about this moon seeing it. Yeah. But that means they presumably can see your face. Because your face is a bit distant, it's a bit bigger.

In fact, it's way bigger than the moon, normally. And they think your face is weird. If you want to move around like a ninja, do it when there's no moon. But it's weird to think of a spider that can see your face. Why is that weird? I don't know. Because I don't think of a spider as having a face. Spiders absolutely have faces, right?

They have eyes. What are you talking about? They've got eyes, they've got... But they don't have a face, a proper face. So you think if you don't have a proper face, you shouldn't be allowed to see other faces? No, I'm not saying that. I'm not thinking at all. I'm just saying it's a surprise

to think that they could look up and think, oh, there's Dan. That's a weird thing. Can I just jump in here for a second? Can I ask...? Oh, we didn't see you there! Dan, I told you to put more drawing pins down before the show started.

I want to know if you're surprised, slash interested in this. And that is that there is a spider called the ogre-faced spider. And by looking at their eyes, we can work out that they can make out the Andromeda galaxy in the sky. That's cool.

Can we see that? You can just about on a really dark day in the middle of nowhere, yeah. Do they know what it is? Do they say it's the Andromeda again? No, they aren't cool. One thing that zebraspiders do, specifically, apparently,

is they do respond to humans, which I do think is something that we don't think of non-mammals as doing. Like, you see a cat, it sees you, it responds to you. And if a human walks into the room while they're going about their business, they'll sort of turn around and look up at you. And they do have...

Andy says they can see our faces, but we can see theirs as well, obviously. And they do have such good faces, jumping spiders, because they've got those two... They just look like something out of sci-fi. There's two giant eyes in the middle, and then two slightly smaller eyes either side. Look them up. They're great stuff.

They are very cool. Excitingly, jumping spiders, these specific zebra jumping spiders, have been to space. This is cool. So they've got closer to the moon or other things they can see, which is great. Must have been massive up there.

Yeah, yeah, it must be really cool. So there was this theory that... Because they jump and they pounce onto their prey, they obviously take gravity into account when they're jumping. So they jump, they know they're going to fall at a certain rate, they know they're going to hit the prey. And there was a theory, a question, if we take them to a tiny microgravity environment

and they jump, they're not going to jump the same way, will they keep on missing their prey or will they be able to learn about space, basically, learn about microgravity? And this was an 18-year-old guy from Egypt called Amon Mohammed, and he won a competition to do this experiment on the ISS. Not to go himself, but just to have the experiment done.

And the thesis was they won't be able to learn, and they did learn. They learned how to adapt to zero gravity, which is very exciting. And what they did was instead of jumping on their prey, they kind of just sidled up to it. Didn't they? Yeah, there was one thought that they would...

What they do do on Earth is that if they're jumping down from above on a prey, they need to make sure that they're going to land on the target. So they tether themselves with one of their silk webs. But it's a bit like Mission Impossible. Tom Cruise going down. Which one? Mission Impossible 1.

So they're sort of jumping down bungee style, but if they need to pull the cord to stop, they can do that and bring themselves back up if they can see they're missing the prey. So one of the thoughts in space was they might be using their line to sort of tether themselves, bring themselves back down and help them along. But no, instead they just walked up and ate.

It says to me the fruit flies that they deployed were not that energetic. To be honest, if you can just stroll up to your fly. Or it says that the pounce is just absolutely unnecessary on Earth as well. Yeah, exactly. Just walk, mate. Walk up to it.

Again, I think I've said this before, but I do find it funny the stuff they make these astronauts do in space. And this one fell to Sunita Williams. And I guess they dished them out at the start of an expedition. They're like, do you want to do this random 16-year-old's idea? She was the one who activated the flies every day and she sort of would release a plunger which released all these flies into the den

and then the spiders would go for it. And it was one zebra spider and one red-backed jumping spider. And they were called Cleopatra and Nefertiti. And they did jolly well. But then of course they did plummet towards Earth at breakneck speeds at the end of the mission and immediately the zebra spider died on impact. No, they were inside a capsule just to add quickly.

It sounds like they just dug them out. No, no, they gave them a little spaceship. The force of the re-entry killed them. It's not actually true. It's not both of them. It was just the zebra spider, actually, Cleopatra. And they're not clear on why she died but something about the impact. But Nefertiti did survive and went to the Smithsonian

to live out her remaining sort of two months before she did. I think she lived in an actual display in a museum that you could visit, right? So people visited Nefertiti. But the other interesting thing I think that they found is that she learned how to do it the old way afterwards. Oh, my God, that's so clever. Yeah, really cool. This is slightly off topic but I found out about a spider hunting thing.

OK. And it's a moth specifically called the metal mark moth which pretends to be a spider, right? So its wings have these marks on which look like big spider eyes. And other parts of its wings look like the furry legs of a spider. It looks like a huge spider, actually, to other spiders. And it moves a bit like one. And it's so good that actual jumping spiders will flirt with it

rather than try to kill it. Really? Yeah. I think we said before that they're kind of not that picky jumping spiders, are they? Then we said that they sometimes just dance with other spiders that are not jumping spiders. And most of the time get eaten. Oh, yeah. But that's the theory of the dance.

So they do this like courtship dance before the mating. And the idea is the reason they do that is so that there is a certain distance away from the female that if they decide it's not worth it then they have a chance to run away. And apparently there are certain moves that they have to do and if they do a perfect dance then they're guaranteed to have sex.

So it's like, you know, in Strictly where if everyone gets tense... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It works, the same in Strictly, doesn't it? I believe so, yeah. Wow. Is there a thing where if you don't do it perfectly you will be killed and eaten?

You must. And also, weirdly, happens on Strictly. Time to move on to our next fact. It's time for fact number three and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that according to a law of 1656 chicken owners on the Scottish borders had to give their chickens clogs. LAUGHTER

OK. Right. So... It seems harsh. This is a thing that happened, not just down the road from here. It's from the Records of Pebbles. And this was about complaints of scraping of fowls

in houses and yards, as in they'd been pooing over their neighbours' yards. And they said that everyone who owned a hen or a capon, so any kind of chicken, would have to tie such a weight of timber to the foot that would stop them from flying. And then it specifically says that they are clogs and it says that forchilling would be paid to the owner

of any fowl going without the clog. Sorry, they would have to pay forchilling. Right. The thing was, if you were to come across any chicken without clogs in that area, then you were allowed to dispose of that chicken. But most people have... That's sinister.

I guess by eating it. Yeah, sounds like it. Yeah, yeah. Most people have a lot of chickens, which means... Have a lot of chickens, you mean? Have a lot of chickens? Sorry. Let's do a poll of the room.

Yeah. Do most people in the room have a lot of chickens? OK. One. Thank you. Yeah. So what I meant to say was, you know that guy in the crowd who came to our show tonight,

who has lots of chickens? Out of curiosity, how many have you got? Loads. Thank you. Loads. So my point says... Who invited the Colonel? Yeah.

So you know how that guy has loads of chickens? Yes. I'm actually starting to doubt his account of how he's got loads of chickens now. I'm just questioning how many clogs you need to buy, the price point of the clogs... I don't think these are beautiful, carved, painted clogs made by Dutch artisans. I think it's more like a lump of wood tied to your chicken's foot.

I'm afraid so. But they called them clogs in the log. So they didn't even carve an inside to put there? We don't own any of these in any museum. Surely they would have had some insoles at least so they'd be comfortable as they walked around. Apology for me hearing a fact that said they wear clogs and assuming that maybe they wore a fucking clog.

Clogs are like... Clogs can be anything. If I got you some clogs to wear, I'm not going to hand you a block of wood. I'm going to give you a shoe. Just on clogs. So you guys are familiar with clog fighting? Oh, yeah.

Is that just a stick fight? So this is... Fair enough. That's fair. This is human clog fighting. And this was, I think, a Lancashire sport slash way of fighting someone else where you... We call that spot in Lancashire. It was known as fighting wig and fashion,

which is great. You would just kick each other. You and one other person would just repeatedly kick each other while wearing heavy wooden clogs. And you would either, this is the great thing, you would either be wearing your finest clothing or be completely naked. You would hope that you would, like,

work that out before the day. Oh, God, so embarrassing. Because it'd be awful if they turned up in their finest clothing. Yeah. It sounds so rough. But what you would do is you would hold onto each other's shoulders and then you were wearing very heavy clogs and they would kind of, you know, say that you should sharpen them, really.

And you would just keep kicking until one of you shouted, sufficient! This is shin kicking, right? This is Lancastrian purring. It was known as parring, or, like you say, wig and fashion fighting. And they thought that it was, like, really turn of the 20th century,

and then it happened and then it died out. But a friend of mine called Anna F.C. Smith, who's an artist in Lancashire, she managed to find evidence of it up until the 50s. So people were still doing it in the 50s. Wow. Were there rules on the, like, the size and... Like, could Charles Aldreave have come with his big coat shoes?

That's a really good point. They would be your actual clogs because people in Lancashire wore clogs in those days. And so you would wear your normal clogs, but you might sharpen them. Metal on them. Because sometimes the rules were the first to draw blood would be the one who got the... Right.

Who got the win. There was a thing... I read a story from 1838 where there was such a brutal, clogged fight that one of the guys fighting went deaf in one ear from being kicked in the leg... Wow. ...as in... That's not... There's no connection between those two.

No. It's sort of like a weird kind of reflexology. Yeah. Your shin is connected to your ear. There's another thing where you would be holding... This is another method of clog fighting. Both of you hold a handkerchief between your teeth and the one who drops it first loses... Like a tug of war with the handkerchief. Yeah, but no, no, no. Well...

Is it the same handkerchief? You're holding the same handkerchief between your two teeth and the one who drops it from there and loses. But I think that... You might go, ah! And then it falls out. But I think there's a way of winning the fight. Never mind your legs. Right.

If you've got the hanky in your mouth, he's lost the fight. Yeah. It depends how deep you want your opponent to get inside your own mouth. You might be supposed to just be kicked in the shin. You're both naked. You're already on pretty intimate terms. They weren't... The Lancashions were very into clogs, weren't they?

Yeah. And they clogged dancing. They were very into that when they weren't fighting with them. They were dancing with them. And it seemed very specific from about 1880 to 1904 or 5. And people speculate that the reason they got into clogged dancing was partly to warm up in the cold, industrial, northern towns.

Which, I don't know, it's not that much colder. But, um, yeah, it was as popular as wrestling, boxing, clogged dancing. The three big draws. There was a group called the J.W. Jackson's Clog Dancers. And they were a group of young boys. And they would wear football jerseys.

And they had clogs with buckles on and bits of metal so that sometimes when you did your dance, they would do sparks. And they actually told the whole of the UK they were absolutely massive. And one of the original guys dropped out in 1896 and he was replaced by an eight-year-old called Charlie Chaplin.

Oh. The same... The same? No, completely the same. No, it wasn't the same. Wow. Very cool. Was that his first job, basically? Eight years old, he'd been working for like eight years at that point. The clog itself, the full wooden one, the clump.

The clumpen. It's really interesting reading about them because they're actually really safe shoes for you to wear. If you're doing hard labour, if you're building on a building side, you're down in a coal mine or whatever, they're incredibly sturdy. But also, they're much better than, say,

like a modern boot with a steel cap inside. Because if something drops on them, the metal of a boot can bend inward and crush your foot and you get stuck in there. Whereas with this, it just kind of splits the shoe open, so at least you're not sort of mangled within the shoe. I feel like the makers of steel cap shoes

might object to the, like, they're much safer. But this basically came out because the EU said in the 90s, clogs aren't safe. And a lot of people in the Netherlands, still then traditionally, and still sometimes now traditionally, wore clogs. So farmers, fishermen, factory workers, you know, there are lots of jobs where clogs

would be the workman's boot of choice. And the EU said, these haven't been tested properly. And so I'm afraid, you're going to have to ditch the clogs and wear steel cap shoes. And so the Netherlands organisation for Applied Scientific Research ran a whole bunch of tests

to prove that they were as safe. So they got all these clogs in to the factory and they bashed them with a mechanical hammer. They put one tonne weights on them to see how they survived. So it was like being run over by a car. They pierced the soles with nails.

They submerged them in water. It was like 300 degrees. I don't know in what circumstances you're suddenly in a furnace. We've got great news. The clogs have survived. We managed to save his feet. Here's the facts about Dutch wooden shoes.

Apparently there was a traditional Dutch marriage proposal where if you fancied someone you would buy a pair of very ornate clogs and then you would secretly at night put them on the doorstep of the person you wanted to marry. Well that would be very hard to do

James. I mean you'd need someone with special training at sneaking around in the dark. We're just trying to speak around in clogs. Clog ninjas. I don't think you have to wear the clogs before you deposit on your Dutch.

That's why the Dutch have no ninja skills whatsoever. Well the idea was then you would return the next morning and if your beloved was wearing the clogs, that meant she had accepted the proposal. And then she would wear them till her wedding day.

Okay, question. Have you left a note to say these are from me? It's really interesting. Does she put them on and think, yes, James proposed! I fear that might have been it because as far as I can tell there's no notes from the source that I read.

I assume you've let her know that that's going to happen or something because otherwise it's a bit of a shot in the dark, isn't it? Or maybe everyone had those doorbell cans back in medieval Netherlands. We're going to have to move on

very soon. I noticed very recently there's a new trend for, we're talking about animals wearing shoes. There's a new trend for dogs wearing shoes. I found the company, well to begin with I got quite excited because Dolly Parton has started a new company called Doggy Parton

and it's specifically for her dogs. You can get cowgirl hats for your dog, you can get Dolly Parton-esque wigs for your dog. There's pink high heels but it turns out it's a stuffed toy so that doesn't count.

But then there's another company that's just started. I think it was last year called Riffruff who has designed all these dog shoes and I think it was a pug in the website that I saw and they kind of look like they're wearing like Nike shoes and Adidas and they've made a hoodie as well

and it seems to be coming back in. To what extent, I haven't seen so far dogs strutting the streets of Glasgow certainly with their stilettos on. No, but if you use the offer code FISH you can get 20% off your first dog shoe on Riffruff.

OK, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Einstein was so famous that women reportedly fainted in his presence and a mob once broke down the door of a lecture hall screening one of his films.

Yeah, he made films. He was a big director. I'm not thinking of Robert Pattinson. That's who I'm thinking of. He was the Robert Pattinson of his day. I had no idea that he was such a heartthrob and just such a

big celeb. This particular lecture screening incident was quite a big deal. I think it was it was called like the New York Einstein riots or something but it was 1930 and the New York amateur astronomers association

was doing a showing. Einstein wasn't even coming. They were just doing a showing of a film explaining his theory of relativity. So, you know, stuff that Einstein's, you know, recently got into and everyone sort of started reading about and they sent out 1500 invitations to their members and 4,500

people turned up and they mobbed the place and the guards couldn't keep control of them. They were sort of bashing into exhibits and stuff in the, you know, in the central hall. They had to call the police to try and calm them down and they did break down the door to the lecture theatre

in order to see the movie. Here was that, sorry. 1930. Because he became quite big just after the First World War, didn't he? Yeah. And that was one of the reasons. So, he kind of made this prediction of where stars would be at a certain time

due to his theory of relativity and there had been an eclipse and so because there was an eclipse there they could measure these stars and the interesting thing was that the people who did the measurement were British and so it was kind of seeing this great moment so the wars finished but we have the British scientists

and the German scientists coming together and proving this new theory and that is what there is. So that's kind of why he became so famous at the time. Right. He actually said, because he, as you say, it was the eclipse in, was it 1919? Yeah.

Total eclipse that sort of verified his theory of general relativity which was basically explaining a way Newton's theory of gravity. So it was saying actually gravity is explained by kind of a bend in the, you know, in space time. I think a really good analogy I read was

he explained that if you have a huge mass then it bends space time in the same way if you drop a heavy ball on a trampoline then it creates a dent in the trampoline and that pulls other objects on the trampoline a bit towards it and in the same way it bends space time but so he, it took the eclipse to prove this

to everyone else but Einstein had his theory proved to himself in 1915 because he saw something in the orbit of Mercury that wasn't quite right and the only way to explain it was that his theory of general relativity was correct and he said when he found that anomaly in the orbit of Mercury

he was so excited he had heart palpitations and couldn't work for three days. Wow. The one in 1919 took a lot of people by surprise they didn't realize it was going to be so huge and so the New York Times wanted to get someone to interview him or to, you know, go to his lectures

but they didn't have anyone there who really understood it so they sent a guy called Henry Crouch who was their golfing correspondent and Henry Crouch wasn't just, didn't just not know anything about physics because he didn't know anything about physics

they wouldn't let him into the press conference but he still had to send something to the New York Times and so he sent them an article that was headlined stars not where they seemed or calculated to be but nobody need worry That's so good I read this

theory that Einstein mania was actually a mistake Okay. So he came to New York in 1921 and there was this huge crowd it was so exciting you know there were thousands of people lining the streets waiting for him there's a really good theory

that actually they weren't there for him at all What? I know. So he visited, he was on someone else's trip there was a politician called Chaim Weitzman he was a politician and he was a child for creating an Israel basically he was a Zionist politician and Einstein was the most famous Jewish person in the world

and Einstein just sort of said okay I'll come along to be there so when the ship docked thousands of supporters came to cheer they weren't cheering for Einstein they were cheering for Weitzman and all the Yiddish newspapers reported oh big crowd turned out for Weitzman that's great

but all the English newspapers just thought oh Einstein he's a crazy physicist he plays the violin he's so funny and they're all here for Einstein and then it turned into mega Einstein mania what did the banners say come on surely they were waving posters what are they screaming?

because he was undeniably huge in America he was also famous there was this rumour that women fainted in his presence he was mobbed wherever he went he'd land in airports the London Palladium after he'd been to New York and they'd seen this huge reception the London Palladium asked him to do a three week long

one man show one down the idiot well we did a one day long four man show yeah we're one twenty first of an Einstein between us I think about him as well is that he really intimidated people

you know if you were in the presence of Einstein it's how? actually I kind of remember the very first time when I started QI and met Stephen Fry I genuinely felt intimidated that I was meeting someone of great intellect that I just said stupid things the whole time he also intimidates people for fun

with the knuckle dusters and it's real accent as well alright mate that was a shock I gotta say anyway my legs are not broken anymore I remember seeing him

going at you with those clogs it was something for long that's going sufficient so there was a story published in the New York Times that when he was ill in 1928 there was a New York physician who attended to him while he was in Germany

and the physician used to tell him anecdotes like he had just anecdote after anecdote after anecdote and everyone thought that he was doing this because he was just wanting to make Einstein cheerful but he said not at all he memorized 150 anecdotes because he was so worried of Einstein

asking him any questions and the ignorance of his answers coming out that he quickly diverted everything into oh did you hear the one about the time when the person did that and he had 150 of them at the ready so that he would never run out I want to see his one man show to be honest

that would be good he was a real player or a tart depending on which way you look at it from the age of about 15 he was kind of had various girlfriends and he ended up age 17

in love with this other fellow physicist the only female physicist studying where he was studying Milaiva marriage and they did love each other I think and he actually did get her pregnant but we have no idea what happened to that child Liselle we have no idea because she they couldn't marry

because he didn't have a job yet she went away, child disappeared but anyway he didn't stick with her for that long he fell in love with someone else while he was married to Milaiva he fell in love with Elsa I think as he was in love with Elsa he also fell in love with her daughter Elsa

sorry? Elsa and Elsa Elsa was his first cousin but also on the other side of her family she was his second cousin was it possible that Elsa and Elsa were the same woman? no it was definitely Elsa's daughter

because they talked about it this way it was into relativity very nice no definitely two different people because he basically said to them I really want to marry you both and do you want to choose which one I marry and sort of propose to the daughter

and the daughter eventually said I actually think of you as more like a father and so John and Mary my mum instead and so he did and that was just the kind of free love situation he ended up in we mentioned ages ago in the podcast

that his adopted granddaughter was someone who actually believed that she was the love child and was actually the daughter of Albert Einstein and she went to her grave believing this and pushing this because she had people write to her

various people who knew Einstein she didn't even really meet him I think possibly she only met him once he didn't know some of his grandchildren Einstein once gave his grandsons a three hour lecture on the mathematical properties of bubbles despite the fact that at the time

Caesar was eight years old he took him out on a boat trip and would not stop talking about soap bubbles for three hours quite interesting Charlie Chaplin was club dancing at eight years old he can listen to a three hour lecture some maybe other

famous people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau very famous in his time and because he was so famous he became really really paranoid and at one stage he thought that everyone was sending him these fan art

and they were so bad that he thought there was a conspiracy happened that people were mocking him with their terrible pictures wow I didn't think fan art existed like that people made drawings of him and paintings of him and he once had a visit from

a couple of friends called Monsieur Madame Brett Madame Brett had an engraving of him that she kept above her mantelpiece and she really loved it and he completely fell out with her because he thought this was such a bad bit of fan art that he didn't want to be friends with anyone

who could even look at it wow that's a high friend bar I mean I've been to all of your houses and I don't think much of the art on your walls but I don't well I've got a massive painting of you over my fireplace Anna yeah and I take it as a parody of me

I'm going to have to wrap us up in a sec I've got a just a quick thing James you mentioned earlier Robert Pattinson which you provided me there's a story, you know these celebrity stories God knows if they're true but he obviously has a lot of fans

he was in Twilight, he's the new Batman and he had a stalker as well and he actually kind of hit it head on and he took the stalker to dinner but at the dinner he complained about his life so much that she got really bored and quit stalking him

that's such a good idea okay that is it, that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast most of us can be found on Twitter but James the Ninja is mysteriously

a lot harder to find 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 our podcast at qi.com where you can go to our group account

which is at no such thing or you can go to our website all of our previous episodes are there so do check them out there's also this new thing we're doing and you can get ant free episodes we're also doing these really fun behind the scenes episodes so do check that out

the main thing to say is Glasgow thank you so much for having us tonight we will be back again and for the Lester at home we'll be back again specifically next week, we'll see you then goodbye you