No Such Thing As A Fish - 461: No Such Thing as the Milkmaid's Tale

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Dan, James, Anna and special guest Rhys Darby discuss boats, goats, Tintin's tuft and mystery moose. 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

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, I just want to let you know that we have a very exciting guest on this week, Andy unfortunately was away and is actually furious he was away because he missed out on the absolute tornado of comedy that is Reese Darby. You probably know Reese for his roles as Murray the manager on Flight of the Concords or as Nigel Billingsley from the Jumanji movies or perhaps you listen to his absolutely brilliant podcast about the mysteries of the universe called The Cryptid Factor which he hosts with his buddies Buttons and a doofus called Dan. But what you may not have seen if you live in the UK is Reese playing his greatest role yet, Steed Bonnet,

Gentleman Pirate in the sitcom Our Flag Means Death. This is such a great series, it came out last year on HBO Max but it's only just come to the UK on BBC2 and it's all about the real life story of Steed Bonnet who decided to give up his entire life and become a Gentleman Pirate of the Seas. He befriends Blackbeard who's played by the absolute genius comedy director Taika Waititi and you can watch it now in the UK on BBC2 every Wednesday at 10 pm or if you're impatient like me just head straight to BBC iPlayer and you can watch the entire series in one bingey go. Anyway it was so great having Reese back on the show you can find the previous episode in the Fish Archives if you want to hear his first time

here with us. Andy wasn't on that show either, poor guy can't get a break. But we hope you enjoy it and then make sure to watch Our Flag Means Death immediately afterwards. Okay on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from four mysterious locations around the globe. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and joining us once again it is the return of our very special guest Reese Darby 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 Reese. My fact is that Pirate Steed Bonnet invented the idea of walking the plank. That's a pretty big invention I would say in the world of pirating. I don't use it in my day to day life, it's pretty niche isn't it? It's putting together two things that already exist, walking and planks, it's not like it doesn't come up with anything new there has he? I know but if you're even a child and you dress up as a pirate one of the first things you learn in your entire life is that they walk the plank. I mean he is what a legacy. That's right. Is it true though? Let's put it this way it's more of a myth really that he came up with it. That's fine that's

what we deal in. It's a Dan fact you know. Yeah you know the show. So well he might have done right? He might have done some people say that he did. I actually believe he did because even though it's out there as a myth I believe knowing Steed as I do playing the role of Steed for two seasons now that he would have come up with it in reality because the whole idea behind walking the plank is they blindfold the the person and they make them walk it and so then they get away with not being accused of murder because that person has killed themselves. The captain has said all right walk along that plank will you all the best and and the guy's like uh what hey what's happening hey what walk along here whoa whoa whoa you know you can imagine it as I'm describing it

here oh I've got to blindfold on what what what's where's this plank going you know and then that's the shark. Yeah so he wouldn't want to stab someone or shoot someone no he wants to do it he wants to be slightly away from the action right and say you did it yourself. Absolutely very uncomfortable with the idea of of killing someone. Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you punching yourself? Why are you letting yourself get eaten by sharks? Exactly that's it. Is that getting you into heaven? I was uncomfortable with killing people so I just let them kill themselves. He's still he's walking a fine line isn't he? He's walking a fine plank for sure but I think yeah I think that's the point that's the it's a moral issue and so he can think to himself oh I didn't

kill him he killed himself he walked off that plank that I designed and it's quite a ingenious idea really to think that especially back in those days you could make someone kill themselves without you having to actually get your hands dirty. Yeah which was we should say like seven golden age of piracy 1718 was it he died? Yes I think so 1700 17 to 1730 was the golden age he was right in the middle of it. Wasn't he very short lived really as a pirate for a pirate who is quite famous it was quite a brief career wasn't it? Two years. I live at the net I think it was like a year and a half. I think we should just quickly praise see this guy in his entirety this was someone who was a really well-to-do character he was living very rich he had a wife he had some

kids and then he just decided as part of ultimately what was I guess a midlife crisis or he was dealing with trauma of a quite difficult childhood just left his family bought a ship and just said I'm now a pirate got a crew named the ship the revenge and just started sailing and he paid his staff you know he paid the pirates he was he was as you say a gentleman pirate with zero abilities. Didn't he not tell the pirates that they were going to be pirates I read somewhere that he kind of brought them on he got all of these guys to be his staff and then only when they were at sea he said oh by the way you're pirates this isn't just a fun cruise this is a that sounds like him as well knowing him being in his shoes absolutely yeah he definitely he bought the ship it was it was already called the

revenge I believe and he liked the name of it and there was actually quite a common name for ships back then and then yeah he installed this is the really really fun stuff he he installed a library on the on the boat so he built a library because he loved his books he wanted to leave home and leave his wife and life but he didn't want to leave his books something you might do Dan so he brought his entire collection of his books and put them on the ship I reckon Dan I reckon you would go being a pirate with your books of course but also probably your Ben Elton collection absolutely well you're signed everything signed you've got in your house would come with yeah I would need memorabilia to sort of yeah wow blackbeard with you know yeah no actually Ben Elton did I think

actually hold this particular bit of tissue um yeah really wow yeah I was actually going to say it's pretty it was pretty hard on his wife with the book stealing not only is she lost her husband but he's nicked all the bloody books but actually in your case Dan it would be quite a relief probably for Fenella yeah it'd be like the ultimate mari kundo or whatever that book was called it's like yeah you know step four make your husband a pirate lose all thank thank god yeah and so in in the series as well there's the relationship uh the fact that he in real life meets blackbeard the most famous of all the pirates and what's crazy as well is I assume blackbeard must have existed for a long time but he had a two-year run as well that was it yeah blackbeard's pirating years were two

years it's amazing you lived pretty fast and loose as a pirate didn't you it probably wasn't the safest line of work to go into if we're being honest no no they were like the Liz Truss of Pirates sweat they those guys literally that's the most fluttering comparison Liz Truss has ever got but yeah blackbeard and him had quite a weird relationship it's kind of the relationship to a needy loser uh and they're the real cool guy of the open seas because steed wasn't that good at pirating especially at first was he no so I mean you know there's the reality through the knowledge we have from various accounts and history and then there's the obviously the the fictional version which my show is so without getting too confused about which which is real and which

isn't because the real reports you know are sketchy at best as well but when you look at it it kind of makes sense that you know something happened between the two of them even if it was just a friendship blackbeard was fascinated by this guy because he looked glorious in his outfits he had these little winker picker shoes and glorious coats and and various things like that he was a fancy man and blackbeard must have gone what the hell are you doing in this job because you know they're all desperate they didn't want to become pirates that was like the only life they had to go into because of of their circumstance and so here's this guy who's like I want to be part of this too he's absolutely not supposed to be there and he was wounded and I think instead of just

let him like killing him or getting rid of him I think there was a massive fascination I think maybe if you look at blackbeard wanting to see the other side of how the other side lives like it probably a lot of people did back in those days you're either ridiculously poor and haven't got anything going on or you're the aristocracy and never the twain shall meet and so when they do I think that's when you've got this really interesting like oh how can I become you or how can I learn from you or how can I steal your ideas to make me better so you was like the Louis Theroux of the pirating world spending a few weeks observing getting all the perhaps because he could have just killed him he could have just got rid of him I mean this guy

back in history was not he's not as portrayed as capable as I am in the show you know and that's saying something but I reckon it's this is a really interesting way of doing history right because we don't have much information about Steve Bonnet we have little bits here and there but Reese you've lived as him for two years in the show pretty much and I reckon you've got a really good insight into what he might have been thinking and what he might have done and stuff yeah why the hell he did it that's the always the great mystery isn't it it's always portrayed as this huge midlife crisis which makes sense it's the fantasy that every eight-year-old has that we grow out of by the time of 12 that's not midlife is it eight years old I feel like when you have a midlife crisis you

revert back to those tragic fantasies you had as a child that are unrealistic and it was portrayed in um you know that the famous book of pirates which is where we get basically all of our pirate knowledge by a mysterious person called Captain Charles Johnson who was written a few years later and his portrayal which is often what is repeated is that he was trying to bear the awful situation of having a nagging wife but yeah Reese you've been him why did he do it I really I really hope that you James and Anna are subtly trying to get Reese to sort of channel Steve yeah and he comes through now so I'm hoping Reese is no longer here we've got English Dundee Steve is just on the show look I definitely think there was a midlife crisis situation going on if you look back at the accounts

but also he had this life that he didn't uh necessarily want he was born into aristocracy and at that time piracy had just kicked in and it was this ridiculous adventurous out at sea life that was pretty much the opposite of what he's doing and he's never even been to see by the way this guy so he's imagining oh wow what would that be like and of course anyone who's really intensely into their book reading has a great imagination and I think he just one day went look I've actually got the means to to change this and he probably had one massive fight with the wife that obviously he wasn't really getting on with and went right that's it I'm out I'm out and in the middle of the night you know he he sorted this out and just took off on a whim

and I think that you know he probably thought that he had the means to to get away with it because he was a chiefly person he was someone who was sort of high up there and so he probably didn't even imagine he was going to get into trouble it certainly seemed like he didn't it's confidence blind confidence yeah I once walked a plank in a virtual reality video game okay and this is why I was thinking about how these guys were blindfolded so we weren't blindfolded when we did this but you're walking the plank on the top of a massive building and then the idea was you got to the end and then you jumped off and then you were in virtual reality and you thought you were dying and then you kept falling falling falling and then you hit the floor and you absolutely

shit yourself because you thought you were dead but actually you're in virtual reality but what I thought was it was more scary because I could see what was happening whereas these guys were blindfolded yes so is the idea that they wouldn't know when they're getting to the end of the plank they'll just keep walking and that's it or yes well let's let's let's have a chat about that I mean I think why do they need to be blindfolded for a start because you know they know they're out at sea they're on a boat all right step up step up onto the edge yeah oh this is well I can feel that this is the edge of the boat no no it's not no you're going you're going into one of the rooms we're going to have a little party no no I can feel the wind in my face here no no

no it's fine walk just keep walking just there's a there's a plank there all right yes yes oh well this is going out into the sea isn't it no no no this is a little it's actually a bridge towards the bar I've got a cocktail here waiting for you Larry okay okay was very windy yes or that we're all blowing blow oh that does it feels feels like normal when not you know what your wind's like Larry ah cheeky bugger just keep walking down there mate and I know I've really got into that but you know I think I've forgotten what we were asking but I actually think that's true because it means you couldn't have like surprise parties on a boat could you because every time you put a blindfold on oh yeah you're walked into a room and they say it's a party yeah I think that's a good point

we've got to and history there's been no surprise parties on pirate ships for that reason happy birthday it actually doesn't make any sense that they would be able to walk a plank while out in the rough seas blindfolded and shaking with nerves I mean you fall off you don't get to the end of that plank do you no such a good point you're falling off straight away also is this where we got the diving board from yeah yes I was just thinking imagine the cockiness of someone that you've sentenced to death who walks flying forward to the end of the plank jumps off and does a triple backward that's amazing what a death what a death stop the podcast stop the podcast hi all just wanted to inform you that this week we're

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at the buttercup sanctuary for goats in Kent and what they did was they put photos of humans men and women black and white and they put one on the left and one on the right and one of them was smiling and one of them wasn't and the goats always went to the smiling one but only when it was on the right hand side when it was on the left hand side they couldn't give a shit they would just they would randomly go to one or the other but when it was on the right hand side they always went to it and two things here one not many animals care whether humans are smiling or not we know that dogs do we know that horses do that's because they're domesticated animals and this is one of the first other animals that we found that actually cares if

humans smile and the other thing is that perhaps why are they only bothered about the right hand side well it could be the way that their brain processes things so maybe they're processing emotions on one side of the brain or visual things on one side of the brain we're not really sure why do they use a black and white photo can you not fork out in the budget for a color for something do they see color do they see color uh that's a great question got well recent you you're from you know with you know goats almost as well as you know steed bonnet um do you think they see color i would like to think they do especially my ones when i when i turn up to feed them um i always come in from the left and they're smiling uh i'm smiling but i but they

you always make sure to smile that's part of it i'm just mentioning that i must be smiling because i'm happy to see that i don't see them or a hell of a lot because they're in new zealand but i spend time with them when i'm there of course they are they are emotionally intelligent i hadn't realized that they were to this extent so they did a study where researchers recorded goats making certain noises noises when they were happy and noises when they were sad so this did involve the researchers making the goats happy and sad so they'd make them happy by sort of giving them food and then they'd make them sad but and this is sort of like really minimal level of sadness they'd isolate them from their herd for five minutes or they'd get a goat

to watch another goat eat when that goat didn't have much food apparently the but i know goats and that is very sad for them that's that's tragic the two things they really care about are being together and eating oh really that's it oh yeah that's it and to have fun they climb so they love to get on top of things and they love running around but they always much prefer to be doing all that sort of stuff to see it okay well maybe this was like torture for them perhaps and also also anna i've been in the restaurant with you when one of us has got our food and yours hasn't quite arrived yet the look on your face i make some pretty weird noises i can't deny that okay i make a weird goat like bleeding sounds anyway the noises that goats make are pretty much indistinguishable

to us when they're happy and sad in those situations except probably reason for your own goats you pick up on it but if you play those sounds to their fellow goats just audio recordings their heart rates will stay normal and they'll be all chilled out when they hear the happy sounds but when they hear the almost identical sounding anxious sounds then their heart rates kind of shoot up so they're feeling this empathy on behalf of this other goat wow reese have you ever this is a uh leaning into a myth here but i'll just be curious have you ever dipped your feet into salt water and then let goats lick your feet no no okay i've already but i have taken the goats for a walk down on that's the thing i know you've got a beach near you been through salt water yeah so okay next time

you're back in new zealand give it a go because i'd be curious to hear whether or not this hurts this was a a sort of myth that's been in books for a long time and possibly it was tried once or twice who knows where the ancient romans were said to have used a thing called tickle torture and the idea was that you would get someone you would soak their feet in salt water and then the salt um would then be licked by a thirsty ghost ghost oh no i just checked my notes down and all this is actually about ghosts all this stuff i've been saying about goats it's ghosts like it if you smile at them always approach a ghost from the right hand side yeah now it's making sense yes um so apparently

that's if a goat licks your feet because they have really rough tongues that the torture and because they're so thirsty and the salt makes them thirstier they keep licking and then they rip your feet off and that would be a that would be a method of torture back in rip your feet off their tongues aren't made of no sorry they would they would they would slowly like um like a lollipop lick their way through your feet oh yeah yeah i tend to not let their mouths too close to my body bits okay because they have teeth and everything you know and and they're very they're always wanting to to nibble and so they nibble on my clothes they pull my garments and i certainly can't see myself getting my naked feet out and dangling them in front of their faces with salt

do they then another question about your goats do i mean do they urinate on themselves and each and each other or themselves so first of all they'll they'll wheel over themselves to attract a female and it looks kind of cool billy goats shove their heads right between their legs because they want to wean their bids because i guess that gathers up the the smell better and they wheel over them and then they will go to the lady who can tell that he's up for up for a shag but then he tests her urine as well to make sure that she's eligible to make sure that she's actually on heat and so she will squat down and he'll put his head between her legs and then she'll wheel over him and then they do this the curl up the lips the flame and response

which is where if you see a go expose its lip like curl up its top lip it's got all these receptors in it yeah james is doing it right now it's very attractive look actually uh it's got receptors in that pick up whether the urine has the right hormones in it that says this woman is ready to be fertilized by you and so it's very very wee based courting process it's sexy stuff i know nothing of that because i only have boy goats oh really yeah well when you have both you know you're intimating and if you've got females then you then you're into milking so i've only got male castoffs which you know the boy goats are only good for either meat or pits yeah oh wow so they're never aroused your goats they never need to know themselves they've never aroused and i've

never even seen them wee are they must they must never never seen them wee that might mind you mind you know mine a pedigree so i don't think they do yeah good point i've heard that about certain breeds they just explode with urine at their death don't they it's a him really yeah well sometimes i see them hiding and i and i'm i come to the pin and i think oh what's oh you're having a wee are you and then i can hear don't i've done coming here i'm in here and then that kind of thing and so i wonder there's probably something happening there and then they just come through oh hello dad what's what's going on today did they call you dad yeah they call dad i didn't see you coming dad you came on the left hand side did you yeah sorry i was uh i was going to

check on you guys see who you want to go for another walk down to the beach oh no i'm fine alexander's just behind the pen they don't go going around there he's just doing something don't worry about him i don't he's sure you've got goats not sort of pantomime act as a goat cross trees here's an interesting thing about goats so you said like pedigree goats you can't get them you can't get really good goats especially for milking and stuff and in order to get those you might need a stud so you might need a really good male goat who's gonna have sex with lots of females but the thing is that they can only have so many they can only have sex so many times right there's only so many hours in the day that you can do that and so recently they've come up with a

new way of basically what they do is they put some genes into a goat which changes its testicles so they're effectively the testicles of another goat and so this goat which isn't the normal stud can have sex with a female and the the offspring will be the offspring of the original stud even though the stud's just at home having a coffee oh my god you know really that's like the handmaid's tail kind of where you think you're shagging one person but you're actually shagging the more fertile person it's like it's actually a less dark version of the handmaid's tail without the feminist dystopian undertones the milkmaid's tail I wonder if that's quite demoralizing though for the goat who the person said your testes aren't good enough we're just going to shove these other blokes on you

who you've always been intimidated by anyway I don't think they even know they're goats probably goats of course they know me goats do they yeah very good so I've tried to take them out you know we've gone into town and my guys have gone no no we can't we're goats we can't go in there we're not gonna we won't be allowed in there dad can I can I can you take the blindfold off me no just just you'll be fine Alexander we're just we're going into town I can sense there's someone coming up up to me on the left hand side I can sense it he's asking me for ID dad what do I do dad I don't have any ID I'm a goat I told him I'm a goat look I'm sorry he doesn't know he's a goat if you could just let him I do know I'm a goat dad I told you and get the blindfold off me

I saw a photo earlier today of it was a tree which looked like it was growing goats there was like an apple tree there was like 30 goats they love climbing trees they were just all sitting in this tree and I didn't think they had the dexterity to do it hadn't you yeah they're they're big on yeah they do like climbing trees and they like climbing but often if you see those photos some places will fake it um just fake it for tourists basically they'll kind of tie the goats into trees and then say look all these goats have climbed this tree and they're all free well because at the end of the day they need the tourists to come and take the photos but the goats aren't going to do what they want sometimes they'll climb and sometimes they won't so they

yeah they kind of fake it sometimes oh that's that's the shocking reality of tourism in some of these places but I'm afraid so um the other thing is there's a theory that goats used to be birds and that sorry that's why they're in the trees a lot because they are reverting back to their previous life is that and the scientific papers written supporting this theory or is this just some bloke in your local pub no I'm just I'm pulling it up now okay here it is scientific theories yeah yeah goats yeah goats used to be birds here it is uh goats goats used to be birds here it is in bold letters absolutely incredible well that's two pages and it's signed at the bottom two pages that's your evidence they believe they're flying that's the closest thing they can get to going back

to their old life as a bird by flying and then they'll end up in the trees and you'll you'll often hear them um uh twerking twerking no twerping you should see him twerk he's amazing what's the actual word that birds make tweet tweeting oh tweeting I think chirping that's why I'm getting confused you mash them together yeah I'm mashing those two together and coming up with twerking yeah um I think that's how the working was born actually wasn't that how it was created yeah um well that's that that's absolutely amazing uh thank you for sharing that fact another another goat fact yeah which is isn't as amazing as that but is true is that we've never talked about myotonic goats and I think they always deserve a mention the myotonic fainting goats oh don't mention on this

podcast the they're a breed in Tennessee that basically have an anomaly in their genes where when they panic if they're approached from the left for instance or not smiling or there's a loud noise something like that then they try to escape but what this does is contract their muscles so they stiffen up completely and then just kind of fall over onto their side and it's quite comical to see if you've never seen it it's bizarre I've seen videos of that yeah it's very interesting do we know why it happens Anna because it feels like it would die out quite quickly uh well I think it was only dyed in as it were quite recently um through breeding so I don't think it would have any evolutionary purpose and you're right in the wild they probably wouldn't survive very long

but they are now bred um from the same batch that have this I think Steve Bonnett suffered from that same uh gene anomaly just sort of stiffening up and fainting in the at the side of any sort of oh yeah yeah and he overcame it did he well how did he overcome it well you know just really sort of uh you know getting with a really tough pirate and learning how to proper be a pirate and I think goats if you you put those little feinty ones in with uh you know some real hardcore proper rustic goats uh that probably learn the ways and and would become more goaty yeah less feinty Billy goat blackbeard takes them under their wing um that's right what you can also do is you can deprive them of water which bizarrely cures this problem there are other problems if you

don't get the water out now so it's a very fine balance to strike but they're they're kind of useful now because myotonia is also a thing in humans like sudden muscle seizures some people have that and the jumping Frenchmen of Maine are they called or something like that I remember really I didn't know I don't know about them are they yeah I think there was a there was a group of French immigrants in Maine I think uh and they had this kind of thing where as soon as you shocked them they were just feint oh wow wow yeah how long are they stiff for how long do they like does it just slowly wear off yeah I think so it's the goats they just kind of wake up don't they the goats it's like a feint yeah yeah I've seen the videos it's bizarre I've seen the videos it's

bizarre I imagine if people did do that and it's a very bizarre trait isn't it um yeah it would make the start of the hundred meters not much good would it as soon as the bang goes off everyone just feint it would be a race to see who came round the quickest yeah that's why the goat Olympics have never taken off yet we call yet we call the best in the world the goats of what's going on yeah okay it is time for fact number three and that is Anna my fact this week is that Tintin's hair originally lay flat on his head until it got blown upwards in an early comic strip and it never came back down wow and that's that's why he's got that famous stupid quiff I think it's brilliant it's iconic how dare you yeah what are you talking about your stupid

actually Reese is sporting it's sort of half Tintinian quiff at the moment so be careful but yeah and it doesn't it was not mentioned anywhere in the comic it's just the very first Tintin comic that was released this is in January 1929 and it was a Tintin or paid to Soviet Tintin in the land of the Soviets and about sort of 10 pages in in the version I was reading he drops out of a tree much like a goat and falls into a convertible car sitting underneath it deliberately and drives the car away and in the next plate you see his hair pushed up and then you follow the story through and it just never drops again so weird did they do it on purpose was this a subconscious thing we'll never know we'll never well I actually have the book here

of course because oh wow you do big Tintin fan and and I looked at this and uh yeah you're right we can we can have a look here I think it's as you say around page 10 yes yeah this is an audio format yeah you've you've all got imaginations at home we want you to imagine Tintin climbing up a tree so climbing up a tree see his yeah his quiff here is forward uh huh yeah okay he climbs up the tree and then there he is um for those at home that are um listening to this you guys can hear him hear jumping now he's in the car and it's flipped to the back and it's because of the wind of the car and you can all hear that in that panel there yeah but that's that's that's pretty amazing that it happens midway through a comic it's not like the start of a new comic it's like it's like Herge the

the creator and the illustrator of Tintin did that in one panel and went oh that looks good I think so well I'll just leave that yeah yeah and do you know what's amazing about what you just showed us there's a little something in that comic which is what absolutely exploded Tintin into the masses of Europe and it and it was a very specific thing that you might not have noticed as we were all just looking at these cartoons which is did you notice at home anyone write in if he's spotted the moment the dances I mean the the four of us is what I'm talking about and what it was is that this is 1929 this is the same year that Popeye was invented by the way um so this is and you know it's years before Superman and Batman this is really old school

comic books what they have in these drawings are speech bubbles right and Europe did not have speech bubbles at this point in their comics they were over in America but they were a completely new idea to certainly Belgium and let's say surrounding countries I don't know about the UK specifically Luxembourg possibly Luxembourg and the Netherlands the Netherlands yeah let's go there yeah and I read a great biography or rather I read a few pages from a great biography by Harry Thompson about Tintin saying that basically his words in these speech bubbles were treated as if they were carved on tablets of stone they became quotes and they became something you would remember as a result of these speech bubbles and that is why Tintin exploded so sorry oh always claiming I would

say at the moment for me the invention of the speech bubble is up there with the invention of the concept of walking a plank um I don't know if it's getting kind of he didn't invent it he didn't exactly didn't even invent it and it's not it didn't independently appear did it it wasn't like oh wow how weird they've got these in America presumably they just read a comic in America and thought well let's start doing that is that right no but do you remember when ok go did their first video on treadmills and you barely even heard the music you were so busy watching this innovative video yeah that's what it was couldn't tell you what the song is exactly the treadmill song what the treadmill song exactly what a relatable for future generations well you know in like 300 years

everyone will be talking about you know how we all do those treadmill dances now yeah you know how everyone does them well guess who did the first yeah it was exactly yeah that book by the way the Tintin in the soviets country so whatever it is I have that as well but if you go to the Tintin shop in London they'll only sell it to you under the counter oh no yeah so I went to um it was my tin anniversary and I thought I'd buy my wife some Tintin stuff and she's Russian so I thought I'd buy the Soviet Tintin book and I went and it wasn't anywhere and I didn't really know enough about Tintin that I knew it existed but I assumed that it was maybe really rare and I said oh do you have this book and they went yeah well we keep it under here now and since the Russian invasion of Ukraine

they don't put it on display anymore in that shop yeah that's so weird so you feel like you were buying comic book porn is it quite exciting um they gave me in like an unmarked paper bag yeah do you know it's crazy so 1929 is when Tintin debuts by 1930 the comic is so massive that Herge was invited to meet the um Empress who was the ex Empress I guess Zeta of Austria-Hungary at the time and when he arrived he arrived by train and there was just huge crowds of people there to meet not Herge specifically but Tintin because they hired an actor to be Tintin who was an unknown kid who didn't have the right colour hair and he was mobbed and not only did he not have the right colour hair he also couldn't quite keep the quiff up so Herge had to keep this

little like little um tin of oily grease hair grease I thought you were going to go something about Mary about it there Dan for a second oh Jesus Tintin had to ejaculate every 30 minutes like those poor goats like the goat but he had to have someone else's testicles implanted into him exactly yeah clustering badicals Tintin but yeah so they came off this train and Tintin the kid was mobbed and he was he was ripped away and Herge had to go and chase him and bring him back but it was like one direction yeah right um if you remember them cool guy yeah yeah it was and in fact you said you gave a famous Tintin quote there James blistering barnacles blistering barnacles it's captain haddock right who says that yes yes frequently and this these are quite interesting

thing about translating Tintin into English because obviously it was originally written in French I was reading an interview with Leslie Lonsdale Cooper and she was one of the two main translators of Tintin from French into English and she was doing for 30 years but she said one of the great challenges is fitting the words exactly into the speech bubbles because you get exactly the same images but I don't you know when you hear a French announcement on a tanoi and then you hear the English one and the French one always goes on about five times longer so I don't know how she was compressing that but blistering barnacles was one of the things that she came up with as a translation of actually me sabore I think it was in French which means a

thousand portholes he's from Belgium though isn't he so yeah but they speak speak French in half of Belgium they do um he's supposedly based on a Frenchman wasn't he Tintin uh Robert Sexy yes that's a good name it's a great name isn't it Robert Sexy he was a uh French journalist and apparently he looked a bit like Tintin he went on adventures to the Soviet Union to the Democratic Republic of Congo and to the US in the same order that Tintin does those books but Herger always said Tintin c'est moi so he always claimed that Tintin was based on himself I think he might have been inspired by various different journalists there was another theory that Tintin and all the characters were based on the family members of Herger and he denied it later

in life he said no no no it's nothing to do with them but let me just quickly tell you about his family um there was his younger brother Paul who had a round face and a quiff there was his dad Alexis who was a clumsy man who had a twin brother called Leon who lived nearby and the two of them would go for walks and they would wear identical bowler hats and carry identical canes singing in unison as they did his dog Snowy uh who originally had the name Milo in French uh who does have the name Milo who's sorry rather who does have the name Milo in French shares that name with Herger's first girlfriend yes but that's no yeah a lot of people a lot of people have suggested are you saying something rude but Harry Thompson points out that at the time it was

considered to be a great crime if you were a young boy hanging out with the opposite sex certainly if you were depicting that in comics and so the only way he could represent this person who was very fond of was to put her as a dog in there otherwise he would have gotten a lot of trouble what what kind of weird excuse maker for the fact that Herger put pretty much zero women in all of his comics were you reading oh we weren't allowed to include women in comic books they had to be dogs they had to come in disguise he just didn't put any women characters in it is a bit of a bit of a hard to draw hard to draw women that's not true what about uh Bianca Kesterfuhrer the opera singer she's a huge character in the you're right she's she is a heroine as well

that's true no you're right he had one he had Bianca that is true and he did have the dog who maybe was based on his girlfriend but also weirdly the person James mentioned sex there he had a travel companion called Milu as well so it might be no way yeah have you guys read what is apparently the best tint in and I haven't read it I'm ashamed to say but tinted in Tibet people seem to say um I'm guessing have you read that Reese yes so that's that's um that's my favorite I mean I've I've let people know that I yeah I think I remember back it might still be there on uh used to be on one of the social medias you put down your favorite book and I just always put tinted in Tibet oh you've got such good taste that was his favorite you probably know this that was

Herger's favorite as well oh really yeah I didn't know that that's awesome um I just because it's got a Sasquatch in it as well that's why oh yeah of course that's why it's your favorite I thought you liked it for the great philosophical undertones and the exploration of kind of Buddhist theology but it's it's a Sasquatch no I've never read it I just I just flicked through and and go straight to the Sasquatch and look at the pictures every time well it makes tinted the only fictional character to have received the light of truth award from the Dalai Lama so this is like the best honor that the Dalai Lama can bestow and it's to anyone who improves public understanding of Tibet which is questionable if they did chug a Sasquatch into the storyline but yeah the Dalai

Lama gave tint in this amazing light of truth what's a Yeti you know yeah it's a Yeti yeah it's perfectly correct it is yeah right it and he's a good guy like he saves them so really I love it when that happens yeah there's there's it's a good it's a great book does the Dalai Lama believe in Yetis do you know if anyone knows I would say so yeah so he has alluded to a belief unfortunately the person he alluded that belief to was Brian blessed so I'm not sure if we can trust Brian's reporting but he when Brian was looking to climb to Mount Everest and obviously looking for Yetis along the way he had a what's it called an audience with the Dalai Lama and he met him they they apparently did some boxing together um Brian took a walk with him in the wood he saw him revive

a headless dead snake back to life and then they talked about Yetis and he suggested that yeah that they are real okay that headless dead snake back to life what did he do just pick it up and wobble it oh my god you're you're just wobbling that it's alive it's alive again he's doing it like the thumb trick where you make it go hey look at that well here's the other thing too I'll say about the hair the haircut on Tintin um yeah think about when you do find your your do you know when you you you're young or whatever you may be in your 20s you're playing whether you're sorting something out and you go right that's me quite often not everybody but a lot of people will will keep that hairdo for their entire life and so that kind of fits in when you think about that

because yeah even even when you lose your hair or it goes gray or whatever you know you go into your your later stages of life you still got that same hairdo you had when you were in your early 20s that was a really good point there was a thing wasn't there there was a scientific paper written about Tintin which was when the first book was written he was supposed to be 14 and by the time the last book was written he must have been about 60 because Herge was writing them for so long but he was 60 years old never had to shave none of his hair's fallen out yeah he's still got those boyish features and according to these scientists they reckon he suffered from hypopetuitorism due to repeated blows to the head and some of the early bucks oh and does that stop you aging

properly yeah it means you never go through puberty I see poor guy he's got sort of an inverse to what most middle-aged men have where he's bald all around the middle of his head and then he's got just lots of hair in the middle and I'm looking at James has actually brought a Tintin doll oh you have a Tintin yes yeah to this episode another visual feature that will be lost on our audience but it looks like a mohawk for me he really does doesn't it yeah I don't know that he does have hair sorry when you turn it around yeah it does it's just from the front he looks bald I'd just say one one final thing is that that he he really didn't like Tintin at the end much the way that Arthur Conan Doyle got sick of his creation of Sherlock and he threw him off a cliff

and and killed him I arguably it's just a wet cliff only because I went there a few weeks ago to the right to the right light falls yeah all right would you say wet cliff is an accurate description so he um he really didn't like Tintin at the end and he was quite sick of him and so the final Tintin book that Herge was working on up until the point of his death was a book called Tintin and Alph Art and all we have is the sort of rough sketches of it but the final pain that he got up to the final bit of the story was having Tintin covered in liquid polyester and being sold as a work of art and we that's the cliffhanger we don't know what happened does he die does he survive Tintin is like like Woody from Toy Story left on a cliffhanger we'll

never know so do you mean he was put in like a work of art like a Damien Hurst kind of thing yes is that the idea knowing Tintin as I as I do I would say he'd probably escape from that yeah but his his god might have turned him against that right like Herge was who knows what he was going to do there we just don't know we don't know Rhys it's it it's interesting isn't yeah I will uh it's interesting isn't it they these people that play also when you think of actors that play these characters that are so loved and they get sick of them as well I was just thinking of Harrison Ford with Han Solo no does he not like did he not like Hans by the way he he said he'll come back to Star Wars but he wanted the characters to die which is a spoiler but at

least that's if you haven't seen that one it came out a few years ago now um but and then the whole James Bond dying in that last bond that that Daniel Craig that's a bit more fresh that's a bit more fresh it reminds me of that character Anna Corellino I don't know if you stop the podcast stop the podcast hi everyone I hate big tech and I cannot lie yeah I hope you're gonna wrap this whole advert I will and you know what if it accidentally gets edited out and you hear the normal advert then that is the loss of the listener because this week we are sponsored by ExpressVPN yes ExpressVPN is a service you can use if you are anxious about these big tech giants how do you stop them from tracking your searches or your video history or everything you click on the answer is ExpressVPN

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for moose in New Zealand despite there being no moose in New Zealand or is there oh yeah exactly or is there is there no there isn't well there could be there is could there be all right well talk to us about why would he not be looking is it quite a short book it sounds like there's not much to put in this book right now if there are no moose in New Zealand are you kidding me though there's plenty in this book and it's not his only book he's written a bunch of books he's written a wild moose chase he's this guy is a legend of New Zealand yeah i knew you'd like that chance um this is a man called Ken Tustin and he has been in the national parks in New Zealand in Fjordland looking for moose because there was moose back in the 1920s 30s when they were introduced

and there's your clincher there was moose so there is not like oh he's going to look for fairies and i hope there's some there you know there there was moose put there then i'll be dead by now those ones it's 100 years ago it's a little thing called mating oh is that yeah go down to the sea get your toes wet come and meet me on a wet cliff mate wow oh blindfold you is that someone blowing no it's not it's just the wind all right get your idea out show us your twerks here we go and mating say this is okay so um i i got the uh the decade slightly wrong this was in 1910 and what it was is that New Zealanders basically in 1910 wanted

something to hunt and they had no natural land mammals of that size and so moose were introduced basically to rectify that so initially the moose really adapted well to the surroundings but then red deer were introduced into the area and that changed the whole food change so much that by 1952 so there was a good you know 40 odd years that they were around the moose population really dwindled and then basically by 1930 disappeared altogether but then in 1952 one was caught on camera so there's 20 there's a 20 odd year period where people thought they were extinct and then suddenly boom here is a moose and that is why this guy says there may be more moose because moose are really good at hiding yes they are they're really they're really hard to

see they're huge i know but they're actually i know i know but this is a huge national park you know it's really hard to spot one um a moose could be standing in a in a field 100 yards away and you won't see it wow they do get they get hit by cars a lot don't they moose like that is a big problem in Canada and is that because of their this invisibility that they can well that must be right yeah because they they've got this mystical ability they can stand still for a long time and one of their i think one of their look if you can just take this seriously one of their um you know like a a security measure defense mechanisms there you go there's the terms i knew you'd get there uh is to you know like um they're caught a lot of animals use that where they just freeze

like the goat thinking and it's always yeah well no that's a different one that's you know but that well kind of but that's there that's a gene anomaly yeah i'm just trying to think of some other animals that do it do the old freeze um a few bugs in headlights they would rabbit headlights mules mules do that definitely i think when they're they just freeze when they can't deal with situation i think so yeah like a possum something they would kind of pretend to be dead no i think all of the examples you've given so far are incorrect okay there are some bugs and things out there that will just i think okay here's one the stick insect because i saw it yesterday okay and a frozen stick in sex so the thing is i used to have pet stick insects as a child

and they never moved ever it wasn't that as soon as they were in danger they stopped moving they just stayed no that's defense mechanism they were scared of me yeah absolutely so i've had one i had one on my uh steering wheel the other day this is back in new zealand when i was on the in the rural property and i went to grab my steering wheel to to to drive as you do and there's a there's a sticky on there and i went oh come on mate because of my hands need to be there he was in the two position because you know you go for 11 and two it's the worst place and i went i grabbed the 11 and i always grabbed the left first grabbed the 11 going for the two oh there's a sticky there and i says to him come on mate and i and he just honestly i see him looking at me i'm on the right

hand side of him no prob's there but he's not moving and i come in slowly i'm cut and i even told him coming in with the hand buddy coming in because you're on my two position and nothing just absolutely frozen so in the end i just picked him up and he made out like he was a stick the whole time i even come to think of it it might have been a poor poor stupid stick insect because i see what you're saying now you're saying animals that are camouflage to their environment freeze but he's not a steering wheel insect so it would be good if you could know as an animal that the thing you're sitting on yeah it's not like you look nothing like it yeah i mean chameleons they're the other ones that lizards in general will will freeze or really dart away but lizards

are the ones that will will freeze as a mechanism so let's go back to what what what was your fact in what are we talking about moose we were talking about mooses right that's right and so hey this is pretty cool we wrote a book years ago race uh where there was a new zealand professor called neil gemel who had gone to Loch Ness and he had used a new form called edna to try and sample the waters of Loch Ness to see if the monster may exist and so edna seems like quite an obvious thing that you would use in order to try and find the moose because you could go there and if the moose had been let's say around a little stream or a pond and if it had been sipping from it in the last 21 days neil would be able to use this device to then take extra x out and say ah there's moose dna in

there that's that means they're alive yeah so i actually dm'd him on twitter and i asked him you know is this is this a thing would you be up for doing it and he said it's so weird i actually met ken i met this guy who's been looking for moose yeah and he met him when he went back to Loch Ness to deliver the results of his findings about the water that he took from Loch Ness and ken happened to be there on holiday and they met at no way to then discuss looking for the moose actually i might seem like it's a massive coincidence but where is ken going to holiday it's obviously going to be Loch Ness isn't it where are these two nutters that you've happened to have heard of going to see each other how day so is he going to do it well he talks about it so he said um what did he say

he said ken and i've kept in touch and the plan was to jump on board with him next time he found some sign of moose but there's been little found in the past few years still remains a possibility we've surveyed quite large sections of yordland and do reasonably broad biodiversity surveys setting baselines and looking for various things endangered birds some species that are presumed to be extinct and of course moose so far there is no evidence of those however there's been a hugely exciting thing for ken that happened in 2020 which is that a kid why i say kid he's a teenager and when i say teenager he's in his 20s and he was on a flight he was a guy called ben young who was in a helicopter flying over fjordland doing some surveying and he saw a moose he saw the moose now here's the thing

here's the thing he's a canadian who used to work with moose there you go he knows what a moose we all know what a moose looks like no but canadians really know he was really know he was specifically a former moose hunting guide in canada i still go listen james he would really know reese you're the one who just told us a canadian could be standing 100 feet from a moose in a plain meadow and not see it so there you go yeah normally but this guy was a trained moose yeah looker wasn't he he's a trained moose looker yeah yeah it's i have to say it's not it obviously is not the maddest idea they were there like you say it is a big place and um sometimes these things come to fruition so there's another really great kiwi animal uh animal in new zealand the

tarkahey which i think are pretty rare i doubt have you seen tarkahey i think they're quite rare aren't they reese yes they're they're rare nice nice looking very nice looking birds though what kind of birds yeah they're the largest bird in like the rail family so like coots and mohens but much bigger very beautiful blue green feathers huge red beak that goes all the way up over their foreheads they can't fly but anyway we thought the tarkahey was extinct by about 1900 so i think the first sighting by europeans was 1849 obviously the europeans captured it roasted it ate it they sort of went quite quickly extinct and then there's a guy called jeffrey orbell who when he was a kid his mum just showed him a picture of one i think in a childhood book and he got a hunch as a child

i bet that's still out there and he spent his life kind of reading up on them and he was he was a doctor i think he was a an eye doctor so he was a legit had a job um he knew how eyes worked so he'd be perfect looking for things he knows how they really work he could he could really know yeah yeah so he took his expert eyes out on this 1948 expedition and he they went up this mountain and you know these things haven't been seen for 50 years and they sat by a little bit of water and two of them just walked straight into their nets these lovely little birds waddled in and we discovered and now they have them i think they're only about 300 they're very unusual but yeah they're very endangered yeah but look there you go i mean that's just one example of how

animals and don't forget you know the more intelligent they are they know we're around they know that they're endangered there's only a small group of them and they hide and they worry and they at their their survival instinct is their main feature and so they are doing whatever it can take because otherwise they could be caught they could be shot we only think it from a human capacity of how how would we hide how would we stay alive but we're nowhere near as good as animals in the natural environment of the forest at staying alive yeah you're right a moose that's ingrained in its system isn't it get away um just back to the fjordlands very quickly i just want to give a quick shout out to a legend of the world of ornithology um he was part of the

ornithological society of new zealand uh joined in 1957 a guy called ron jack nilson who very sadly passed away october 26 2022 um he was a legend of his field and he spent much like ken many many years looking for an elusive supposedly extinct species of bird which are called the south island coca-coa have you heard of that reese the south island coca-coa um oh yeah we found this this year in november wasn't it yeah it was the first of november last year yeah when did he die october 26 oh no oh god that is so close yeah um but no seriously what what what how do you spell the bird name ko with a line above the ko sorry ka ko so coca-coa and it's a bird that hasn't been seen for many many years um people occasionally have supposed sightings but no one has properly

confirmed it no one has a photo and if anyone in new zealand in that region is listening there is at least there was when this paper was written a ten thousand dollar reward for any photographic proof of the south island coca-coa there's quite a lot of quite a lot of money to be made isn't there if you can find these things that don't exist oh it's not the easiest way probably to pull in a decent sell a reliable salary if you tell your partner you know i'm going to quit my job because i've heard lots of money to be made you're nagging me too much i'm going to get my books and i'm going to go and find the coca-coa okay i'll see you at dinner the age old story okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get

in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast we can all be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland james at james harkin Reese please don't contact me uh i think i hit this last time i haven't got time to read all your messages and anna uh you can either podcast at qi.com yep where 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 our previous episodes are there do check them out but most importantly go and watch the entire series of our flag memes death Reese's brilliant pirate sitcom the entire series is up now to watch on the bbci player it's an absolutely awesome series um Reese thank you so much for being here and for the rest of

you we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye