No Such Thing As A Fish - 462: No Such Thing As A Luigi Board

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Live from Up the Creek in Greenwich, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss ring mutts, King Tuts, reincarnation and the Restoration. 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 coming to you live from up the creek in Greenwich, London! My name is Dan Schreiber. Here I am sitting here with Anna Toshensky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite 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 some shows at the Roman Coliseum featured sausage dogs.

People fighting sausage dogs? It's so unclear, it's so unclear what the actual thing is. The thing is they would be quite far away, you wouldn't get great visibility on a sausage dog from that distance. If you were in the back, you'd have no idea what was going on. Yeah, that's true. But maybe it was a swarm of sausage dogs against one Christian, you know, that is possible. Would you rather fight a thousand Christian-sized sausage dogs?

A thousand Christian-sized sausage dogs? Or what? Or not. They often didn't get a choice, fun fact, in the Coliseum. So we should say there's been an archaeological study done recently, and these are Daxons, Vena dogs, whatever you want to call them, and they were the kind of precursor, the prototypes of these dogs, because the modern breed only emerged in about the 18th and 19th century. But they were basically this kind of dog.

If you went back in time when you saw one, you would think it was a sausage dog. Exactly. The thing is we genuinely don't know what they thought, and the archaeologists have been crawling in the sewers under the Coliseum for a year. They spent a year crawling in the mud on their stomachs, and they found lots of stuff. They found seven coins, which does not feel like a good return on investment. It's not a good wage, is it, for the year? And they found some bones.

They found some leopard bones. They found some lions and ostrich bones. But they also found these dogs, and we don't know were they part of staged battles, which is great fun, or were they acrobats, which is also fun. Which is amazing. So the fact that there's a slightly more boring explanation, which is that they might have been used to kind of hunt rats, because when you're in the Coliseum, loads of people there, you're eating lots of snacks.

It could be that they tried to stop the rodents, but I mean, I'd rather think of them as acrobats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's all speculation. Did we not write stuff down back then? Because I'm pretty sure we did. How is it that sausage dogs have escaped history, yet we are... That's a great question. There was a lot going on at the Coliseum.

It was some mad shit for about 500 years. You couldn't write every single thing down every day. I'm sorry. If I walked out of the end of an evening at the Coliseum, and I saw gladiators fighting, I'm not saying that. I'm going, did anyone see the fucking sausage dog? But no, but there was so much more weird stuff than that. Like the real acrobats did amazing things.

And one of the frustrating things is we don't have that much information, because people write about it in fragments. Sometimes we've only got little bits of writing. There was the Pertauris, which the sources we have suggest was a giant seesaw, and we think it was used at kind of half time in the Coliseum. So there's huge seesaw, and you'd have two opponents competing on either side, and one would jump onto it, and it would fling the other one up in the air. I think about 30 feet in the air.

No, stop it. Stop it. Apparently. OK. They'd go through hoops of flame, I think, one of the sources said, and then come back down, and then the other one gets flung in the air. There is an account of them falling to their death sometimes, as will happen. Wasn't there an account of them putting criminals on there?

Yeah. And the idea is, the lions come in, right, and they're going to attack the guy who's the bottom of the seesaw, so you're always trying to get to the top of your seesaw so that he's at the bottom. I think that satsums is speculated that that might be what they were used for. It is, but there's no suggestion. The problem is, as soon as the other guy gets eaten, you're fucked, aren't you? Yeah.

Yeah. The weird thing is, this is all the halftime shows, though. Lots of what we're talking about now is the halftime shows in between, what, chariot races, and then maybe other final gladiators, but a lot of the damnatio ad bestias, so being killed by wild animals, basically, organised by a group of people called the bestiary. There are lots of sources claiming that the bestiary were incredible trainers of animals, and they would train animals to kill people in incredibly elaborate ways that referenced myths for people.

So they would recreate death scenes. You guys remember the story of Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods, and then he was punished, he was chained to a rock, and a liver would fly down every day and peck out his eagle. So, eagle would fly down every day. But they recreated it the opposite way around. Exactly. Yeah.

Supposedly one bestiary spent months and months training a single eagle to remove a man's organs. I can't believe that's true. The halftime shows sounded amazing. They kind of sound like a modern halftime show of, let's say, a basketball, if you watch American basketball. Super Bowl, maybe? Super Bowl.

Like, it's really show-stoppy kind of stuff, so they would do things where snacks would fall from the sky, and including from, I mean, they're not from the clouds, obviously, but they were sort of launched, kind of like how the people that would stand in the middle and shoot out t-shirts out of rockets. They had a toga cannon? Exactly. Yeah. Well, what they actually had, though, which is amazing, is you got this wooden ball where

on the inside you would win something like a t-shirt or, I know they didn't have t-shirts, so it's very progressive. No, but it would be food or it would be money or it would even be the deeds to a house, you know, or an apartment. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of people really fought over it. But were there bad things?

Were there bad things in the balls as well? No, I don't know. So, like, if you open the bowl, you might get a t-shirt or it might be you have to go on the seesaw? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It did sound pretty cool, though, didn't it? Yeah.

They had, possibly, we think, like the spectators would have water sprinkled on them, because they had toilets with running water, so they would kind of get the water from the river and kind of get it to go through the stadium and go through where all the toilets are. But they also had huge... We think because they had this in pool and we haven't seen it in the Coliseum, but it's very, very similar. They had huge, huge towers with loads of water in, and that water would kind of sprinkle over everyone to keep them cool.

And they also had a retractable roof. No! This is amazing! I know, they were more than 2,000 years ahead of Wimbledon. It's so amazing, isn't it? There we go again. They just had a canvas roof that they could bring over whenever it got too hot or cold. Yeah, the Valerium, I think, and it was operated by about 1,000 sailors who would pull on the

ropes because they used to pulling on rope sailors. Oh, wow. But, yeah, and you'd have advertising up, and we've got the, I want to say, etchings in the stones, but we've got the evidence that you'd advertise, there will be shade. Vella errant, you know, there will be shade for you. It's incredible. Although Caligula liked to wind it back so he could watch people just boil, boil up. Oh, yeah, absolutely classic Caligula.

Yeah. It sounded hectic working there, though, because basically you could be a part of the show if anything went wrong, if the emperor decided. So Claudius in particular, there was a biographer called Suetonius who wrote about the fact that Claudius, if he was watching a show, and something went slightly wrong, and everything was operated underneath in terms of the, if the gladiators were fighting, or the animals that came up into the stadium, they were all in the hypergeum, which was underneath, which is this extraordinary kind of like the backstage of a theater where they have just a crazy

amount of stuff that you wouldn't realize to make shows happen. That was happening underneath. And so if something went wrong where something came up at the wrong time and it pissed off the emperor, he would just say, whoever the staff is down there, they're now in the show. Get them up there to fight the lions. Anything that went wrong, if the catering went wrong, get the caterers in there. So he just kept adding people to be killed in the... Right.

Sounds great. I heard that sometimes hecklers would be thrown to wild animals. Really? That's fair enough. We should start that. I like the hypergeum because it's like, it's like whack-a-mole, isn't it? It's like a lion would pop up somewhere, and then you had to go and fight it, and then some monkeys, and then a sausage dog would go to see you.

But the whole point was that there wasn't spots you knew that they would pop up. There were so many spots that, like the whack-a-mole, you could be facing this way, expecting a lion, and then it comes behind you. And apparently, the system to bring them up sometimes was so supercharged that the lion would be lobbed into the stomach. Come on. That's an encounter, right? Oh, my God.

There's so much speculation about this stuff. It's amazing. And the first, the best seats were reserved for the emperor and the Vestal Virgins. All right. They got the best seats, and then if you went a little bit higher up, you would get the senators, and then you would get the knights and the nobles. And then the very, very furthest strata was for commoners. And then they built one more, even right at the very, very back strata.

And do you know who that was for? A commonist. What was it? Women. Women is exactly right. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm afraid so.

Because they gave us the best seat. Well, yes, exactly. You wouldn't be able to see the sausage dog unless it was flung really high. It seated a lot, it seated 50,000 people, the Coliseum, roughly. And I went to Wembley to see a show. And that gives you, like, if you were watching a sausage dog down, as you said, like, because I went to see, I went to see Billy Joel at Wembley. Oh, yeah.

And my wife booked me this ticket as part of a Christmas present. And I said, what are the seats like? She said, I didn't really check. I'm sure they're good. You couldn't be further away from Billy Joel as possible. It was so far away that when the gig was playing, we could hear the song and the screens that allowed us to see him, which genuinely, he's sausage dog size at that distance. It was out of sync with the visuals.

And I was like, oh my God, Billy's going to be so angry because, you know, so much money is spent. That's the way we were. Sound and vision were traveling at a different rate that they were not in sync. So if you counted the number of seconds between the time he opened his mouth and the time you saw it, you could tell how far away he was. You could tell when you're going to get struck by lightning. That's right.

Amazing. Well, you say 50,000 sounds big, but I just don't think we ever make a big enough deal of the fact that this Coliseum basically replaced Circus Maximus, which was its predecessor, sat 250,000 people, still the biggest ever stadium. It's just, I find that just amazing. That was Rome as well, but it was, you know, they got bored of it. That was where they had lots of chariot races and then chucked the Coliseum in, which they never called the Coliseum.

They called it the Flavian Amphitheatre. And we think the reason they changed the name is quite funny. So it started being called the Coliseum in sort of early medieval times. And we believe it's because the Colossus at the time was the Colossus of Nero, this gigantic 100 foot tall classic Nero statue of him, which had, as Nero went out of fashion, its head kept changing. So whatever emperor was in power at the time, they'd shove his head on the statue. And eventually someone wrote a poem about the Colossus saying, so long as the Colossus

stands, Rome shall stand. When the Colossus falls, Rome too shall fall. And when Rome falls, so falls the world. And then almost immediately after that was written and published, the Colossus fell. And we think they went, well, shit, everyone's going to think the world's going to end. We better change what the Colossus is. And so then we think they named the Coliseum, the Coliseum. Wow.

Because it was right nearby. And they said, let's just pretend. Wow. That's really cool. I've got some stuff on sausage dogs. Of course you do. Sorry. Very nice.

We've actually got to move on. No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Don't go near it. I thought this fact would go in a very different direction. I've basically only got sausage dog stuff now. Do you guys know where the sausage dog capital of the world is? Oh, Germany.

No, it's out of this year. It's in the UK. Oh. It's almost totally ungettable. Is it Maidstone? It's on the coast. On Light Maidstone. No, it's not.

I don't even know why I say it. It was in Southwold this year in Suffolk. Oh, yeah. They had, well, a lot of, you know... Push people in the audience. This year, Southwold hosted the world's largest ever single breed dog walk when 2,238 sausage dogs turned up for a walk. Whoa.

At the same time. That's a lot. The size of one gladiator Christian. You said turned up. Like, A, they were posters up around town and the dogs just trotted up on their own. I know. And they had one person to walk all of them.

It was a nightmare. Do you want to hear a fact that's not about Dachshunds? Yeah, and then we need to move on. OK, OK. So I was reading an article in researching this about a Dachshund which was caught on CCTV in Germany and it was the only police lead for a case, a crime case, because it had an unusual lead

and they couldn't see the face of the criminal and they could only see the lead on the Dachshund and that was the police link. So it was such a confusing case. Do we have any leads? Yes, we've got this one lead. I told you. LAUGHTER

But I only mentioned this because of the final paragraph which I loved but is not Dachshund related but it was in this story. So here I'm just going to read it verbatim. It may not be the first time a pet has provided key evidence. In 2017, a woman in Michigan was convicted of killing her husband partly on the testimony from their parrot which kept repeating,

Don't shoot in the dead man's voice. Oh. Wow. Spooky. In his voice. It was supposedly in his voice. I've never heard a parrot that can do voices but this one can.

Wow. Amazing. But he didn't say don't shoot Mabel, did he? Oh, yeah. So we don't know who he was talking to. Yeah, yeah. How did that help convict her? OK, well, tune into Anna's new true crime podcast

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It is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1920s, spiritualists started complaining that Tutankhamun was appearing at their seances too often. It's just sort of spamming them. Was he disruptive or was it just there's too much of this? Sometimes. Yeah, he seemed to have quite bad mood swings

which I guess he was a teenager. So this was... Go to your pyramid. No! Fuck, go to your tomb. Sorry, there we go. Sorry. This was in Tutankhamun's second heyday

which was the 1920s I guess. So he was, his tomb was discovered in 1922. It was this huge deal and he became this massive celebrity. Obviously no one had ever heard of him before this. And at the same time seances were very popular. Spiritualism was very popular. And so he kept on popping up and there was an addition of a journal called Light,

a journal of spiritual progress and physical research. And a letter in it said, we are getting a little tired of Tutankhamun. Messages purporting to be from him which consists of vague generalities are quite worth this. Anyone could compose them. And saying basically, you know,

either give us good evidence of your identity, I don't know how, write some hieroglyphics or something. They're hard to do on a Ouija board. You need the expansion pack for that. You do, yeah. You need the right font, don't you? Some wingdings on there. Yeah, they said we don't want just random celebrities claiming to turn up.

Either we want the good evidence or we want their message to be of such high quality that their identity becomes unimportant. Some very fine teaching comes from these visitors and it's being spoiled by Tutankhamun. And the thought was, wasn't it, that the reason he started coming up because of this heyday thing

is because the attention was so great on him that he was, like, invoked back into existence. That was the excuse, wasn't it? Yeah, rather than why is Tutankhamun not been, like, breaking into everyone's seance prior to that, it's because, well, he didn't know he was needed prior to that. Yeah, as in he was, like, they were claiming he was a bit of an egotistical attention seeker

and so he was up there, like, well, no one cares about me. And then they started caring, so he decided, fine, I'll come and visit you now. So what was he saying? What were the messages he was ringing? So sometimes he was angry, his tomb had been violated, and he would smash everything up, he injured a medium,

he broke lots of Egyptian sculptures that were in the room, and then sometimes he was a nice guy. He really depended. I wonder who a modern equivalent of that would be, as in someone who's very, very famous. Well, in 2003, there was a pay-per-view Princess Diana seance.

I don't know if you remember that, yeah. 2003, God. Yeah, but pay-per-view. Why do you sound appalled at pay-per-view? Because it's event television, it was sort of... Normally it would be a huge event that you would have pay-per-view because, you know... Got it.

Right. But you're saying it should have been BBC then. License fee only. Prime time. Yeah, absolutely. Budget cuts for the BBC. They just can't afford it. But check this out.

This is a seance that I'd never heard of before. This was a medium who was quite famous called Lillian Bailey, and she claimed that she had a spirit guide who was called William Headley Wooten, and he was a captain during World War I. He died in World War I, and she would use him in order to bring other people to talk. And she received a request one day to go and do a seance,

but they said it's a bit high profile, the person. So what we're going to do is we're going to pick you up from your place, we're going to blindfold you, and we're going to take you to the place. So she was sat around the table, and then she wasn't allowed to take the blindfold off. So she did it. And at the end of it, having contacted someone,

she took the blindfold off and sitting in front of her was Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, and a few other of the royals. And what it was is it was not long after the King had died, and the Queen Mother was obsessed with the idea of contact. So the Queen was at a seance. Can you imagine taking that blindfold off? Bloody hell.

And she slowly put it back on. Take me home. But she kind of used that in the future as a kind of she's the Queen's official medium. Well, you were? Yeah, yeah, by royal appointment. That's who she said she was. And the Queen Mother often would book sessions with her afterwards to try and do it.

And the person who set it up, which was not in the movie, was a man called Lionel Logue, who was the therapist who treated the King for his stammer in the King's speech. Right. He's the one who set up the seance. Wow, they should have put that in. Yeah, what a scene. Oh, my God.

Do you speak in a seance when you're one of the guests, or do you only speak when you're the medium? You're not really supposed to. OK. I just thought, because that would have given it away, not enough people speak like the Queen and Prince Philip and the Queen Mother to conceal your identity. Maybe they put an accent on.

Not like an Aussie accent, or... Cockney, Irish or something, you know? German. LAUGHTER Whatever their best at. Actually, speaking of Germans, there was a big thing in the war, wasn't there, where there was a medium called Helen Duncan,

and she was a Scottish 25-stone, working-class mother of six who swore, smoked and drank whiskey. She sounds great, right? But at the time, she was like, in the upper classes in London, they thought she was an absolute genius. They thought that she could speak to the dead. She was really, really important in the high society. And then, in 1941, she was in a seance in Portsmouth,

and she claimed the spirit of a sailor told her that a certain ship had been sunk, and it turned out that that ship had been sunk, but it hadn't been reported yet. And so, obviously, she became... They were really worried about her. First of all, maybe, you know, she is somehow getting messages from the dead, or maybe she's getting messages from the Germans,

or... Yeah, they thought she might be a spy who was ceding... Yeah, and, of course, she got done for witchcraft. Yeah, she was the last person, or the second last person, the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act. But she got imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. So what was she being imprisoned for? Being a witch.

It's absolutely incorrect. Not being a witch. That's absolutely right. Oh! So the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not about persecuting witches. It was the first act that acknowledged witches are not real, and so people pretending to be witches are the ones who need to be punished now for faking it.

And so she was punished for pretending to be a witch. That's brilliant. God, that's a real Catch-22 situation as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Have you guys heard of Colin Evans? No. Colin Evans was a Welsh spiritualist in, I think, the 1920s,

and his big thing was claiming that he could levitate. So he would get an audience, probably an audience around this size, a few hundred people. He would request the room went completely dark. The audience would sit around him and pitch blackness, and they would chant. They would all chant the same thing, an incredible atmosphere, something amazing to be found.

Levitate. Levitate. Levitate. Levitate. Now the lights down? No. It was completely dark, and then he provided proof of it. He would take photos of himself at the very moment

where he was levitating. But the thing is, he was just jumping. He would just jump, take the photo, and then land. That was quite impressive. That was the whole act. When was this, though? 20s? Photos took a long time to expose back then to capture something.

No, no, no. You had a flash photo in the 20s. It might have been 30s. Exposure times were right down. Was he smiling in the photo, or was he serious? He was very serious. But his feet were slightly blurred, and that also gave away. But also, I suppose Dan is right that the technology

must have been new enough that people didn't, like, catch on, right? Didn't assume. I guess. And it was also, even if you were in the room, you'd see a tiny flash of light, and him... Oh, so that would provide the light as well. Mid-Jupiter. Mid-Jupiter.

I always think that back in these olden days, the Seance days in the 1920s, it must have been so much darker than it is today. I just think there was less natural light around. Maybe we didn't have a moon back then, because basically all the tricks they did were based on it being pitch black. Maybe you have one candle, you know?

Just a bit of atmosphere, one candle. No, you can't have any candles. Well, because you had things like Seance trumpets, which were these trumpets through which the spirits spoke. They magnified their voices, and they used to float around in the middle of the room, and they'd have glowing rings on their back-end and front-end. And the way they floated was that a medium's assistant

would just be holding it up, but he'd be wearing black. So no one would see. And it's like, how dark does it have to be that you can't see? And the ectoplasm, probably the best thing about all Seances, the weird, like, physical manifestation of spirits, which was kind of white stuff, gooey stuff that would come out of orifices of the medium.

I mean, it's got to be pretty dark for you to think that's anything spooky, because usually it was handkerchiefs that they would stick up their nose as far as they could and then kind of pull out. There was one amazing medium, Mary M, who produced ectoplasm with photos of Arthur Conan Doyle on it. So she said, Arthur Conan Doyle's coming out of my nose.

It was after he died, look at this, and then pulled this tissue out of her nose with a photo of him on it, which someone pointed out later was the same photo that had appeared in a newspaper about a week earlier. It had obviously been stuck on. Oh, my God, yeah. Arthur Conan Doyle solved an incredible case

where someone was claiming that they'd contacted a celebrity from the other side, which was there was a book that was released called The Mystery of Edwin Druid. We've spoken about it before on the podcast. I actually wrote about this in my book as well. I got obsessed with the same. What's that called, Dan?

The theory of everything else out now. If anyone needs a Christmas present available. It's actually in most shots, so, yeah, and they have lots of copies, so if someone could find one. But no, I got obsessed with, but there was a period where there were people claiming, because seances were so massive, that celebrities who were dead, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens,

all those were, they were dictating from the other side new novels, new works, and they would go on sale by real publishers, and people would buy them. They'd be reviewed in The New York Times, even if skeptically, they got sort of space, and there was one book which was The Mystery of Edwin Druid. It was the final Charles Dickens book that he never finished, and he didn't leave any notes of what had happened to the character

and who had killed Edwin Druid. So a guy called T.P. James actually finished the book by contacting Dickens from the other side, and he said, this is the final book, they published it. There was a new forward written by Dickens as well, to explain the process. They had a new book that they were working on together called The Life and Adventures of Buckley Whippleheap.

It was a very exciting thing. And it was Arthur Conan Doyle who said he didn't contact Charles Dickens. The reason Arthur Conan Doyle knew that is because he himself did a seance in which he contacted Charles Dickens and asked him, did you finish this book? And he said, no, it wasn't me.

Just on the Ouija board. We're saying it right, Ouija? Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija.

Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. Ouija, Ouija. He was a former woodworker who took over the business

and you know, it was so popular, again around the time of the 20s and 30s at one point he had several factories all just churning out Ouija boards. They sold thousands and thousands of thousands of them. And he only sat up in such a big way because the board had told him

prepare for big business, so yeah. But this is the really spooky thing. He went up on the roof of one of the factories to see a flagpole being replaced, right? And then he fell off and died. It just fell off. Yeah, yeah. OK.

And then he came back and said something. No, no, no, no. But it still makes you think, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. The reason I think that it's pronounced Ouija is there's a YouTuber called Sexkick who went on to Yahoo Answers and searched for various different spellings

of Ouija board and found, how do you make a Ouija board? Have you played the Ouija board and can you burn a Ouija board? And it seems, and quite a lot more, and it seems like there's a lot of people in America who think that it's not a Ouija board, but a Ouija board. It's really good.

It's coming through. Who are you? It's me! OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that according to his various biographers, Pythagoras could talk with animals,

be in two places at once, had a shiny golden leg and was able to tell fishermen the exact number of fish they'd caught in their net just by looking at it. So this was a sight... I could do the last one, I reckon. Well, it depends how many there are.

It depends on the... Maybe not a trawler, then. Two. Screw you, Pythagoras. I'm genuinely really shocked that we've done 400-plus episodes and we've never ever mentioned Pythagoras, and I'm doubly shocked that

after all the years of us doing this stuff, I didn't realise what a mad life he supposedly had according to the stories of his life. We all know him for his theorem, very famously. He was a mathematician, he was a philosopher. I didn't realise there was a cult around him that sort of put him into a sort of paranormal territory where he was able to reincarnate and...

But he wasn't really a mathematician, either. That's the weird thing. Cos I thought he was a mathematician. He wasn't really, he was kind of a mystic and then cult leader and political figure. But the cult were very into numbers, weren't they? So that was part of it. And numbers are very maths-related.

So... They're maths-adjacent. Not when you're doing algebra. Great point. Oh, didn't you get a long way? Look who did GCSE! But no, he wasn't really a mathematician. Pythagoras' theorem had been come up with

about a thousand years before him. Oh, actually, related to the first-ever episode we did a fish, there's a Pythagoras fact. One of the people who proved Pythagoras' theorem in a new way that had never been demonstrated before was... President Garfield. President Garfield, yeah.

Lying in that hospital bed, being fed through his arse, you've got to do something to distract yourself. That's a confusing sentence if you haven't heard the first episode. I'll just have to go back and listen. It's a great teaser, yeah. They were obsessed with numbers, as you say. And numbers, every number had a different personality.

Now, I don't know, because I couldn't find out anywhere how high up this went. Because it can't go forever. But masculine numbers are odd numbers, and feminine numbers are even. Even are considered the only perfect numbers. Although odd ones are equated with divinity, so all the genders are doing well out of this.

Oh, yeah, quite sweet. The feminine number is two, and the masculine number is three, and then five is the marriage number. But, yeah, all these numbers meant specific things to them. Yeah, it went about, I think it went as far as ten. Because they had to... How far is it? They had this special thing where it's like...

Can you imagine, like, a snooker bowl triangle where you have one, then two, then three, then four, and that added up to ten. This was very special to them. And they had a poem, or a hymn, really, blesses divine number, thou who generated gods and men, the mother of all, the all-comprising,

the all-bounding, the firstborn, the never-swerving, the never-tiring, holy ten. Right. Yeah, they love ten. Yeah, yeah. And they love triangles. Blake's nooker must have been hell, actually. White agarine.

I get it, the right angle thing. What do you guys think he was like? Like, let's imagine we're living in the time. OK, well, I can say so. Like, a lot of the things that you've said there about the golden thigh and talking to animals, they were written much, much later. Exactly.

But some of the things that were written at the time when he was alive, they said that he did believe that the souls of humans could return as animals. Yes. So he did believe in reincarnation. We know that because people said it at the time. And also that he, you know, he had his own kind of wisdom. He had his own kind of learning.

So we know all that kind of stuff happened. Like, maybe not. OK, so what about... Because there's a story about a dog. And he was passing someone in the street. He believed that, you know, people could come back in the form of animals and all of this, as you just said. So he once stopped someone who was beating a small dog

in the street because he recognised in the barking... You should be in the Colosseum. No, he recognised in the barking, the voice of a friend of his who died. He'd then been reborn as a puppy. The whole story does kind of imply that he recognised the barking as a friend of his. He wouldn't have thought anything was a mess.

Must have been a bad dog. Just leave it. But what does he then do with the dog? We don't... You're turning this into a very different kind of talk show type of podcast. Jerry Springer's style. We don't know what he was like. No, as in... What's the dilemmas? Sorry.

My friend is a dog. My friend's a dog. Stop beating the dog. OK, I'll stop beating it. Wouldn't you be like, Greg, what's up? Have dinner at all. He's just going to be like, all right, see you, buddy. Enjoy your new life. It sucks, you're a dog.

Catch you later. Stop harming my leg. You never did that before. Yeah. He did love numbers, but he hated irrational numbers, or at least he didn't believe they existed. Is that why they're called irrational, because he was so irrational about them?

He had an irrational loathing of them. Sorry, they're the ones that go on forever. And they're numbers that you can't be expressed as a fraction or a ratio, which I only realised when I was doing this research, having kind of known this irrational I ratio, they're numbers that you can't express as a ratio. So, five, six over two.

Yeah, you idiot, can't believe we... Can't believe we were all thinking that. So, if you take 22 divided by seven, it gets to quite close to 3.14 something, but it doesn't get to pi, which is 3.141, blah, blah, blah, blah, which goes on forever. And that would be an irrational number. And he didn't believe in them, because he loved finite numbers.

And they were on a boat one day, on a cruise or something. And one of his followers, called Hepaceus, proved the existence of irrational numbers by saying the square root of two is one, which not is one, is one, is one. This is why I got no further than GCSE. And he, according to reports, was tossed overboard. Yeah. Really?

So, you've got to be careful with strict teachers. Wasn't they killed him? Yeah, they killed him, yeah. They killed him for proving that the square root of two is an irrational number. Yeah, supposedly, yeah. But he made him walk the plank. But he believed in reincarnation, so he probably thought he'd bump into him on the street. Greg! Greg, dude.

I don't know what happened with my temper that day, but, wow, it was a fun cruise, though, wasn't it, while it lasted. When you joined his cult, you had to say nothing for five years, and that was how you got to the next level of the cult. OK. And also, he had a... If you'd have gone four years in 11 months, that's a tough one, isn't it?

And you'd bang your foot. Yeah. But he had a system for his followers, right? So, there were the Mathematikoi, who were the senior followers, right? And he would meet them in person, and he would discuss proper maths with them, hard maths, and, you know, they would think a lot, and they'd do a lot of, you know, they'd do the big stuff.

And they had to make sacrifices. They had to give up meat, women, they were all men, and private possessions, OK? So, that's the senior tier. And they never touched white roosters. Is that true? Yeah. Wow. OK. I'm out. You'll have to give up meat, women, and private possessions.

Fine, fine. Anything else? There's one thing. I'm out. A couple more rules. OK, yeah. Don't eat your brain. Don't eat your brain. Couldn't find out really anything else, but I suppose that's all you need to know. Don't break bread.

Don't poke fire with a sword. Never urinate into the sun. I've heard don't urinate into the wind. Never into the sun. You might put it out. And we say that they couldn't eat any meat, which was mostly true, but they did still sacrifice an ox

and whenever they proved a mathematical formula. Sorry, what am I being sacrificed for again? Normally it's to a piece of gold or something. This doesn't sound important. You're being put into a pie. Oh, my God. That's sympathy. That's the best joke you'll hear for months.

But then, he also had these junior tier followers, who people who basically hadn't subscribed, and they were called the Akusmatikoi. Is this like a Patreon? It was a Patreon. Genuinely, he had a subscription service, so the Mathematikoi were in, and then the Akusmatikoi,

he would only speak to them from behind a curtain. Wow. And they weren't allowed to see his face, and they couldn't learn any proper maths, like any detailed maths. That was really because he wasn't the real Wizard of Oz, was he? He was just an old man. He had a curtain so that you couldn't see him as he was talking.

There is one of the stories of his death is directly associated with that, so someone on the lower Patreon level was part of that, couldn't see his face, got so angry that he couldn't see him, was furious that he burnt down his house, He burnt Pythagoras' house down, and then he chased him into a field.

So Pythagoras was in the lead, he's going good, he gets to the field, he's escaping this man, this is how the story goes, and then he notices that the field is full of beans, and Pythagoras refuses to step on beans, because he believes that beans, much like dogs, are the reincarnation reg. I thought what you were going to say is that the guys chasing him

went round two sides of the field, and he went diagonally across it. So he gets to the field of beans, and he stops and he thinks, I'll step on these beans, I'll kill the beans with my feet, and so the man catches up, and rather than going, fuck it, I'll just stamp on some beans,

he just stands there while the man cuts his throat, and kills him, and that's the death of Pythagoras, according to one opinion. I think there's another version of the story where loads of his followers gave their own lives, so that Pythagoras, go Pythagoras, go, go, you must go, we'll give up our lives, well we're killed,

and they still get to the head of the bean field, I can't do it, I can't sacrifice them, I can't do my beady friends. You supposedly had the power to write words on the face of the moon. Oh yeah. And I forgot to write anything more about that. I said, did he ever do that,

or was it... I'd love to tell you Andy, I'm afraid, that's a single sentence there. And for just $2.99 a month, you'll be able to see the words I do write on the face of the moon. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.

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All right, I need to move us on to our final fact of the show. It is time for our final fact and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is when the website health.com listed the fattiest foods in every state in the US

entrance included North Carolina's liver mush New York's garbage plate and Indiana's fried brain sandwich. See, they never read Pythagoras in Indiana today. So yeah, this is a fact

just about the disgusting things you can eat in America. Yeah, the fried brain sandwich sounds really weird. Weirdly, like the others are slightly you've missed it, well not even that you've missed it, but fried brain sandwiches are literally exactly what they sound like. Oh, okay. Whose brain? Well, it used to be

cow brains, but after my cow disease came in, they're now pig brains. One little tip if you, when you bread the brains, as in you put the breadcrumbs on there, make sure you have cold hands otherwise they can fall apart. So that's a little bit of a tip.

The best place to get them is Hilltop Inn in Evansville and that has been dubbed recently in 2009 actually the manliest restaurant in America. Oh. I know I'm a man, but I don't actually want my restaurant to be manly. No.

It's not even in my top five criteria for a restaurant. Shall we go with Italian, Chinese or manly? Exactly. This list is incredible though. So you read out some of the most amazing sounding ones, but even the other things on it, the Colorado

the Jack and Grills seven pound breakfast burrito is the least healthy food in Colorado. Connecticut, the two foot long hot dog which, and these aren't just in one place, lots of them are available in lots of different places. There's the quadruple bypass burger. 8000 calories. I've had some

of one of them. Have you? Yeah, in Vegas, right? It's not impressive to have had some of one of them. Don't put your photo on the wall for that, mate. They'll put some of your photo on the wall. Did you hear about the Luther burger? This is in Georgia, in the south.

Right, it's a normal burger, the Luther burger. It's a normal burger. It's got egg, it's got bacon and it's got cheese as well as the burger. So far, so meh. But it's not served between a bun, can you guess? Luther, between two church doors. That's right.

Yeah. Between the north. It fills the gap between the north and south doors on the transept. It's amazing. No, someone in the audience murmured it, actually. It's between two Krispy Kreme glazed donuts. Oh, yeah.

And was that part of his Protestant theology? The donut thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Shall I just quickly say the other two very quickly? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, liver mush is

a savoury sliced loaf made from pork liver scrap meat, often from a pig's head, spices and corn meal. Nice. And they have a liver mush eating contest in wherever it was, in North Carolina every year. They also have a liver mush pageant,

but in last years we've had contesting of what? Are there floats? It really feels like putting lipstick on a pig really trying to make that attractive. It's basically a festival and they have lots of things, but they have

basically local children or young women that kind of... Dresses liver mush. Is it like a liver mush queen? They often do that kind of thing, don't they? And the liver mush eating contest where last year the winner managed to eat some. LAUGHTER

And garbage plate is from Rochester, New York and it's basically, this actually sounds really good, it's a choice of any meats so even though I am vegetarian but let's pretend I'm not. It's like hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, any kind of stuff, you shove a load of french fries on it,

shove a load of beans on it, macaroni cheese and then cover it in a special sauce. That actually sounds quite good to me. Really depends on the special sauce. I think it's hot sauce. We've mentioned it before, James, you've been there

but I just love reading about it every single time which is the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmo, Sweden and it just collects food that is utterly horrible and James, you tried a few things there which tasted horrible. I was reading an article by a guy who went there in 2019

called Arthur De Mayer and he described, he gave a bit more of an explanation about these particular foods so you can have an Icelandic shark dish there called Hakarl and he said it was eating it was like gnawing on three week old cheese from the garbage that had

also been pissed on by every dog in the neighbourhood. That was one thing he had. I had that there by the way. Did you vomit? No, I didn't vomit at all from any of them actually although I retched quite a lot. Does that count? No. But the Hakarl one was funny because

the guy told me that it was seeped in urine and I ate it and you could really believe it tasted, it did taste like piss and then I actually put it in a QI script and it turned out to be completely untrue and it was a natural

uriny taste that it had they didn't add any urine into it so we cut it. There's another one the South Korean wine, did you drink that? Actually I think that's behind a sort of glass because you have fresh turds of children specifically

and the owner of the museum one of the founders of the museum he actually went about scooping up his 8 year old daughter's poo in order to make this concoction. That doesn't count. It's like if you're buying it from South Korea is a special thing that's one thing. If you're actually making it

from your own that's different. But it says it has to be fresh and no turd is going to be fresh by the time it's gone from South Korea to Sweden. I don't think turds are ever fresh that's not They absolutely are They can be new

You can have them I see what you're saying like if you're at a fresh deli you wouldn't expect to see it, would you? They're safe at least 5 days after their best before date. I'm telling you Gosh it's got slightly distracted from this

because someone wrote in actually to the podcast email account podcast at qi.com and this is from Eveline Keely and it's the Oklahoma has a state steak you know these official state things they have absolutely mad stuff

so Oklahoma's state steak is the ribeye steak the state drink is milk this is a complete brackets but they've got a state astronomical object which is the rosette nebula 5000 light years away I've no idea why

such an unreciprocated relationship twinned with but they've also got this is what brought me back to the actual fact which is the state meal and the state meal is this it's some chicken fried steak followed by barbecued pork

followed by fried okra, squash, cornbread grits, corn sausage with biscuits and gravy black eyed peas, strawberries and pecan pie that's the state meal cool a lot of that sounds good just not in the course

of one meal actually just speaking of like many courses with meals there is a footballer called Robert Lewandowski who plays for Poland and whenever he eats a three course meal he always eats his dessert first isn't that cool does he have a reason for it

yes he's Benjamin Button isn't he this is a new wish kind of diet and the idea is you eat a very fatty dessert and then you eat your main course and then you eat your starter and the idea is

what happens is if you eat a normal meal you have your starter and your main course and then the dessert will come and it looks really good and you're like oh go on then I'll have it and you find some extra space for it but people are less inclined to do that for their starter and they tend to choose better main courses as well

and so there was a study done with people who were either told to eat in the normal order or they could have a cheesecake and then choose their main and choose their starter or they could have some fruit and then choose their main and then their starter and they found that the people who ate the cheesecake first

had 30% fewer calories than anyone else in their meal and that includes the really fatty dessert that they had that's brilliant it's like a trick it's like you're tricking your mind you just cracked it haven't we what do you think

that's amazing the whole food thing if that works I've had a sticky toffee pudding so I think I'll just have a salad for the main thank you very much but do you want to finish your meal with a nice bowl of soup or would you rather finish with a chocolate cake I'd rather finish with a starter

a starter is everyone's favourite course isn't it see way fewer than a third of the people in the room said yes sorry that's not proof you'll always get at least one yes you are one of those people who goes to a restaurant and goes oh I think I might have 12 starters quiz question

can you guys name a processed food product that the Earl of Sandwich was responsible for inventing a processed product a food or drink product oh fuck I'm giving it away or drinks did you say yeah follow that

is it a liquid eye sandwich it's the M&S new liquid sandwich it's fizzy drinks what so he commissioned Joseph Priestly the chemist to work on ways of making stale water more palatable and to keep water lasting longer

because of ships ships would have stale water it would go horrible it's a problem people don't want to drink their water on board so they might be dehydrated so he hired Joseph Priestly and Joseph Priestly created carbonated water and as a result it's slightly acidic carbonated water so that means it's

slightly antimicrobial and it means it lasts longer so that is actually the product that he is kind of responsible for and the sandwich was way way earlier and he just popularized it you might remember this I got married in the room where he invented the sandwich

did you and that was such a cheap meal as well interesting fact everyone while you're eating your ham sandwich it's a homage enjoy your glass of coke can I just say Andy crisps are available for purchase

which will be a meal deal which you can pay for when you leave it's not a free wedding I should have mentioned Andy said to us before the show started guys I'm going to tell a personal anecdote tonight was that your personal anecdote it was my personal anecdote pretty good

nice he never tells anything that was huge insight it was very brave well done the guy from the council made such heavy weather of it in the room on the day it was practically more of a sandwich talk than a wedding

it was most of the ceremony and do you wish to be sandwiched between the holy laws of matrimony can I just mention one other food American state food that I didn't know about again we'll be very familiar to people from these places but in places like Oregon

and Washington state now it's spelled G-E-O-D-U-C-K G-E-O-D-U-C-K GUIDUCK weird to start with is GUIDUCK spelled completely the wrong way and I've never seen one they're the biggest

burrowing clams in the world and they look they've got kind of a normal ish size clam shell about the size of your palm and then it looks like looks like a slug's coming out of it right GUIDUCK yeah but it looks like a slug who's tried on a dress 12 sizes too small for it

it's coming out of it you've got a slug the length of most of your arm coming out of this bulging out of this tiny shell and I mean it looks so phallic it's very hard to get around the fact that it is and this is a delicacy they've lived up to 150 years

so and their entire lives are they're born they burrow really deep with their shell into the sand and the reason they've got this huge phallus on them is so that it can stick up and just pop out of the sand on the bottom of the seabed so it can collect up what it needs wait the phallus is collected

no no it's not a phallus it looks like a phallus oh sorry I've got to go it's that sweetest mouth and it's a it's a siphon and he's going to be doing some googling tonight it's a really creepy slogan it's not a phallus it's a mouth

I don't know why whose slogan is that it's the slogan of the gooey duck and yeah it's it's actually a siphon so it sheds salty liquids actually that it doesn't need anymore in fact in water I know it looks like a phallus and it's shedding salty liquids

but I assure you ladies and gentlemen it is a mouth if a gooey duck looks like a phallus and quacks like a phallus look we've run over I need to wrap us up 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 we can be found on our twitter account so I'm on at Shriverland Andy James at James Harkin and Anna you can do my podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at

no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish dot com all the previous episodes are up there there's also links to all the merchandise that we've got and also club fish are very secretive behind the scenes place where we do extra episodes and compilations and gossipy chat it's really fun

so do check it out but we'll be back again next week with another episode so we'll see you then thank you so much up the creek that was awesome we'll be back again goodbye