No Such Thing As A Fish - 470: No Such Thing As A Walking Stick Full of Bagels

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Monica Heisey discuss fingers, holes, failed marriages and a very Canadian scandal. 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

Hi everybody, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we have two exciting announcements to make. The first is about who our special guest is this week. She is a brilliant Canadian writer, screenwriter, showrunner, now also a first time author. She is Monica Heisey and her debut novel, Really Good Actually is out within the last few weeks and it is unsurprisingly really good actually. It's all about the life and travails of a woman who has become a surprisingly young divorcee. It is extremely funny. It's kind of, you know, accidentally snort milk out of your nose funny. It's great. Highly recommended. So we hope you enjoy the show. Monica was great as you will hear shortly. The second

announcement we have to make is that we are doing a live show of no such thing as a fish. Very exciting. We are going to be at the Hallowed British Library in London. They are having a season all about animals and as part of that, we are doing a show called Fantastic Beasts. It's going to be Dan, James, myself and a special guest to be announced. It's going to be on the 21st of April and if you don't live anywhere near the British Library, there is also going to be a streamed version of it. So just go to no such thing as a fish.com slash live. You will see there the tickets are available for our British Library show. So check it out. Okay, that's it. That's all of the announcements on with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Monica Heisei. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Monica. So my fact is that in ancient Hebrew times, men could get a divorce if their wife had been alone in a room with another man. And I was really interested in this fact because my divorce lawyer told me that this may still be true. I couldn't find anything back enough,

but she basically said if he could prove that a man and a woman had been alone together in a room for more than an hour, it could be reasonably assumed legally that adultery had occurred. I think we should just say that we're not all in the same room at the moment. I think that's very important. No. I think people were a bit desperate because it used to be that you could only get divorced for five reasons, one of which was adultery. And so I think people just could stretch it a bit to be really just trying to get out. It's really the history of what you needed to say or allege or agree that you had been doing to get divorced is absolutely mad. For a long time it was only adultery or adultery

was the only substantial grounds. And then they introduced other ones a bit later on. But there was one rule where if one of you had committed adultery, then your partner could divorce you. But if you both had, they might not be able to because legally the divorce was kind of an acknowledgement that one person had committed wrong with the other was being. Like an eye for an eye and a shag for a shag. Yeah. And if you'd both done it, then you weren't allowed to lie saying, oh, I've committed adultery. Sorry, that's a Ned Flanders version of adultery. You weren't allowed to lie saying you'd committed adultery. That's perjury. So they made it very, very difficult. Well, that's religion for you.

Also, it was a very specific definition as well. Adultery legally is a married person having full sex with someone of the opposite gender. So if your husband had a gay affair and you were a woman, you couldn't sue him for divorce on grounds of adultery, but you could sue him for unreasonable behavior. No, really? Yeah. Wow. This thing in the Jewish law, this is from the Mishnah, which is the oldest written question of Jewish oral traditions. And the thing is that because if the woman had been in a room with another man, in theory, there can't be any other witnesses, right? Because it's basically one person's word against another person's word. And okay, you have the perjury thing. But what they would do is they would give you the ordeal of

bitter water. And this was to tell if you were telling the truth or not. So they would give the woman some water with some dust in it. And it's not really clear what the dust is. It might be bits of barley, it might be bits of something else. And the idea is if the woman drinks it and the water is so bitter that she has to like spit it out. And then that proves that she was in the wrong. God, it's like witch trials. A little bit like that. It's a trial by ordeal, though. I feel like I give myself this test every morning when I try for one sip of the water that's been

out by my bedside table all night. I'll tell you, the worst divorce situation I read about in this research was to do with if you were divorcing the king of Thailand. Oh, yeah. The problem is, is that if you go to divorce the king of Thailand, you have to obviously accuse the king of Thailand of reasons for the divorce. Unfortunately, by law in Thailand, you were not allowed to accuse the king of anything. So when the current king's divorce case was going on, I think he was the crown prince at the time, he went to court and he made all these accusations against the wife. And the wife had to just say, uh, yep, he was fine. Couldn't say anything, couldn't

defend himself. Yeah. So he obviously, he obviously won. I've got a fact about the king of Thailand. Do you remember, um, the king and I that, um, the, the play or musical play? Yeah, uh, it's basic. It's about someone called Anna Leon Owens who went to work for the king of Thailand. Uh, and the real life Anna Leon Owens was the great aunt of Boris Karloff who played, was it Frankenstein or? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just a fact.

Okay. It's just two people you wouldn't expect to be related to each other. I reckon. Yes. Yeah. That's very true. Like Ben Elton and Luke Longley are brothers in law. That would mean nothing to no one except Australians. Yeah. I've never heard of Luke. Who's Luke Longley? One of the great Australian basketball players played with the Chicago Bulls in the Michael Jordan period. You know, he's a, he's a legend. One of the great Australian basketball players. How big is this color?

There's three of them. And, uh, And one of them is related by marriage, but not blood to Ben Elton. Amazing. Gosh. Why didn't you pick that as your headline fact this week, Darren? I've been pitching it for nine years, you guys, swatting it away every week. I found a modern, uh, divorce story, which I, I can't believe that this is true, but it was reported in a bunch of places. So this is to do with a Bosnian couple, Sana Klarek, uh, and her husband, Adnan. And Adnan had not been happy in the marriage and he started looking around for love and he went online. And so he started chatting to someone online. He used a fake name

just to make sure that no one could clock on to who he was. Uh, he met someone. He said, I suddenly was in love again. It was beautiful. I thought I'd finally found someone who understands me and who's in a similar situation in a bad marriage like I am. So they decided to meet up and they meet up and he sees a city in the spot where his online love should be. His wife, who has also gone online, created a pseudonym, looked for love. They found each other. And what's remarkable is that is how they found out that each of them were basically cheating on each other and divorced off the back of it, despite falling back in love with each other in this online scenario. They looked at it as negative. It's like a Richard Curtis film until the last sentence,

isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Super plot twist at the end though. There was a guy in New York. He was from New York anyway and he divorced his wife in Dominican Republic and she didn't find out for 22 years. So he filled in the form and got her to sign something which he didn't know what she was signing. And he got an official divorce and then she only found out when she got a letter through about the house that they owned and her name wasn't on the deeds. And she sort of rang her lawyer and said, what's going on? And he said, well, it turns out you're not married and you haven't been for 22 years. But they can't have been living together. Yeah. What? He just didn't tell her that they weren't married anymore. And what she said in the case, and I couldn't find

in the end happened, but she said that she thought that he'd done it deliberately so that he would own everything. If he left her in the future, she wouldn't have any rights. That's what she said. But then he stayed with her for decades? Yeah, because apparently, I mean, I can't really speak for him. But what she said is that the marriage was kind of happy, but he just did it as a kind of backup in case he needed it in the future. Oh my God. Oh no. What's about that? I became really obsessed with unreasonable behavior as a category. So they changed the law in 2022. And now you could have a no fault divorce in the UK, which means that you don't have to identify a guilty party. You can just both agree that you

want to dissolve your marriage. But prior to that, you had to pick one of these five categories, kind of whether or not there was something going on. And unreasonable behavior is such a very capacious category. And I think 51% of women filing for divorce in this country, that was their grounds. There are only 36% of men. And a lot of it has to do with gaming. People were divorcing because either their husbands were gaming too often, but a lot of them, like a non-negligible portion, were people who were having digital affairs. So you're basically meeting someone via not by fortnight. Your Sims avatar is having sex with someone else's Sim. So what are the other limits to this? What was it called again?

Unreasonable behavior. Unreasonable behavior. What are you worried about, Dan? Excessive Ben Elton memorabilia purchases from eBay. Is that, do I need to watch out? I do think it's a very bendy category. It basically is like a prolonged commitment to behavior that is a problem to the marriage. So that can include like actively building a life separate to your partner. If you're developing too many not shared interests, or you're really going hard on, I don't know, you have a new hobby and you're going away and pursuing rock climbing all the time. And your partner is no interested in whatsoever. Eventually, after a certain amount of rock climbing, I suppose it can account for unreasonable.

I think reckless spending counts as well. If you're spending loads of money on Ben Elton Damn it! I'm done. Yeah. Did you guys ever hear of the Brighton Quickie? No. This is a divorce practice. And I've done a fair bit of reading about it. I can't quite work out how real it was. Basically, in 1923 the law was changed saying you could petition on adultery only. It was the only grounds for divorce. And that led to this thing where it's kind of like Monica's original fact about the being in a room together. You would go down, as the husband, you would agree to be the adulterer. You'd book a hotel room in Brighton because it's easy on the train from London. You spend the night there with a woman you don't know. You don't have sex or

anything. But there's a hotel receipt saying you've booked a room for two. The next morning, maybe you're witnessed by the chambermaid. Two pairs of shoes outside the door. Exactly. Exactly. And there's then a small body of evidence that you can use to get your divorce. And then tens link back. Yeah. You haven't even got to commit adultery. But you will be divorced in due course. But I just can't tell how much it actually happened if at all. It's in a few novels and it's written about at the time. But it's not. Also, how important is the chambermaid in this? Like, are all the rooms in this hotel packed with people going for a Brighton quickie? And she's got to sort of be... She's the witness. Yeah. She's the witness for like 40 things a day where she

has to... Yeah. Was that... Yeah. And then I saw the shoes outside that door and then was it the pancakes? I took a tea and they were on top of the bed. There was a pillow on the floor. So that's suggestive. Yeah. I read that in Delaware and Colorado, you can get your marriage annulled if you did it for a dare. But none of the other 48 states is that explicitly in the rules. Like, probably you still could get an annullment if you said that but it would have to go into something else. But in those two states, it explicitly says it is illegal to get married on a dare. I mean, all marriages are kind of a dare. Yeah. That's what the proposal is. It's a big dare. Yeah. I dare you to stay with me until one or both of us dies. I bet your wife is wishing she

shows truth. Yeah. Every day. I got a thing which is one of really classic Marvin Gaye albums, which was called Here, My Dear, was made within a divorce proceeding, whereby Marvin Gaye didn't quite have the alimony that he needed to pay for his child. And so the agreement was the next album that you do, your wife, who you're now divorcing, is going to get half of the money, royalties and the upfront money from the album itself. And he decided, well, I don't want her making any money. So I'm going to do a quickie album, basically. I'm just going to not really do anything good. It's going to come out and it's just going to be panned by the critics. No one's going to like it. And then suddenly he got fascinated by the notion of this album and ended up putting more heart and

soul into this album, possibly than any of his other albums. He was really hands on. He wrote the lyrics. He never writes lyrics for his songs, according to the stuff that I was reading. He never really was hands on with playing the piano. But in this album, he insisted on doing the lyrics, the piano. And it was panned at the time. But it's been, it's one of those albums that's been reviewed by everyone since, you know, the Rolling Stone has named it one of the best 500 albums ever made three times in lists that they released. And it constantly appears on these lists now. But it was a, it's a pure divorce album. Pretty cool. That's the story of the producers, the film the producers done. We've just done, you've given us a fact, which is the song,

Pina Colada. And now you've given us the film, the producers, but you've translated it to being about Marvin Gaye. No, no, no. We see you. We see what you do. They, they made it bad. He made this good during the process. The producers. I wonder at what point he decided to start making it good. Like if he's like, I'm going to make it so bad. And then what day did he realize? Oh, I'm actually very invested. I'm really trying quite hard now. Yeah, I don't know. I guess if you're an artist, it's going to be really hard to go. I'll just put out a shit album. Like that's, that must be a painful thing to do, to make a decision on. I don't know. Some of them manage, don't they? But I think like, I think if he didn't normally play piano and didn't

normally write the lyrics, and then he started doing it, he must have not normally done it because he didn't think he was as good as the people who were doing it, right? Originally. And then when he started doing it, he's like, Oh, this is pretty good. It's also a little bit self myth making. Oh, I tried to make an album which sucks. And instead, I've made one of the 500 greatest of all time. Oh, that's just me. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babel. And that's a clue to what Babel does. See, it was a clue to what Babel does. Yeah, because Babel is a brilliant language learning app and tool. It has over a dozen

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All one word. That is your offer code. And you use it by going to babelbbel.com forward slash podcast 23 the letters to three. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is Andy. My fact is that the same fingers are responsible for the clicks in the Adams family theme, the bongos in the Mission Impossible theme, and the xylophone in the Simpsons theme. The same human fingers created three of the great artworks of the 20th century. I think it's unbelievable. I think it's so great. Would you say that you play the xylophone with your fingers? I was going to question that. Yeah. His name was wood fingers Richard's and he he was incredible. You know what fingers Richard's

when he clicked his fingers for the other family himself on fire. Emil Richards, he was a hero of percussion. I should say where I got this is via a brilliant piece published each year by a guy called Tom Whitwell, which is a 52 things you learn each year. I think I may have mentioned him before, either one or two or three years ago. But anyway, it's a brilliant list. And this is one of the facts. I just couldn't believe it. And Emil Richards, it turns out, born 1932, died 2019. In between those two dates had the most amazing musical career. Yeah, he played with Frank Sinatra. He toured with George Harrison. He was one of the most amazing session musicians ever. The list of people who played with this just he played with Charlie

Mingus, you know, he was proppered into the scene of jazz and blues. And and then yeah, as you say, he went on tour and also played on three George Harrison albums. He was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1994. That's a very hard Hall of Fame to get into. Is it harder to get into than the Australian Basketball Hall of Fame? Yes, I imagine to get in you have to do a special not to get into the Percussive Hall of Fame. But no, yeah, what an extraordinary guy. Yeah, it's amazing. Frank Zappa, Doris Day, The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees, Blondie, Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye. I don't know if it was on the the album. Imagine. I think I think Marvin did all his finger clicks on that album. Right, okay. He was just incredible. His I loved

this. His autobiography was called My Life Behind Bars. Oh, you may have come across this in the course of your research. Do you can you guess what kind of animal he wanted to come back as in the next life? Oh, I didn't see that. I did not see that. Something percussive. So woodpecker. Such a good, such a good guess. I wish it was that. Imagine it's just totally unrelated. No, no, no, it is related to his percussionist life. Oh, it is. An octopus. Oh, so you can have more arms. Woodpecker is better, actually. Yeah. Six of them are legs. In an octopus. He had the world's largest collection of percussive instruments. Really? This guy, yeah, he had 700, over 770. I don't know if that's 771, maybe.

You're probably right. He had an ang klung, a bulbul tarang, a chimta, a flapamba, a janggu, a mbira, and a pak havaj. When I was looking here up, they said he plays the vibraphone, and I went to look up what a vibraphone was, and the first thing that just said, not to be confused with the vibraphlap. And what is that? Always getting them fixed up. A vibraphlap is, have you ever seen that instrument? It's like a piece of wire bent into a U, and there's a wooden ball on the end, and it hits the box. So that's a vibraphlap. And a vibraphone is more looks like a xylophone. I don't know how you would confuse them. They don't look at all alike, and they're both so obscure that I feel like it's very unlikely you

would be talking about one and not know what the other one is. Either you're not talking about these at all, or there's no risk of you confusing the two. That's a good point. What a guy. So he did the Mission Impossible theme tune. The bottom goes on that, and I was looking into the Mission Impossible theme tune generally. So there's this fact which is that the beat of the song was written to the Morse code of M and I. So can you give us what it goes like for anyone who doesn't? Andy, you're a bigger fan. I always end up doing Bond by accident. Can you do it quickly? Do you mean the bit they go bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Yes. Yeah, so it's it's dash dash dot dot is the thing for it. That's great. But the guy who wrote it,

Schifrin, he wrote that whole song, he says, in three minutes. Wow, really? Yeah. You often hear that with a few musicians where they say, I just banged that out and it just came to me as a fully formed piece. And that happened and that happened with Mission Impossible. So that's quite cool. And the same with the James Bond theme. That wasn't written in a quick time, but if by a guy called Monty Norman, and he actually, which is I really like this, he was hired by the Bond people to come up specifically with this theme. And they took him out to Jamaica on a holiday. And he met Connery out there and Ursula Andres, because they were filming Dr. No. Yeah, they were filming Dr. No, the first one out there. And so he was brought to meet them all and get a vibe of it.

And he ended up just using a previous tune that he had written for a completely different adaption that never got used. It was a stage production of VS Naples novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. That's the original James Bond theme. And it was played on sitar. It's the other one that goes Oh, because I know the original lyrics about something like I was born with an unfortunate sneeze. And yes, that's it. My parents said that I was made the wrong way around. Oh my God. This is a bigger repurpose than Candle in the Wind. This is a big shift. So strange. And I think at the end of the song, he sneezes so much that he falls into a lake or something of that tune. Oh, right. This guy, Monty Norman, he also wrote an autobiography. So life behind bars,

very good title. Do you know, Andy, you look like you might know the title of his autobiography. No, I don't. Is it musical and James Bond theme? No. Well, I'm not going to get it. No, it was called a walking stick full of bagels. Okay. Without knowing the context, that is not a good. I think that must have been a classic phrase back in the day. You're like a walking stick full of bagels. And what does that mean? How would a stick be full of anything? There we go. So many questions. I bet they were all answered in the unpublished autobiography and we are yet to find out. I think the best autobiography title I've ever heard was Tori Spelling's autobiography, storytelling by Tori Spelling.

Really good. Really strong title. I got it. I got it off that title. But that doesn't go down well in the divorce case. Have you guys heard of the village of Kong Thong in northeast India? No. This is a village where every child is given a theme tune. It's a little village. It's really cut off from the rest of India. I don't think you can get that by car. I think you can get that by boat. But it's in the middle of a jungle and people would forage for broom grass which they would sell on. And so a lot of the time you would spend in the jungle sort of walking around probably alone. And the thing is in the jungle is quite hard to

hear people for long distances because it all gets soaked in by the trees. And so they came up with this different way of telling people you're around by having a different tune that you would whistle or you would shout or whatever. And so when you're born you get your theme tune and then for the rest of your life whenever you're in the jungle people will make this little you'd be like oh that's me. That was the Simpsons he was singing. I think lawyers will be in touch with that kid. He was from the Simpson family of Kong Thong. That is so cool isn't it? That's awesome. Unfortunately it's kind of dying out because people now will connect with each other using mobile phones so

they don't need these theme tunes so much. Yes again. The internet's ruined it all. I'll have a quick think about songs that use the old Handeru's as a kind of iconic bit of it and obviously if you're thinking theme tunes the Friends theme tune I'll be there for you by the Rembrandts. There's like a clapping bit right? Yeah so it's four claps. Apparently there's a bit of controversy because Courtney Cox did five claps on a TV show once and it sent the writers of the song mad. The song I'll be there for you. It was actually a song composed specifically for the TV show and the Rembrandts had very minimal input into the writing itself. It was the actual creators of Friends who wrote the song and it proved to be such an iconic theme tune that everyone was

begging for it to be released. Yeah I bought it in the chance when it came out. So what that was was they had to go into a studio and write a whole song because there wasn't a whole song. It was only the theme tune bit of the song. They needed two more verses to be added in. Oh really? Yeah so it was a backwards constructed full song that ended up coming out. That's so interesting. So it was 40 seconds on it. There was like a time in the 90s when all the theme tunes used to come out and you could buy them for the charts like the X-Files did around that time as well and they all did quite well in the charts just because people thought oh I like that song. Yeah I love I mean the X-Files is my favorite theme tune of all time

and it turns out to the guy who composed that song. Mark Snow? Yeah Mark Snow and David DeColvany claims I think this is tongue-in-cheek. I mean it completely is tongue-in-cheek but he says there were lyrics to the X-Files theme tune by Mark Snow and these are the lyrics. The X-Files is a show show show show show with music by Mark Snow Snow Snow Snow Snow. Those are the only two lyrics that we know of according to DeColvany. Do you guys know what composers of TV theme tunes hate? I guess. Oh when they when on TV shows when the continuity announcer goes next up on BBC three. Yeah that's a really good point. I'm specifically talking about the skip intro button okay which is very controversial. Oh of course. They get furious those guys and gals about the

skip intro because Netflix found out that users were frequently fast-forwarding a bit because that you know if you're watching three episodes in a night you don't want to see the theme tune three times. So Netflix claims I can't quite believe this. Skip intro is pressed 136 million times a day which cumulatively saves 130 years of human time. We never especially the shows where they've put some proper effort into the into the intros. I think you lose quite a lot from not having those intros. Can you imagine watching Game of Thrones and not having that amazing theme tune with all the stuff happening and then just going straight into the shaggy nuts? Yeah exactly. Yeah really sets the vibe. I think grooving to the soprano's theme is like maybe 30% of what I like

about watching the show. Obviously the rest of the other 70% is that it's groundbreaking beautiful human drama but the theme tune is also up there. It's a bop. I agree. We stand up in our house. We stand in silence for every theme tune. It's a huge respect in this household. Monica aren't you show running on a show at the moment? I just finished show running on a show. Yes. Are you going to get to pick the theme tune? I think we're going to have like proper opening titles. So we're going to have to do a whole, we're going to have to figure out a whole thing. Yeah I've really been shown my own limitations in this area because my description is like I want it to sound uh cool. Well I got some advice for you Monica. If you're working with the sound person

do a secret thing here which is do actually write lyrics to whatever the theme tune is but don't put them out because you could then claim 50% royalties on the song. This is what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek. He wrote lyrics for the Star Trek song. They never used them and anytime a royalty check came in he was a co-writer of the song so he got 50% of everything and the song Suicide is Painless the mash theme tune. It was used in the Robert Altman movie commissioned specifically for that movie by Robert Altman and he tried to write the lyrics for it couldn't crack it and so he asked his son Michael who was 15 years old at the time to write the lyrics so Michael did that and as a result of that song not only being used in

the movie but then the long-running TV show with Alan Alder he says Altman says that he made $70,000 for directing that movie and his son has earned more than a million dollars over the years just from that being sold. Those lyrics are good though aren't they for Suicide is Painless but Gene Roddenberry is he not just stealing half of the credit but it feels like the workers and the musicians who've done all this work and he's just like well I'll pretend that I've written some lyrics and take half the money. It's quite cheeky. It's very cheeky. Hey that's the business we're in guys and Monica isn't that's Hollywood baby. Just quickly Ed Sheeran has written the theme tune to James Bond despite no one having requested

that he do that which I think is quite sweet. I think that's a very Ed Sheeran thing to do. But that isn't that I would say that when a new Bond comes out people submit songs that's how that's always worked. No it's not you don't send in there are so many songs that are out that are rejected Bond songs by bands that submitted a song that didn't get used which they then use. Is there a process? Is there an open process by which I mean could we submit one? Yeah that's what I was thinking. Did I accept anything? That can't be true. I thought that they would commission a cool art. It can't be like a bake off. The last film they asked Billie Eilish to do. No she just got lucky. She just happens to have the best plot they sent in a million and

hers just happens to be the best one. They listen to them blind as well. They don't prejudice themselves. It's like the voice. It's like the voice. Could be anyone. That can't be true Dan because they always pick the trendiest person in the world that's Iron Delta. No I mean Ed Sheeran has consistently been the second trendiest person in the world. He just keeps missing it. The reason I say it is I know that Radiohead had a rejected Bond song so I'm trying to I'm trying to work back from from there and I'm pretty sure Johnny Cash had one as well and I think this is a thing. Yeah but I can't I can't say for sure. Maybe they ask people to tender for it rather than anyone being able to send stuff in. Oh yeah I think they send I think

they ask like a group of people. I don't think it is open. Right. It's not quite as open as that. Open season because you'd see there'd be a there'd be a thing every three years wouldn't there. Exactly. Have you guys heard of Dusan Sestic? He's a composer of the Bosnian National Anthem. We spoke about Bosnia earlier. He entered the competition to to do the Bosnian National Anthem. He did really want to win. He just wanted to get like second or third place. There was money for it. He like was quite into the old Yugoslavia. He didn't really care about the new Bosnia but he thought I'll get some money out of it because I'm a decent composer. Anyway he won and he wrote the National Anthem for Bosnia and then in 2009 someone noticed that it was remarkably similar

to the theme tune of National Lampoon's Animal House, the 1978 movie. Right. And when you listen to the both they're almost identical. Like there's no difference whatsoever but blessing he went on TV and they were all like well how come you made our National Anthem? She said National Lampoon's Animal House and he said oh maybe as a young man I heard it and it kind of stuck in my head and but I didn't deliberately plagiarize it. It just so happened. That is brilliant. This is the problem with being national policies being decided by right in contest. This is why Canadian legal tender is called the Looney and the Tooney. The $1 coin has a loon on it so it's called the Looney and then they had a contest to name the $2 coin which has a polar bear on it and the winning entry was

the Tooney and now that is actually what we call it and it just makes us sound like a joke country. Without knowing the other options Monica I do think Tooney is quite good. I think there's a bit of Bodie McBoatface to it. Haven't they recently just while we're talking about money and and having mentioned Star Trek there was the thing where you would Spotify your Canadian dollar right? The guy who was on the picture looked so similar to Leonardo Nimoy from Star Trek that you would draw Spockers on him and you would draw the hair basically. Yes it was called Spocking and the Bank of Canada had to issue a statement saying that it was legal to do but inappropriate. And I think from what I read

they've changed his image now on the bill is that right? There's a new version of the same guy just so it's less spockable. I think if you draw that Spock on any note then Chief Roddenberry owns half your money. Yeah and then a Spock that was Spock's person for another agency in Canada, Angel Agency said to the Bank of Canada this is fine as you say it's perfectly legal and I'm sure Sir Wilfrid Laurier would get it who's the man pictured off the bill who died in 1919. I've just got one more theme tune I'll quickly want to bring up which is the Fresh Prince of Bel Air so we all know that theme tune it's a it's a Kraken song by Will Smith and it was a song that he wrote despite not being necessarily asked to write it at the time he kind of just did it

and he showed it to I believe it was Quincy Jones who was doing the music for the for the show and they said yeah you can go and do it obviously it's a massive hit and when it was released in 1992 as a single but here's the thing I don't know if James you bought singles as you were saying back in the day in 1992 the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune was only released exclusively in the Netherlands and Spain and that's where it charted that's it that's really because I when you said that I thought to myself how come I didn't buy that like I was so sure that I would if I was around at the time I would have bought it because I bought wiki wiki Wild Wild West or whenever it was by Will Smith so great song yeah I bought all his other crap so I was really surprised James James

did you buy William that was a great album oh an album no I was more of a singles buyer really yeah it's not a good album then I'm sorry I think enough times past that I'm able to have a pop at William keep the name of that album out of your dash okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that in 2024 the first ever theater production of Dracula will celebrate its hundredth anniversary unfortunately fans can't celebrate it in the venue it was performed in because it's currently occupied by an over 18s adult themed crazy golf course called the house of holes filthy so this is in Darby a city in the UK and I was there recently on the

weekend for a game of bitty golf how was your quick round I was no I was there doing a ghost story festival and afterwards I was hanging out with this really cool guy called Chris Horton and he said I've got a fish fact for you and he told me he'd passed the house of holes and made him laugh and so yeah so it is a very well known theater as well it was called the grand theater then it just got repurposed over the years to be something new and there was you know restaurants in its place and so on and now there is this uh this amazing crazy golf the house of holes yeah can I just I'm sure I'm sure we'll talk more about crazy or can I talk specifically about the house of holes and Darby yeah sure I don't mean to cast any experts on it I don't think

it's terribly erotic it doesn't seem to be from the website it seems like a lot of it just seems to be novelty because I think that people at home some people at home will have an image in their heads yeah what it is yeah but let's let's let's sort of give context then through images one of the holes uh you have to hit the ball through a bunch of standing dildos for example um yes I'm I'm not saying it's totally unerotic there's another one where for some reason there's a lot of blow-up dolls that are uninflated hanging on washing lines just hanging in the vicinity of the hole itself um yeah the the area where you play pool because you know these places indoor places have like you can play arcades and stuff the bed where you play pool is called anal

butt um what yeah and anal has a four instead of the second a in anal so an four l uh but well it's not got to do with pool what's that mean not quite sure I couldn't get to the bottom of that one um but it's it's there surely the phrase anal and butt are sort of yeah achieving the same it's feeling feeling a little redundant to me personally it's definitely a redundant adjective isn't it how's your butt well it's very anal but I don't know what's in the water in Derby but there was a newspaper piece a couple of months ago Derby is now about to get its second erotic mini golf venue it's really popular the new um glory holes golf venue will apparently include risque items and decor and um some derby themed holes as well so that's

nice that's good can I quickly just because let's give this fact just a tiny bit of substance before we get into erotic golf um I just want to quickly say that the production just for context was the first ever Dracula production and it was put on in the early 1920s and it was a show that was sanctioned and approved by Florence Stoker who was the widow of Bram Stoker and this was the production that became the sort of official theater production that as it traveled around the UK and then went international cast in its lead Bella Legosi who became as we all know the iconic Dracula in film and weirdly the final performance that Bella Legosi ever did as Dracula on stage was back in Derby at another theater just around the corner from the grand some 20 odd years later

so Derby does have a real Dracula connection as a result of this very interesting and Legosi so he got the role in 1927 when the play moved to the USA that's when Legosi entered the scene and then in the 50s it was when he toured again and came back to Derby and did a big English tour of this show and he got really upset because apparently the audiences were laughing sometimes because Dracula was no longer the big scary thing it had been uh it was the early 50s you know people have been through a bit since the 20s they um they're not as scared and uh yeah it seems to have probably the end of his career which is very sad and it was also this play was also very important for the image of Dracula the guy who wrote it a guy called Hamilton Dean he made Dracula

appear as that more modern suave sort of coat wearing cocktail drinking kind of character rather than brams just all out vampire chaos energy zombie like stuff does it he drink cocktails passion fruit martini sorry he does yeah there was actually one earlier theater production of Dracula which came out eight days before the novel came out this was if you did a novel someone else could make a play of it and there's not much you can do about it unless you put on your own play and so what ram stoker did was he had a dramatic reading of his book on stage they had to have it open for the paying public so they would put uh bills up half an hour before it started saying Dracula on in half an hour had two people bought tickets for it and sat in the

audience uh while a couple of actors sort of just read through the book and from them doing that it meant that no one else could part play on because he owed copyright on the theater production how amazing yeah monica have you done that with really good actually i should do just stop someone doing a bootleg play that was basically what my experience of doing the Edinburgh fringe was was going out half an hour before the show being like anybody somebody and then uh you know wildly entertaining two people chills actual chills remembering that everyone's Edinburgh yeah okay down well we've done the Dracula thing can we go back to the erotic uh mini golf now let's do it i just remembered when you were talking about that that i have played not played golf but i've

used a golf club shaped like a penis at the penis museum in Reykjavik they have one uh and you can sort of pick it up and play with it and yeah it's like it's it's just the head part of the golf club is shaped like a penis but it's not it's not for a serious golfer right i said it's not built for proper play you know master's conditions i don't think it adheres to the official um uspga rules it's like a walking stick full of bagels you're not going to use it as an actual assist as a walking stick um i think there's a link between the original boom in crazy golf and the current derby based boom in erotic golf okay so when was the original boom 20s and 30s um some some lots of sources say that it completely went out when the great depression happened but

actually it didn't really it actually boomed during the early 30s um during that period apparently the usa built 25 000 mini golf courses it was described as a devastating craze in the times in in 1930 and i think the theory behind it is that property value had collapsed and the value of lots of things have collapsed and people started their own tiny businesses to generate small amounts of income you know it doesn't have to be anything huge but it's it's a small local thing on whatever kind of waste ground or land you've got you know some restaurants turned it half the restaurant became a mini golf course and the rest of it stayed a restaurant so maybe times of financial hardship but when you get a lot more mini golf because you get shops that

are closed or empty so the new um glory hole golf is is the site of the old gap store in derby you know you've got retail space available what is a glory hole i've got a gap uh so no that's my economic yeah no it's a really yeah it's a really good theory it's almost a thesis rather than a podcast isn't it but yeah mini golf doesn't use golf balls yes i do there's no that there are there are special mini golf balls they're kind of more rubbery they're more rubbery they bounce more and there's a standard i this i find this mad there's the world crazy golf championships i mean there are a few world crazy golf championships one is in Hastings and normally apparently they only get about three overseas players each year

so the extent to which his world is a bit uh debatable but they don't tell you uh at the world crazy golf championships what the ball is until the day before it starts okay but it's always going to be spherical it's always going to be spherical i'm pretty sure about that but and then other championships they will they'll let you play a different ball on every hole and the only rule is that once you've started a hole you have to play the same ball all the way like normal golf is that true oh how about local if i was playing mini golf like we play in uh narrow bean in Australia they're using special balls i think they'll be more rubbery for sure if you if you check them yeah who would have thought this would be the fact that blew my mind most this whole round of nine years

golf again um go on this is i'm afraid it's back to the it's back to a tangent from the original erotic mini golf thing oh yeah just that it was on um you know this new place opening up it's going to be called glory holes golf uh and we got an email in the fishing box recently uh subject line gibbon glory hole action oh my god i know this sorry this is incredible this is a gibbon in a uh zoo or a sanctuary this is a female gibbon and she was living on her own and um she got pregnant and it was it was basically a virgin birth and it was it was so exciting that for the scientists they thought i can't believe this anyway they did a bit of an investigation and it turned out obviously it was not a virgin birth in between her enclosure and the next door neighbor male

gibbons enclosure was a nine millimeter hole through which they had managed to successfully breed become parents nine millimeters they were just sort of both mushing up against the wall i'm afraid so life finds a way life well that's a scene i don't want to see in jurassic park i would like to hear david attenborough do one of his little jokes but you know when he's sort of makes the animals a fool where he's like our nest is as good a place as any and then stop the podcast stop the podcast hi everybody just wanted to let you know we are sponsored this week by express vpn absolutely express vpn is a what is it it's a sink plunger for content it's a sink pump that's you know what i was just about to say exactly the same thing yeah it's a thing

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and dozens of countries i think about 94 countries and if you want to give it a go just go to express vpn dot com slash fish and if you sign up for a subscription it will give you a bonus three months on top of that for free that's absolutely right so be smart go to express vpn dot com slash fish and when you do that you'll get an extra three months of express vpn for free okay on with the podcast on with the show okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that in 2009 an aide to the canadian prime minister called 10 downing streets to offer condolences for the death of margaret thatcher in fact she wasn't dead it was a misunderstanding due to the death of the canadian transport minister's cat who was also called thatcher

superb yeah really good what a cool want to come fly on the wall at that cool yeah moggy not a maggy it says brilliant brilliant was that you don't know someone else no no that's the headline of the guardian article that's amazing so yeah this was a black tie dinner in toronto uh 2000 canadian conservatives were there and many of them got a text message saying simply thatcher has died and um demetri suda asked who was the aide to the prime minister who was steven harper at the time he was sent to write a letter of condolence and he ran buckingham palace in 10 downing street to kind of work out what they should say and you know and offer condolences as well and then he found out that they hadn't died and it turned out that transport minister john bed

had a 16 year old gray cat called thatcher uh and sadly that cat had died um but he denied sending the text later on but there definitely was a text that was sent to all these people about the cat this is like international incident version of david's dead on big breath yes that's the greatest tv moment ever what there was a famous david who died david bowie yep bowie uh did someone in the building know who i don't know why i'm telling this story everyone knows it better than me monica you can tell it mono no no yo please you tell it i've actually only seen the clip okay so in the big brother household that year was angie bowie the first wife of david bowie and also in the house that year was david guest who was lyza minnelli's

ex husband right angie gets called in while david guest is having a sleep in his bed everyone knows he's having a sleep so he's not around and she gets told that david bowie has died so she is uh obviously uh she didn't like her ex husband but she's also very distressed because he was a huge part of her life she comes out she's trying to keep it secret and one of the other americans who's staying in the house comes up and says are you okay and she says you can't tell anyone but david's dead and this other woman immediately freaks out because she thinks it's david guest who's died but angie hasn't made the connection so angie's kind of going god i didn't think you were that big a bowie fan i can't see how this has erupted and it causes chaos in the house for five

minutes it's it's tv at its finest well imagine that but with two thousand canadian conservatives what a scene it must have been the true patriot love tribute dinner i was that what it was called military families honoring thing but canadian politics monica is is fabulous is it well i feel like there is i feel like there is a list of political scandals in canada or wikipedia and you know some of them are pretty dry like the usual grift you know or bribery or slightly dodgy dealings but there are some there are some fun ones tunigate might be my favorite were you tunigate were you were you involved in tunigate monica not to my knowledge but i'll never admit it if so you'll never catch me tunigate actually think about it now tunigate way too long ago

you're clear you're clear you're clear um basically there were a million cans of decomposing tuna that was that was the central problem right and it wasn't really really really unsafe but it had started to go off before it was put in the cans the firm involved was called starkus and they said no you just these inspectors they just don't like fish that's their problem and they said and we'll close down our plant and you'll lose all these jobs and you know and that's when it becomes a political thing because then the fisheries minister said oh yeah it's probably it's fine yeah all this stuff it's great it's actually good and he got a panel together uh look can you just assess this tuna please and they said yeah this this is rotting tuna in these cans and he says okay I think we

need a different panel and he got a different panel together who eventually said yes these million tins of rotting tuna are fine and then he resigned yeah and I don't think much of the tuna was eaten in the end and then the phone went bust anyway so that's a very classic Canadian scandal where it's like it threatened to really kick off and ultimately they just nobody really consumed the tuna and it was sort of fine that's like the other great Canadian political scandal the fuddleduddle incident what's this fuddleduddle incident in 1971 happened to the first prime minister Trudeau our current prime minister's father who was accused of having spoken or at least mouthed unparliamentary language in the house of commons he seemed to have been caught

mouthing the words fuck off but when pressed by television reporters would only admit having moved his lips so they were like what were you thinking when you moved your lips and his response was what is the nature of your thoughts when you say fuddleduddle or something like that implying that he had said fuddleduddle instead of fuck off right that's good if no one's heard you yeah you'd you know you're across the room from them well then in 2015 his son actually stated on the record that his dad had not said fuddleduddle this is a big scandal minor scandal but that's sort of the scale it's like someone that's always the scale it's always a little bit funny like someone threw a pie in Jean Chrétien's face in the 90s and that was quite a big deal

the pies were actually coordinated ongoing assault on Tartis sewer canadian satirical political group and they even released a hit list of people they wanted to get with pies including Celine Dion and Conrad Black and Chrétien and then they were successful in pying Chrétien twice right oh that's got a stink the pies were they were they the kind of clown pies where it's like just custard or is it actual like apple pies cream pies like oh it's just cream pies it may even have been shaving cream or just like what you guys would unfortunately call squirty cream it's not a nice thing to say and i'm sorry to say it speaking of um shaving cream i can't believe we managed to get onto shaving cream um William Lyon Mackenzie King who was

prime minister of Canada for 22 years my favorite well i'm not surprised because he did seances and stuff right Dan yeah but he also used to see symbols in his shaving cream in the morning which he thought would predict the future yeah wow extraordinary guy i mean he was he was prime minister for 21 years which possibly is still the record length or anyone to do it he had quite a tragic family life he lost all of his family during the war and so as a result turned like many people did to spirituality as a thing but what many people didn't realize at the time was he was taking that spirituality into the into the office with him as a prime minister and getting guidance from the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci and his deceased dogs uh the shaving film thing he would shave and

then the shaving film would go into the water on the in the sink kind of thing uh and at one stage he saw a polar bear and an eagle and the polar bear was supposed to represent like russia or soviet union i should say and the eagles supposed to represent america and they were kind of fighting shaving cream and then a dog appeared in the shaving cream which he thought symbolized canada and that it came and helped to push the bear off the eagle and that was kind of him thinking that he what side he needs to be in the cold war he needs to be on as if he didn't know what side he should probably be on in the cold war i think not probably just confirmed his suspicions i do feel like a polar bear would be fairly easy to see in shaving cream like i'm

wondering yeah if the shapes he was seeing were sort of like you know i saw a vision in my shaving cream of a cloud meeting sort of a fog yeah oh my god what a character yeah he was i was having a look through the old uh the old fishing box um podcast at qi.com really good fact we got in from uh from john ford so thank you john this is something maybe you've done at monica it's that canada flies a new flag over its parliament every single day every single day there's a new flag and they give the used one to a canadian and you can apply to get your own flag and you think i have done this i guess it's possible um i feel like you haven't anymore i haven't quite no but if i said i have the option well you have the option but unfortunately oh you won't get the

flag so this is a bad thing the current waiting time is a hundred years it's more than a century because so many people have applied so and they mentioned this on the website like it's a totally normal thing yeah they say the current waiting time is more than a hundred years and so you can either log on and make a request why would you or you can change your details if you made a request you know five years ago and you're moving house now just to keep it updated but why would you do that either are you allowed to do it for your next generation can you exactly can it go to the descendants i don't think i'll know any of my hundred year from now descendants well enough to care whether or not they get a flag it's also like not hard to get look at if it's not very

special it's only been up over parliament for one day yep you could just get your own flag this is the kind of shit i buy in ebay this is all part of my divorce that's giving unreasonable behavior to me actually have you been reading about william amos from the liberal party in the last few last few months very recently he was on a zoom call parliamentary zoom call and he had to apologize because he said i urinated without realizing i was on camera and the amazing thing was is that the month earlier he'd also been recorded in the nude during the virtual session of the canadian parliament so twice in two months the first time he'd been out for a jog and he was kind of getting changed while the session was going on and they could see see it all yeah see the

right honorable member see his loony and his toony but yeah i can see myself i'm not falling for that just i can see myself doing that twice in a row you quickly check maybe not twice in a row i think what's better than this case right yeah i would definitely get a post-it for the camera after the first time yeah would i i don't know no you think i couldn't possibly do that again that's what you think that's what you think oh my god that was the stupidest day of my life you know what mistakes on that front and then you just go along and and you know do you say he was urinating into a cup or something i don't i don't know as far as i can tell because the this kind of thing has now happened you know we're pretty

deep in the pandemic has not happened a number of times just in fairly high profile people and it has as far as i'm aware never happened to a woman it's just men yeah who i don't know haven't thought it through or aren't worried enough yeah i can't even believe that you're saying that you think this could happen to you this would never happen to me there's no world in which i would be like okay i'm doing work zoom i'm gonna quickly get fully nude no one has to know okay that's 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 have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy

at adrew hunter m james at james harkin and monica at monica heisy yep or if you'd like to book a round of golf at the house of holes you can head to at house of holes uk it genuinely has amazing reviews do check it out uh so everyone loved it there everyone loved it or you can go to at no such thing which is our actual twitter handle and you can get through to us there or you can email us at podcast at qi.com also do check out our website no such thing as a fish.com all of the previous episodes are up there but the main main thing that you need to do is get to a book shop or an online book shop and get really good actually by monica heisy it is storming the charts here as we speak it's been in the sunday times bestsellers list for four weeks it is an absolute

rockin book it's incredibly funny so um do get it now and otherwise come back because we're going to be back with another episode next week and we'll see you then goodbye