No Such Thing As A Fish - 529: No Such Thing As A Badger Love Note

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

James, Anna, Andy and Dan discuss flying, canning, paging and leeching. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinsky, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1950s America,

flight attendants consulted an alcohol chart of the sky so they knew when they were allowed to serve booze. Wow. Yeah. So is that because, it must be because some parts of America you can't drink, but does that, does that mean Colorado goes all the way up to the top of the universe? Where does it end? Does the ISS, are they not allowed to drink their snuck up portions of booze that they hide? This is the 1950s where there were a lot of dry states in America and that dry ban expanded all the way up to 30,000 feet into the air. I suppose it makes sense because let's say you lived in a

dry county and you thought, well I'm gonna get out of this, I'm gonna hire a hot air balloon, I'm just gonna float off the ground and drink a load of booze. It makes sense that they stopped that from happening. That would be my first thought. Exactly. But you used to be able to go off shore, didn't you? That's true. That's how people would get around it.

But so this is the issue is that obviously you're in a plane that's flying over multiple states. Do all laws apply above all this? You know, there's like 12 weird laws. And it's like, you're not allowed to kick a horse in Ohio on a Sunday. And you're flying over in a plane and you're like stop kicking that horse. Anyone intending to marry a second wife is now allowed for the next 30 minutes. Was it the case that you'd have to say quickly down it we're about to hit Pennsylvania?

Yeah it's really odd. What I couldn't find was if it's the sale of alcohol because they used to sell the alcohol on board there, or whether or not. So exactly, we're approaching Pennsylvania, quick everyone! Skull! Yeah, skull, skull, skull! And the way that it was done is the flight attendants would look out the windows for monuments, so they'd be like, oh, okay, we're coming up for that now, or... What? Yeah, yeah, there were so many restrictions.

How can you tell you're in Pennsylvania from the air? Well, just to say this, surely the pilot had a better way of knowing where they were going than munching down and saying, look, there's a church that I recognize. I remember back in the 50s with mail delivery, they just had big arrows on the ground. Concrete arrows. I have to admit, having been in a helicopter with my wife flying, it's only a small helicopter, so we don't have that much instruments and stuff, but you do, like you have a map and it's like, there's a golf course here. And you're like, my wife's like,

can you check there's a golf course on the left-hand side? Yes, there is. Okay, we're going in the right direction. Yeah, unfortunately you always get lost because you're only looking for the golf course. But it wasn't just that, the attendant would have to know, is this state allowing drinking on a Sunday or an election day?

What are the hour restrictions? Because sometimes they're just restricted for certain hours. So yeah, certain holidays that are being celebrated there. Are we allowed to drink then or not? So question. Yeah. There are still dry states in America. Why did they not do this anymore?

I guess maybe they've realized. It was weird being an air stewardessess in the 1950s wasn't it? I'm sorry the fact that I paused at Airstewardess does remind me how weird it also is that I still think of Airstewardess as the terminology even though it's stopped being the term in the 70s. Yeah before you were born in fact. Way before I was born. Wait I just want to emphasize way before I was going to say that. Does everyone else do that? I cycle through them in my head, you know. Like Hoster, Stewardess, Trolly Dolly.

I actually don't even think Trolly Dolly anymore, I'd like to point out. So woe candy. I think we can call them flight attendants, can't we? Well, it was weird being a flight attendant in the 1950s, and it was explicitly just for women. I hadn't quite realized how all flights in America, pretty much all airlines, stated men need not apply, to the extent that there was a completely transformative lawsuit in 1971, which was brought by a man

who wanted to be a flight attendant, a guy called Celio Diaz. And they had a witness for the airline who was a guy called Eric Byrne, a psychiatrist, and he testified that a flight attendant who was male would make passengers really uncomfortable and he said you know because you'll be effeminate and he said it'll make male passengers uneasy as it might arouse feelings in him, he would rather not have aroused. Oh, there are definitely some states in America that you wouldn't be able to do that.

How interesting. And we've said before, I think that the reason that there were women to start off with is because they were nurses. Yeah, Ellen Church was, she wanted to become a pilot. They said you can't. She made a case case of saying what if then you need a nurse on board and while I'm there I can serve some drinks I can I can refuel the plane just like a miss yeah her biggest argument I think was that she said if you have a woman on board you're not gonna have scared passengers because the men will be too afraid to admit that they're scared when there's a woman who's not scared on board. That was her pitch.

And I think before that it was children basically, right? It was teenagers. And again, it's like, you know, if the teenager's not scared, then we probably won't be scared. That's good logic. I think that would work for me. Teenagers famously have no sense of risk. They have absolutely no clue whether something is harmful or dangerous behaviour. That's true.

Maybe it's more like the protective instinct. You can't show you're afraid in front of a teenager because you're the grown-up in the room. To be honest, one of the main reasons they were teenagers is because teenagers were a bit smaller than adults. I'm talking now about the 1920s. There was an airline called Daimler Airway, which went from Manchester to London in a biplane which could carry nine passengers but this was a route you could take and they had these cabin boys whose job was to hand out hot water bottles and earplugs and reassure you during the flight saying don't worry it's supposed to be falling apart. It's the early days of flying. In 50 years if it makes you feel better this will be totally safe.

I should just finish what I was saying about the guy who brought the lawsuit to say that in 1971, four years after he brought it, it was ruled that airlines could not discriminate against men. And it obviously also was a very homophobic thing. So we think of the fight attendance rules as being sexist, but it was also really homophobic. The idea was that these men would be effeminate and they'd be arousing homosexual feelings in other men that they didn't want to have. And yeah, in 1971, you weren't allowed to do that. Sadly, this poor guy who brought the lawsuit was at that point too old to become a nurse steward. Oh, so he was ageist as well.

It was ageist and he'd hit 35, yes. And women, we should also specify, were employed at first as nurses. But the reason that they employed only women after that was because they were fair and they wanted the male passengers to be attracted to them. It was. And it's really interesting, like until 1978 in America, if you took a plane from, let's say Detroit to Chicago, you had to charge a certain amount, no matter what. Do you mean ticket price? Ticket price, yeah. Right. Exactly. So it was all dependent on the route and it was not dependent on anything else. And so you had to attract customers, so what would you do?

You would make it really attractive. So you would have like piano bars on your plane, you would have fillet steaks on your menu. You would have very attractive cabin crew, stuff like that. And then in 1978, they increased competition, complete race to the bottom, cheaper the better. They got rid of all the frills, no more pianos on planes, no more fill at stake, hideous stuff at every turn, unbelievably ugly staff. But what it meant was the race to the bottom meant that a lot of companies went out of business.

So you had much fewer companies who are running those routes. And it meant that the cabin crew had less sort of chance to move between different jobs. Anyway, that's my rant against capitalism. Please enjoy my next Ted Talk. So you just want Porsche, fillet steaks on your first class flights. First class for everyone. I remember I was on a flight coming back from Dubai

and we were going through the craziest turbulence I've ever felt. You guys know I'm a nervous flyer. So that was, I was petrified Yeah, and someone started screaming in the back screaming and it screamed it kind of that the echo of your own We're traveling so fast sound couldn't keep up with it Yeah, no this guy was yelling and he was yelling quite a few scary words And so we were like oh my god is this like is this a bombing is it a hijacking?

yelling quite a few scary words. And so we were like, oh my God, is this like a, is this a bombing? Is it a hijacking? Pottergeist. Loneliness. Yeah. And so everyone's terrified. Everyone's really scared, but clearly the people know what's going on. And suddenly flight attendants were all running to the back.

Now it turns out it was a medical emergency. But my last thought that I always think about this, my last thought that had the plane had blown up in that moment was that I watched a chef run back and all I could think was, they have chefs up front? That's incredible. That was my final thought. How did you know he was a chef? He had a giant white hat. He saw what was going on and went, Mamma Mia! A huge long mustache, yeah, flipping that pancake as he ran. He was slicing some tribes with the big knife in midair as he went. Incredible.

They don't have chefs on planes. Yes they do. Chefs, that's a perfect disguise. He fooled you, absolutely. He was an air marshal. But all air marshals these days dress as chefs. First class, they have chefs. They do. Can I tell you about an incident that happened? This is not a flight I was on, but it is in the great list of air rage incidents on Wikipedia.

In 1995, a group of 18 British and Irish tourists got rowdy on a flight from London to Minneapolis. They started sending their children to steal food and drink from the flight attendants' carts, causing trouble. What they didn't know is that several wrestlers from the US Olympic freestyle wrestling team were also on board the flight. And did they take part, or is it like a doctor? Are they not allowed to intervene in situations

otherwise they're liable? I can't do a triple suplex on this child. He is my son. LAUGHTER Yeah, they did. No, they piled in and they helped restrain the rowdy. They piled in like a helped restrain the rowdy. They piled in like a rile bum bum. One after the other. Every 30 seconds. He's getting out the train table.

Wait, doctors aren't allowed to intervene? No, they aren't. They're not David Attenborough. They're not. Is there a doctor on board? Yes. Great. Can you stay where you are? Can literally anyone else perform surgery? At MCBR. I don't know the details, but there's a thing where if you intervene, you feel like you are liable or you could be liable for something. So obviously they do because they can say someone's lie. But then if something goes wrong, then suddenly they're

wearing their doctor's hat. Yeah. Is that not wearing their chef's hat? I was looking at some famous flight attendants. Kate Middleton's mum, Carol. Carol Middleton? I'd say famous. Oh, there was snobbery about her, wasn't there? A strawberry about her. Snobbery? She always keeps a strawberry about her. There was snobbery, because they called her Doors to Manual or something, which is what you say when the plane lands. I didn't know about that. Yeah. Johanna Sigurðaðottir, who was prime minister of Iceland from 2009 to 2013 and the country's first female PM and the first openly LGBTQ head of government. She was a flight attendant. Marina Machete, who was the first transgender winner of Miss Portugal.

Marina Machete? It's such a great winner of Miss Portugal. Marina Machete? It's such a great name, isn't it? Wow. You'd be too scared to take her on. Another one I was reading about was the first female steward in the Soviet Union called Elsa Garodetskaya. And she flew from Moscow to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan. And it took 13 hours. And if you went by train, it would take 129 hours and 30 minutes. So the flights were really important in the Soviet Union because these places are so far apart and the best version of this I found was in Kazakhstan there was a flight from Almaty to Balkhash

and it was a two hour flight but if you wanted to go by train, it would take 157 hours. LAUGHTER Because there was no direct train between the two cities. So you had to go from Kazakhstan, from Almaty, all the way up to Novosibirsk in Siberia. And all the way back down again. And it would take about a week. And we regret to announce there's a five-minute delay for today's journey. LAUGHTER Isn't that amazing?

Wow. Some flight attendant codes. Oh great. Bits of language. So do you know what they say if they find you attractive? No, nor do you Andy, be honest. As in they say it to you directly? No, I think, so it's one of these silly little sort of things

that gets put into click baity articles online. I'm going back in it already. No, it's so, right. You'm going back in it already. No, so right, you can either say Bob about someone. How would you say it? Like what's the context? Best on board. Exactly. When do you do you sort of shout Bob up the plane? Why do you need to code? You must be saying to your fellow attendants, oh, there's a Bob in, in World 13CB. I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or as you, as people get off the plane, you say cheerio to them instead of goodbye. To you.

Or thank you for flying with us or whatever. It'll be a word that you say, you know. That's interesting. Toodaloo or something. Don't take this as gospel and humiliate yourself in front of just a perfectly polite vice-attendant who's happily married. Cheerio and you just grab them like that guy at the end of World War II.

I have a favourite flight attendant story, a story of honey traps, very topical. In the 1960s, the KGB was trying to blackmail the Indonesian president, the guy called Ahmed Sukarno, and the way that the KGB blackmailed him was they had their agents on one of his flights, a private flight, disguise themselves as flight attendants and, you know, serve him drinks and stuff and look sexy. And they flirted with him to the extent that eventually he invited them to his hotel room when he landed. And they had a big old orgy,

not knowing that the Soviets had hidden a camera behind the mirror in the room and filmed the entire orgy. And then later on, the Soviets called him to a private cinema and gave him a private showing of himself having an orgy with these flight attendants who were in fact agents. And so, do you know what he did? Had a wank? What?

Do yourself! Bad news, there's another camera in the cinema. Who's filming that? And it just kept happening and getting again. He's still there. That didn't happen, but he did ask for more copies that he could take home to his homeland because he said the people would love him for it. That's very funny.

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No such thing which is all one word and join babbel today your guaranteed path towards speaking a new language Okay on with the podcast on with the podcast Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that a team of ecologists have been studying the health of the oceans by dissecting leftover tins of fish from the 1980s. All these fish are dead! Yeah, it's quite a roundabout way of doing it. It seems like half of the ocean was made of brine, but the other half was made out of olive oil.

What about the spicy tomato sauce bits? That was the Mediterranean. So what, yeah, what's, what's that? Well, this is really ingenious. It's actually been published now. It's a paper in the Ecology and Evolution Journal and it's research done by Chelsea Wood and Natalie Mastic, who were looking into the health of marine mammals specifically. So there's quite a few links in this chain. They were looking at seals and whales and how their health had been over time. But to do that, they wanted to know what parasites have been in the ocean because parasites get into salmon and cause disease

in salmon and then seals and whales eat salmon. And then you know what kind of diseases seals and whales would have been getting because these parasites will give them certain diseases. So how do they find out what parasites were in the ocean 40 years ago? Well they didn't know and then suddenly out of the blue they got a call from a seafood products association in Seattle saying they were cleaning out their basement, had loads of long expired tins of salmon. Did she want them? And she said, that's actually a great idea. Yeah, let's do it. Does it work? It worked inside tins of salmon. So can I just say, so this was 40 years ago. So just before you were born, Anna.

Just ages before I was born. Ages before you were born. But does that mean that anyone eating salmon 40 years ago might have had parasites in their salmon? None of the parasites, when they opened the cans, were alive, nor would they have been alive once they'd been canned. So they burrow into salmon's muscle. They're right inside these muscle pockets. And they said they could pick through the tinned muscle tissue with forceps and see the worms like spring out of their muscles. That's disgusting. It's so disgusting. So if I eat salmon, that's not happening today.

Yeah, you can get a magnifying glass on it. Salmon do have a lot of problems with, especially the farmed ones, because they're in such a tight proximity to each other. Sorry, I'm really putting you off here. But they're so close that they get more, obviously they get more lice. Yeah, I know that, but I've never seen worms in salmon. Yeah, they're there. You've got to maybe get a magnifying glass to them

Oh, don't put a magnifying glass on anything. It's the basic rule of food So the cans ranged from expired like expired cans from 1979 to 2021 and they were literally able to plot the health Can by can year by year the parasite thing. I just found that really interesting I don't fully understand the science of it But basically the parasite in order to reproduce it needed to be eaten by something that then is eaten So it's eaten by krill the krill is then eaten by salmon The salmon is then eaten by a marine mammal and once it gets to the mammal

That's when it can reproduce and put its stuff back out in the cycle starts again So you're saying that these parasites don't survive unless they end up in a mammal? Yeah. Exactly. They can't reproduce. It's like the old woman who swallows a fly, but at the end, a giant fly bursts out of the horse. It's sort of that disgusting. Wouldn't make such an appealing children's book, but yeah.

Tin food. We have briefly mentioned Nicolas Appert, who discovered it. There was a big competition in France to find a way of preserving food so that Napoleon could basically feed his armies overseas and at long distances and it took 15 years and he won it. What we didn't say, I love this, he originally used ceramic containers sealed with cork but he's basically the father of canned food. The process was called, he was called Nicolas Appert.

It was called Appertizing. Spooky. That is good. Appertizing. Good branding. Yeah. Is it a pun or is that there's no correlation? It wouldn't work in French. Exactly. His name is Appertizing. An accidental pun. Isn't that mad? Wow. The best type. He was so convinced about his work, he published a book about it in 1810, he was so confident about it he attached a small note to every copy with his address on it so you could turn up at his house. That's a great idea, Andy, have you considered that for your novel for anyone who doesn't

like it? Absolutely, I will do anything. But his thing didn't really work that well, did it? No, all the jars exploded What happens is you heat up the food so that it kills all the bacteria and stuff But if you don't do it well enough the bacteria will create Gases and the gases will get more and more and more and eventually bang Quite exciting opening the pantry isn't it every day? You had to wear face masks.

I quite like that the original tins were champagne bottles. Because the first thing that he canned stuff in was empty champagne bottles. Really? Yeah. And there were champagne bottles corked with cheese. What a disgusting image of the cork pops, just this foaming cheese. Are you joking? Like, if there's cheese and wine together at last. Yeah. Only a French inventor would have come up with the empty champagne bottle stuff. How the hell do you shove a whole duck into a champagne bottle? Well, I'm delighted that you've asked.

He found this a bit of a problem at first. He found, surprisingly enough, they weren't wide enough to fit a lot of foods in them. But he doctored them so that they cut off the top so that it widened the neck and then yeah stuffed it with cheese and lime wrapped in cloth to cork it. I assume it's lime as in the quick lime. Yeah, not just a squeeze of lime. But then it was a guy called Philippe de Gerard who came up with the tin can, which is closer to what we have today.

He was also French, but he actually sold it to the British. He gave the patent to a guy called Peter Durand. And Peter Durand... Who also sounds French, who are you? Yes, he does. Yeah, buddy, he was Durand. Yeah. Durand. There you go.

And basically became part of the British army, then started using the tins and actually at the Battle of Waterloo, the British army had loads of these French tins, which must have seemed a bit off to the French. It is weird. It's so weird that he was the front man, Peter Durand, because he was completely the front man. He did not come up with the idea. It was all so that Girard could get his thing through.

One reason because, like, the English didn't trust the French So if a Frenchman came over with these tins of food Everyone buy these no one would believe him because he was French. Yeah. Yeah, so he needed someone with a French sounding name But then during sold the patent after a couple of years to a man who we've I think we've mentioned it was for Brian Duncan And I think we've mentioned it once before, Brian Donkin. That is a solid English name, isn't it? Brian Donkin. You don't get more English than that. I've heard a throwback to like 10 years of you constantly going, donk, donk, donk, donk.

What was that? Well, that was just an old music style donk. Yeah, donk. Do you not remember that? James had always mentioned that. It's honestly like 10 years ago. It was like a northern music style where it was like dance music, but it but it would be like donk donk donk donk. You take a normal tune and you put a donk on it. It's like a remix but I once got Stephen Fry to

say put a donk on it on QI as part of a bet. That's it. Did he also invent the music Brian Donkin or was he just a donk man for that? Donkin invented the donk and it was yeah yeah he made it big on that. No he so he was an amazing engineer from Northumbria he was. He was a metal worker. He had a paper making machine business He patented the first steel pen and then he starts making corned beef in his preservatory He's just a legend this guy and then in 1813 he presented his beef to the Duke of Kent not a euphemism He got a letter back from four royals saying the Queen herself had tasted and enjoyed his canned beef again. And he got the patent and he's so popular.

He was so popular. There is a cove in Chile, which is called Catella Donkin, because the crew had loved their Donkin tinned meat so much. We're talking about Donkin statues now and maybe there are some in Northumberland, but I've never, like he should be a national hero. And he's completely forgotten. There was an amazing BBC article, it was really, really a long one, about his life and canned food, but Duncan is a huge part of it. He's buried in Nunhead Cemetery, which is in South London, and his name is a footnote beneath three other

guys all called Brian Duncan. Who are related to him? Who are related to him? They just put all the random Donkens in one grave. It was a mass Duncan grave, wasn't to him? All the random Donkens in one grave. It was a mass Duncan grave, wasn't it? It was called Duncan-Donkens. There was one angry guy trying to kill Brian Donkin,

got it wrong three times, finally got it right. I know. He did do lots of other stuff, didn't he? He worked with Brunel, Brunel's son, on the Thames Tunnel. He worked on Charles Babbage's computer. He was multi-talented. And as John Nutting of the Knutting editor of the can never go to the cinema alone with John Nutting

Wait, why not? It's a euphemism for masturbating right? I just thought it was headbutting someone so That's all sorts of confusion in my life. Anyway, he's editor of the Can Make a Magazine. Either way, we'll get you kicked out of a Wetherspoon on a Friday night. The double nutting, that's why you're getting arrested. He's just a big fan of Duncan. Duncan and Nutting. He lamented that he's forgotten by the wider world, which I always think when people say can we believe he's lost to history? I can believe it. I agree he's done an important

thing. He's come up with sort of tin canning or commercialised the process. What do you expect for that to be a household name 200 years later? No, no, no. A sad truth. Well, anyway, nice to dust off the donk. There's a really old fact on QI that it took 50 years after the invention of the can to invent the can opener.

I'm sure we've said that before on this show as well. I didn't realize that there are actually really good reasons for that. Firstly, the first process, there were only six cans made an hour. So, you know, there wasn't the mass market. If you invent a tin opener, they're going to open them quicker than you can make them. Exactly!

It's not worth it. And secondly, they were made of wrought iron and lined with tin. They were thick. No modern can opener would have possibly been able to crack into this. What was the method back then to get into them? Chisel, hammer and chisel. I mean, very few, in my experience, very few modern can openers can open modern cans.

That's a good point. So modern ones are steel and they're incredibly thin. And, but the original ones were just so thick. I love this, in 1860s America, shop grocery clerks would open your cans for you to take home. Yeah. They would open it in the shop, you would have your cans for you to take home. Yeah, they were in the shop

You would have your cans open for you. That's quite nice. I quite like that with jars Jar of pickles just go to the person who's scanning the trick Imagine you're in the queue Like there's always so many different reasons that it's gonna take ages at the counter when someone's in front of you and you just see the person who's scanning all the stuff heads off to get a chisel and a hammer. Ah shit. Cashier after cashier, Jimmy with the big wrists

trying to open your can for you. Jimmy big wrists. Jimmy nutting. I found out about an invention in can opening that I didn't know about and it was almost a hundred years ago. Wow, so just before you were born. So just before I was born.

The electric can opener. Did you guys know this was a thing? I own one. Why have I been struggling away with these crappy plastic things? This is no exaggeration. My electric can opener is probably the best thing I've ever bought. Wow. Wow. I think it's it's a genius thing.

You just put it on, you press a button and then it opens the can. That's so good. Invented in 1931. Why don't we all have why didn't they all have them by 1932? Why don't I have one today? I mean, it sounds like they are readily available to buy. They are. You could just go to a shop and buy them. Well, we don't all have James's secret sources. I've actually never heard one. And it does sound like a, I mean, James has given it the hard sell. Genuinely, I would say it is

one of my favourite items in my entire house. Including his wife and child. The only thing that obviously puts them out of business a little bit at the moment is those ring pull tins that you get. Like a lot of them are ring pull. So I will deliberately buy tins that don't have the ring pull on so I can use my tin opener. In the after times, once you know the food's run out and everyone has used up all the ring pull cans, you're going to be the king. Exactly, until the batteries run out. Oh yeah, then you're stuffed.

Glorious two and a half weeks i will be the king of the world does it have a manual setting like can you do it if the batteries run out yeah if the batteries run out you're knackered wow yeah you should just pull all the rings off your cants when you buy them yeah i do ask the person in the shop to do that for me can't when you buy them. Yeah, I do ask the person in the shop to do that. Yeah, electric can open it. Is it big? Does it have to sit on the counter? Or is it not? This big. If it was solar powered, you could have permanent. Yeah, it's not.

No, I'm afraid it's probably not very good for the environment. But I find them so useful. Yeah, I think that's not a very good for the environment, but oh, I've said yeah, I find so useful Yeah, I think that's not a big cost for the environment frankly. I've got but I've got solar on my roof So if you want if you come round we could form a power couple in the aftertimes He can harness the Sun He can open your tins. Right, you're sort of giving yourself the main part in that, aren't you? Son of a... Son of a...

And Dan and Anna will find some jobs for you, you know. I'm good, thanks. Can sardines. This is interesting. I didn't know this. They have their own kind of connoisseurs and vintage years. So, oh wow. If you buy an expensive can of sardines, you might prefer to get a 2004 vintage compared to a 2008 vintage. That's incredible. Are there people at the restaurant who send them back? So this is a 1993? Specifically for the 97? This is cork, this is tinned. It's absolutely amazing. So there are companies like, who I'd never heard of, like Rodel and Conner Tabler in France,

and they sell these sardines. And the thing is, apparently sardines get better the longer they're in the can, up to a certain number of years but what happens is the flesh becomes much smoother and more tender and the bones eventually kind of disappear the tiny bones that you get in your in your sardines eventually it just becomes a mush of sardine and that's the absolute best time to buy them and you get people who just buy them and then just keep them for 10 years until they're exactly the right moment and then they'll eat the sardines. Again, that'll be funny for the prepping.

Don't have that! Exactly when the nuclear war happened. Yeah, exactly. We need to keep that another seven years. And apparently you have to flip the tins every six months. Like a mattress! Like a mattress. I don't know, I think it's so that the oil or whatever gets nicely distributed and doesn't settle. This is really interesting James, because my mum went to Portugal last year and she brought back tins, because Portugal, they're obsessed with canned fish aren't they?

And they have these really beautiful tins and she brought back cans for each of her children, of which I am one, with our year of birth written on them. Really? And mine just said 1986 and I just thought that's a nice design and cracked into it and had it on toast, but I suspect that was actually a 1986 vintage. Did it taste better than any other sardines you'd ever eaten? It was sort of full of crawling maggots, besides that was actually delicious, yeah. As we know, your mum would go, oh, what?

Crawling maggots? We used to eat those every single week. Exactly. It's a delicacy. Also, did you just slip in your berthier to prove that you're not 100 years old? God damn it. Cut that out. Edit it out.

OK, it is time for fact number three. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that German writer Christoph Friedrich Nicolai treated his visions of ghosts by applying leeches to his anus. It really builds that fact, doesn't it? Did it work? Yeah. It worked.

Of course it worked. Of course it worked. Okay, come on. Explain yourself. Did it work? Yeah Explain yourself. So he had previously suffered from something that he called a violent giddiness and he was treated by leeches and He was kept having these Treatments and then one time he missed his treatment and he started seeing what he thought was ghosts. He said, I observed at a distance of 10 paces the figure of a deceased person. I asked my wife whether she saw it.

She saw nothing but being much alarmed sent for the physician. Okay, and so then what he did was he decided, he was a bit of a skeptic, a bit of a scientist, so he decided he would not take any more leeches for a while, put up with the ghosts, and then after a while he would try the leeches and see if it got rid of the ghosts. And sure enough, a bit later he presented his, what he called his

memoir on the appearance of specters or phantoms occasioned by disease to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. And he said that he applied the leeches to the anus and they went away the ghosts and he concluded that the ghosts originated in my internal consciousness alone a consciousness that was disordered so he was kind of disproving the ghosts existed by saying there was a physical treatment for these ghosts and that means there's no such thing as a ghost it was all in my head yeah and was there a reason he had to apply it to his anus? Why his anus? I think it was an easy way to get at blood. It's easy access, isn't it? It is.

It's sort of easy access. I think your hand is even easier access. No, I think- No, a leech is better than your hand for getting blood out of your anus. I believe that there was like a relatively common place to put leeches back in the day. Well King George III used to put them on his temples when he was suffering from his bouts of depression and so on. So when was this going? Oh yes, sorry. I should say who Christoph Friedrich Nicolai was.

So this problem that he had was in 1799. He was German. He was around at the same time as lots of other German writers that you would know, such as Goethe. And in fact, he had... You've listed all the German writers I would know. I may come to some more. So, but he had a big argument with Goethe, actually. So Goethe wrote a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther, which we have mentioned before, which was about a depressed young man and actually a lot of people copied this young man

and dressed like him and committed suicide and stuff so it was like a real massive massive deal in Germany and Nikolai wrote The Joys of Young Werther which was kind of a slam on the sorrows of young Werther and then Goethe in response composed a poem where Nikolai stood of young Werther. And then Goethe in response composed a poem where Nicolai stood next to Werther's grave and defecates on it. Good Lord. And he also put him in Faust. Not one of his most famous works, was it?

Well, Faust is one of his most famous. It sure is, yeah. There's very little defecating in Faust, is there? There isn't, but there is a character called the Proctofantasmist who was actually Nikolai in disguise who put leeches on his bum and in Faust Goethe says he is about to sit down in a puddle that's the way his soul acts and when leeches feast on his rump he is cured of ghosts and ghouls. Wow I mean it must have been a big deal at the time. He's made it into that. That's not the only work of fiction that he's made it into. He also was in a story called Mrs. Zant and the Ghost, which was written by a friend of the podcast, Wilkie Collins.

Really? Yeah. And so, um, and in reference to the hallucinations and so on. So it must've, it must've been the talk of the town. Yeah. E.T.A. Hoffman wrote about him. Schlegel wrote about him. Not Schlegel. Schlegel. You know Schlegel. I've heard the name. Yeah. ETA Hoffman wrote about him. Schlegel wrote about him. Not Schlegel. You know Schlegel. I've heard the name. You know him from the Philosopher's Song. That's literally what I was about to say. I was just saying Monty Python. Yeah, he was just as drunk as Schlegel. Yeah. Schlegel was a linguist, basically. He was a philosopher as well and stuff. ETA Hoffman wrote The Nutcracker, I think. Oh, wow. That's big news. So, you know, they are big names who were, as well as writing all these big things, ETA Hoffman wrote the Nutcracker, I think. Oh wow! That's big news.

They are big names who were, as well as writing all these big things, also writing about this guy's rectum. Yeah, yeah. And Tchaikovsky wrote the music to the Nutcracker. Yeah, yeah, but he wrote the story. Well, Schlegel actually wrote, in response to the Nutcracker, he wrote the can opener, which is a very beautiful... So it was huge leeches for thousands of years, wasn't it? You hear about old treatments that

come and go, but leeches just came about 2,500 years ago and then stuck around until the 19th century when finally they went out of fashion because it was thought to be unscientific and then came back into fashion. But the way you treat people with leeches is you attach them to someone and they make you bleed. Their saliva has an anticoagulant in it and they also put a chemical into you that widens up your blood vessels and they put an anaesthetic into you. They're great surgeons. I think I can drink about a thumb full of or a thumb size of blood, you know, from an area before they're nice and full. Five times more than their own body size, I think, which is a lot.

But you don't normally leech to death unless the doctors have put dozens of leeches on you, which is pretty rare. You're definitely not going to leech to death. No, it'll just be like an annoying little pinprick in your finger for a day. I've sometimes had to like a blood sample from my fingers at home and you get these little sort of pinprick things, don't you? Yeah. And I just can't get them to work.

Really? Yeah. Last time I had to do it, they gave me two and I couldn't get it to work. And so I had to go and buy some more, but you could only buy them from the pharmacist in boxes of 500. So I now have about 495 of these at home, which I literally, if

anyone wants to buy them off me. Well, in the aftertimes those will probably come in handy. Those will be a way for you to test the faith of the elect. You could probably gradually open a can with one of those actually, once you run out of battery. Have you use 20 of them. Have you heard of the Birmingham Leech Center? No. This is run by Bridget Croft, who is a nurse, and she is the only nurse in the UK

who is qualified to do private leaching. Okay. So everyone else's, all the other leaching is on the NHS, and it's to repair joints and after microsurgery and help blood vessels heal. She does it privately. And she says in some areas of Eastern Europe, it is looked on in the same way as going to a spa. What is she using it for though? Because it's not for sewing fingers back on. No, exactly. So that would be on the NHS or whatever. This is pain relief, gout, baldness,

all sorts of stuff. Oh, so is this stuff that doesn't work? Because it doesn't work for those things. Baldness? I don't think we are... I don't know about baldness. Well, is it just that people see you from a distance with all the leeches on your head? I think, oh, he's got a full head of hair.

That's Tupé's moving around a lot, isn't it? It works from across a dimly lit bar but up close the results do fall off. I mean that does sound like old school leech work to me. It does, yeah. Whereas modern leech work is quite specifically for the getting body parts back on, isn't it? No, that's true.

Leeches, they share something in common with tinned salmon, which is then they're now being used to tell us about the environment. So in China, they took 700 terrestrial leeches that they found, all of the same species, and they are going and taking the blood out of them and diagnosing what animal it was taken from. So the question, sorry, to interrupt terrestrial leech. Is that something that's not an alien or? You have to listen to Dan's other podcast to find out about extraterrestrial leeches. And the ones that you won't find in the water of bogs and stuff. They're land based.

Land based? Can you get them? That's me guessing. Yeah. You get them, so some of them feed on deer, for example. The story of how they came back into use is a pretty amazing one. I actually listened to a podcast on leeches, an episode of Sideways, which I love by the way, you should listen to it, Matthew Side, and he was talking about this story. So in 1985, there's a four year old called Guy Condelli,

whose ear is bitten off by his grandparents' dog. And as the surgeon remembers it, the surgeon Joe Upton remembers it, the ear arrived in the emergency room half an hour before the boy. So I don't know what kind of thing happened there. I said we're going to reattach you to the boy. So they've got this ear, they've got this boy and they can repair the arteries fine. This is where leeches come in so useful, it's for vein repair. Because as Joe Upton described it, to try and sew veins back on, imagine sewing wet toilet paper together.

They're so floppy, they just keep flopping and they kept on reattaching the ear and it kept on going purple and black as it filled with blood because the veins couldn't carry it away. Old Upton, he'd read about leeches as a treatment and he tracked down the Welsh biopharma place where they bred them for use in pharmaceuticals, so they hadn't been used actually the way they are now and he got some scent to him and this is a completely new idea he's just thought you know what let's attach a leech to this guy's ear and see if it works. That's amazing. So amazing and he just about gets the leeches out in time and says literally as soon as he puts them on this boy's ear the ear goes from black to a lovely pink ear colour, as the leech basically repairs the veins. Or it allows the blood to flow through the veins, it widens the veins, it means that the blood can flow freely, which gives them chance to repair

themselves. The body's very good at repairing itself, it just needed a rest. The ear just needed a rest. So apparently now these days if you have finger or ear or penis surgery, what they'll do is for the 10 days afterwards you keep getting a leech just put onto the place that needs repairing. So over the 10 days, that's how they fix it. Yeah. It's just incredible. Yeah, they're amazing.

Have you heard of the Beedale Leech House? This is in North Yorkshire. Beedale, I know Beedale. Yeah, so Yorkshire and it's a little building, but it looks like a miniature fortress because it's got crenellations on the top your castellations You know, it looks like a castle. Yeah, I love that. You just corrected crenellations to castellations Yes, I appreciate that. It's just absolutely just because people will have been listening to it I don't know what crenellation is and then you started to repeat yourself. They'll have gone

Oh, thank God. He's repeating himself and tell me what it is and then you said an even more obscure word. Like these bits I've just drawn them. Yeah I know what they are. Yeah these guys are. The only thing I thought was a crenellation is I thought that was a crenellation not a castellation. That's what I thought as well. I'm not sure it's the former it's definitely the latter I don't so I think we've got distracted from the fact this is a house built for leeches so they would be kept in there because to collect leeches for the market you collect them from the fact this is a house built for leeches. So they would be kept in there because to collect leeches for the market you collect them from the wild, you collect them from rivers and from bogs and swamps and you'd normally just walk through barefoot and you come out you've got a load of

leeches on you and that's the leech collector's job. And then you take them to the leech house and drop them off there so they'd be kept alive and then there's a sort of staging post for them. And this is the last leech house in the UK and it's still alive and then it's a sort of staging post for them. And this is the last leech house in the UK and it's still there and it's got a stream diverted to run through it. It's on the banks of a little beck. It doesn't still house leeches, does it? It doesn't still house leeches, but it had a fire to keep them warm in winter and it had, there were special containers of moist turf and moss for the leeches to live in.

Oh, here we go. How did I find this right? Keyword search. It's amazing how Andy searches on Google for moss leeches and Dan searches for extraterrestrial leeches. And he goes, did you mean terrestrial leeches? No, I didn't, but OK. Yes, what is it?

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On with the show. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that in some American states and cities in the late 80s, children could be sent to prison for six months for the crime of owning a pager. What's a pager. What's a pager, Granddad? I don't know. Anna, you're 100 years old. So this is from a great newsletter

called Pessimists Archive by Louis Anslow. It's a brilliant article. And it was all about how there was this panic about pagers, which are electronic devices. Can you tell us a bit more about them? Yes. You could do very very very primitive texting on advanced models and the early ones you just got a beep and you knew that you had to do something in response

to the beep. So like a doctor might have them, it would beep and they're like I have to go to the hospital. Exactly that. But then later they would be able to send you like a couple of words or numbers or something. But the original ones were- But you wouldn't be able to send a message back. It's purely receiving. of words. Yeah, exactly. But the original ones were... But you wouldn't be able to send a message back. No.

It's purely receiving. Yeah. To send the message, someone had to pick up a phone, call a number, and kind of direct your pager to be beeped. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there were all these headlines in the 80s about these powering the drug trade. Maybe youths who own pagers are getting paged and they're going to pick up the drugs or

whatever. And they probably were useful for drug dealers, to be honest. But it wasn't, it wasn't most pages in schools being used. I think what it was, is that most drug dealers did use pages, but not most pages were used by drug dealers. Exactly that, it's exactly that. That wasn't necessarily what the right wing press thought.

No. And so, New Jersey banned them for under 18s on pain of six months in choke, which is such a long time for owning a pager. Michigan did the same, and thousands of young people were arrested and suspended and handcuffed and things. I couldn't find anyone who was sent to prison for that.

But in one year alone, there were a thousand arrests in Chicago schools solely for owning pagers. Arrests? Because your fact, it kind of reads like one of those like, there's a law in Mississippi that you can't let your horse open your can. It's like, you're a flag girl for New Jersey, everyone put your pages away. But then, as you say, 700 school kids were arrested in 1994. And weird kids, because if they're not dealing drugs, which as we say, some of them were,

but if they're not dealing drugs, which as we say some of them were, but if they're not they're just losers. Because I'm going to associate owning a pager with like nerdy businessmen. What I associate it with actually is Ross in Friends who famously has one in series one. Oh does he? And so what kind of kid owns a pager? In the 80s they were so cool. They were so cool. And what are they called in the 80s? Because drug dealers use them. And because your parents hated them and because politicians hated them. To have one was the ultimate status symbol. James is speaking as if. I was alive.

You were desperate for a page. This is America. It wasn't in the UK as far as I could remember slash read. But basically, the reason they were good for drug dealers is before you had them, if you wanted to get in contact with someone to buy your drugs, you had to give them your landline number and now you're giving them effectively a mobile number so the cops wouldn't know where you are. But because they became associated with the bad guy, kids were wearing them around their

necks as like a status symbol. And they were so cool, there was a market for fake pages. So you could buy a cheaper pager that didn't do anything, didn't send or anything like that, but you would just wear it around your neck and say, look, I've got a pager when it wasn't real. Would you occasionally have to say beep to make people think you're getting a, oh, that's my dealer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read an article that was written in 1977 about pages, just talking about how awesome they were. They would say that if you were in a queue for a restaurant and the maitre d saw a pager on your belt, you would be able to go up the line. There's stories of parties where the hostess of a party, and this was in Washington, became nervous that she hadn't invited the best people in her social group there because she couldn't hear the beeper pagers at her party. These pagers are fakes!

Well what then became even cooler than the beeping pager was the wiggler. And the wiggler was the one that doesn't beep out loud but, like a phone on silent, vibrates. So she thought okay maybe if it's not beeping it's because I've got the extra cool new kids here. Oh you've got the wiggles. I've got the wigglers. It is interesting how transformative that is. Just what you said, James, about it going from a landline to a mobile, people communicating in new ways that cannot be tracked as easily.

It made a huge difference. And then I read one article in 1993 that was talking about the drug business using pages. They interviewed a cop and they said, now we're finding dealers with flip phones. Maybe that will be the next rage. Maybe. Who's to say? We probably should say pages are still in use. They were until a couple of years ago. No, well, there's this old factoid about the NHS is the only place where you still get

faxes and pages used. They were slated to be phased out in 2021. But. Matt Hancock said that was going to happen, didn't they? And if you're outside the UK and you don't know who Matt Hancock is, good for you. And there was still, I think, about 80,000 being used in the NHS as of last summer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they still kind of work. Yeah. And if you're in a hospital and there's no reception in a room, it's useful. And it is obviously, it's used for the doctors who are in rooms where there's

Incredibly thick walls because of x-ray and all sorts of all that stuff is what they're basically fighting further than a mobile signal So it's a lot of NHS stuff deal a crack We're also using pages in ways that we don't realize all of us all of us have had All of us have had probably our hands on a pager and not known it Any time you go to a restaurant and you order up at the bar and they give you an item that says when this buzzes Come back. That's when your meal is ready. That's a pager. No. Yeah, that's pager technology just used in a different form. I have one of those that I hang around my neck.

Just a lot. And you get a beep on it and it lets you know that your cans have been opened. Do you know what they stopped doing? Cause they've been around for decades actually. I think they've stopped doing this. Although I've never tested it. They obviously have a range that you can't go out of.

And they used to shout at you. So pagers often used to speak instead of beeping. And if you went more than 100 feet away, they'd shout, you are out of range. So it was just so embarrassing. Actually, just a normal one. I can't say this is true of all of them, but they have a range of about half a mile. So that's quite long. That means in most restaurants, you could just go to the pub. Yeah. Yeah. So that's quite long. That means in most restaurants, you could just go to the pub. Yeah. Nearest pub in London anyway. That's in the middle of nowhere.

So sometimes pagers would have a thing in the 70s, 80s, 90s, where if you wanted to contact someone on their pager, you would call the number and you'd get through to a switchboard and you'd say, can you contact this pager? And it's from this number. And then the person would send a message to the pager and they'd have a series of

messages that they could send. So if you were the wife calling, the message would be programmed to come up, call your wife. Or if you were work calling, it would be go to the office. Or if you're a doctor, it would be go to the hospital. Which is also your work. Yeah, so you don't need those two messages if you are a doctor. But if you're not, you know, useful. Anyway, I was reading a really good article in the New York Times from 1976, which is talking about the pros and cons of pages. And it does say the problem is almost every beeper wearer has a story to tell of the beeper going off at the wrong time. And this is an issue with them. So for

instance, a salesman we spoke to said that one evening he was having a very pleasant conversation with a young woman and just when he felt that he was making an impression and he was getting somewhere, his pager blared out, call your wife. Honestly, what a nightmare. The pager is definitely the bad guy in this. And they did actually speak to an answering service in New Orleans, one of the interchange services which said we have 1400 pages in our system and not a single one when the wife calls, ask them to say the message, call your wife. They all said, I'd like the message, call your answering service, please. Or just, you know, go to work. Every man thinks there might be a situation where I don't want the message to come up,

call your wife. That is outrageous. That is men. Answering service is such an awful euphemism for wife. Isn't it? I think of myself. Have you guys heard of gaydar? Heard of it.

Yes, I have. The idea that gay people can tell whether other people are gay. Yeah, but in 1999 someone invented a device which has been described as a kind of electronic pager which was called Gaydar and what it would be was for guys who were walking through big parks and if they saw someone that looked good looking and they didn't want to embarrass themselves by hitting on them they would have their Gaydar go off because they had a gaydar as well. What? Yeah. Yeah, so it was an electronic device What if I'm with my wife?

What's that coming from your ass? This guy called Graham Lees was was one of the inventors and so he went to test it out in a park and he walked through the park and unfortunately they discovered quite quickly... No one else had one! Buzzing around the park, crying. Well I assume there must have been someone else that was in the park and he didn't know they were testing it. Unfortunately they hadn't fully tested out the frequencies and it was at the wrong frequency so instead of spotting someone else who was wearing one of the gay dars, he was suddenly chased by horny badger. There was

squirrels there were squirrels that were coming after him. He then as he was running away from Chased a person with a vibrate. We all have vibrating phones now We all have vibrating phones now. We're all being chased by badges. The frequencies, there's a specific frequency. There's a love note for badges, is what you're saying. Exactly. He set off car alarms as he walked by because the frequency just met a certain tone that made them erupt. It's the one special frequency that works for all cars and all badges. Yeah, badges, squirrels and car alarms. No, when you often come back to your car, there's a badge a-humping it.

The alarm's going off. 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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on various social media accounts. I'm on at Tribaland on Instagram. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy? I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M. Yep. And you can get to all of us as a group by going to where, Anna? You can get us on No Such Thing As A Fish on Instagram or at No Such Thing on Twitter, or you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. You'll find a link there to Club Fish, our private members club where we put up lots

of bonus material. You can also find all of our previous episodes, bits of merchandise as well. Or you can just come back here next week for another episode. That's where we'll be. We'll see you then. Goodbye. you