No Such Thing As A Fish - 85: No Such Thing As Michelangelo's Snowman

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Live from the Brighton Comedy Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss naughty Popes, attractive picnic tables and "fun facts" about hawks.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Brighton Comedy Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage it's the three regular elves Anna Czazinski, James Harkin and Andy 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 you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1511 the people of Brussels protested against the government

by filling the city with dozens of pornographic snowmen. It's a pornographic snowman, it's a snowman that's not wearing a scarf. Yeah, how did that work? Well I can tell you about the snowmen themselves because they have been described. There was a snow nun who was seducing a man, there was a snowman and a snow woman who were having sex in front of the town's fountain and a snow naked boy urinating into the mouth of a snow drunkard. How do they do it?

Like because they must have- When a male snowman and a female snow lady love each other very- no I know what you- yeah. Yeah, because is it like, oh this is a lovely looking snowman and then a final little things added and suddenly ah. Or a big thing, it really depends on the snowman. It's cold, I'm sure it's not going to be big. Yeah, so actually it was kind of a tradition at the time or it was a few people did it and then everyone kind of took over.

It's known as the miracle of 1511. It had been really cold for like six weeks in Brussels, very very bad weather and there'd been massive population growth in the city and there was a big wealth discrepancy between the peasants and the Habsburgs who were in charge. So everyone was generally pissed off with the government and they thought, well how can we get our point across, well the only way to do it is to make a snowman. But I don't know how you could do two snow people having sex because snowmen are just- a snowman is just a ball of snow and then a smaller ball of snow and then a smaller

ball of- Yeah, I think these were like a bit more- they looked more like statues. That's a very good snow skill though. I mean I can't do that kind of- I don't know, I've never tried, maybe everybody can. You could do the snow balls, that would be interesting. For the pre-curfew snow sculptures, several snow people were involved in a tableau satirising the edicts handed down by the local government, which I think sounds like a very complicated snow sculpture given the three balls on top of each other we come up with now.

They had snow unicorns and snow mermaids and a snow dentist, not even joking, they had tooth pullers back in the day, so that was what they had. And apparently busty snow hookers enticing people into the red light district. So it serves a purpose as well as protesting the government, you know, it can help local industry. Brussels seems to have very creative protests, I was reading, I think it was just this year that they were protesting against the government, it was the farmers, so the way they protested was they were lined up against riot police but they brought their cows with them and

then they squirted, direct from the udder, cow milk at the riot police and there's all these photos of riot police with their shields going, these guys going, that's the weirdest looking protest. So in Brussels around the time, they had all the different classes, the class system, and all the different classes had their own kind of snowman. And so if you're like a poor person, a peasant and you sort of posh snowman down there, you'd attack that snowman. And the magistrates got involved and there's court cases of people.

How can you tell if a snowman is posh? I know, maybe the carrot comes from Waitrose or... I don't know. You know, you can buy off eBay a melted snowman and that involves a bowl of water with a carrot and two blueberries in it. My 99p is the starting price. And the finishing price. Also, snowman building kit you can get now.

Okay. Snowman building kit, which just says on the front, just add snow. And there are loads of these. So to make a snowman, the best way, this is from an article on the Smithsonian website and they interviewed a physicist at Rhode Island College and his name is Dan Snowman and they don't ever refer to it throughout the article, they just very politely don't make any gags. And so he says that for one thing, he says that you can make upside down snowmen, but

he said, I just thought you'd like this, Dan, that they are as rare as Sasquatch sightings and there's probably never been one. But anyway, the way you make a snowman is there are five types of snow in terms of moisture and they are technically named dry, moist, wet, very wet and slush. It's all about the ratio of free water to actual ice. So dry ice. Andy is absolutely no fun around Christmas time. I read an article on a website called Quartz.com and that was about how to make the perfect

snowman. And they said the temperature is very important. Too higher temperature and the snow will lack strength, i.e. it will be water. Do we want to hear some more 16th century snowmen? Sure. Sure. Apparently Michelangelo built a snowman. He was commissioned to build one by Piero Medici.

Commissioned? Yeah. Commissioned to build one. So Piero was like one of the Medici's but he wasn't like into art like everyone else was. So he said to Michelangelo, well just make me a snowman then. But apparently it's the best snowman that anyone's ever seen. Yeah, but everyone says that after they've melted, there's no burden of proof.

Some people think that it was the basis or they did it as a practice for David, for Michelangelo's David. Just on the subject of snowmen and religion, this January there was a cleric in Saudi Arabia who issued an edict banning snowmen from being built. I would imagine not a massive problem in Saudi Arabia. But he said, I mean I'm sure they get snow in some parts of the country at some times. Anyway, he said it is not permitted to make a statue out of snow even by way of play and fun.

And he also said it promotes lustiness and eroticism. Only in Brussels. We're going to have to move on very soon to our next fact. James, you got something else? A student who built a four foot phallus out of snow in a park was given a fixed penalty of £80. So that was a thing. Someone else actually.

Is that like the worst news report ever? So that was a thing. Here's Andy with the weather. It's going to be cold still, I guess, so back to you if you want. There was another snow fine, actually. In 2013, police in Germany gave a parking ticket to a car covered in snow which just turned out to be a snow sculpture of a car. They issued the parking ticket and then they realised once they'd issued it when they tried

to scrape the snow off to reveal the number plate and it just kept on going. They must have kept thinking this is a really small car. But the policeman's comment was when he realised that so they left the parking ticket on it and the policeman said, we can take a joke as well as the next person. But whether it was made of metal or snow, it was still obstructing the road and that should have been clear. OK, I'm going to move us on to our second fact of the show and that is Chazinski. My fact today is that Harris Hawks stand on each other's shoulders to get a better view,

which is incredible. Also considering they can fly. Are they standing on the shoulders of a flying bird? No, they stand on each other's shoulders when often they're standing on a perch, on a cactus or something and I think then the guy on the cactus is like, I can't quite see over that tree and then could you stand on my shoulders. And they've been seen up to like, so usually it's two to three hawks high, you can get four hawks high.

Four hawks standing on each other's shoulders, it's amazing. And yeah, we're not entirely sure why they do this but it could be a number of reasons. So to get a good view of, you know, if you want to get a proper angle down on your potential prey. Also to provide shade, I think. So it's often the dominant hawk, which is on the bottom. So it's thought that the dominant hawk goes, I'm really hot. Somebody needs to go on top of me as like a bird parasol. And also it might be because perching spots are scarce.

Oh wait, so they open up their wings. They open up their wings, yes, and create shade. So one of the ideas I think is that they're on a cactus and it's hard to find a bit of cactus that doesn't have spikes on it. And so when they do find a bit with no spikes in it, they're like, oh, we're all going to sit there. Yeah. Which is really annoying for the one guy who found the cactus that had no spikes on it. Oh, get off, come on. So who's in the better position, dominant hawk at the bottom or a guy at the top?

Well, it's a dominant hawk at the bottom, I guess he is. You've got three hawks on your shoulders. That's going to be really heavy. Well, I didn't interview any hawks for this fact. But yeah, it's called a stack. A hawk stack. Why is that? It's one of those, it's impossible to trace back the etymology of that use of that word there, but...

There's a theory that hawks would taste most like dinosaur out of anything that we've got. Because a lot of people have asked the question, what would a dinosaur taste like? And there's a... I thought it would taste like chicken. Well, a-ha-ha. A common misconception. And you're going to feel like an idiot now. I was on Slate.com by a guy called Brian Palmer

and he said that actually meat's flavour is also affected by what the animals been eating and hormones is not just on sort of the biology or the genes or something. So chickens don't eat meat. So if you get a bird which eats meat, like a hawk or another raptor, then that's what dinosaurs would taste like, a bit heavier and darker. Also, this is a really interesting fact about Harris hawks, for any ornithologists out there. It's not actually a Harris hawk, it should be Harris's hawk.

That's my fact of the day, fact of the year, I think. It was discovered by Audubon, who was a famous 19th century ornithologist and he named it after his mate. Audubon named Harris's hawk after a guy called Edward Harris and he was the one who funded a book that this guy was writing, which was The Birds of America, I believe it was called. And he discovered a number of new species in that book, I think it was something like 25 species.

He also named 11 species of fish. This is one of the best revenge plots I've ever heard in my life, because none of those fish exist, okay? I think we've established no fish exist. Good point. So he was basically, he was at his home, and the guy who was writing the book on the fish came over to his house and while he was at his house, he was telling him about this book

and how it was going to be the ultimate book on fish. And while they were chatting, they saw a couple of bats fly in and the fish guy thought they were new species of bats or he was scared of bats, we're not quite sure, but he immediately grabbed Audubon's violin, which was really expensive and smashed them against the bats. And Audubon was like, what? But he was toasting this guy, so the guy sat back down

and then he went, I know some fish that I've discovered that you should include into your book. And he went, fantastic, what are they? He described them, he drew them, they went into the book, and then he got outed for putting fake fish into his book. Isn't that the biggest, best revenge plot? Wow, yeah. Yeah.

I was reading the other day, so Hawke's standing on shoulders, I was reading about monkeys. I was reading this book, Sapiens, and they work together as well, and they have this amazing thing, a language that zoologists have managed to isolate certain calls. So monkeys in isolation, they'll send a call out and the call will say there's an eagle in the sky,

so all the monkeys look up to see if it's coming, and then they'll play another signal, which says there's a tiger on the way, and so they all go up the tree, but then they've discovered that some monkeys are actually seeing another monkey with a banana and go, there's a tiger, and they'll leap up into the tree,

and you'll just take the banana. Yeah, so devious. Okay, on that, this is very, very cool, so mockingbirds make alarm calls when they see a hawk, and iguanas listen to mockingbirds, they listen to a completely different species of animal, and when the mockingbird makes an alarm call,

the iguanas all run for it, because the iguanas can't tell each other there's a hawk, because they're silent, they don't communicate with each other. They're all not talking to each other, but they just listen to the mockingbirds. It's like one of those things where you're in a strop with someone, so you make someone else communicate with them on your bar.

I'm not talking to him. It's really sad. You can just imagine two iguanas facing each other and not able to say how they feel, and you know. If you swapped your eyes for a hawk, you'd be able to see an ant crawling on the ground from the roof of a 10-storey building.

Also, you'd be arrested immediately. But I can see an ant, although that's still not getting around a lot of wildlife legislation. Well, they're thinking about doing laser eye surgery now to give us much better vision, which I think is completely unnecessary, aren't they? So hawks have, like, or eagles have 20-5 vision,

and they think they can get humans up to 20-10 vision, which I don't really see the need. 20-5 vision means that something that I can see that's 5 metres away, and they'll be able to see that it's 20 metres away, and they can see it with the same vision, right? So if James is on the top floor of his 10-storey house and he's lost his pet ant,

this will come in handy. Do you know that lobsters can regenerate their eyes? But they can only do it a certain number of times, and after they've done it that number of times, instead of regenerating an eye, they regenerate a limb. What was that? Do they regenerate the limb where the eye once was?

Yes. Wow. That's great, that, isn't it? That's insane. That is amazing. Do they know how many times they've got? I don't think they do. They probably don't even know they're lobsters. Imagine shaking hands with somebody's eye. Weird.

I was trying to find your fact, Anna, because actually it's surprisingly hard to find that actual sentence on the internet that hawks stand on each other's shoulders, and it was on a site where it's like... There's a lot of sites you get these days that are trying to educate children about everything, and this was a super fun hawk page,

and there was a bunch of stuff about hawks, and then it said extra fun facts. And so the opening one was back-standing, so they stand on each other. That was one. And this is the second extra fun fact. They gather in large groups and congregate on the electrical transformers

where they are electrocuted to death. Science is fun! That's a lot of fun facts. They are kind of the bad guys of the natural world, hawks. So people don't like them, and a lot of people like this video online, which you should all look up. Actually, there are a few videos of smaller birds

who are usually preyed upon by hawks, attacking a hawk, so it was a mother-king bird, and a hawk came a bit too near her nest, and she jumps on the hawk's back and grips onto his shoulders and then pecks away at his forehead, and the hawk flies through the air, nothing he can do.

This is the other day, that seagulls attack whales, which is another kind of little thing against... The country? No, you get seagulls, and they go down and there's a whale that's kind of near the surface, and the seagulls come down

and just grab a bit of flesh from the side of the whale. Wow. I know. Would whales ever deal with a flying animal? Would they get back down and tell a story? You won't believe what just happened up there. It was a thing literally in the air. A small flying whale up there. They're like,

how do you know you're a whale? Did you know that a hawk is terrorising the people of Manchester at the moment? A massive bird named Stephen, reported by the Manchester Evening News. The name Stephen by residents who hate him, so I don't know why they've given him a name,

who stands on street lights screeching at people. It says, the massive bird named Stephen is known by experts for its intelligence. Not Stephen specifically. But Stephanie Milling, who lives just off Pollard Street in Manchester, said it's been hunting and catching wood pigeons,

but it keeps trying to get my cat. And I have a friend nearby who has pet rabbits, so we call each other every now and again, saying, Stephen's out. Get your rabbits in. James's ant farm is in serious trouble. We need to move on to the next fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact this week is that Pope Innocent VIII was given the nickname The Honest because he was the first Pope to acknowledge that he had illegitimate children. They should have called him Innocent The Smoothie. Ooh. Come on.

Those of you who heard the podcast, you knew what you were coming from. Um, so... Those who haven't, you can leave now. No refunds. Um, so in the old days, Innocent VIII was 15th century, so ages ago, back in the days,

when you had very naughty popes, and there was an amazing spell of naughty popes. It sounds like Andy's weather forecast will be having a spell of naughty popes. Naughty rabbits, huh? Yeah. Pope Stephen is out. Um, so...

Normally, when popes had illegitimate children, and in the Renaissance, and the Middle Ages, loads of them had illegitimate children, and they used to say they were their nephews and nieces, even though they clearly weren't. So they used it to get them jobs. But Innocent VIII acknowledged this,

and then he still used his position to get his children jobs. He made his 13-year-old grandson a cardinal. Wow. Yeah. When I was looking him up, I looked at his Wikipedia page, and you got a lot of links at the bottom to other related articles on Wikipedia, and one of them led me to...

This is the title, List of Sexually Active Popes. And it is a massive list. They were active. They were going for it. Yeah, they were. They were wild. So this fact kind of reminds me of, like, I think the modern day, or maybe it's always existed,

elevating honesty way too high, so that whole, I really want to be honest with you, I've shagged your dad. That kind of thing, which is like... Wait, hold on. Firstly, which of the three of us are you speaking to? It was the plural you. Oh, God.

I'm really sorry. The Wikipedia list of that other shagged. It just says yours, yours, yours. So, yeah, you don't need to know that. And in fact, there were popes who shagged, so Benedict IX was a particularly bad one, who was responsible for copious bestiality, sodomy, sponsoring orgies, sponsoring orgies.

Sponsoring orgies. This orgy is brought to you by The Pope. Have a good time! I'm just imagining, like, hi, I'm thinking of having an orgy next week. Would you mind sponsoring me? You can get 10p per...

Benedict IX is amazing. He was Pope on three separate occasions. He became Pope at the age of, like, really, really young. Some sources say he was 11 when he became Pope. I can't quite, but there's a lot of propaganda, though, so he may not have done. But he did sell the papacy to his godfather to raise money for his wedding.

And then he got bored and decided, no, actually, I'd like to be Pope again. Yeah, he was crazy. I was reading through the list of popes, because a lot of them share the same names, Pope John, Paul, and so on. Paul George Ringo. I mean, there's amazing names to start with.

They're incredible names. My favourite one was Pope Hilarious. That's an actual Pope. Pope Hilarious. Did you look into Pope Hilarious to see what Hilarious things he did? He was so boring. I was desperate.

I spent the majority of my research going, come on, one thing. One of my favourite popes is Benedict XII. And what happened with him is, the cardinals, when they were deciding who was going to be Pope, what they would often do is, in the first round of votes, they would all vote for someone

who's probably not going to become Pope because they're a bit rubbish, and then they would think, well, no one else will vote for them, and they'll see how the other cardinals are voting. Unfortunately, everyone voted for Benedict XII. Was he good? No.

Pope John XII turned the Vashkin, or the Papal Palace, into a whorehouse, apparently, committing adultery with numerous women that included his father's long-term girlfriend. And I like that because this is the 10th century, and I didn't know you had long-term girlfriends in the 10th century.

I thought you were married, or you were single. Or dead. Popular choice in the 10th century. Maybe he invented the idea of long-term girls but it never gets recognised for it because he was the Pope, and they were focusing on that bit of his story.

I think that I'm not... Because a lot of these stories, I'm not sure... Yeah, there's a lot of sort of... They're often put in from the detractors and smearing of reputations. So there's also the thing of... They might have been made up by an anti-Pope, who was not, as you would think,

a Pope made out of antimatter. Or made out of ants. I was thinking, sort of a rival Pope, who would set up a separate court elsewhere, somewhere in France, or even somewhere in Italy, and say, I'm the Pope.

And then spread horrible rumours about the actual place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although celibacy in the church really didn't become the absolute norm for an extremely long time, until about two or three hundred years ago. And it's thought... So until I think there was a Council of Trent ruling in 1563

that really said, seriously, clerics, you have to stop having sex. We've been saying this for fifteen hundred years, no one's listened. But they kept on doing it, and actually the reason that the... that eventually passed in the Council of Trent, the reason that members of the clergy

in the Catholic Church can't have sex is because there were so many illegitimate children, and they were taking the church property and passing it on to their children, so it was going out of the church, because they'd be like, I guess this church is mine, I'll just give it to my son. It's got to keep our property.

And so they said, sorry, you're not allowed to have sex. But Protestants were very pro-sex at the time. So Martin Luther, who's sort of founder of the Reformation, thought that it was really bad, the whole celibacy vow thing, because it encouraged masturbation. And as he said, Martin Luther,

founder of, I guess, the Protestant Church, if it doesn't go into a woman, it goes into your shirt. What? And we can't be having that. That's the invention of the tissue. That's a terrible sentence.

It's good, isn't it? It sounds a bit like the start of a song. If it doesn't go into a woman, that never might. I can't. No one else. Hold together. I was very quickly looking into,

so he was called the Honest as a sort of nickname, and I love history's nicknames, Ivan the Terrible, and so on, Joan of Arc. Does that work? No. But my favorite one, this is a king, Louis the unavoidable.

Imagine seeing him at a party. Oh, no. Oh, he's coming over. Oh, Louis, hi. Hi. Bye, good. He's a king.

Oh, yeah. All right, I'm going to move us on to our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Spanish construction workers recently accidentally destroyed a 6,000-year-old neolithic tomb that looked like a picnic table and replaced it

with a new and better-looking picnic table. And it's incredible. You can see the photo. It looks like a big table with surrounding chairs. So, I mean, they're fault, really. And then they've replaced it, and the new one is just... Oh, I'm sorry.

They're fault the neolithic people's fault for making the tomb like a picnic table. Okay, when you say it like that, I can retract that statement, but you look at the new picture, and it's this really nice-looking picnic table. I mean, it's actually really nice. What happened is they didn't know

that it was a heritage site property, so they said, let's do something good for them, and then got in serious trouble for ruining it. I read that one local architect said it was probably due to a miscommunication because it was the summer holidays.

So tragic. And also in the summer holidays, demand for picnic tables, rockets. Yes. So, they did this global survey, global, they did in China, of the Great Wall of China, down the road, someone must have gone,

I found this wall full of bricks. They built a whole town out of the Great Wall of China. Yeah, it's incredible. That is the only town you can see from space. A man in central Ohio has been arrested for having sex with a picnic table. Here's Andy with the weather. Yeah, he would stand

the small metal table on its side and use the hole where the umbrella should be to have sex. Can't be a happy experience, can it? Perhaps this is more common among certain parts of society than we think because there's actually a man in Tennessee as well

who was arrested for the same thing, and he was initially arrested, a 49-year-old man, because he was making an unusual deposit at the ATM nearby, so attempting to copulate with the ATM. What was wrong with this shirt? I cannot think

of which bit of an ATM with a gun to my head I would pick. I haven't done it, but... Officers arrived and they took him outside of the bank and sat him on a picnic table and went back into a bar. And another guy came and went,

sorry, are you using this? I thought it was bad when wasps turned up at a picnic. I've been getting lucky all these years. Speaking of things that have been ruined... Your ears, ladies and gentlemen. I read a story about John Lennon and when he he had a period which was known as the

lost weekend, longer than a weekend, but it's where he just went absolutely off the rail, he was doing lots of drugs, he was partying all night long in all over L.A. and he stayed at Hugh Hefner's house for a party he didn't stay there, sorry, he was at a party

and while he was there, he was so drunk and he was smoking a cigarette he didn't have anywhere to put the cigarette out on so he decided the matisse that was hanging on the wall would be the nice spot for it so he stubbed this cigarette into this matisse so all the bouncers, bodyguards of Hugh Hefner's

Playboy Mansions immediately grabbed him to throw him out and Hugh Hefner went, no, stop did you see what he just did? I didn't see, I just heard about it, but guys John Lennon just stubbed the cigarette out on my matisse that is probably worth double the amount of money now that you're there, but go take him around

the whole house, I got a Picasso in the back room I mean that's quite cool when value is added through destruction on other things being accidentally destroyed bungling builders as they refer to when they mess up accidentally destroyed

the wrong house in Cumbria it destroyed a woman's home instead of the dilapidated house a few streets away contractors were supposed to demolish another house 500 yards away on another street but set to work on Mrs Beattie's home without checking they had the right address Thomas Armstrong

construction limited admits they got it wrong but Mrs Beattie is still considering legal action Mrs Beattie, when will you enter? It's vendetta in 2013 there was a pair of Peruvian real estate companies which destroyed a pyramid

a small one, it was six meters high but nonetheless it was a pyramid and it was 4,000 years old as well and the company's workers tried to destroy three more pyramids before people who were on looking stopped them okay get this, in the same year 2013 another construction company in Belize

bulldozed one of the largest Mayan pyramids in the country it was 30 meters tall and they did it just to get rock for road building and one of the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology said at the time these guys knew that this was an ancient structure it's just bloody laziness

it just couldn't be bothered to go and get other rock from elsewhere that wasn't a pyramid and this happens all the time small pyramids in Central and South America get demolished isn't it true that one of Shakespeare's houses and I think it was his most famous house

the guy who owned it was so annoyed of people coming and knocking on his door that he just knocked it down yeah he was he was called the Reverend Gastral or Gaskell or something like that yeah and he lived there and people just kept going past going oh look, Shakespeare's house and he was like no I've had enough of that

it's not that big of a position is it yeah also move in the end he had to because he got driven out of the town I think yeah he did yeah and also he destroyed his house so he would have had to move anyway we're gonna have to wrap up very soon just a quick thing on picnics

I looked up this is no picnic it took 190 years after the first french use of the word picnic before we got the phrase this is no picnic so I'd just like to imagine that people were having a constant picnic for 190 years there's this common misconception that

the word picnic the etymology is racist it's one of those internet rumors that started about the year 2000 that actually a picnic used to be where you'd go to watch like lynching of slaves which just isn't true so in the year 2000 the University of Albany they wanted to organize the university wanted to organize

a picnic a big celebratory picnic for the students but they were told that it would offend people because it was a racist term so instead they decided we'll call it an outing and then they were into this would offend people because it was a homophobic term and so eventually

the picnic was publicized without a title I didn't know this just on picnics and picnic tables Paris the way Paris celebrated the millennium was by having a 600 mile long picnic imagine being that guy who found picnic tables sexually attractive turns up in Paris that weekend

and he's gone to Paris to get away from the picnic tables finally a new life under a new identity oh my god okay I'm gonna wrap us up okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for being here if you want to

get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on Twitter I'm on at Shriverland James at Egg Shaped Andy at Andrew Hunter M Anna you can email podcast at qi.com and yeah if you want to listen to all our previous episodes you can go to nosearchthingasafish.com

we will be back again next week with another episode thank you so much for being here guys really appreciate it goodbye