No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A 15-Hour Working Week

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss hand-drawn stockings, raccoon-damaged temples, and the doomsday aircraft destroyed by a single bird. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone. Before we start this week's show, we want to tell you about the winners of this year's prestigious Heinz Oberhammer Award for Science Communication. That's exciting. Okay. Who got it? Us! No! Yes! That is amazing. It's so cool. And what it means is that we get to go to Vienna and we're going to record a podcast there and it's going to be a 300th episode. And guess what? You can get tickets. That was the hammiest piece of acting I've ever seen there at the start by the way, guys. But that is indeed correct. If you are listening from Vienna or Austria or if you fancy a trip there on the 25th of November, then go to No Such Thing as a Fish.com and you'll see the link there to get tickets and see us perform our 300th episode. Is this an award I see before me? Oh, God. Oh, that was good. No, pipe down. On with the show. Who's not ready? I'm not ready, but carry on. Jane's not ready. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in

Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Is it really? I thought it was one of you guys first. My fact this week is that the US Navy's Doomsday aircraft, which was designed to survive a nuclear attack was recently taken out by a single bird. Okay, this was in the news. A few people might have seen it.

The US Navy called it a Class A mishap. That feels like something that would be in a PG Woodhouse novel. I'll tell you what, Jeeves, this is a Class A mishap we've just had. It was the E6B Mercury. It's a Boeing 7707, which supposedly if there is a nuclear bomb that goes off nearby, it's supposed to be okay. But actually a bird got into its engine and it had to make an emergency stop

and the engine had to be replaced and it cost them about $2 million. Oh, wow. That is a class A mishap. That is. And so I was really curious about this plane because it's sort of, it's like the less fancy

but tougher brother of Air Force One basically. Yeah, although Air Force One is anything that the president's on, of course. Yes. But the particular Air Force one that we know about, yeah, So it's a soups up version of this one. Yeah, it's all nuclear command centres as opposed to nice beds and desks and cool press rooms and things like that. But I wonder, because I read this, I couldn't believe that it could survive a nuclear attack.

And they say it can survive a nuclear attack, but I just wonder how close it can be to a nuclear attack. Because if you dropped a nuclear bomb on it, it would be blown up. Yeah. In many ways, you know, most of the people in the world could survive a nuclear attack, depending on where the bomb it drops. Absolutely true. If a bomb drops in Australia, I reckon I'll be okay. But they said it was, they said they've got all sorts of, I read they had mesh to prevent radiation and other things.

Yeah, right. And also it's strong enough to survive the pulses of electromagnetic energy that come from a nuclear bomb. Presumably, like you say, not if it lands on the nose cone. I do see what you mean by that. Maybe it's because it can only flyably for about 10 hours, 10 hours worth of fuel. so maybe it has to make a landing in an area that's been recently bombed

and all this meshing and stuff means that you would survive on the inside and not be turned into radioactive spider I lost my thread at the end there you couldn't tell they are very cool do we know what kind of bird it was was it at least a big bird

we don't know what kind of it wasn't big bird from Sesame Street if that's what you're thinking thank God famously can't fly we don't know what kind of bird it is although they have lots of labs in America who can find this kind of thing out. They like to scrape bits of bird off airplanes, don't they? And using the DNA, they'll do it. And you just send in. There's a thing called, if you have a bird strike on your plane, it's called Snarge. Snage, so there's, yeah, that's right. And I wanted to know where this word came from. Did anyone find out? No. Okay, as far as I can see,

it comes from the Smithsonian Institution's feather identification laboratory. And I think just the lab scientists have just called it Snarge and it feels like it might be an acronym or something but I don't really know. And when they first came up with it, one of the other words or phrases they used was bird ick. Snarge is quite on a matter pick. I imagine they just sort of thought all this sound sort of tells you that it's... Bird gooey and... Yeah, maybe. Snodge, yeah.

Snage. And in this lab, they will test things and work out exactly what will happen when any bird hits any aircraft and they have invented the bird avoidance model or bam, Nice. Very cool. This isn't the only bird strike that hit a military plane this year with scary consequences. Yeah. So earlier this year, an Air Force A-10 was flying through America over Florida, and it got hit by a bird as well, hit the engine.

But as a result of being hit by the bird, something in the plane malfunctioned, and it ended up dropping three dummy rounds, basically three massive bombs, but they weren't charged over Florida and landed in Florida. and I mean it was just so lucky that they were fake bombs because otherwise America would have just bombed its citizens But then I read that story And I think if you'd have gone up to it And started prodding it with a stick You could have got injured They'd warn people not to go near it right

Exactly, it was still slightly charged Yeah they're like This is completely harmless It's just the dummy bomb But also please do not handle it under any circumstances So if you are and I don't know if they found them So if you are in Florida and you see I think they're about 25 pounds

So they are quite, they're not huge But you know if you spot one Well they said where it is roughly They said they're in the general vicinity of two kilometers west of Highway 129 at a particular location. But that's quite a big margin of error, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Can we just say one more thing about these weird planes?

Yes, please. So they're called the National Airborne Operation Centers. And these are the ones, I don't know if you guys remember, but I mentioned them a while ago. And you guys did not believe the fact I said. But these are the ones which have antennas, which are five miles long. Oh, yes. Oh, come on. Yes.

Have you checked that? Yeah. Yeah. Like a long kite string, basically. It's like a tail. It's like the plane's tail. Except planes already have tails. It's like a second tail.

It's like a second tail. And it's so it can communicate with submarines underwater. Because they need extremely long waves. Yeah, exactly. So the point of the planes is that they tie everything together. So they tie together the bombers, which have got nuclear weapons on them. They tie together the submarines, which have got nuclear warheads, and the ballistic missiles in their silos,

they can communicate with all of those and basically coordinate a nuclear attack if America wants to make one, or if it's been attacked and they want to retaliate. What's amazing about these planes is that they have a crew basically on standby waiting for Doomsday. They're just there maintaining the plane

while the other three are getting prepared for their next round, so they sort of swap spots as the ready plane. So you come on your new shift and you go, all right, Jeff, was it Doomsday on your shift? Yeah. No, it wasn't doomsday at my shift.

All right, okay, we'll see you after, see you in eight hours. One day. Yeah. Bird strikes, though, kind of a big problem, or a big thing that, you know, aircraft designers have to address. And the first bird strike is cited as being Wilbur Wright of Wright brothers' fame.

No way. Yeah. And it was in 1905. And it really raises my problem with the term bird strike, because it always gives too much agency to the birds. And so in this case, it was 1905. So it was only a couple of years after the first ever, powered flight and Wilbur Wright was poodleing about in his plane and he wrote in his diary,

I twice passed over the fences into this bloke's cornfield and I chased flocks of birds on two rounds and I managed to kill one in his engine which then fell on top of the surface of the wing and fell off when he did a sharp curve. So basically he chased and harassed lots of birds until he smashed into one and then he dumped it off his wing and that's not a bird striking you. No, it's a plane strike. It's a plane strike. Yeah. I think that's what they should be called. Do you? But then what if anything else hits the plane?

It should be called bird receipt. Well, have you heard about the other kind of receipts that they have? They have frog receipts. They have turtle receipts. They have snake receipts. How high are those frogs jumping? It's amazing, right? So, according to these people who work at Smithsonian,

they get, because things get carried up by the jet stream, often animals other than birds get hit by these planes. And they quite recently got a rabbit that, got hit by a plane. No. Yeah. So, rabbit receipt.

Sorry, how does the rabbit get into the air? It's pulled up by the jet stream, by, you know, a tornado or... It's called it quite rare. It sounds unlikely,

doesn't it? But this was actually in a Smithsonian. You guys believe this and you don't believe a plane could have a long antenna. I'm just trying to explore this a bit. I think a lot of the animal sucks.

Because they are not called birds strike actually by people in aviation. Are they called? Are they called? Are they call? It's not called animal socks. They should be.

They're called wildlife strikes because of the variety. But the other ones who aren't birds seem to be mostly on runways. So in Florida they have a bit of a crocodile problem where I think one crocodile did actually jump up and hit the wing of a plane. I don't think crocodiles can jump. They can jump. It flipped itself up to the level of the plane, apparently. Wow. This is the thing that happens in Florida occasion.

I mean, there was one. I know what you're saying often on there. But this person who works at the Smithsonian Institution Feather Identification Laboratory said that They had a cat that was hit at high altitude. Wow. So. Such a shame. Only eight lives left for that.

Could have been on the back of a brimstick. Could have been. Who knows? Who knows how it got there? On the early air strikes thing, have you seen this amazing portrait of Eugene Gilber? Who was a French pilot. In 1911, he was flying from Paris to Madrid. So very early, exciting air race.

And he was flying over the Pyrenees Mountains. and he got tangled up with an eagle. There was a mother eagle which flew down and attacked him basically because she was very protective of her area. And he started firing his pistol at it from inside the cockpit of this. What must have been a biplane, I think, not to wound just to scare it. To scare it off, yeah. But someone who should have thrown a cat at it.

You should have. But someone has painted a portrait of this happening. That's an incredibly epic picture. Wow. That's amazing. We should say it's really, really rare as well. So I think the amazing stat is that since 1912 there have been 250 deaths from bird strikes due to all flights ever. So it's incredibly unlikely.

But obviously still it's quite important to avoid them. And the testing, have we mentioned the chicken gun before? I don't think we have. We have. We have bizarre. Wow. There used to be experiments on plane engines in the testing phase where you would fire a bird from a gas cannon into the engine and see what happened, basically. and they've now replaced it, boo,

with a block of gelatin, which is the same density as, for example. A chicken. Chicken's a bad example because they're flightless. They're probably not going to end up in the engines, but as a goose. Easy to get, though. Easier to pick up chicken.

And they used to put frozen ones in, didn't they? And one theory was that, well, there are a few reasons you might do that. One might be because a frozen one would be basically as hard as a bird can be You're not going to get a harder bird than a frozen chicken. But you might as well then just do it with a rock. You might as far as far.

Well, one of the reason is because they thought that if a bird was flying in and it was about to get hit, it might tense all of its muscles because it thought it was going to get hit. And that would be similar to a frozen chicken. Yeah. That seems that's exactly what you would do, isn't it? That's what I would do. Yeah.

It is a stressful in situation to be in. Yeah. You wouldn't relax and go floppy. Even if you knew that was what you're supposed to do to increase your chances of survival. Apparently these days most of the testing is by computer simulation. That makes more sense. It does make more sense, but for me it's not good enough. No.

No, I want to be flying on a plane that's had a chicken fire. Do you know what it is that kills the plane? I would have thought it hits the engine and then it snarges all up and then it can't spin around. It gets really hot and it sets on fire. Can I just quickly say excellent use of snage? I don't think snarge is a verb. Isn't that? I think it's any kind of word.

Yeah. Yeah, right. Fair enough. Does it accidentally make one blade smash into another blade? And then that causes all the... It basically, it bends one blade in the engine. And so what they're trying to do when they throw the chickens at it is make sure that the blades can withstand the chicken blow without bending. Because as soon as one bends, then the engine stalls.

But the worst thing that can happen is if it hits, or if something hits one of the fan blades in the engine, or if there's just a bit of wear and tear and they snap, which does happen every few years. And that's the main plane sort of. of hazard that they're trying to test against because if one fan blade snaps, then it turns into kind of shrapnel. So it's spinning around really, really fast. It's inside the engine, turns into shrapnel, and then it flies through the engine. So it breaks the whole engine down. And so they have to do these, like most of the money goes into doing these crazy tests where they have these fans, so like picture sort of a ceiling fan. And each blade...

Come down, Andy. Just remember last week's podcast at the Moulin Rouge. You're not a plane spotter. You're just a plain fan spotter. Each blade costs about the same as like a luxury car, about 50 grand. So each fan is worth about $9 million because they're really special shapes. And they have to be an incredibly special light but strong material. And then they have to throw stuff at them or explode them to see if they can still function with them exploded. I've got a couple land-based bird strikes, non-plane related.

So do you know the Le Mans, the car race? I do. The town of LeMond is twinned with Bolton. Is it? Yeah, that's cool. So 1953, the winner was a guy called Duncan Hamilton, I believe his name was. And Duncan Hamilton won it despite being absolutely pissed off his face. He was so drunk.

He and his buddy had done a practice circuit before the race. And this is a bit confusing, but they had the same plates as another car that was on there, which apparently is illegal. And so they got disqualified from the race. So they thought, well, we're on holiday, let's just go to the bar, got absolutely tanked. And then the guy who was the manager of the Jaguar team, who they raced for, called Lofty England. Wow. He should be the head of the Brexit party.

He persuaded the organisers to let them both race, but they were completely smashed, but they did it anyway. And in between the pit stops, they were desperately trying to sober up Hamilton with coffee. So it sort of change your wheels and give you a drink. And this is a 24-hour race. It's one of the most long, hard, enduring races. But halfway through the race, or not halfway, but along the race, a bird flew into his face at 130 miles an hour. But they think, because he was so wasted, he kind of shrugged off the pain of it and managed to continue. And won, they won the race despite being smashed in the face.

That would take your face up. I know, right? It depends on the bird. If it was a ring. Yeah, it would be fine. If it was an albatross. Yeah, big trouble. I mean, there was a thing, Fabio, who is a male model.

He appears on romance books. He was in the, I can't believe it's not butter ads. It's weird that you expected us to know that. But if I'd had to guess, I would have said he was a male model. He's the male model. He was on, I think, something like 200 romance novels. Yeah. He looks like Conan the Barberia.

He's got this huge flowing blonde. Huge main. Guys, guys, calm down. We know who you're talking about now. He's a handsome guy. He was known as the most beautiful man in the world. Anyway, he was opening a roller coaster and so he was on the ride. He was going 73 miles an hour down the first drop when a 10 pound goose flew into his face.

Oh my God. I'd love it if the photo went off just at that moment. Oh, wow. But there are photos of him, of him, not of him being hit, but of him coming back in. Just spitting feathers out of his mouth. Yeah. His entire face is bloodied. He was on the roller coaster ride with a load of sort of models and things like this, because it was

the big PR launch of this roller coaster. Yeah. And you just see the carriage coming back in. Models all look traumatized. He's covered in blood. He's got a broken nose. Do you not think it might have been a jealous fellow model who's just taken a goose on a drone like this?

Well, his looks ruined forever. No, of course. You can ruin Fabio's looks. Beautiful man in the world. They were actually improved. Yeah. Okay, it's time for fact number two. And that is my fact.

My fact this week is that when nylon stockings became rationed during World War II, department stores set up leg makeup bars where women could have stockings drawn onto their legs instead. Very cool. Yeah, they would just go to the shop

and they would take hours at a time and they would draw the hemline at the back of their leg and they would put powders and so on? Would they kind of paint the leg to look a slightly different colour and then draw the line? Yeah, exactly. Do you put it in like an old cup of tea for a little while until it stays?

Like you like with an old mat. The leg is a big cup of colour. tea. That's a nice idea. You could put everyone in a jacuzzi, just sitting around the edges. Yeah. And then everyone could have a cup and just take some of the tea. Nice.

That'd be lovely. Well, they did used to do it with gravy, I think, didn't they? And with coffee. Yeah. Because I think we, so it's sort of like women used to just paint the lines up themselves, I think people often know. I didn't realize they had the salon specifically to do it for the wealthier. I suppose you don't get a wobbly line.

But yeah, if you were doing it at home, you dip your leg in a sort of vat of gravy. or cocoa powder was another substitute. Amazing, considering a time of extreme rationing and deprivation, that people just have vats of gravy like around solely for their legs. I know. Well, they had their priorities straight. I don't know. In those days, you probably would have to reuse the gravy, no?

I'm sure you would, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's such a, I mean, it's just, it's makeup for the legs, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nothing wrong with it. Makeup is just drawing another face on your face. So why not draw another leg on your leg? Exactly.

It's brilliant. And it's because people were obsessed with nylon. I mean, it's so bizarre the nylon craze because basically I think it was invented in about 35 and it own or 34. And it only became commercially available in 37 or 38. And by the time the war hit, people were obsessed with it to the extent that as soon as it started being rationed because it was needed for various wartime instruments,

they went nuts and they were desperate to show that they still sort of had nylon. There was this big black market where nylon went for sort of the equivalent of about $500 today. You'd get a pair of nylon tight. For just one? Yeah. Yeah. Did they get people like trying to steal your tights off you because they're so expensive like an iPhone? Oh, probably.

It was so hard to steal tights because they are quite well adhered to the legs, aren't they? And you could be pulling them pulling it. It turns out it's just gravy stains. But I think it's quite harsh because like you say, everyone loved them. It was like the most amazing thing of its day. And like you say, everyone got it for a few years and then it was taken away because of the war. It's like as if we all had iPhones and then they go after three years, you can't have iPhones anymore. That would be harsh.

It would. The world might be a better place. The first day of sales, nationally in America, was the 16th of May, 1940. So the rest of the world was at war. America hadn't quite decided yet. And the statistics vary, but some people say that four million pairs were sold in four days. It was true mania. But this is a bit like tele, I think.

Didn't Britain just get TV? And then the war happened. And they said, well, we're not going to do TV anymore for the next six years. And then it started again in the late 40s or early 50s. It was another of those inventions which had been existing, but it was just back burner for the war. And then post-war, when they were available again, there were nylon riots.

It was because they didn't have enough stop for the amount of people who wanted and were obsessed with them and been waiting for them to come back. So in Pittsburgh, they had 40,000 people lining up over a mile, even though there was only 13,000 pairs available. So you can imagine the chaos when those shops opened the doors. Yeah, they used to be, you know, Police would have to be deployed quite a lot, I think.

This was sort of 45 and 46. There was, I think DuPont, the main company that made the tights or the stockings. They said they would make 360 million pairs as soon as the war ended within a year. And they could not live up to that at all. People went nuts, got really excited. So there was, yeah, the 16 block queue where people started fighting. In Georgia, there were fist fights and police had to be called to break them up. There was a mob in Chicago of 1,200 women who were outside a dress shop just bashing

on the windows. Again, police had to be called. They weren't mad. They weren't hysterical. I don't want to, you know, be stereotyping here, but they lost their shit, though. People were scared of nylon because partly because it had this weird process

by which it was made, it was full of acid and stuff, and partly because there was just this huge ferroarie about it, so there's a backlash. And all these rumours went around about what it could do, so people thought it would give you cancer of the legs. They thought it melted in hot water. I don't know why he'd go in hot water. wearing tights, but it was that.

They feel like snakes when wet, the self one. People thought they were made from corpses, because there was a thing called cadaverine, which was gathered from substance, gathered from corpses to make stuff, but they weren't. It was a rumour. Wait, so cadaverine didn't exist?

I think cadaverin, I think it did exist. It was a chemical that you could get from rotting cadavers that comes from rotting cadavers. I think that's a word that people used for just like, you know, human snarge, basically. Human snage. But the thing is with this is, it was a very smelly process.

Like the industrial process was really smelly. So when journalists went there, they smelt how bad it was. And I think actually, one newspaper did say that this happened in a newspaper article, and everyone believed it when obviously it wasn't true. Yeah.

That's great. And there was, I think there was one other report in a paper of a woman who was standing at a bus stop, and the bus went past, and the exhaust fumes of the bus stripped the nylon off her legs completely. And there were all these rumours that the nylon

would just fall off your stop. Well, it's like a Betty Hillside. Was it, I think, was it, what people thought they might burn, did you say? Yeah, melt or melting on it in hot. I think so. It's basically a plastic, is there? It's polymer. Yeah.

So it makes sense that it would just melt onto you. It actually could a bit. If it was too humid, the air or too damp, then it could start melting down your legs. Really? Oh. There is a problem with nylon and health today, which is nylon tea bags. So they started coming in about 12 or 13 years ago. And I read article, I've found.

articles from a time saying hey great new nylon tea bags number of these boring paper tea bags um and you know they're silky and they feel nice and it turns out they're plastic you know obviously plastic's bad for you plastic's bad so is that the most of the ones that i would get down the shop so they like that or not really so a normal packet of um a normal packet of pg i think those are all paper except sometimes they're sealed with a tiny tiny blob of got it but the some coffee shops sell them in and they look kind of weird and different. You mean the posh ones? The posh ones.

Yeah. It feels like a bit like silk. Well, really posh ones are made of silk. Wow. But if you don't, if you can't run to add these for tea. If you can't run to a silk bag, someone will fobby off with a nylon one. And they've been studied. So every single silky, plasticy tea bag releases 11.6 billion microplastics.

These are very, very, very small. Jesus. And three billion nanoplastics. And those are extremely tiny. Small and still. Yeah, but they are, they are bad. So a scientist tried feeding them to water fleas, which are little, tiny lobstery animals.

And they became very stressed, and their exoskeletons swelled up. So it wasn't good for them. But it means that what you're saying is in your cup of tea of posh, but not that posh tea, then you're getting it into your body. And basically, I mean, they're going to find this in years to come out.

It's going to be, you know, when the Romans had lead in their pipes, and they all went crazy. And everyone knew it was because of the lead in the pipes. That's what it's going to be. We're just eating plastic all the time. Aren't the bristles on toothbrushes? Plastic is, I mean,

then nylon as well. Do you think this is going to be the explanation for sort of Brexit and Donald Trump and all of that? It's actually just like, you know how we've discovered that the Salem witch crisis was people say it's caused by the ergo from the dodgy bread? It's going to be that we were just eating microplastics. That's it.

Okay. I'm so glad about that because I hate those tea bags. they make awful tea. I don't think they're very permeable. They're not permeable enough. That's exactly correct. So pretentious places serve them and you don't even taste any tea. I read an article that said that when they were trying to come up with the name for nylon,

there were over 400 options for what they wanted to go for. Yeah, and there's a few that we know of. So one was Clis, KLIS, which is silk backwards because this was, yeah, a knock-go product. It was like instead of silk, wasn't it? That's why it was so big. Exactly, yeah. This was like the cheap replacement, the affordable. replacement. Neuron was one, which is actually no run. So no run. Because the tights don't run. Because the

tights don't run. And then there was Dupro. And it's a shame it wasn't called that. Dupero. D-U-O-O-H. I think it's more like Duperu, you know. Oh, Duperu. Yeah. Duperu. Yeah. Duperu. Yeah. Sorry. pronoun. Sorry, pronoun. Super Duperu. Okay. So that was an acronym. It stood for DuPont pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Yes. And DuPont was the manufacturer. Yeah. Yeah. We should say why they banned it? Because the reason it was so amazing was that it was another material which replaced silk, basically. And before the war, America imported, I think it was 80% of all the silk made in the world was imported. And 90% of that was from Japan.

So obviously, when the USA and Japan were at war, big problem. And nylon was this incredible wonder substance, which really contributed to the USA winning the war. because it made better parachutes than silk parachutes. Silk parachutes got mouldy, the hard to fold, nylon's way better. And it was used for ropes and fuel tanks and shoelaces and mosquito nets and hammets. Just anything you could think of in the field that was fabricy. Nylon was the thing. Yeah.

You know. Yeah, when we were told to hand in their tights, weren't they? It was sort of a patriotic war effort. Can you turn tights back into, let's say, a fuel tank? Yeah, I believe they could because they were asked to do an amnesty, And I think that one of the slogans was a Boeing super fortress lands on enough nylon to make 4,000 pairs of stockings. So that's it made the tires. But they did ask people to hand in their stockings.

I think you could turn it into a rope quite easily. Yeah, true. Or if you're in the SAS, you could pull it over your head for the disguise. Yeah, that's good. Cut a pair of eye holes. Or if you're marching into Paris, saving Paris, you could go in disguise in the Moulon Rouge. A lot of callbacks to the previous episode. It's almost as if I literally just edited it to get there.

James is trying to turn this into a long-running storyline. After five years, we need some plot lines emerging. We need a narrative. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that more than 80% of Japan's temples have suffered from raccoon damage. And it's really sad because raccoons are not even native. to Japan, obviously, but they've swarmed there the last few years, and they're one of the main causes of damage to the temples. So the advice to anyone out there who's thinking about

getting a raccoon for a pet is don't. They will eat anything and they cause damage to anywhere they are. So in Japan, they've just climbed all around the temples and they want to find a nice little cozy nook to sleep in, and they'll tear and eat and scratch through anything that stands in their way. And is it because people have got them as pets and then let them go, or It is indeed. So it's this weird story where there was a very, very popular show in the 70s in 1977 called Rascal the Raccoon. And it was an animation. It was like an anime thing. And people thought, oh, I want to get a pet raccoon. They obviously got the pets before they watched the end because the moral of the show and the book it's based on is that raccoons are terrible pets. You can't take care of them. And at the end, they had to release it back into the wild.

Anyway, people bought all these. I think people were buying like 2,000 a year. year of being imported into Japan. And then they started eating people's houses. And so they released them. And they banned the imports, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, you can't do anymore. I read one source that said they were importing 1,500 a month. Wow.

Which would be amazing. It's too many raccoons. It's too many. I mean, if you're a country which doesn't have any raccoons, then one is too many. You're right. You're absolutely right. And the author of this book, it's Sterling North, great name, Sterling North. It's like lofty England.

he passed away a few years before this animation hit Japan so he never got to see the true sort of success of his he populated a country with an animal basically we're saying it's not really a success it's not a success story it is if you're a raccoon it's a and you want to travel it's a huge win for raccoons and we know that Sterling North was interested in raccoon's success

yeah we don't know what you thought about Japan do we know because America is the only place we're there and where they're, you know, native. But they've sort of invaded Germany as well now in Europe. They haven't invaded. It's not like... Well, I don't know, because the European press called them Nazi raccoons. Did they?

Yeah. As in if you look at any article in the last 10, 15 years from some of the more salacious press, I must say, they'll say, Nazi raccoons coming to the Netherlands or Nazi raccoons coming to France or something. And that's because there was a theory that the first ones were let. Into the Wild by Herman Goering. This is a massive rumor and apparently

he didn't do it. They were let into the wild in Germany in 34 to promote diversity of fauna but Goring had nothing to do with it. But the rumor has persisted and so we get all these articles saying Nazi raccoons. At least we stamp that rumor out today.

In America I don't know if they were kept as pets because I guess they should be in the wild, hence the moral of the book. But one person who did keep a raccoon as a pet was the president of the United States. Which one? In the White House, Calvin Coolidge.

Yeah, he had a raccoon called Rebecca. And Rebecca was meant to be eaten as part of a Thanksgiving dinner. But he kind of just took to Rebecca instead. Did they used to eat that instead of Turkey? Apparently. Did they? Well, they didn't.

It came from, um, was it Mississippi? I think sent him the raccoon. And I think Calvin looked at it and went and someone said, is edible, mate. And he said, it's not edible to me. Take that way from me. Because, you know, he claimed he was doing the decent thing. And yeah, then they sort of loved her, didn't they? Yeah, proper pet. Like, she had a engraved collar that she got for Christmas. Yeah, she was a good pet. Did you read that that Christmas, when they gave her the engraved collar, the present that they got their son was a coat made of raccoon fur? Nice. That's a good warning to Rebecca to behave. It's very good, isn't it?

But the collar from the raccoon was made from the wrist bone of that child. They are really clever. That's the amazing thing. And I read an article saying that they, in the early 20th century, were used in a lot of lab experiments, and that they could have been lab rats, basically, or they could have been the go-to for experimentation. But basically, they're too good.

They're too clever. They escape. They chew through things. They start performing experiments on us. Yeah. They get into the air vents and then and just they were a nightmare. And it turns out that rats are a bit easier to control. Yeah.

Yeah. They love hanging out with humans, don't they? They're one of the species that has really thrived from human, you know, building up urban environments. They work very well in cities. They're like the American version of a fox, like an urban fox. I think they are. I think they're sort of like a better version, like a grade up from foxes. Because they've got hands.

They've got bloody hands. Yeah. Although not opposable thumb is the only thing we've got over them. The one thing is opposable thumbs. And this is actually proved quite crucial in the US. Well, I'm sure there are lots of listeners who have issues with raccoons breaking into your bins. And so they're like constantly trying to upgrade bins to make them inaccessible to raccoons. But because they're so smart, they keep on working out how to do it.

And then they have made one apparently, which is clocked onto the fact they don't have an opposable thumb. So if you can do that. Is that in Toronto? I think it might be, yeah. Because Toronto spent $31 million dollars getting a good. raccoon-proof bin in 2015. They were so frustrated and they were really hard. And the city's mayor wrote,

we are ready, we are armed and we are motivated to show that we cannot be defeated by these critters. As they were being rolled out across the city, he tweeted, I love the smell of new raccoon resistant green bins in the morning. Whoa. And within a few days, raccoons had managed to make their way into a few of these sample ones. And had beaten him. There's actually an argument, I think, that it's,

It's quite bad that we keep on trying to upgrade these bins because we're just making them cleverer now. We're in this terrible arms race with raccoons where the more we complexify the bins, the better they're getting. I know what you're saying, but then actually we're getting better as well. So actually by them forcing us to get better, we're getting smarter. The raccoons are getting smarter. It's the rest of the animal kingdom that are losing out. Eventually it'll just be a massive battle between us and the raccoons for the crudives on air. You were saying about how lots of towns really don't like them.

There's an online factoid that says if you take a raccoon head to the town hall of a town called Hanukkah, they'll give you $10. And it says that all over the internet. But when I read it, I emailed them and they said, no, this is absolutely rubbish. So if you do have a raccoon head, don't bother taking it to the town hall of Hanukkah. That's good. I think we've done a real public service. We've prevented people from decapitating more raccoons. Although actually with the battle that's coming up, we need to dig up as many as possible.

So right. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the economist John Maynard Keynes once bought a priceless Cizan painting and then hid it in a hedge. Very good. Yeah. Why? Did he hide it? Well, it was a hedge fund, wasn't it?

Brilliant. You see. Because he's an economist, you see. The end. It's the end of that section. So this is a fact from a podcast that's coming out very shortly, actually, and it's by friend of the show, a few of us know him, Tim Harford, who is the undercover economist. And it's called, his new show is called Cautionary Tales.

And it's all about sort of mishaps, basically, things that haven't gone to plan, fiasco's grade A mishaps, you know, this kind of stuff. Oil tankers crashing. And I've seen a bit of it. and it's going to be an extremely good show. Oh, it sounds amazing. I mean, it sounds like we're going to be stealing a lot from it.

I mean, look at it. It hasn't even come out. We're already stealing from it. Borrowing. Borrowing. Sorry, legally borrowing. Are we giving this fact back at the end? So anyway, Tim sent me this fact.

And it's about Keens or Keynes. Keynes. There are people say Keynes, but I've read Keynes online. I've read Keynes, but I think we should say Keens. Otherwise, no one's going to know who we're talking about. And it was in 1918. The first world was grinding on. He was a bright young economist.

And he realized that France's economy was very weak too. And Britain was going to need to collect a massive amount of loan money. And he wanted to buy up artistic masterpieces on behalf of Britain. So then the British government wouldn't need to collect quite as much loan money. Britain would have a lot of new artworks. Got it. And also he felt a bit embarrassed about working for the war effort. Because he was quite a bohemian.

He was quite a pacifist. And a lot of his friends had kind of ditched him over. his stance in the war. So he got Charles Holmes, who was the director of the National Gallery, on side, and he found a huge art auction that was happening in Paris. All of Degas' collection was being sold. And they went to the auction. Holmes had shaved his moustache, so he wouldn't be recognized as the director of the National Gallery, just in case. And the auction was really quiet because Paris was in the middle of being bombed by Germany at the time of the auction. So not many people turned up. And Holmes bought over 20,

masterwork paintings and they had a sort of blank check from the government. They had 20,000 pounds, which a huge amount. And Keynes, Keens bought himself a Cézanne. And they traveled back to England. He'd been traveling for 24 hours and he was visiting his friends in their countryside home. And he was so knackered that he just chucked the suitcase in the hedge with this priceless painting in it. And he walked into the house and he said, there's a Suzanne and the hedge outside if you want to go and look. So I've been to this house. Have you? Yeah. It's called Charleston and it's in Sussex. It's very near my in-laws. I went to it recently. It was part of the Bloomsbury Group House. It's so Virginia Woolf's sister is who lived there with her artistic friend slash lover and his lover.

It was a complicated situation. And the house is amazing. It's full of incredible art like Walter Sickarts, Walter Sickert's original stuff, which I studied because if you remember, there was a theory that he was Jack the Ripper, according to Patricia Cornwall. So I was looking close for any clues. No, no, it's just normal paintings. probably because it's bullshit yeah probably because there's no truth to it didn't write I did it in any of the corners of the pictures but no yeah so it's an amazing house so I probably pass the hedge so cool

I'm still a bit confused about why he didn't just bring the suitcase into the house and ask if he could leave it in the entrance hall or something whenever you come back from holiday and got all the way to your front door and you know what I can't be by the bringing a bag this last bit I'm just going to throw it in a hedge yeah it feels like there's something missing from the account because it's all from him writing it

and from his friends. I think maybe part, it might have been because he wanted to make an entrance and say, hey, it's me. And I've got a priceless bit of art

in the hedge. It's not clear. You don't, just all, everyone in the house would go, why have you put in the hedge, mate?

Yeah. They rushed out. I bet they did. Of course. Nobody did. Because they wanted to see it and they gathered around it by moonlight.

And it was, it was quite nice. The reason he had bought it was because the national gallery director had refused because it was Cizan, who I think was a post-impressionist and it was very avant-garde

and it was too avant-garde for the National Gallery to be buying and Holmes, I'm not going to waste my money on this, it's too edgy and Keynes was a bit more out there and he said, I'll buy it. He was out there for normal society but then he feels like he was the straight-laced one

of the Bloomsbury set like he was bridging a gap I think because he but he had such a central role in that set of people who were just artists and creatives which you don't picture Keynes being and so he was there with um yeah wolf and sackville west and eam foster and one thing that they

were all very relaxed about and i find this really interesting that society was really relaxed about was the fact that he was bisexual and for the first years of his sexual life he was only had relationships of men and i find that so bizarre because he came immediately after oscar wild who obviously you know we know what happened to him and then immediately before allan cheering but there was obviously this relaxation for this 30 year period and so he was really promiscuous and he had this love triangle with Lytton Straiti who was then became very jealous of him going out with someone else and it was Littin Strati who said things like his common sense is enough to freeze a volcano which you can really imagine and he said he hated how he treats his love

affairs statistically which is kind of true he kept to have a spreadsheet he had an Excel spreadsheet didn't he did he wrote well it may not have been full on spreadsheet but he used to record the numbers in his diary which you know if you were just just a number in someone's diary. Well, I'd be quite proud. It depends on the number, doesn't it? Yeah.

If it's a scoreboard, then great. There were high numbers. Yeah, didn't he have lots of codes or something for everything that they did? I haven't got this written down, but I think he would have sex with someone, and then he would have like AS for anal sex or, you know, different things for different things.

And then I think he would give people by their initials But then if it was just a dalliance, it would be bloke in a hedge or whatever. It was like something. Bloken hedge apologised about throwing my suitcase onto him. But I think it was that. It was like there would be no names. It would just be this person in this situation. Yeah, it would be like bell boy.

Yeah. You had the swede of the National Gallery, the soldier of the baths, the French conscript, the lift boy at Vauxhall. Really? Yeah. Lift boy at Vauxhall. Wow. And still no blue plaque at Vauxhall. He also revolutionized economics.

Wow. Which he, it's incredible. And he, so he had only studied economics for eight weeks during his student days. He never sat an examiner. He studied classics and maths. And then he only started properly going into it when he was offered a lectureship in economics age 25. And then he just turned up and started revolutionizing the art. And then he almost went bankrupt three things.

times in his life, despite being one of the greatest economists of history. Hey, it was the Great Depression. That was one of them. You can't blame him for that. But what about the other two? I didn't know that. So the first one was when England went to the golden standard, as in peg the pound with the gold, and he gambled against that happening and lost a shit ton of money.

And then he speculated against the war. He didn't think the war would happen. And he lost a shit ton of money on that. And then the Great Depression, which I think we can understand. Actually, I mean, all of it we can kind of understand. Gosh. He liked a gambler. Yeah, he's a gambler.

But he got one thing really right, which was about the Treaty of Versailles. So he was present in Versailles as the representative for the Treasury, financial rep. And in 1919, he was arguing these compensation payments that you're suggesting Germany makes, they are too high. And this is an insane impulse, and it will lead to disaster in the long run. and he was ignored he was kind of kept out of the room actually and so he was left to try and you know he and a couple of other reps

were advising around the edges saying this may not work and he failed basically because the impulse to punish Germany was very strong but he was proved right him and Churchill wasn't I feel like Churchill said the same things they were just outside the room bitching about a stupid Versailles Wow but they were laughing in their faces

20 years later one thing that he didn't get right was he said oh I don't think he's going to get right is he said that by 2030 everyone in the Western world will be working a 15-hour work week. That was his prediction. If things go really badly wrong, we might be. He thought that only workaholics would be working more than that.

And everyone else, progression would get so much that you could do that amount of work and you'd get paid enough that the rest of your time you could be at leisure. Because basically technology would have been able to do stuff for us. That was his idea, yeah. But what he didn't realize is that as technology goes up, so does the number of people who have to work at that technology. Bloody robots actually just make more work for us. They do.

People don't realize that. Not supposed to happen. But he did think a very sensible thing, which was that the obsession with money that society has is insane. He thought it was like this crazy social pathology because why do you want money? What you want is leisure? What makes humans happy is leisure time?

And so he thought what we should all be striving towards is that, you know, three hours work a day. Yeah. Sounds like a good idea. Does, fingers crossed. 2030, still 10 years awake. He had this weird thing. Just to go back to his personal life, now we've covered the economics. So he had a really lovely marriage, as far as I can tell. He married a ballerina called Lydia Lopakova or Lopova.

But he was very confused by this. At first he started falling in love with women and became a bit confused by that. The first woman he fell in love with, he said, I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male, I haven't been able to think of any suitable steps to take. Asked a man in hedge for his opinion. He is also stumped. He married this ballerina eventually and he took her on honeymoon to, I think it was Sussex, but he had this honeymoon where he invited some other people, and one of the people he invited was Wittgenstein, the philosopher of Wittgenstein,

who was not that much of a laugh to have a honeymoon with. It sounds really unpleasant. Apparently he spent the whole six days making her feel like shit. She was a bit below a social class, Maybe it wasn't as intellectual. Yeah. Like making her feel really stupid. And eventually she apparently made a remark about how beautiful a tree was.

And he said, what do you mean by that? You know, challenging her to explain herself. And she just burst into tears. What an absolute cant. When Keens first saw his future wife at the ballet, I read, he described her as a rotten dancer with a stiff bottom. Wow. It's not very nice, is it?

It's not very nice. Although actually a stiff bottom, I don't know. That could be a nice thing to stiff bottom. Yeah. It's so often not when paired with rotten dancer. I have a couple of art things just of hidden art. So a few years back, there was a guy who was watching a movie with his daughter. And in it, in the movie he was watching was Stuart Little.

And in the movie, in the background, he noticed this painting that looked suspiciously similar to a lost avant-garde painting that was from Hungary. So, sorry, can I just say, Stuart Little isn't animated, is it? Stuart Little himself is animated, but the rest of it's got Hugh Laurie. Yeah. Yeah, so in the background of the house that Stuart lives in is this painting. And he's going, I swear to God I've seen that painting from somewhere before. And he had a little black and white picture of it.

It was 90 years old and had been lost for nine decades. And he got in contact with the production and he said, do you still have this painting? It took two years for them to get back. eventually the lady who was in charge of the dressing for the house said, yeah, I found it at some market. I bought it for nothing. And they've now established that this is the lost work of an artist called Robert Barreni. It's a two years to reply to an email.

It was a very successful films to it little. And they had a sequel. They had a sequel to make. That makes me feel a lot better about my email response. That is the main takeaway for me as well. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah.

There was another incident in 2008 where a Norman Rockwell painting really famous with Norman Rockwell painting was found hidden behind a false wall and this was, it was worth $15.4 million and the reason that had happened was this weird story so it was really famous because it had been on the cover of magazine in the 50s

and it was bought by a cartoonist called Don Tract Jr and he just bought it for $900 in 1960 and he sort of displayed it people thought for years afterwards people would come around and they'd be like, oh yeah, Don's got that great picture. And people were a bit confused because when they looked closely at the one he had, it didn't match up with the magazine cover. So a bit odd.

Anyway, he died a few years ago, 2008 or 2007, and his sons went through his home. They discovered an entire false wall they'd had built and behind it was the real painting. And he'd painted a copy of that to show to the public. And his son's theory about why he'd hidden the original is because he disliked his wife. whom he then divorced so much that he was worried she would take it. Wow. So he did it. Oh my God.

That's a lot to do, isn't it? That's incredible. In 1505, Leonardo did a fresco. We're just first naming Leonardo, are we? Oh, sorry. Leonardo DiCaprio. Leonardo da Vinci made this fresco, and it was in the grand meeting hall of Florence's Palazzo Betio.

Okay. And then the Medici's came along, and they decided, oh, I don't really like that. I want something else in that place. So they commissioned the architect Giorgio Vasari to renovate the room and to put something else in its place, which means that we've lost that fresco. But we know that Vasari was a big fan of Leonardo,

and so we think that he probably wouldn't have destroyed it. And in that room, if you go there now, there are two words painted in the whole room, and they are Sertzer Trova, which means seek an usual find. And we know that at another time, he has in another time put a fake wall in place to hide something that he didn't want to damage. So we think that somewhere in that room there might be Leonardo's lost fresco. How hard is it to search a room?

But I guess if he's got art on the wall. He's painted his own. He's painted his own fresco. Just tear it down. I guess Leonardo versus. Apparently, and I'm quoting this from the article I read it, it says, excavation has been tangled for years in the famously convoluted Italian bureaucracurial. It's actually the people who worked on Stuart Little who were in charge of this renovation.

How many fake walls are going to... These are going to be tiny rooms eventually. Yeah, you're right. I'm sure we used to be able to fit the dining room tape with it in here. I've got a fact about war art and art being hidden in times of war. So the Second World War, I think we may have mentioned before that all the art of the National Gallery was sent to a cave in Wales. Yeah. And by the end of the war it was the most high-tech cave in the world

because they built a railway inside the cave to move all the art around. It was really cool. And I really like how it got there. So the paintings were sent in post office vans and Cadbury delivery trucks to avoid attracting attention to them. Oh, my God. I can't think of anything I would be attracted to more than a cabriess van driving through my village in Wales. It's true.

And you're right, Wales suddenly hundreds of cabboree's delivery trucks driving through. In the war when chocolate was rationed. Exactly. But there's one painting which gave them such problems. So it's by Van Dyke and it's a portrait of Charles I first, right? And it's a biggie. It's 12 feet by nine and a half feet and it's on a truck. So it's, I presume it was wrapped up. But there was a very, very tight bend in the road just before they get to the thing. So there's no other way of getting there. Very tight bend in the road. And at that same point, there's a railway bridge over the road. And they calculated. it would be possible to do it, but you'd have to pivot really... Pivoted really carefully. And they didn't want to take the risk. So the way they solved it was they took up the surface of the road.

They just destroyed the surface of the road to get several more inches of clearance. Wow. I know. Because it was such an important piece of art. And if you go there now, you can see at the point where the bridge is, the curb is really high above the road because the road is several inches there. It's still there. still there. Oh, I'd love to know where that is. That's amazing. Which Van Dyke are you? Dick.

Who are we talking about? Yes, Dick Van Dyke and Leonardo DiCaprio. The two famous Renaissance artist. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. at Andrew Hunter M. And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com and get the reply within two years. Yeah, or go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got everything up there from upcoming tour dates to all of our previous episodes, links to our new book. There's also a behind the scenes documentary. Plenty of stuff up there. Check it out.

But we'll see you again next week. Have a good one. Goodbye.