No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A 200m Baguette

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Live from Boston, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Bastard baguettes Saddam Hussein's campaign song, and the first ever criminal to be put in Boston's stocks. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

No such thing is a fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Boston. I'm Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, 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. Dan, just before you start, fact number one, we actually, we played a little bit of the Stars and Stripes theme tune. themed team to start to strike people. As I believe you call it.

Okay, the national anthem. We actually got sent a fact before the show on this subject by Gadget Gav who said that in Boston, if you start singing or playing the national anthem, you have to then go on with it all the way to the end on paying of a hundred dollar fine.

So if you wouldn't mind, just... It's as far as I know the lyrics. Great theme tune though, guys, honestly. Okay, it is time for fact number one, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first criminal in Boston to be sent to the stocks was the man who'd actually built the stocks. And he was found guilty of overcharging for the building of those stocks. This is a wonderful fact.

This was back in 1639, and it was a guy called Edward Palmer, And it's exactly as the fact is on the tin. It's a guy who did the labour. And when he went to invoice, he invoice for one pound, 13 shillings, and seven pence. And they thought that was unacceptable. So immediately, once it was open, he was the first person charged. He got fined five pounds as well, didn't he? So he got fined three times more than he charged for them.

Yeah. And so he had to go and be put in the stocks for it was an hour. So just a quick humiliation and then a serious amount of money to... At least he hadn't been charged to build, you know, a guillotine or something. Yes. He must have been grateful for that. Look, was he, did he make actual stocks or appellery? Because there's been a lot of confusion about this for 500 years.

So they were stocks. I believe they were stocks. They were stocks. Okay, because pillory was the one where, I think you sort of get taught in primary school there what stocks are, where you shove your arms through two holes and you shove your head through a hole. Like when you're taking those comical photos. with cardboard cutouts. And that was actually a pillory, whereas stocks

is more like you just had your ankles often like strapped to the ground or something, didn't you? Yeah, it's just you put your feet in. Or you just put your feet in, yeah. And the idea is that as well as being in the humiliation, the public will see what you look like, so they walk past and go, that's a bad guy. But actually, small boys would walk past

and tickle the feet of people in the stocks. Oh, really? That's pretty brave, because the people in there are criminals. That's in your neighborhood. Yeah. That's true. And they're probably out in an hour.

So... But the thing is, it was for quite minor things, usually, the stock. So in England, for instance, it would be for petty thieves, for unruly servants, for hedge-terers. Don't know what a hedge-terror is.

Yeah. Gamblers, drunkards, ballad singers. Seems harsh. Yeah, and any kind of traveling musicians. They were way harsh. There were minor crimes but there were police quite heavily So there is a great book

Called Curious Punishments of Bygone Days which is published in the late 19th century And it's got all kinds of Now hilarious stories Of quite a repressive sounding time. So again in Boston There was a man called Captain Kemble Who was a sailor

And he had He got done for publicly kissing his wife On a Sunday After returning from three years years at sea? No, thank you. His punishment, I think I've mistyped it. I have written punishment

was three years in the stock. I think it was three hours. Imagine if he was in for three years and they came out and then kissed his wife again. They're like, sorry. Yeah, because sometimes the things people threw at you in the stocks were even worse than having your feet tickled. I'm very confused that you think that was a bad thing to do, is tickle the feet of someone passing by.

Because often you got dead animals thrown at you. Dead cat was a good one. In fact, I think there was a quote from someone at the time who said, like if someone's in the stocks, you walk past the marketplace of an evening, and someone's in the stocks you think brilliant. And a dead cat is a treat, if you can spot one of them, and a live cat, an even greater treat.

But that book is incredible, actually. So there are a few other good tales of bygone punishments in this book, written in 1886. And another one is about a, it tells him a man in Moscow, actually. in the 17th century, who'd published a pamphlet about people's liberty, who said that people should be free, and so he'd gotten a lot of job of saying that. And so he was sentenced to three days of being tied to a scaffold

and forced to literally eat his words. So they got his pamphlet. It's actually very clever. They got his pamphlet, and they tore it up, and they fed it to him. And there was an eyewitness account that said they'd serve him one page at a time, and when it got to a stage where it looked like he might actually be incredibly ill, they'd wait until the next day and then keep serving it up.

So they didn't cook it at all? It's actually a misconception you can get food poisoning from raw pamphlet. But thank goodness Russia is now a paragon of liberty. Also in Boston, we were talking about Boston stuff. In 1679 there was a Frenchman who was suspected of setting a fire in Boston and he was ordered to go to the pillory

and have both his ears cut off. for suspected arson. That's amazing. But you have quite a... There's quite a lot of history, isn't there, in Boston? Especially compared to the rest of America. Because Dan and I were walking through Cambridge yesterday. And Dan pointed to a quite new-looking building.

And he said, you know what? I can't believe that building was built in 1588. And I said, no, Dan, that that is the street number of that house. I was suspicious. I was like this brickwork looked right. The next one was built in 1590 and 1592. Whipping? Wipping was a thing.

Just to drag us back to the topic at hand. There was one, obviously, whipping was absolutely huge, major league punishment, very big back then. So in one case of whipping, the man carrying it out was a church official called the church beadle. And he wasn't doing a very good job of it, he was so light-handed that the sheriff, who was watching the

whipping the punishment take place, grabbed the whip from him, whipped the offenders, but not before he had whipped the beadle himself for being bad at whipping. That was an offence at the time. Well, I actually read about that story as well, so what happened was the beadle was almost pretending

to whip him, and he had like some red ink in his hand, and he kind of went like that, and then he would smear the red ink, so it looked like he'd been whipped on the back when he hadn't really... I think the guy might have paid him some money to do that. And then, like you say, the constable then started whipping the beadle, but then

a lady came and started beating up the constable. Wow. Four people attacking each other in an awful violent conga. It's weird, isn't it? I was looking into the police force here. So this fact was 1639, and

it was in 1630, the sort of foundations of the first ever American police force came about. So it was a night watch and so on, and it was only in the 1800s, 1833 that it sort of became officially Boston Police. But am I right in saying police badges have 1630 written on them?

We have no idea in this audience. Very law-abiding audience. Very law-abiding audience. No one wants to admit to anything. No, but so yeah, so they had that. And well, I found this really fun fact about them. In 1903, the Boston Police Force got the first ever police car

of anywhere in America, but no one knew how to drive it. So they had to hire a show for her. Who would take them to all the crime spots? The whole transport system with the Boston Police

a couple years ago, they added to their fleet a ice cream truck. It's a part of there's an ice cream truck, which is wrong by. What for? They think it's sort of, if they go around, you know, maybe if the criminal doesn't want to come out, because

they're not. They're not luring criminals out with Mr. Whippy. That doesn't make any sense. Because you just have a cue of small child, small child, small child, massive criminal. And then presumably

as someone in a policeman's hat and badge, cat-handedly trying to scoop some ice cream out. Oh, your ice cream. Please. I don't need your pity, clap. We're going to have to move on fairly soonish to our next fact. Just a thing about putting people in this dock

specifically in Boston and in New England, they just got way more into it than the English had been, so they brought it over from England when they came, and then, because they were Puritan and everything, they added a whole bunch of other crimes, basically. So, in

Britain and in England, then usually you went in the stocks if you stole something, but in Boston, it really did tend to be that if you'd blasphemed, then you always got it. If you publicly kissed your wife, then you got it. If you're an adultery, you got it, and we used to have that in Britain

you'd have a big A branded on you so sometimes you'd be in the stocks and if you'd been found guilty of adultery then you'd have a big A that was branded on you and you'd have to wear it on your sort of shirt and you'd have to wear that A for say a year and then everyone knows you're an adulterer which I don't know if that's a punishment

for a certain type of person but um That's what Alvin the chipmunk had on his book Yeah He was a terrible husband He was a terrible, terrible husband. They don't bring that storyline into it much, but we know.

Anyway, the Americans added all the other letters. So they went through the alphabet. So you've got a B if you were blasphemous. You've got a D for drunkenness, not allowed to be drunk, ever. You've got an I for incest. Very bad, not into that. And they sort of did... Wow.

They completed the alphabet with all the various different crimes. They must have struggled a bit with X and Z. They had to get really Senephobe zebra theft. Done. It is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that five of the main types

of French baguette are called flute, Fiselle, Viennese, Sarmintin and Basterd. So... I like the way you said that half with a French accent and half none. This was from a great article

in the Financial Times about the best baguette. in Paris competition, which is called Le Grand Prix de la Baguette. Really? It's really called that. And these are just some of the types they have, and it's an amazing competition. It's held at the National Syndicate de Boulanger,

and there's so many entries for the competition every year. They get hundreds of entries. Over a thousand members of the public apply to judge, because you get a kind of citizen judge on the panel. And the winner, it's mostly a prestige thing, So you get 4,000 euros, you get a smallish cash prize, but you also win the right to provide the president's baguettes for a year. Oh, wow.

Yeah. It's very prestigious. I think that that's quite a lot of pressure on the president. I feel like Macron every day, because it's every day, isn't it? You make your first baguette at the morning, and it gets immediately, you know, a police castle takes it to the... With the chauffeur, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Takes it to the palace, and poor Emmanuel is probably going, another fucking baguette. Oh, God. But do you think every morning he has to make the show? Oh, my God, there's your best forget yet. I'm not sure they're that good either, because I was reading that, I know, last me. I was reading that as part of this Grand Prix,

the first of whom you have to jump through is it has to be the correct length. And I think it's the correct length and weight. And there are 200 entrants and 100 of them fail at the length. and weight section. It does feel like there's a communication problem with the rules. Well, they have to be exactly between

55 centimetres and 70 centimetres, right? Yeah, which is quite a large margin of error. Yeah, and the weight has to be between 250 grams and 300 grams. What impossible precision is this? But, like, traditional French baguettes, like in the 19th century, they were like eight metres long, were they? What, eight? No, eight feet long.

Eight feet? but you would get them like they were bigger than humans are. Yeah. Bigger than French humans, certainly. In fairness to the French there's not many nationalities

where everyone's tall of it ain't fun. I didn't know that we got at the French for being short. You're thinking Napoleon, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. We've said before that Napoleon was above average height for a Frenchman he was taller than Nelson.

It didn't work on a number of levels Did it? Well, speaking of Napoleon, actually, there is a theory, which I should just say at the very top is not true. He was nine feet tall. There is a theory that the baguette

was invented by Napoleon's bakers and they were invented so that soldiers could put them down their legs while marching. And then whenever they got to wherever they were marching to, then they could pull them out and eat them. Oh, right. I have to say you've had it on unnecessarily sexual dimension to this theory.

It was hung like a baguette. I've got a bit of a yeast infection down there. Hey, this is a cool thing. So in France, baguette is not just used to refer to sticks of bread, but, for example, like, chopsticks are baguette chinoise. Sure. Chinoise.

No, but my favorite one is that a wand is baguette magique. And so in the Harry Potter book, He's always pulling out his baguette magic. Which... It does sound a bit Napoleon, doesn't it? There's an expression in French to lead by the baguette. And that is because a baguette is also a baton. So it's like walking with a marching band you lead with your baguette.

It can be a ramrod. It can be a type of diamond cut. What's funny about ramrod, Boston? It's an old War of Independence joke. They've certainly adapted to the word to a huge number of meanings given it's only been around for a century It is a much smaller language Than the English language

It genuinely is smaller There are fewer words I'm not this is not just another Napoleon The people are short The words are short And the word precedes the bread Yes In fact it comes from the Latin word baculum

Which meant staff And a bacculum as some of you know Is a penis bone in, you know, waruses and chimpanzees and lots of animals have penis bones. I love the way that you said an abaculum is, and then a few people in the audience went, penis bones.

Like, it's your catchphrase or something. It's like a really weird pantomime. I understand you don't have pantomimes here. Everybody didn't make sense. Oh, yes, you do? Stunning. There's another theory about where it came from, where the word came from,

is that it was invented just over 100 years ago when the Paris Metro was being dug, the Paris underground system, because apparently workers were carrying big loads of bread to work, and they needed to bring knives with them to cut it, and they used to keep getting into constant knife battles. And so, apparently, the builders were tasked with finding a baker who could give them some bread

that didn't require a knife, and I don't know what kind of battle you can get into with a little button. Actually, a bread knife could be quite dodgy, if you get it on the serrated edge. Definitely. To a Frenchman, they look enormous those knives. Yeah, it is weird. They were not named in print until 1920.

So there were sort of long breads before, but there is a load of bread legislation in France at the moment. So in 1993, even as recently as that, they passed a bread decree because they were worried about deterioration of quality of bread. And so now, you can, can get two very different kinds of loaf. I say very different. They are both

stick French breads, but one of them is a baguette Tradition Francaise, which is of the very, you know, significant national historical one, and you have to make that on the premises. You can only use about three ingredients. You know, it's really precise. You can't put extra

additives or toppings or anything. And the alternative is just a baguette. Did you explain why they're called bastards? I didn't actually. So they're mostly named after their shape so the flute is thin the ficelle is very thin

the bastard is fat so I think the idea is that it's kind of halfway between a long thick one and a short stubby one and so it's like two things cobbled together so it's like a bastard in that way and is that where we get you fat bastard

you've had that I don't I don't think it is to be investigated It's a shame that's not in the Harry Potter books Harry pulled out his bastard There's some more Bread legislation in France Which is very weird

And it changed recently actually So there was this widespread panic in 2015 Four years ago Because they dropped a law that has existed since 1790 Which is basically when the government ruled That everyone across France Had to have access to baguettes at all times of the year, every day, day and night.

And so it required half of Paris's bakeries to take holiday in August and the other half to take holiday in July to ensure that suddenly there wasn't a bit of a dearth of bakers and people couldn't get their bread in the morning. And that has remained until 2015. So bakers are in this position where, you know, if 50% are already on holiday on the 2nd of July, they're not allowed to take a holiday for a month.

And they were finally told, these laws were relaxed and they were finally told, okay, you can go on holiday when you like. On the condition that you have to put up in your window, I think you have to put up a sign saying where the nearest baker is that is still there selling baguette. And there was panic. Yeah, and did anything happen? Did they all run out of bread and stuff?

All of France starved to death. Can you guys guess? Just give me a guess of the longest, the length of the longest baguette ever made. I would have said probably around 10 feet. 10 feet, okay. Any advance? 200 metres. Wow, this is going to be impressive now, Andy.

Well, it's not because Dan's completely ruined it. It was an amazingly long bread until Dan said 200 meters. It was a pathetic 122 meters long, which is literally half of what Dan said. No, don't clap of bread that long. That's rubbish. Oh, you absolute saboteur. I had all sorts of extra stuff about this weird bread. I know what you're all thinking.

How do you make a bread that's 122 metres long? Do you get one that's 200 metres long and cut it at half? Anyway, we need to... No, we do not. No, you absolute baguette. I will not have that. You know, after you finish talking about this, I'm going to tell you it's wrong anyway.

Uh-huh. Wow. Okay, well, let me... Can I please tell you first? because, oh my God, it was in 2015, it was at the Milan World Expo, there were 60 bakers involved, and how did they make it 122 meters long?

They made a portable oven, which slid all the way along. That is impressive. And then they cut it into, and they spread Nutella all the way along it, because Nutella was sponsoring this attempt. Anyway, now... That's true, they did do that,

but that's not the longest bugger ever. Oh. Because the record was broken this year, I'm afraid. Yeah. How long? Was it five million miles? It wasn't actually.

Stupid suggestion. It was 133 meters and it was done to raise money for the Italian Red Cross so you've just ridiculed by your ridiculous guess. Sorry. I'm very sorry. Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is Chisinski.

My fact this week is that Whitney Houston's record label once sent a cease and desist letter to Saddam Hussein asking him to please stop using the song I will always love you as part of his political campaign and yes it's risky to kick off with the Saddam Hussein fact in the America tour but this it was a song that he used this was in 2002

and he was running for president against nobody and it was sort of leaked in the Western media that he'd been using as a political campaign song this Arabic version, which was basically a knock-off version, exactly sort of verbatim and exactly the same nuances and sounds as Whitney Houston's song, I Will Always Love You. And so her record company, Arista Records, got in touch and said, please stop doing that.

And surprisingly enough, I don't think he took a blind bit of notice. But yeah, how weird is that? He did very well in that election. He got genuinely 100% of the vote. Because normally, I was reading an article about how dictators like to pitch it. Do you, are you modest? Do you just get 90? Do you go all in and you get 100? Or do you sort of say around 95?

Actually, in the course of this, I found out the most impressive result of all time in any election. And that was in 1927 in Liberia. In the country at the time, there were few of them 15, 15,000 registered voters. winner, Charles King, won 243,000 votes. Turnout was 1,680%. And he was given a Guinness World Record for fraud. And so that song, of course, made famous by Whitney Houston, but actually, Dolly Parton originally.

Yeah. And she made an absolute fortune on the song from when Whitney Houston released it. But then they asked her about this thing with Saddam Hussein, and she said, I was surprised as anyone, but it's too serious an issue to comment on. Not for us, guys. Saddam Hussein

was asshole, asshole, I think we can all agree. But in 1980, he was given the keys to the city of Detroit. Oh, yeah. This was when he was still, you know, very much in the good books of the USA and he had made a big donation to a Detroit church.

And I read an article about it, said that he still had them, you know, even to the end. But other keyholders... Really? They weren't on him right at the end. He's not trying to get into his bunker going, I'm fucking Detroit. No.

But other people who are keyholders to the city of Detroit include Santa Claus, Stevie Wonder, and Elmo. What a group photo. We should At some point I think we should move way from Saddam Hussein Yeah

So just something about campaign songs America does a very good line In cool campaign songs For your presidential campaigns It's almost the highlight of your presidential campaigns But I like Bob Dole So do you know what Bob Dole chose in 1996 When he ran against Clinton?

He So he used the song Soul Man as in written by Isaac Hayes, David Porter in the 60s a big kind of civil rights anthem, Isaac Hayes, so it was the voice of chef in South Park as well. So this big civil rights African American anthem and he used it, but he changed the lyrics to

Dole Man. Incredible. And not only this, I can't believe he did this, it was performed by Sam and Dave, like a duo who sang it, and Sam actually re-recorded it. How ignominious is that with the lyrics Dull Man?

So he changed the lyrics, he sung it a bit, and then the writer's got in touch and said, we really don't endorse you at all. You're nothing to do with the song, please go away. And also, it didn't work at all anyway because it sounded either like a dull man or sold man when he sung it. They do like their puns, don't they?

In their campaign slogans, there's been loads of good ones. Oh, well, good. So U.S.S. Grant said Grant was another term. Thomas E. Dewey, when he was up against Roosevelt, said, Jewie or don't we? And did he win? No, Thomas said, yeah, he famously was the presidency of a...

No, of course he did he win. There was Alfred Landon, who was up against FDR, and he said, let's make it a London slide. Nice. Very good. Yeah. It's funny, because all these people were on the losing side, weren't they? Okay, here's something.

someone who's on the winning side, Franklin Pierce. He said, we poked you in 44, we shall pierce you in 52. Wow. And then... It really was another time, wasn't it? And then, four years later,

James Buchanan came in, and he said, we poked him in 44, we pierced him in 52, and we'll buck him in 56. Amazing. There was another one, and so Stephen Douglas, another famous. US president, not.

So he ran against Lincoln and he had a song written or he wrote a song which I don't know what the tune was but it was about kind of how people were always going on about how Lincoln was this kind of saint and it was like tell us how great he is how he seeks his closet every night to kneel and pray

any lie you tell will swallow any kind of mixture but oh don't we beg and pray you don't for God's sake show his picture because he was so ugly Oh, really? I know, right? And now we think of him as quite a noble-looking character,

but apparently back in the day, not hot. He was eight feet tall. Only with the hat, Dan. Yeah, you don't know what happened. When you take the hat off, it might have been a really tall far behind he had. He could fit an entire Frenchman under that hat. That was the thing. George W. Bush, he relied on Tom Petty's single, I Won't Back Down.

during his 2000 campaign. He then got a cease and desist letter from Tom Petty and immediately backed out. Amazing. There's a good sort of argument that you should not get into politics because when you do, you just find out that all your heroes hate you.

Well, it's really... So this is the thing. So there are all these stories about musicians complaining, but basically, if you're playing at a venue which has a public music license, you can play their songs, basically. So, I mean, this happens lots and lots.

And we should say it. So people who have asked Donald Trump to stop using their song or declined his, you know, said, please, please don't play that, have included Neil Young, R.E.M., Twisted Sister, Adele, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Queen, dead George Harrison's estate, dead Pavarotti's estate, Stephen Tyler Overeaux-Smith, dead Prince's estate, Pharrell, Rihanna, Guns and Neil Young, I'm interested that Neil Young is the one who they went back to twice.

Do you think he was the one they thought, okay, who was sort of the least against us? We're going to have to move on to our final fact very shortly. On political songs. So when America first became independent, they kind of took God Save the Queen, or God Save the King, and they just added their own lyrics. So they had God Save Great Washing. God save the 13 states. God save America, but it was all to the same tune

as God Save the King, until they stuck on their theme tune that they have now. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1898, a Boston magazine described the game of croquet as a source of slumbering depravity a veritable

Frankenstein monster of recreation. And we've got a lot of depraved people in tonight. So basically when, like, Croquet was quite an elitist sport in the UK. And then it came over to America

and everyone started playing. It became like a game that everyone loved to play, like the whole country played it. And it was really thought to be quite depraved. And the few reasons for this. One reason was people were like gambling on it a little bit, but another reason is because men and women

played together, and often when women would play their shots... Boston, are you still that Puritan? We're all going immediately into the stocks after tonight's show. So women would deliberately shorten their dresses to play more comfortably. They'd... As they played a

I know. As they played a shot, they might lift a skirt and show a bit of ankle. This article, it is amazing. Like, it's so fervent that it all, like, you know, you sort of think, my God, is this person serious? It's really... So the article that I read it in, sorry,

it is in J-Star, and it's by a historian called John Stern-Gas, and it's called Cheating Gender Roads in the 19th century croquet craze. Oh, nice. So the, and also the other thing was, Croquet, it is a devious game, because you get the...

No, it is. It is, you know, there's a lot of, sort of mucking around you can do with your opponent's piece. It's like basically chess but you can move the other guy's bishop. Like it's mean. It's so nothing like chess. It is unbelievably like chess. It is unbelievably like chess.

It's not. I will go to the wall for this. There is a lot of tactical play. I read somewhere saying it's a bit like chess and I thought what kind of idiot would make that comparison. You've been reading my blog, I'm very glad.

But have you ever played chess with Andy where he comes in a mallet and just smashes the bag. But it does provoke... It's so frustrating if you're losing at Croquet because your opponent just uses your ball to get their ball all the way around the course. And this article that you were quoting, the 1898 one, it said,

it is not long before every honourable feeling, every dictate of morality has become obliterated. In place of our refined and upright people are two pairs of gruesome moral monstrosities. the poison of croquet eats deeper and deeper into their souls. I know. It's really good. It's really bad.

So, Milton Bradley, who made these croquet sets, they had the rules, and one of the first rules in capital letters was keep your temper. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin called it the destroyer of lifelong friendships and a ruiner of happy homes. The International Herald Tribune reported that a woman, testified during a separation hearing that her husband refused to speak to her for days after she questioned whether his ball had really gone through the hoop

Okay, first of all, why on earth did that get to court in the first place? I read that it was like the judge said Who's going to court because their husband didn't speak to them? It feels like there were underlying issues in that relationship Does it does? No, but my friend back in England she broke up with her boyfriend over a game of croquet Really? Really. And I was part of that game and I have to say, I was the one who went, that guy's got to go, because he was horrific in this game. He did exactly what Andy was saying. He was playing

chess. That doesn't mean anything. Unless he was literally holding a chess board and playing chess while playing croquet. But you think several moves ahead? Fairly. I think

the most controversial thing about it, so croquet was kind of a feminist moment and the reason it was so controversial largely was because it was the first game ever that women had played and majoratively so every croquet set had on the front of it a picture of a woman playing croquet and this was crazy between 1860 and 1890 you know women weren't allowed to believe the house if they rode a bike they were in trouble and they were all playing croquet and not only that but it turns out they were all heinous cheats and so this this really piss people off and so there was this big theme that women were terrible

cheaters in all games. There was, I think, added to the official rules of croquet when they were codified was this manual that said, don't cheat. We are aware the young ladies are fond of cheating because, in quotes, it is such fun and they think the men like it. There are very good ways you can cheat if you're a lady playing croquet. Because ladies at the time were very long and often hooped skirts, which come out quite far. So it's the work of a moment to just walk over to your ball. Just stand on top of it. No one can see, because the skirt's on the ground all the way around,

kick it over a bit into position, and then suddenly you're lined up for the next shot. That's very cool. It was an Olympic sport at one point, wasn't it? What was that, sorry? It was an Olympic sport for one year. Yeah, in 1900? In France.

In France. Yeah. They could barely move the bowls. It was like the borrowers. Yeah, but the French did. really well in it, didn't they? No, they were the only it was a bit of a Saddam Hussein moment.

They were the only people who took part and they won all the medals. Sorry, the next Olympics, the 1904 Olympics, croquet was kicked out, but then the American version of croquet, which is called Roque, was then done at the 1904

Olympics, and it was purely Americans who played it and won all the medals there as well. Yeah, well done, you guys. But this is, I think this is my favorite fact about why we found for this fact is that Roque,

so Roque is the American version, the way they got the name Roe it was invented by a guy called Samuel Crosby, he was from New York, and this was in 1899, and he came to it by removing the C from the front of the word and the T at the end of the word,

and that's it. Wow. If you read Roque websites, that's like the legendary story of... Yeah, so it's R-O-Q-E. Well, you know the reason why it was dropped from the 1900 Olympics? It's because one person turned up to watch it. Yes.

There was one spectator and there were seven players. Yeah. It was an English guy who was living in Nice and he came all the way over from Nice to Paris to watch the first matches. He didn't even watch the final. And the reason that the French won it and the French were the only people who took part

is because there was a group of croquet players who lived in Paris and they didn't want any foreigners playing at all. And so they made it so all the games took place over like three or four months. And so no one could afford to stay in Paris for that whole time. And so it's only people who live there who could play it. Sneaky. So he had encouraged as cheating.

Actually, sorry, can I just say in that Olympics? So there weren't that many spectators as any of the sports, really. Apart from in the discus, there was quite a few, because it was in the Bois de Boulogne, so a lot of locals were there. But the 1896 discos champion who came to 1900

Olympics, he managed to dispatch his discus into the crowd on all three throws. Oh. Whoa. Is that extra points or a bonus prize? Do you guys know who invented croquet? No.

No. It was a guy, well, his name's quite controversial, which is why I raise it. But it was a guy called Walter Thomas Jones Whitmore. He was an English guy. And I've actually, he invented it in Charlton House, which I've been to in England.

It's a lovely place. I play croquet on the lawn. It's just that kind of life by lead. But he was called Walter Thomas Jones Whitmore, but he was born Walter Thomas Whitmore Jones. The reason he changed his name, which he did in 1867, was because his best friend was called Willie Dickens, and they used to go for walks together down Regent Street,

and he got really sick of Willie Dickens making a joke every time they passed the drapery Dickens and Jones at Regent Street. And go, oh, it's you and me, mate. You look at you and me, Dickinson Jones. So we're like, fuck it, I'm going to drop the surname Jones. Wow. That's amazing. That's petty.

It's very petty. We should talk a bit about modern croquet, because croquet's really exciting today. Because they've... Guys. It is. It is. Thank you. And he's actually an official commentator back home at the UK.

It's amazing commentary. Oh, what a great chess move he's just made there. There's a new game in town and it's called Golf Croquet and it's got much less of the chess actually. It's much more... It's a speed and speed game basically. More Pac-Gamine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's... The champion, the American champion is called Ben Rothman. Actually, Egypt is one of the best countries in the world at Golf Croquet. They clean up. They win all the awards, men's and women. They're really, really good at it. Anyway, the American champion, Ben Rothman,

was profiled by the San Francisco Chronicle and the entire interview read as basically one long sick burn on him. So it started off. Ben Rothman is the champion of the world, and practically no one knows it. And they do a series of vox pops over the course of the interview with people who are saying, yeah, I've never heard of him, a few feet away from where he is practicing his game. So, and the article ends, at Lake Merritt, the parade of passes by,

who had no idea they were in the presence of greatness continued. Croquet doesn't do anything for me, said Alex Paneda, who was walking by the croquet ground, with his dog, Dominic, for who Croke did nothing either. It just ends with the line, I think it's cool that he's world champion. Thanks for telling me, I still don't care about croquet. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening, Boston. You've been amazing. Goodbye!