No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Bacon Scented Sleep Mask

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Dan, Anna, Andrew and James discuss prisons, escapes, chess and why you can never have too much spam. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, 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 fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that it. In 1978, chess player Victor Kocchnoy accused Anatoly Karpov of cheating using an elaborate yoghurt-based code. Was it an elaborate yogurt or an elaborate code?

I actually added that word elaborate to kind of make it feel a bit better than it actually is. No, it is an elaborate yogurt. It was blueberry, wasn't it? How basic are the yoghuts that you're eating day to day? You think blueberry is elaborate? Anything about standard Greek is elaborate. I've read some places that it's blueberry, but some places that it might be the even more elaborate, bilberry yogurt. Okay, that actually, that really is top tier.

But basically what had happened was, we'll get onto everything that was happening around there at the time because it was an extremely controversial match. But Karpov was just playing chess, and then suddenly someone brought him a yoghurt, and no one knew that they were going to bring a yogurt. Normally you would have your snacks at very specific times, but suddenly they just brought him this blueberry or bilberry yogurt and then he made a really good move

and Karchnoy who for various reasons was quite suspicious thought that this must have been a code and whatever the flavour of the yoghut was going to be that was telling him what kind of move he had to make. And then Karchnoy later on he did say that it was a joke and he was trying to sort of parody the fact that people are always blaming each other of cheating. but the truth is that he definitely did make the accusation. The officials took it seriously, and they changed the rules to say that everyone had to decide what snacks they were going to have before the game started, and they had to have them at certain times.

So it's not the idea that maybe he wrote something in the yogurt, in Bill Braves. Oh, if you drizzle it in and honey, that would be a nice way of doing it. That would be clever. Right. So basically, this was 1978. This guy, Kachnoy, he's a great, great chess player, possibly the best chess player never to become world champion. But he had defected from the Soviet Union.

And the reason he defected is because the Soviets had decided to give other people a chance as their main challenges and not let him do it. So he decided, fuck this, I'm getting out of there. And so he went to live in Europe, eventually in Switzerland. But because he was so good, he was still like the main challenger to Kapov. And so they had this game, but the Soviets were trying every trick in the book to stop him from winning. So at first they said that he wasn't allowed to take place because he didn't have a state, as in he wasn't Soviet anymore, he wasn't Swiss yet, he didn't have a country. And then when eventually the chess authority said, well, you know, he's the best. He's just beaten a guy called Petrosian who was previously thought to be the best.

So they thought, okay, well, he's got to take part. But the Moscow newspapers refused to name him. They just called him the opponent or the challenger. They wouldn't say what he was called. And his family was still in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet authorities refused to let them leave. So they kind of kept them hostage because they were so upset about this guy who defected and was possibly about to become the world champion.

Wow. God. So with the family pissed off when he was just lounging around, eating blueberry yogurt midmatch, that's a bit casual for somebody's family's got a gun held at them. Yeah. No, I see that point. I see that point.

But he thought that possibly, I think, that by becoming the world champion, they wouldn't be able to get at him because he'd be world famous. And, you know. Yes. There were other, the match had other accusations as well, didn't it? So, Kortnoy brought his own personal chair, which he'd like to play chess in. Fair enough, you're sitting down for several hours. You want to be comfortable.

But Karpov's team, they were the ones who were suspicious now, and they requested the chair be dismantled an X-rayed. Wow. Really? Yeah. What would be expecting to find in there, you wonder? An extra chess piece? It doesn't work like Monopoly, does it?

You can't just bring an extra bishop on the... Theoretically, if no one noticed, you could accidentally just drop an extra bishop on there. Wait, I'm sure I took both your bishops. Nope, you're misremembering it. Yeah? No, you only took one. But this one is a different design to the other bishops from here. Well, it looks like a bit of a chair leg, to be honest.

The paranoia, looking into this, of chess players of what they must go through. I mean, if you were playing a game, it feels like half the game is just looking out for ways in which the other player is cheating. There's a yogurt, there's a man standing over there, there's a chair, like, you know, which one of these are giving him the details. The man standing over there is a really good one.

Are you talking about the French team in 2012? Yes, that's right, yeah. In 2012, there was an Olympiad in Russia and there were accusations that the French team were managing to get the messages to the actual player by standing in prearranged spots behind the board. so I'm not sure of the exact code but if I'm standing over here

then use your knight or if I'm standing over here there's a great move that you can't see the bishop or whatever did they not all stand in the exact order of which the chess pieces are on the bod two of them were on a horse yeah one of them had a little mitre

that would be really fun why is your manager only walking diagonally what's going on why is the queen here and they never proved that did they They often don't sort of prove it. So that's still an accusation, we should say. I don't think the French team were found guilty of doing that.

But it does make you think, is it not, after a point, easier to just play the game well than to memorize this very, presumably quite complicated code of standing formations? The problem is that computers are better than humans now, right? And so if you can somehow get a computer to tell you what to do, then you're going to be able to be even the best human. And so that's why cheating now is even more. of a problem than it ever has been before.

Although I listened to a more or less podcast, the Radio 4 show more or less, and they interviewed their head of research at chess.com, who was saying, it's quite interesting now spotting cheaters who are cheating with computers because computers play in a completely different way to people. So he was acting like anyone could tell the difference

straight away, which I imagine we couldn't. But he was saying, you know, you can tell after a few moves if someone is suddenly using a computer. And the key difference is that computers don't play They don't have a memory of the move that proceeded, and they don't have a long-term strategy. And so when it comes to a move, they act like they've never ever seen the board before, and they just do what's the exactly perfect move for that moment, whereas human beings, we have a plan, and then we want to stick to it, even if sometimes circumstances happen that mess with the plan.

So, for instance, it's very unusual for a human to willingly take back a move in chess. Because if you've made a move, you don't want to retract it. A computer got no compunction about that. Just do it when it wants to, when it sees it's the best move. The thing about retracting your moves with computers, that's like where you almost go back to your previous position, right? Because the retracting moves that you or I might have a problem with if we were playing chess would be if I moved my night to a place

and then I took my finger off it and then I go, no, no, I want to take that back. Right. And that actually did happen with the one of the one, the greatest chess players of all time, which was Kasparov, Gary Kasparov, when he was playing against a woman called Judith Polgar. And she is probably the greatest female, she almost definitely is the greatest female chess player that's ever played. And if she'd have beaten Kasparov in this game, it would have been the first time that a woman had ever beaten a world champion in a game of chess. And he moved his knight into what would be a bad position. And then he took his finger

off it and he went, no, no, I did take my finger off it. And he put it. And he put it. back and then he ended up, I'm not sure if he won or tied the game. Eventually, she carried on. She became the 10th best player in the entire world anyway. But that could have been such a big moments of the first woman beating of Grandmaster. Did you guys read about her? Judith Polgar, she's amazing. So she was, her father was called Lashlow, Polgar. And he had three daughters, and he trained them all to be chess players. And it's one of those stories, which kind of half sounds a little bit like, you know, he's really forcing them to do this and it's quite bad. But then on the other hand, they all loved it. And whenever you interview them, they were all like, oh, this is what

brought our family together. We all absolutely loved it. And so his daughters, Susa, Sophia and Judith all became grandmasters eventually. Judith could beat her father by the time she was five years old. At 15, she was the youngest person, male or female, to be awarded a grandmaster title. And then eventually she played against Kasparov and should have beaten him. But wasn't allowed to because of that. And there was a great interview with Sousa when they asked her about playing against men. And she said that she'd won loads of matches,

but she'd never won against a healthy man. After every game, there was always an excuse. I had a headache. I had stomachache. There was always something. Well, I think that's a bit eggs in one basket training all three daughters to play chess. If it was up to me,

I would train one to play chess, one to play drafts, and one to play snakes and ladders. And I would hope that one of them in the field would become the world champion. Yeah, the problem with snakes and ladders is it is literally all down to luck of the dice, isn't it? There's literally no strategy there at all. A lot of people say that it's just luck and there's no strategy, but I would say.

Actually, I do remember when I played against you, there was that guy stood in the corner with a ladder in front of him in saying you want to do. No, you say that about snakes and ladders. I was reading this article that really annoyed me because of what you've said. So about cheating and games, it was in the LA Times, It was about whether you should let your kids cheat in board games. And it was written by this guy whose four-year-old daughter cheats at snakes and ladders by like climbing up the snakes

or jumping forward to the ladder bit. And the gist of the article was, you should let kids cheat because they don't really get a sense of fairness and ethics until they're seven or eight. And before that, they're just developing their creativity. But the question was framed at the top as, you know, you're playing snakes and ladders, she's cheating. Do you insist that your children play by the rules

and then trounce them every single time? Or do you let them cheat? And I was like, Snakes and the Ladis is the one game where a five-year-old does have a chance of beating you. It sounds like the dad is cheating all the time. That's why I never let my little sister play me at Snakes and Ladders because she would have a chance of beating me. Literally, I'm like, no, we're going bowling.

We're doing the test your strength machine again. That was until she was about seven years old. Chess.com, they have chess detectives, which I love. So they've got six chess detectives. And I didn't realize how big chess.com is. I mean, it's absolutely massive, this global site. Since March, the number of accounts they have closed for cheating, specifically, is 85,000. Now, obviously, that might be some people setting up new accounts after the get busted the first time.

But that is a lot of people cheating around the world. Well, apparently it's 30% of chess masters. It's just masters. Again, according to this, exactly. The people you'd thought should really be a buffet. But they quite often play matches on there for money or tournaments. And 30% of them, he says he's had to give a warning to. And he says there's a system where you give them one warning and you say,

our computers have seen that you're cheating and using a computer. And then he says the vast majority of them don't do it again. Which he said is so they're really being noble and realizing they've done wrong. But presumably they're just thinking, oh, shit, they've got detectives on this one. In 2013, there was a Bulgarian player called Beroslav Ivanov, and he was forced into retirement due to a scandal. He walked into the arena, and they wanted to search him for an electronic device, and they said, can you take off your shoes?

And he said, no, my socks are too smelly, so I refuse to take off my shoes. And they said, right, okay, well, you're disqualified, and basically you won't be able to play in any international competitions anymore. Wow. Jesus. Has he stuck with that? He's not. Yeah, he doesn't play?

board of chess anyway. He doesn't play anymore and that's maybe because he has such smelly feet. It's possible that he has such smelly. He also, I think, in that same tournament, but he had a few suspicious moments and another one was where a competitor spotted a suspicious bump under his shirt and grabbed it, which seems like an incredibly awkward moment if you've got that wrong, but said it was indeed an oblong object similar to an MP3 player,

but then somehow didn't catch it. I don't know if you ran away into the crowd or something. My torso, he said, is so smelly. Well, there's that story in 1993 at the World Open where there was a guy called John von Newman and he came in and he was playing, he was an unrated newcomer and he was wearing headphones the whole time,

suspicious already, and he drew with a grandmaster in this tournament. This is an unrated player. And everyone kept pointing out that he had a suspicious bulge in one of his pockets which appeared to make soft humming noises and buzzing sounds at real pivotal points in the moment. And so they got him afterwards and said, listen, we think there's a bit something dodgy going on here.

And one of the tournament directors quizzed him about chess. And it turns out he didn't even have the basic fundamental knowledge of how to play chess when asked the basic questions. Yeah, so he was sent in. He had someone on the headphones just telling him what to do the whole way through. The knobbly one. No, no, that one. No, no. The one with five nubs on the end.

Don't take your finger off it once you've touched it. I want to see the Michael Spicer, the man in the other room. You tit! Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that imitators of Harry Houdini included Howdaini, Boudini, Udini, Howdini, Hoedini, Hardini, Houdini, Houdini, Houdini, Bernardi, and Cunning the Jailbreaker. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

There's a footballer called Troy Deanie. I wonder if he was originally a Houdini. Probably. Probably. It's he very good in the box. That's a Houdini joke about him getting out of a box. There we go. So this is from a great article on Jeannie magazine,

which is a kind of magic Wikipedia. A Wikipedia about magic that is. And it's just about all the people, Houdini was so successful, that just everyone started imitating him. There was another guy called Kola, who obviously didn't get into the main fact, because it doesn't sound enough like Houdini. But his catchphrase was,

give my regards to the chief of police, which is just such a great thing to shout as you're escaping. Yeah. And often these people would advertise in a way that you would definitely think it was Houdini, right? Yeah. So like there was a guy who was called the Great Alexander that you would think, well, that sounds nothing like Houdini.

He's fine, right? But then I saw on wildabouthoudini.com. which is like a blog all about Houdini. There was a flyer from this guy called the Great Alexander, and it just said in massive letters, Houdini, and you would think by walking past that Houdini would be there. But actually, if you read the small print, it said, Houdini, the great escape artist, would be outdone by the great Alexander.

I think we should give a shout out to Wileabouthoudini.com because it is unbelievable. It's made by this guy called John Cox, and he's collated. think it must be every single primary source about Houdini ever, like every newspaper clipping, every diary entry of everyone who ever met him. It's so good. You can just disappear into it. Well, it's really nice, isn't it? Because you get the article and often you then have to do extra digging, but he's put the picture of the newspaper where it was originally mentioned. Like, for example, Houdini didn't start off as Houdini when he got into the world of performance. He was

originally a trapeze artist and he was billed as Eric Prince of the Air. and you read that, but next to it, he's tracked down the original citation for it in an advert, in a newspaper to show that this existed is a real thing. So he's really done his research for the website. Yeah, he's got the Houdini source of why he left one of his very first jobs as Pro Jaya the Wild Man of Mexico, or Pro Hea maybe, which I think we've mentioned before that he played this role and his job was to snarl madly as raw meat was thrown at him. and so this is one of his early performance acts and he quit when he ended up being hit in the eye with a slab of meat. And indeed, he recalls this himself.

There's a 1902 newspaper article. What's also great about him is that he wrote prolifically columns for newspapers and he was writing while he was in Berlin for Octoberfest in fact and he said, I couldn't look at my trainer for three weeks because my eyes were closed. That caused me to become tame because of this meat slab. He had his own magazine. Who did?

Houdini had his own magazine called Cundra's Monthly Magazine. And it wasn't explicitly his magazine, but if you read any single edition of it, you would notice that it was plugging Houdini. It was writing malicious gossip about other magicians Houdini didn't like and criticizing all the people imitating him. It only lasts for about a year. But, yeah. He did like to sort of have a go at other magicians because he did find himself constantly having his ideas and his invention stolen. And he desperately wanted to make sure that people couldn't use them. But that was really hard because if you were to patent your invention,

as part of the patent, you would need to reveal what the trick was. So he could never do that. He did get round it slightly. There was one loophole that he managed to find, which was he had the Chinese water torture cell. And that was one that he prized a lot. And what he did was he put on a play where that was in the play, this act that you would escape.

But he only put the play on to one person sitting in the audience. then he was able to copyright the act as opposed to patent it so that no one could then do it because it was copyrighted as a play. It's so clever. When he died, he gave his tricks to his brother, didn't he? So his brother was also a magician or an escape artist, which I didn't know. He was called Theo, but he went under the name Hardeen, which is almost like one of these rip-off names, isn't it?

Yeah. In fact, it's just about the only sound that is not made by those imitators. And when Theo died in 1945, the props went up for sale and they were eventually bought by David Copperfield. And they're currently in storage in Las Vegas. And the way to get through them, they're in a big room that's next door to a sex shop. And you have to go through the sex shop to get to the warehouse. And there was an interview with Hugh Jackman who'd went to see them. And he said that the way you get to this warehouse is that there's a mannequin in the sex shop.

And you have to press the nipple on the mannequin. And when you press the nipple, a special door opens you can go in and see all of Houdini's tricks. Oh, my God. That is so good. Would he be happy about that? Those tricks should never, they shouldn't exist really still, should they? Because when Houdini died, he gave them to his brother, to Hardin. And the stipulation was that once his brother had died, that all of his stuff, all of his magical effects and physical things had to be burnt and destroyed.

So that's how that was meant to end. However, Hardin sold a lot of it during his lifetime in the 40s to a guy who was a Houdini enthusiast called Sidney Hollis Radner. And Radner then put it in a magical museum, the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame at Niagara Falls. Now, in 1995, a fire broke out in the museum and completely destroyed the museum. However, all of Houdini stuff survived,

despite the whole building going down. So it feels like it doesn't want to disappear. Feels like it wants to continue on. Who really was escaping all that time? Was it Houdini or his equipment? Because if they escaped a fire, maybe he was a patsy to them. His tricks were quite interesting, weren't they? Especially the escaping things.

He escaped from piano boxes, from coffins, from ladders that he was locked to, from glass boxes. He once escaped from the belly of a whale. Is that living or dead? The whale? It was dead, the dead whale. Okay. So good. And when he was in Leeds, he got into a big barrel of beer.

You guys read about this one? It's pretty cool. It was at the Teckley Brewery, and they put him in a massive barrel of beer and said, okay, you have to escape. But Houdini was T-Total, and he became overcome by the alcohol and lost consciousness and had to be hauled out by his assistant.

That is so good. Wow. He used to do that, by the way. There was a level of PR about that where the beer keg in particular would be if it was a town that's centered around a beer industry. He would use that as a way of promoting and appealing to everyone there.

But if you're somewhere that doesn't do beer, let's say he's going to, you know, the home of Melton Moabry pork pies. Does he have to escape from an enormous pie? You mean the home of Melton-Mobri? Yeah, exactly. I had a momentary loss of confidence thinking, is that an actual town?

But yeah, imagine that because actually the pastry case of a pork pie is technically known as a coffin, isn't it? So he is escaping from a coffin. And actually, what you do is you put him in the pie and you put the pie on a conveyor belt going towards a massive oven. And if he can't escape the pie in time, he'll be cooked.

He has a connection to the first ever episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Can you guess what that is? Okay, what did we talk about? We talked about CERN and the... Yeah, a large hedge-on collider. Oh, we talked about the Philippa Langley, finding Richard III under a car park.

I cannot believe you guys have not mentioned the most obvious fact from episode one. We recorded the whole thing, locked inside a cave with 17 chadlocks on it, suspends that. Yep, that's what I'm talking about. Before Andy came here, we had an Andrew Hunter Flurry, an Andrew Hunter Murray, an Andrew Hunter Flurry.

Does he have something to do with President Garfield's anus? Yes, he does. Did he escape from President Garfield's Ains? No, he did not. He never went in in the first place. He was obsessed with murderers. So he bought all this paraphernalia. He had this massive collection.

And he was obsessed with John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln, of course. And he was also obsessed with Charles Gito, the man who killed President Garfield. He bought all of these things to do with him, like his phrenological analysis. And he was locked in Gito's death row cell. and escaped. And that was one of the famous tricks. And in the process, he freed all the other prisoners

on the same death row as him. Really? Well, apparently he freed them and then he locked them up again in the wrong cells. I've one more thing about Houdini's habits at home because he and his wife were extremely close, not as close as he was with his mother,

which is another story for another time. But when Houdini and his wife had an argument, he would leave, he'd walk around the block, and then he'd come back, and he would open the door of the room where his wife was and throw his hat into the room, right? If it was thrown out again, she was still angry and I guess he would do it again. And if the hat remained in the room, she'd calm down and then they were going to resolve it. What if the argument was about him leaving his clothes

hanging around the house all the time, like a lot of the arguments in my house are about. You keep throwing your things all over the floor. He was actually one of the things he was as famous for as his escaping, apparently, and this is according to the Wild About Houdini website, was his needle trick. And the East India needle trick involved him basically swallowing a whole load of needles and some thread. And then he'd vomit it all back up again. But the thread would be threaded perfectly through all the needles with a little knot before each one.

Very impressive. Yada, yada, yada. But the weird thing about that is, talking of how close he was to his wife, she died in a place called Needles. No. Dun dun dun. Needles, California. That is the least spooky thing I've ever heard.

It's like I've spent days searching for a Houdini-based coincidence. That is the least impressive coincidence since Geoffrey the cat at that mongoose that time. I have one last Houdini imitator to mention. This Houdini impersonator was dubbed Harry Houdini, and it was an orangutan from Borneo who lived in San Diego Zoo and whose real name was Ken Allen. That was the name of the orangutan.

His real name. His real name. His real name. His real name was something in orangutan language, probably. It's what the zoo called him. He was called Ken Allen. But Ken Allen was quite a famous orangutan, I think. Very famous.

Yeah. For the fact that he was constantly successfully escaping from his enclosure and no one could work out why. So he got given the name Harry Houdini. And they eventually had to bring in mountaineer experts to look at the wall to see if it was the crags in the wall that he was somehow gripping onto to getting out. And it turns out that that's what it was in the end. And they had to spend $40,000 eliminating all the holds in the wall

so that Ken Allen couldn't escape anymore. But, yeah, Time Magazine listed it in 2011 as one of the top 11 zoo escapes of all time. And I refuse for this podcast to ever end until we cover the other ten. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that

when the gates at Surman Lina Prison in Finland are locked, it's to keep tourists out, not to keep prisoners in. Wow. This is prison on an island just off Helsinki, just really near Helsinki, and it's an open prison.

but I was reading an article in The New Statesman, an article written by Helen Lewis, a journalist, who went and visited, and she wanted to go and check out the prison because it's quite famous, and they'd have to close the gates because tourists keep on wandering to the island, which is a tourist destination in its own right,

and trying to get in. So prisoners are allowed to wander out, people are not allowed to wander in. But it's an amazing place. Finn is one of these places that has lots of open prisons, so it's got 13 open prisons. I think about a third of their prisoners are in these places,

prisons, and they can do things like they have like therapy horses and they have sauners, they have their own little houses, like huts that are sort of like hostels that they stay in with shared cooking facilities, nice sort of sitting room with a big widescreen TV. You can stay, you can go to the mainland if you want, stay with your family overnight, if you ask for permission. It's a good sitch. And as a result, it has practically no recidivism. So it's, it's really interesting because it seems like it's,

It's for people often nearing the end of sentences where they might have been in higher security prisons for the early part of their sentence. This is a way of slowly acclimatizing them to life on the outside. So you're not just going straight from maximum big house, you know, 23 hours a day in a room to the open world again, because that's a really juddering change. I did read though that, and I'm quoting exactly here, attempts to escape are limited to a few dozen a year, which sounds like a lot to me. It does sound like a lot. Like an enormous amount.

Given that there are, I think there are only about 100 prisoners in there. That is a large percentage of them. Yeah. In 2013, they had double the number of attempted prison escapes in any other country in the world. Wow. But the idea is, why would you try and escape? If you're getting towards the end of your time and you know that if you try and escape, then you're going to get put back in the big house again, then that's the idea, right?

That's why you would never, in theory, it makes sense that you would never try and escape. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it gets you more time, more jail time in that same place, because that sounds like a pretty cushy deal. Sadly, I think you get sent back to one of the normal prisons if you try and get out. So it's not a good plan. But I mean, the conclusion of most people who look into it is that the disadvantages of the odd escaped, not too dangerous prisoner, are outweighed by the advantages of the fact that places like Finland and Norway is another one like this, have a recidivism rate of 20%, so only 20% of prisoners after, like, I think it's 10 years, end up back in prison, whereas here it's 75% and in the US, it's 83%.

So it seems to be working. And also, there's no challenge in an escape, because you get, you literally get given a key to your cell. Yes, the Harry Houdini of Finland is not very impressive at arm, is he? Opens the door, wanders onto the ferry. saves loads of money as well. I don't know how our prisons, which are very kind of unpleasant situations, managed to be also so expensive, but I think it costs, whereas these ones are quite cheap,

so it costs the equivalent of 160 euros a day compared with 205 euros for a closed jail. I guess maybe those locks, those locks cost money? Yeah. It'll be tiny things, won't it? Remember that fact James told us about when they took a single olive out of the meals on airplanes, that they saved.

If you take a single bar out of a prison gate over the year, that actually leads to huge savings. Yeah. America used to have rotating prisons, which I did not know. That sounds fun. It's unbelievable. It's basically, there's a central pole, and there's a cylinder of cells all the way around it.

And if the warden turns a crank, I've no idea the mechanism that powers this. It must have been pretty big. The prison rotates and you get locked away. You basically don't have a door to escape through once the prison has been rotated. Oh, that's clever. A bit like an escape room.

It's exactly like an escape room, yeah. Yeah, there are only a couple left. One of them is called Squirrel Cage, and it's in Iowa, and that was three stories tall. But that's not a functioning, that's now a sort of museum heritage thing, isn't it? There are no rotating prisons currently operating in America. Yeah.

That would be too much like fun. Because they were really dangerous. It was too dangerous for the prisoners as well, because let's say a fire broke out in the prison, Or if the mechanism broke down and it took ages to fix, you would have people dehydrated, not being able to eat, not being able to escape. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was too chaotic, so they eventually had to abandon it.

I assumed you were saying that people got squished as the rotating happened. Oh, they did. They did. They did. Your hand could be caught as if it suddenly, if you were putting your hand outside the bar, and they suddenly very quickly rotated it. They were saying that hands would get lobbed off and arms.

What? Yeah, so it was a very... very dangerous mechanism. Jesus. You just need a recording that you get at the theme parks. Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle

slash prison cell at all times and they won't get lopped off. Wow. Boy. Oh, that turned horrific very quickly. Another very dangerous prison that is also a kind of open prison is this extraordinary place,

San Pedro Prison in Bolivia. It's the largest prison in La Paz and it basically is its own town. and but sort of not deliberately. It's through corruption, really. So the inmates all have jobs within the prison walls. The only way in which it's now a prison is that it's surrounded by guards who won't let you out. But the inmates all have these jobs.

They rent accommodation. They live in there with their families quite often. They get their money mostly from working in the cocaine factory inside the prison. And then they sell the cocaine to tourists to come and visit the prison. And in the 90s, I don't know if any listeners were, backpacking in the 90s, but apparently it was a backpacker hot spot. It was this unwritten rule that if you went to the pass, the backpacker, you could get let into this prison and hang out in this really quite dangerous environment, just lapping up the

local culture. And the only reason they crack down is because they used to offer tours around the prison. And the government cracked down on this because they thought the police were big distorting the money from the illegal tours. And they had politicians and stuff inside. They have elected leaders in the prison. who apparently enforced the laws of the community mainly by stabbing people.

Wow. But that's like only in the hand or something. You know, you steal an apple, you get stabbed in the hand. Because you can't just send someone to prison within a prison, I guess. No. It sounds like you're an advocate for this place, Anna.

It does a little bit, especially when you said it's where you get the cocaine and then you're like, oh, and this is also the place where you lap up the local culture, which sounded like the most obvious euphemism for drug taking I'd ever heard in my life. You can lap it up, you can sniff up the local culture, rub the local culture into your gums if you want to.

It's just, it's the backpacking experience. Oh, my word. You guys, of course, know Amon de Valera, the hero of Irish politics, right? Sure, but why don't you just, for the listeners at home, why didn't you quickly explain to there? Well, just Amid de Valera, a great hero of the Irish independence movement. He was locked up in, oh, I think it was about 1917 or 18, right? That's right. And the story, he escaped, right?

But the story of how he escaped is absolutely insane. He was in for possibly conspiring with Germany. That was the charge. So he stole a key from the prison chaplain, impressive. He got some candles from the chapel and he pressed the key into the candles, right? So now he's got an impression of the key. But the problem is, you need someone to make the key. He didn't have the facility to do that.

You need to make some metal to pour into the thing, right? Exactly. So what they did was, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he didn't have the facility to do that. and a couple of, I think, fellow prisoners, they sent the IRA a Christmas card on which they had got someone to draw a cartoon of a drunk man holding a big key. And the key that they drew on the card

was an exact copy of the impression he had taken from the chaplain's key, right? So basically it was a code saying, make a key that looks like this, and it'll get me out. The guards didn't notice. They made the key to the dimensions on the card. They sent it inside a cake,

genuinely inside a cake. Christmas cake, probably. Probably. It got through. It didn't fit the lock. They made it too small. As soon as he got out of the cake, he thought, oh, this doesn't fit.

Did they make it the size of the drawing on the card? That's the big mistake. Well, they had to do it again. They had to send another amusing cartoon, this time with the kind of Celtic symbol, in the middle of which was a key. I was going to say, did they have to wait till next Christmas, or did they do it, like, maybe, as a Valentine's card,

or an Epiphany? card. They were like, oh, in Ireland, this is a thing we do. Big thing, yeah, yeah. So then basically they sent the second cartoon, they sent back another key. That also did not work. So this time it was too big. The Goldie locks, the Goldie Unlocks key is coming up. Very nice. Eventually they just sent, so they sent a third cake to the prison and inside that cake was just a blank key and a set of files saying, make your own bloody key. And it worked. Just one weird thing on prison, like living within a prison,

is that women don't have to wear prison issue clothing in British jails. And men do. And that's been the case since 1971. And it's because research finds that people adhere to the rules better if they're not actually wearing uniform. And I think the idea is that it sort of humanises you and so you're more willing to bay the rules. In America, it was famously quite a strict penal system.

The inmates often do have to wear orange. Or in fact, when oranges the new black came out, some prisons stopped their female inmates from wearing orange and made them go back to stripes because orange had become cool. Really? Not allowed to be cool. There is in Norway as well at the Bastoy Rehabilitation Center.

I don't know if it's the pronunciation of that. It's got an O with a line through it. Bastui, I think it is. Bastui. They have a similar thing where the guards don't wear uniforms and they don't wear uniforms because they say they don't want to create sort of unnecessary division between

them and the prisoners there, who they don't call prisoners. They call residents because it just feels more friendly. It just feels like a cool dad really, that prison tried a bit too hard. Speaking of words that begin with B-A-S-T, as we just

were, that your Bastui place or whatever it was. Segway incoming. The place in Finns, which is called Suomen Lina, is it, Anna? Suoman Lina. That is, like you said, a famous tourist attraction, and it's because it's a Bastion Fort.

And a Bastion Fort, you guys might have seen these. It's where you have a fortress, but instead of being a normal castle, it's in a star shape. Have you ever seen those? You get them around Europe, don't you? Do you know why you have star-shaped castles or why you used to have star-shaped castles? Is it something defensive?

Is it to confuse airplanes, because they'll look at the castle and think that that's up because it's a star, so they'll fly in the opposite direction. Brilliant. That's such a good idea. Oh, my God. That's so genius. But no, it was a time before planes, unfortunately.

But Andy was pretty much there. So basically it was in a time of cannonballs. And if you fire a cannonball at a normal castle, it's going to hit the wall, and it might make some damage. But if you fire the cannonball at a... surface which is not straight on, which is not perpendicular, it's actually slightly slanted, then the cannonball might just kind of hit the edge of it and skid off the side of it. And so the idea was to make these star-shaped forts where if anyone was firing cannons at you, then it wouldn't initially do as much damage.

So that's why they haven't. So clever. So clever. Is that a thing called, I want to say, a ravelin? Or it might be connected to a ravelin. I think it is that. Yeah. I remember reading that word while I was reading this fact.

But yeah. Because I went to one of them in Cronborg. When we were all on tour, in Denmark, there's Castle Cronborg, which is the setting for Hamlet. Oh, yeah. And they have got these star-shaped fortifications outside. And it's, it makes it, yeah, as James says. And that's a ravelin. Useless to throw a javelin at a ravelin, right?

Yeah. As the saying goes. That's their catchphrase. They got that painted above the gates. Okay. It is time for our final fact of the show. my fact. My fact this week is that one of Hawaii's biggest annual festivals is devoted entirely to spam. That's spam the food. When they invite you to the spam festival, so they send you 5,000

emails telling you it's on every year. Extend your penis at the Hawaii Spam Festival. Yeah, I love this fact. It was given to me in a conversation that I had with a mutual friend of as Jason Haisley, we were chatting about it. And he said, by the way, did you know that they have the Waikiki Spam Jam, which is this annual spam festival that takes place in Hawaii. And it is a massively popular festival there. 35,000 people attend, according to their website. They have live bands playing.

They have merch. You can get spam t-shirts, shorts, slippers. They have craft booths. Can I just check, sorry, the t-shirt shorts and slippers. They're not all made of spam, aren't they? No, they just feature a... a picture of spam, I'm guessing. Right, because that would be absolutely disgusting and not Survivor Wash.

I'm going to say, Dan, when you sent around this fact, I thought that it was a massive exaggeration. And I've been to Hawaii, and they have lots of festivals all the time. And I was like, there's no way that the spam one is one of the biggest, which is what you say, but it so is. It's absolutely huge. Yeah. And they are obsessed.

Hawaii is obsessed with spam, and they have spam in places that I've never heard of or dreamt of thinking they would appear. Okay, no need to get into personal detail. Well, okay, maybe I'd big that up too much. But, you know, McDonald's has Spam burgers, and so does Burger King. They have a Spam burger. And, yeah, you can get them in all the local dishes. Everything, spam is just integrated all over Hawaii.

I think the most common way in Hawaii that it served is quite nice because it's a sushi spam. And that's kind of a nod to, they've got a big Japanese population, actually. And also I think it's quite nice because Hawaii obviously has quite a difficult history with Japan. And now they serve spam sushi. And it's spam on top of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed. And it's called Spam Musubi. And that's where you'll usually sit.

I think the reason that spam is so popular, not just in Hawaii, but also throughout the whole of the Pacific, is due to the war, isn't it? It's due to the Second World War because basically the Japanese soldiers took over a lot of these islands. And the people, whenever they grew food, they had to give it to the Japanese soldiers and they were forced to do all this stuff. And then when the Americans came and sort of liberated them, they didn't have any food.

They were just kind of searching for any kind of food they could eat. But the American soldiers had tons of this stuff. Like they had spam coming out of their ears, the American soldiers during the Second World War. So they gave it to the locals. And that's where the kind of love of spam came from. Yeah. I listened to a podcast all about spam.

which was great. It's actually the business insider podcast. It's called Brought to You By, and it's about the kind of the stories behind big old brands. And anyway, it was like places that have had a US military presence around that time because spam was just kind of taking off. And places that have rice-based dishes

because apparently it goes very well with rice and then places with very hot climates because it's canned. And so it's like a canned meat that you don't even need to put in the fridge. So it's like Korea, Guam, the Philippines. It's massive. True. The founder was a man called Hormel, and the firm that still makes it is called Hormel.

So his son took over the family firm, Jay Hormel, and he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 1945, just as the war was ending. And he said that there was a file called the Scurrilous File, which contained hundreds of letters of abuse sent to him by soldiers all over the world, saying, I have to eat this spam, and it's disgusting, right? And he said in this interview, maybe the verb to spam will come out of this war. Nothing would surprise me anymore, i.e., he was saying that sending random letters or communications to someone who hasn't asked for it is to spam. Now, that is not where the word spam as a verb for email comes from, but it is an earlier link between the two concepts. Isn't that weird?

That's so good. That is so good. We should say what the sort of received, acknowledged fact of where it comes from is, which is it was a Monty Python sketch where Terry Jones was running a restaurant where the only thing that you could have was spam and would you like spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. It just was always different.

Spams, spam, spam. And that's where the people who gave it its name took it from that. But I think you're right, Andy. I think that's more of a direct... Is that weird? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Be cool. Monty Python sort of ruined spam for a while. For a while, Hormel was really angry about it. It was just getting popular again. I think people hated it in the Second World War. And then they started to enjoy it in the 40s and 50s. There were these spam girls, weren't there?

These Hormel girls who the company employed, and they were a band. They were this musical group. And they were worried because after World War II, 90% of sales had been to the army. And they thought, oh, my God, we're going to stop selling it. And so the Hormel girls traveled around the U.S. in 35 white chevies doing sort of singing, dancing, parades. They had their own radio show and sales shot up. They made spam.

Cool. They were known as the Spannettes sometimes, this band. Nice. And they were all dressed in like soldiers, in not soldiers' uniform, but like soldiers' band uniform, weren't they? And it was kind of to remind you of the wartime effort, really. Yeah. But then also, Hormel's soldiers.

Chili Conkani. So he saw this thing with the Hormel girls working so well in America. So he thought, okay, I'm going to try and do it with chili conkani. So he created a mariachi band, which went around Mexico trying to sell Hormel Chili Conkani. How did that go? It sounds like it was less successful. It was less successful, yeah. Hormel's grandson was also in the arts. He still is. He's a guitarist and we all will have heard his work. He's called Smokey Hormel and Smokey is his birth name. That's not a nickname. He was called Smokey. Sounds like the company was too used to naming Hans by that point. And he's a, he's a guitarist. He plays blues and country, but he also appears on albums by Adele and by Beck and by, yeah, Mick Jagger and he's the main guitarist

on what was Johnny Cash's big final major hit, Hurt. the nine-inch nails cover, Kid Rock, Joe Strummer. I mean, he's done him all. Or Mel have a new innovation. They've got a thing that they've just announced this October. It's bacon-scented face masks.

All right, okay. In a very 2020 story, they say it has... Is that to wear when you're asleep? No, it's to wear when you're going out and about and you want to smell bacon constantly. Not like a face mask that covers your eyes. Not a sleep mask.

I mean, a co-covement. COVID-y face mask. James, has you been going around in these COVID times just wearing a sleep mask? It's terrible. I keep walking into people. How are you supposed to keep two meters away from people when you can't even see them? Because I was thinking like a sleep mask that smells a bacon is completely pointless because the smell of bacon famously wakes you up, doesn't it?

Oh. No, this is a thing. They claim it has, and I'm quoting here, the latest in pork-scented technology. Oh, yeah. I don't know what the last thing in pork-cented technology was, but it says keep the delicious smell of bacon always wrapped around your nose. Not sure. You can get a spamarita along a similar vein,

which is a span-flavored cocktail in Soho, here in this very capital. Wow. Yeah, get it at Jinju Korean restaurant in Soho. And it's made of tequila, mescal, agave nectar, pineapple and fresh lime. Sounds absolutely delicious until you add the spam. One more member of the Hormel family, which we were talking about a few minutes ago, is James Hormel. And he is the main donor of the Hormel Center of San Francisco Public Library, which collects all the importance of LGBT books from the last 20, 30, 40 years of American history.

And he also was the first openly gay man to represent the U.S. as an ambassador. So this was under Clinton's administration, and they needed a new ambassador for Luxembourg. And they chose this guy, James Hormel, obviously done a lot of philanthropy and stuff. And so he's a really good person to have to do this. But the Republicans were just not having it. They were like, we cannot have an openly gay man representing the United States as an ambassador. So there's a massive, massive argument. And to support their argument, the Republicans went to the Hormel Library,

and then look through all of their history and then found a load of what they regarded as very pornographic things. And they said, look, this man supports pornography. He shouldn't be representing the United States. And it got really, really high up this argument until it was pointed out that all of the works that they pointed out were in his library were also in the Library of Congress. So, yeah.

And then he became the ambassador. Spam on your face. Have you heard of Mark Benson? No. Andy, you don't mean Mark Benson, do you? I do. Give it his full name. Mark, I love spam, Benson.

We're going from one great philanthropist to another here out there. Absolutely, absolutely. And what links them a single can of spam? This is a spam lover called Mark Benson. He's from the UK. And in 2017, he and his wife went to the festival in T-shirts saying, Mr. and Mrs. I love spam Benson. So his wife said on it to, and he has changed his name.

The Hawaiian festival they went to. Yes, they did. And not only that. And not only has he legally changed his middle name to I love spam. I think if Mark Benson really likes spam, he changed his first name. too I love spam. Actually, I think you can hide your middle name, can't you? That's a good point.

I mean, he does have a T-shirt saying his name. He's not gone very far to hide it. But they went to Hawaii. After they went to the Spam Museum, which is, where's that? Is it Minnesota? It's at the headquarters. They call it the Guggenham. Very clever.

But they went to the museum and they got married there. They got married at the Spam Museum. Spam's brand manager got themselves ordained in order to officiate at this wedding. So it's the most spam-themed wedding ever. So good. You were now spam and wife. What on earth? He said, do you know why he said he changed, he loves spam so much?

Or he said he changed his name as a tribute to spam to his grandpa who worked in the spam factory in Liverpool and to the war effort. Okay. Quite right. It's one way to remember the war, I think. That museum that's, oh, go on, Andy. You've had to say something. Well, they've got some, they've got some lovely children as well, so we know at least they

didn't need a spam donor. Okay. I'm glad I let you talk there. That museum is in Austin in Minnesota, and it sounds quite interesting. They have volunteer guides that are known as spam ambassadors, and they walk around. around the spam museum with little bits of spam on toothpicks, which they call spampals. Oh, my God. Did you guys hear about the 1990s spam carving contest in Seattle?

No. This was amazing. It ran for 10 years before being shut down. Or maybe people lost interest. I don't know. But you were given two cans of spam, one plastic knife and 15 minutes, right? You were allowed to bring your own extra tools if you wanted to, but power tools and chain soles were explicitly banned by...

Sorry, two cans of spam, and you might want to use power tools. Well, you're absolutely right. You would have been... You would have gone on very well with the organisers, James, because they said that's overkill. Well, sometimes it's hard to open those tins, isn't it? So you might need a sort of pneumatic drill to get in there. I think they're wrinkles.

Are they? They are wrinkles. They are wrinkles. I'm looking at them upside down. But there were so many good sounding winners In 1994 the winner was nude descending a staircase So I'm going to carve that in spam in a quarter of an hour Are you sure that wasn't just a description of the person who'd won

I've not done a very good sculpture But I am nude and I am walking down a staircase Other winners included Jurassic Pork Spam Henge, very good And my favourite, a model of singer Spammy Winette singing Spam by Your Man. 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 all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website.

No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there, bits of merchandise, up there as well. Go check it out. Anyway, we'll be back again next week. We'll see you then with another episode. Goodbye.