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

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

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

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tashinsky, and Andrew Hunter Murray. 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 My Fact. My fact this week is that in 1950s America, flight attendants consulted an alcohol chart of the sky so they knew when they were allowed to serve booze. Wow.

Yeah. So is that because, it must be because some parts of America you can't drink. But does that mean Colorado goes all the way up to the top of the universe? Where does it end? Does the ISS? Are they not allowed to drink their snuck up portions of booze that they hide? Yeah. This is the 1950s where there were a lot of dry states in America, and that dry ban expanded all the way up to 30,000 feet into the air.

I suppose it makes sense because let's say you lived in a dry county. And you thought, well, I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to hire a hot air balloon. And I'm just going to float off the ground and drink a load of booze. It makes sense that they stop that from happening. That would do my first thought. Exactly. But you used to be able to go offshore, didn't you?

That's true. That's how people would get around it. But so this is the issue is that obviously you're in a plane that's flying. over multiple states. Do all laws apply above all the... You know there's like 12 weird laws? It's like you're not allowed to kick a horse in Ohio on a Sunday.

You're flying over in a plane and you're like, stop kicking that horse. Anyone intending to marry a second wife is now allowed for the next 30 minutes. Was it the case that you'd have to say quickly down it we're about to hit Pennsylvania? It's really odd. What I couldn't find

was if it's the sale of alcohol, because they used to sell the alcohol on board there, or whether or not. So exactly, we're approaching Pennsylvania quick, everyone. Scull, skull, skull, skull. And the way that it was done is the flight attendants would look out the windows for monuments. So they'd be like, oh, okay, we're coming up for that now. What? Yeah, yeah. There was so many restrictions. How can you tell you're in Pennsylvania from the air? Well, just to say this, surely the pilot had a better way of knowing where they were going, the mucking down, and saying, look, there's a church that I recognize. Well, remember back in the 50s with mail delivery, they just had big arrows on the ground. Concrete arrows. Yeah, I don't know what it was like.

Having been in a helicopter with my wife flying, it's only a small helicopter, so we don't have that much instruments and stuff, but you do. Like, you have a map and it's like, there's a golf course here, and you're like, my wife's like, can you check there's a golf course on the left-hand side? Yes, there is. Okay, we're going in the right direction. Yeah. Unfortunately, you always get lost because you're only looking for the next golf course.

But it wasn't just that. The attendant would have to know, is this state allowing drinking on a Sunday or an election day? What are the hour restrictions? Because sometimes they're just restricted for certain hours. So, yeah, certain holidays that are being celebrated there. Are we allowed to drink then or not? So question. Yeah.

There are still dry states in America. Why did they not do this anymore? I guess maybe they've realized that it's stupid. It was weird being an air stewardess in the 1950s, wasn't it? Sorry, the fact that I paused at air stewardess does remind me how weird it also is that I still think of air stewardess as the terminology. even though it stopped being the term in the 70s? Yeah, before you were born, in fact. Way before I was born.

Wait, I just want to emphasise way before I was born. Does everyone else do that? I've, I've gone through, I cycle through them in my head, do you know. Like hostess, stewardess, trolley dolly. I actually don't even think trolley dolly anymore. I'd like to point out. So, woe, Andy. I think we can call them flight attendants, can we?

Well, it was weird being a flight attendant in the 1950s. And it was explicitly just for women. I hadn't quite realised how all flights in America pretty much all airlines stated, men need not apply. To the extent that there was a completely transformative lawsuit in 1971, which was brought by a man who wanted to be a flight attendant, a guy called Celio Diaz. And they had a witness for the airline, who was a guy called Eric Bern, a psychiatrist.

And he testified that a flight attendant who was male would make passengers really uncomfortable. And he said, you know, because he'll be effeminate. And he said, it'll make male passengers uneasy as it might arouse feelings in him. He would rather not have aroused. Oh, there are definitely some states in America that you wouldn't be able to do that. Well, indeed. How interesting. And we've said before, I think, that the reason that they were women to start off with is because they were nurses. Yeah, Ellen Church was, she wanted to become a pilot. They said you can't. She made a case of saying, what if then you, you'd, need a nurse on board. And while I'm there, I can serve some drinks. I can, I can refuel the plane.

Just like a nurse. But her biggest argument, I think, was that she said, if you have a woman on board, you're not going to have scared passengers because the men will be too afraid to admit that they're scared when there's a woman who's not scared on board. That was her pitch. And I think before that, it was children, basically, right? It was teenagers. And again, it's like, you know, if the teenager's not scared, then we probably won't be scared. That's good logic. I think that would work for me. Teenagers famously have no sense of risk. They have absolutely no clue

whether something is harmful or dangerous behaviour. That's true. Maybe it's more like the protective instinct. You can't show you're afraid in front of a teenager because you're the grown-up in the room. To be honest, one of the main reasons they were teenagers is because teenagers were a bit smaller than adults. I'm talking now about the 1920s.

There was an airline called Daimler Airway, which went from Manchester to London, in a biplane which could carry nine passengers. but this was a route you could take and they had these cabin boys whose job was to hand out hot water bottles and earplugs and reassure you during the flight saying don't worry, it's supposed to be falling apart.

It's the early days of flying. In 50 years, if it makes you feel better, this will be totally safe. I should just finish what I was saying about the guy who brought the lawsuit to say that in 1971, four years after he brought it, it was ruled that airlines could not discriminate against men. And it obviously also was a very homophobic thing. So we think of the fight attendance rules as being sexist, but it was also really homophobic.

The idea was that these men would be effeminate, they would be arousing homosexual feelings in other men that they didn't want to have. And yeah, in 1971, you weren't allowed to do that. Sadly, this poor guy who brought the lawsuit was at that point too old to become an heir steward. Oh, so it's ages as well. It was ages and he'd hit 35, yes. And women, we should also specify, were employed at first as nurses, But the reason that they employed only women after that was because they were fit and they wanted the male passengers to be attracted to them. And it's really interesting. Like until 1978 in America, if you took a plane from, let's say, Detroit to Chicago, you had to charge a certain amount no matter what. Do you mean ticket price?

Ticket price, yeah. Exactly. So it was all dependent on the route and it was not dependent on anything else. And so you had to attract customers. So what would you do? You would make it really attractive. So you would have like piano bars on your plane, you would have fillet stakes on your menu, you would have very attractive cabin crew, stuff like that.

And then in 1978, they increased competition, complete race to the bottom, cheaper the better. They got rid of all the frills, no more pianos on planes, no more fillet steak. Hideous stuff at every turn. Unbelievable ugly staff. But what it meant was the race to the bottom meant that a lot of companies went out of business. So you had much fewer companies who were running those routes. And it meant that the cabin crew had less sort of chance to move between different jobs. Anyway, that's my rant against capitalism.

Please enjoy my next TED talk. So you just want Porsche-fil-it stakes on your first-class flights? First class for everyone. I remember I was on a flight coming back from Dubai, and we were going through the craziest turbulence I've ever felt. You guys know I'm a nervous flyer, so that was, I was petrified. Yeah, and someone started screaming in the back, screaming and it screamed

It kind of... Was that the echo of your own screaming? We were travelling so fast, sound couldn't keep up with it. No, this guy was yelling and he was yelling quite a few scary words and so we were like, oh my God, is this a bombing? Is it a hijacking?

Poltergeist! Boom! Loneliness. Yeah, and so everyone's terrified. Everyone's really scared, but clearly the people know what's going on. And suddenly, flight attendants were all running to the back. Now, it turns out it was a medical emergency.

Right. But my last thought, that I always think about this, my last thought that had the plane had blown up in that moment, was that I watched a chef run back and all I could think was they have chefs up front? That's incredible. That was my final thought. How did you know as you a chef? How do you know

he was a chef? He had a giant white. He saw what was going on with, mamma me! A huge long mustache. Yeah, yeah. Flipping a pancake as he ran. It was slicing some tribes of the big knife in mid-air, as he were. Incredible.

They don't have chefs on planes. Yes, they do. Chef is the, that's a perfect disguise. He fools you absolutely. He was an air marshal. But all air marshals these days dress as chefs. First class, they have chefs. They do.

Can I tell you about an incident that happened? This is not a flight I was on, but it is in the great list of air rage incidents on Wikipedia. Oh, okay. In 1995, a group of 18 British and Irish tourists got Rowdy on a flight from London to Minneapolis. They started sending their... children to steal food and drink from the flight attendants carts.

So they're causing trouble. What they didn't know is that several wrestlers from the US Olympic freestyle wrestling team were also on board the flight. And did they take part or is it like a doctor? Are they not allowed to intervene in situations otherwise they're liable? I can't do a triple suplex on this child. Here's my son. Yeah, they did.

No, they piled in and they helped restrain the row. They piled in like a royal bumble. That's it. one after the other, every 30 seconds. He's getting out the train table. Wait, doctors aren't allowed to intervene? No, they are. They're not David Attenborough.

Is there a doctor on board? Yes, great, can you stay where you are? Can literally anyone else perform surgery? Attempts, CPR. I mean, I don't know the details, but there's a thing where if you intervene, you feel like you are liable or you could be liable for something. So obviously they do because they can save someone's life.

But then if something goes wrong, then suddenly they're wearing their doctor's hat. Yeah. Is that not wearing their chef's hat? I was looking at some famous flight attendants. Kate Middelson's mum, Carol. Carol Middleton? Yeah, I was a flight attendant.

I'd say famous. Oh, there was snobbery about her, wasn't there? A strawberry about her. Snobbery? A strawberry. She always keeps a strawberry about her person. Yeah, yeah. There was snobbery, because they called her doors to manual or something,

which is what you say when the plain lans don't use. I didn't know about that, yeah. Johanna Sigurthar Dottier who was Prime Minister of Iceland from 2009 to 2013 and the country's first female PM and the first openly LGBTQ head of government she was a flight attendant

Marina Machete who was the first transgender winner of Miss Portugal Marina Machete It's such a great name isn't it? Wow you'd be too scared to take her on Another one I was reading about was the first female steward in the Soviet Union called Elsa Garudyetskaya and she flew from Moscow to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan

and it took 13 hours and if you went by train it would take 129 hours and 30 minutes so the flights were really important in the Soviet Union because these places are so far apart and the best version of this I found was in Kazakhstan there was a flight from Almaty to Balcash okay and it was a two-hour flight but if you wanted to go by train it would take 157 hours

because there was no direct train between the two cities so you had to go from Kazakhstan from Almaty all the way up to Nobosibis in Siberia and all the way back down again and it would take about a week and we regret to announce there's a five minute delay for today's journey isn't that amazing

some flight attendant codes of bits of language so do you know what they say if they find you attractive no and nor do you Andy be honest as in they say it to you directly no I think so it's one of these silly little sort of things that gets put into

click baity articles online I'm going back in it already no it's so right you can either say Bob about someone how would you say it like what's the context best on board exactly yeah when do you do you sort of shout Bob at the brain

why do you need a code you must be saying to your fellow attendants oh there's a Bob in in Rule 13 CB Or as people get off the plane, you say cheerio to them instead of goodbye. Or thank you for flying with us or whatever. There'll be a word that you say, you know, to do-de-loo or something. Don't take this as gospel and humiliate yourself in front of just a perfectly polite flight attendant.

Cheerio and you just grab them like that guy at the end of World War II. I have a favourite flight attendant story, a story of honey traps, very topical. In the 1960s, the KGB was trying to blackmail the Indonesian president, the guy called Ahmed Sukarno, and the way that the KGB blackmailed him was they had their agents on one of his flights, a private flight, disguised themselves as flight attendants

and, you know, serve him drinks and stuff and look sexy. And they flirted with him to the extent that eventually he invited them to his hotel room when he landed. and they had a big old orgy, not knowing that the Soviets had hidden a camera behind the mirror in the room and filmed the entire orgy and then, later on, the Soviets,

called him to a private cinema and gave him a private showing of himself having an orgy with these flight attendants who were in fact agents and so, do you know what he did? Had a wank. What? Do yourself.

Bad news. There's another camera in the cinema. You film? that. And he just kept happening again and again. He's still there? That didn't happen. But he did ask for more copies that he could take home to his homeland

because he said the people would love him for it. I mean, that is funny. Completely backfired. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that a team of ecologists have been studying the health of the oceans by dissecting leftover tins of fish from the 1980s. All these fish are dead! Yeah, it's quite a roundabout way of doing it.

It seems like half of the ocean was made of brine, but the other half was made out of olive oil. What about the spicy tomato sauce bits? That was the Mediterranean. So what, yeah, what's that? Oh, this is really ingenious. It's actually been published now. It's a paper in the Ecology and Evolution Journal

and its research done by Chelsea Wood and Natalie Mastic, who were looking into their health of marine mammals specifically. So there's quite a few links in this chain. They were looking at seals and whales and how their health had been over time. But to do that, they wanted to know what parasites have been in the ocean because parasites get into salmon and cause disease in salmon and then seals and whales eat salmon.

And then you know what kind of diseases seals and whales would have been getting because these parasites will give them certain diseases. Okay. So how do they find out what parasites were in the ocean 40 years ago? Well, they didn't know. And then suddenly, out of the blue, they got a call from a seafood products association in Seattle saying they were cleaning out their basement, had loads of long expired tins of salmon. Did she want them? And she said, that's actually a great idea.

Yeah. Let's do it. Does it work? It worked. They looked inside tints of salmon. So can I just say, so this was 40 years ago. So just before you were born, Anna. Just ages before I was born, yeah.

before you were born, but does that mean that anyone eating salmon 40 years ago might have had parasites in their salmon? None of the parasites when they opened the cans were alive, nor would they have been alive once they'd been canned. So they borrow into salmon's muscle. They're right inside these muscle pockets, and they said they could pick through the tinned muscle tissue with forceps and see the worms like spring out of their muscles.

What? That's disgusting. It's so disgusting. So if I eat salmon, that's not happening today, is it? Yeah. Yeah. What? Yeah, yeah, a magnifying glass on it.

Salmon do have a lot of problems with, especially the farmed ones, because they're in such a tight proximity to each other. Sorry, I'm really putting you off your salmon. But they're so close that they get more, obviously they get more life. Yeah, I know that, but I've never seen worms in salmon. Yeah, they're there. You've got to maybe get a magnifying glass to them. Oh, don't put a magnifying glass on anything.

It's the basic rule of food. It's just so off-put by whatever you see. You're right. So the cans ranged from expired, like, expired cans from 1979 to 2021. And they were literally able to plot the health. Wow. Can by can, year by year. The parasite thing, I just found that really interesting.

I don't fully understand the science of it, but basically the parasite in order to reproduce, it needed to be eaten by something. That then is eaten by krill. The krill is then eaten by salmon. The salmon is then eaten by a marine mammal. And once it gets to the mammal, that's when it can reproduce and put its stuff back out. And the cycle starts again. So are you saying that these parasites don't survive unless they end up in a mammal?

Yeah. Exactly. They can't reproduce. It's like the old woman who's follows a fly, but at the end, a giant fly burst out of the horse. It's sort of that disgusting. Wouldn't make such an appealing children's book, but yeah. Did food? We have briefly mentioned Nicholas Aper, who discovered it. There was a big competition in France to find a way of preserving food so that Napoleon could basically feed his armies overseas and at long distances.

And it took 15 years and he won it. What we didn't say, I love this. He originally used ceramic container sealed with cork, but he's basically the father of canned food. The process was called, he was called Nicholas Aper. It was called Apertizing. Spooky. That is good.

It's appetising. It's good branding. Yeah. Is it a pun or is that there's no correlation? It wouldn't work in French. Exactly. His name is Apeer and is appetizing. An accidental pun.

Isn't that mad? Wow. Best type. He was so convinced about his work. He published a book about it in 1810. He was so confident about it, he attached a. small note to every copy with his address on it so you could turn up in his house. That's a great idea. Andy, if you considered that for your novel, for anyone who doesn't like

it. Absolutely. I will do anything. But his thing didn't really work that well, did it? No, all the chars exploded. Oh. So a lot of the jars. Come on. They didn't know what happens is you heat up the food so that it kills all the bacteria

and stuff. But if you don't do it well enough, the bacteria will create gas. and the gases will get more and more and more and eventually bang. Right. It's quite exciting opening the pantry, isn't it? Every day. You had to wear face masks.

I quite like that the original tins were champagne bottles. Hmm. Because the first thing that he canned stuff in was empty champagne bottles. Really? Yeah. And there were champagne bottles corked with cheese. What a disgusting image of the cork pops.

It's just this foaming cheese comes out. Are you joking? Like it's cheese and wine. Together at last. Yeah. Only a French inventor would have come up with the empty champagne bottle of cheese. How the hell do you shove a whole duck into a champagne bottle? Well, I'm delighted that you've asked.

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

He was also French, but he actually sold it to the British. He gave the patent to a guy called Peter Durand. And Peter Durand. Who also sounds French? Yes, he does. Yeah, but he was Durand. There you go. And basically became part of the British Army, then started.

started using the tins and actually at the Battle of Waterloo, the British Army had loads of these French tins, which must have seemed a bit off to the French. It's so weird that he was the frontman, Peter Durand, because he was completely the frontman. He did not come up with the idea. It was all so that Girard could get his thing through. One reason, because, like, the English didn't trust the French.

So if a Frenchman came over with these tins of food and said, hey, everyone buy these, no one would believe him because he was French. Yeah, yeah. So he needed someone with a French-sounding name. But then Duren sold the patent after a couple of years to a man who we've, I think we've mentioned it once before, Brian Duncan. Now that is a solid English name, isn't it? Brian Duncan, you don't get more English than that.

God, I've got a throwback to like 10 years of you constantly going don't, don't, don't, don't, what was that? Well, that was just an old music style don't. Yeah, don't. Do you not remember that? James would always mention that. It was honestly like 10 years ago. It was like a northern music style where it was like dance music, but it would be like, don't, don't, don't, don't. Put a dunk on it.

take a normal tune and you put a donk on it. It was like a remix. But I once got Stephen Frye to say put a donk on it on QI as part of a bet. That's it. Yeah. Did he also invent the music, Brian Duncan? Donkin invented the donk. Yeah, yeah, he made it big on that.

So he was an amazing engineer. It's from Northumbria. He was a metal worker. He had a paper making machine business. He patented the first steel pen. And then he starts making corned beef in his preservatory. He's just a legend this guy. And then in 1813, he presented his beef to the Duke of Kent, not a euphemism.

He got a letter back from four royals saying the Queen herself had tasted and enjoyed his canned beef again. And he got the patient. And he's so popular. He was so popular. There is a cove in Chile, which is called Kattela Duncan. Really? Because the crew had loved their donkin tinned meat so much. Where are our donking statues now?

And maybe there are some in Northumberland, but I've never, like, he should be a national hero. And he's completely forgotten. There was an amazing BBC article. It was really, really a long one about his life and canned food. But Donkin is a huge part of it. He's buried in Nunhead Cemetery, which is in South London. And his name is a footnote beneath three other guys all called Brian Duncan. Who are related to him?

Who are related to him? All the random donkins in one grave. It was a mass Duncan grave, wasn't it? It was called Duncan Donkins. There was one angry guy trying to kill Brian Duncan, got it wrong three times. Finally got it right. I know. He did do lots of other stuff, didn't he?

He worked with Brunel, Brunel's son on the Thames Tunnel. He worked on Charles Babbage's computer. He was multi-talented. And as John Nutting of the Can... It's just a great name. John Nutting, editor of the Can-Macon magazine. Never go to the cinema alone with John Nutting. Wait, why not?

It's a euphemism for masturbating. Right. I just thought it was headbutting someone. No. I think that's led all sorts of confusion. in my life. Anyway, he's editor of the Can Maker magazine. Either way we'll get you kicked out of a weather spoof

on a Friday night. The double nutting, that's really, that's why you're getting arrested. He's just a big fan of Duncan, Duncan and Nutting. He said, lamented that he's forgotten by the wider world, which I always think when people say, can we believe he's lost to history. I can believe it.

I agree, he's done an important thing. He's come up with sort of, tin canning or like commercialise the process. What do you expect for that to be a household name? 200 years later. No, no, no. I mean, well, anyway, nice to dust off the donk.

There's a really old fact on QI that it took 50 years after the invention of the can to have the can opener. I'm sure we've said that before on this show as well. I didn't realize that there are actually really good reasons for that. Firstly, the first process, there were only six cans made an hour. So, you know, there wasn't the mass mark. You invent a tin opener, they're going to open them quicker than you can make them. Exactly.

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

But the original ones were just so. thick. I love this. In 1860s, America, shop grocery clerks would open your cans for you to take home. Yeah. They would open it in the shop that you would have your cans open for you. That's quite nice, actually. I quite like that with jars.

Yeah. Like a jar of pickles. Just go to the person who's scattered in the street. Would you mind losing one? Slowly walking back along the high street. Imagine you're in the queue. Like there's always so many different reasons that it's going to take ages at the counter when someone's

in front of you and you just see the person who's scanning all the staff heads off to get a chisel and a hammering. Oh shit. Cashier after cashier, Jimmy with the big wrists trying to open your cans one year. Jimmy big wrists. Jimmy nutting. I found out about an invention in can opening that I didn't know about and it was almost a hundred years ago.

Wow, so just before you were born. So, yes, before I was born. The electric can opener. Did you guys know this was a? the thing? I own one. Why have I been struggling away with this crappy plastic thing? This is no exaggeration. My electric can opener is probably the best thing I've ever bought. Wow. I think it's it's a genius thing. You just put it on, you press a button and then it opens the can. That's so good. It invented 1931. Why don't we all have, why didn't they all have them by 1932? Why don't I have one today?

I mean, it sounds like they are readily available to buy. They are. You could just go to a shop and buy them. Well, we don't all have James' secret sources But you guys heard it here I've actually never heard one And it does sound like a I mean James has given it at the hard time Genuinely I would say it is one of my favourite items in my entire house

Wow Including his wife and child The only thing that obviously puts them out of business A little bit at the moment is those ring pull Tins that you get Like a lot of them are ring pull So I will deliberately buy tins That don't have the ring pull on

so I can use my tin opener. In the after times, once, you know, the food's run out and everyone has used up all the ring pool cans, you're going to be the king. Exactly, until the batteries run out. Oh, yeah, then you're stuffed. Yeah, yeah. Glorious two and a half weeks.

I will be the king of the world. Does it have a manual setting? Like, can you do it if the batteries run out? Yeah, if the batteries run out, you're knackered. Wow. Yeah. You should just pull all the rings off your cans when you buy them. Yeah, I do ask the person in the shop to do that for.

so funny yeah electric can open it is it big does it have to sit on the counter or is it not this big if it was solar if it was solar powered you could have permanent

yeah it's not I'm afraid it's probably not very good for the environment but oh I find it yeah yeah I find them so useful I think that's not a big cost for the environment frankly I've got but I've got

solar on my roof so if you come around We could form a power couple in the aftertimes. The original power couple. The opposite of the original. The post-apocalyptic power couple. He can harness the sun. He can open your tins. Right.

You're sort of giving yourself the main part in that, aren't you? It's the summer part of that. So on a... And Dan and Anna will find some jobs for you, you know. I'm good, thanks. Can sardines This is an interesting I didn't know this

They have their own Kind of connoisseurs and vintage years So No Oh wow If you buy an expensive Can of sardines You might prefer to get a 2004 vintage

Compared to a 2008 vintage That's incredible Are there people at the restaurant Who send them back So this is a 1993 Specifically for the 97 This is corks It's tinned

It's absolutely amazing So there are Like companies like who I'd never heard of like a Rodel and Conatabler in France. And they sell these sardines. And the thing is, apparently sardines get better the longer they're in the can up to a certain number of years. But what happens is the flesh becomes much smoother and more tender and the bones eventually kind of disappear the tiny bones that you get in your in your sardines. Eventually it just becomes a mush of sardine and that's the absolute best time to buy them. and you get people who just buy them

and then just keep them for 10 years until they're exactly the right moment and then they'll eat the sardines. Again, that'll be funny for the prepping. Don't have that. Exactly when the nuclear war happens. Yeah, exactly. We need to keep that another seven years.

And apparently you have to flip the tins every six months. Like a mattress. Like a mattress. I don't know. I think it's so that the oil or whatever gets nicely distributed and doesn't really.

doesn't settle. This is really interesting James because my mum went to Portugal last year and she brought back because Portugal they're obsessed with canned fish aren't they? And they have these really beautiful tins and she brought back cans

for each of her children of which I am one with our year of birth written on them. And mine just said 1986 and I just thought that's a nice design and cracked into it and had it on toast but I suspect that was actually a 1986 vintage.

Did it taste better than any other sardines you'd ever eaten? It was sort of full of crawling maggots That was actually delicious, yeah. As we know, your mum would go, oh, what? Rolling maggots, we used to eat those every single week. Exactly.

It's a delicacy. Also, did you just slip in your birth year to prove that you're not a hundred years old? God damn it, cut that out. Edit it out. Okay, it is time for fact number three. That is James. Okay, my fact this week is that German writer

Christoph Friedrich Nikolai treated his visions of ghosts by applying leeches to his anus. Really builds that fact, doesn't it? Did it work? Yeah. Of course it worked. Okay, come on. Explain yourself.

So, he had previously suffered from something that he called a violent giddiness, and he was treated by leeches, and he was kept having these. treatments and then one time he missed his treatment and he started seeing what he thought was ghosts. He said, I observed at a distance of 10 paces, the figure of a deceased person. I asked my wife whether she saw it. She saw nothing but being much alarmed sent for the physician. Okay. And so then what he did was he decided he was a bit of a skeptic, a bit of a scientist. So he decided he would not take any more leeches for a while, put up with the ghosts.

and then after a while he would try the leeches and see if it got rid of the ghosts and sure enough, a bit later he presented what he called his memoir on the appearance of spectres or phantoms occasioned by disease to the Berlin Academy of Sciences and he said that he applied the leeches to the anus

and they went away the ghosts and he concluded that the ghosts originated in my internal consciousness alone, a consciousness that was disordered. So he was kind of disproving that ghosts exist. by saying there was a physical treatment for these ghosts and that means there's no such things as ghosts it was all in my head

Yeah and was there a reason he had to apply it to his anus Why his anus? I think it was an easy way to get up blood It's easy access isn't it? It is yeah it's sort of easy excess I think your hand is even easier excess No a leach is better than your hands for getting blood out of Uranus I believe that there was like a relatively common place to put leeches in it back in the day Well, King George III used to put them on his temples when he was suffering from his bouts of depression and so on. So when was this guy?

Oh, yeah, sorry. I should say who Christoph Friedrich Nikolai was. Yeah. So this problem that he had was in 1799. He was German. He was around at the same time as lots of other German writers that you would know, such as Goethe. And in fact, he had a... You've listed all the German writers I would know.

I might come to some more. So, but he had a big... argument with Goethe actually. So Goethe wrote a book called The Sorrows of Young Vertha, which we have mentioned before, which was about a depressed young man. And actually, a lot of people copied this young man and dressed like him and committed suicide and so. So it was like a real massive, massive deal in Germany. And Nikolai wrote The Joys of Young Verta, which was kind of a slam on the sorrows of Young Verter. And then Gertha, in response, composed a poem where Nikolai stood next to Wertha's grave and defecates on it.

And he also put him in Faust. Not one of his most famous works, was it? Faust is one of his... It sure is, yeah. There's very little defecating in Faust, is there? There isn't, but there is a character called the Procto Fantasimist, who was actually Nikolai in disguise who put leeches on his bum. And in Faust, Gertes says he is about to sit down in a puddle.

That's the way his soul acts. and when leech's feast on his rump he is cured of ghosts and ghouls Wow I mean it must have been a big deal at the time He's made it into that That's not the only work of fiction that he's made it into He also was in a story called Mrs. Zant and the Ghost Which was written by friend of the podcast Wilkie Collins

Really? And so and in reference to the hallucinations and so on So it must have been the talk of the town Yeah ETA Hoffman wrote about him Schlegel wrote about him Not Schlegel You know Slagel You've heard the name.

You know him from the philosopher's song. That's literally what I was about to say. I was going to say Monty Python. Yeah, he was just as drunk as Schlegel. Yeah. But yeah. Schlegel was a linguist, basically, who's a philosopher as well and stuff. Okay, right.

ETA Hoffman wrote the Nutcracker, I think. Oh, wow. That's big news. So, you know, they are big names who were, as well as writing all these big things, also writing about this guy's rectum. Yeah, yeah. And Tchaikovsky wrote the music to the knocker. Yeah, but he wrote the story.

Well, Schlegel actually wrote, in response to the nutcracker he wrote the can opener, which was very beautiful. So it was huge leeches for thousands of years, wasn't it? You hear about old treatments that come and go, but leeches just came about 2,500 years ago and then stuck around until the 19th century when finally they went out of fashion

because it was thought to be unscientific and then came back into fashion. But the way you treat people with leeches is you attach them to someone and they make you bleed. Their saliva has an anticoagulant in it and they also put a chemical into you that widens up your blood vessels and they put an anaesthetic into you.

They're great surgeons. I think I can drink about a thumb full of, or a thumb size of blood, you know, from an area before they put they're nice and full. Five times more than their own body size, I think, which is a lot. But you don't normally, you don't normally leech to death unless the doctors have put dozens of leeches on you,

which is pretty rare. You're definitely not going to leach to death. No, it'll just be like an annoying little pinprick in your finger for a day. I've sometimes had to like a blood sample from my fingers at home. And you get these little sort of pinprick things, don't you? Yeah. And I just can't get them to work. Really?

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

if anyone wants to buy them off me Well in the aftertimes Those will probably come in handy Those will be a way for you to test the faith of the elect You can probably gradually open a can with one of those actually Once you're on out of battery If you use 20 of them

Have you heard of the Birmingham Leach Centre? No This is run by Bridget Croft Who is a nurse and she is the only nurse in the UK who is qualified to do private leaching. Okay. So everyone else is all the other leaching is on the NHS

and it's to repair joints and after microsurgery and help blood vessels heal. She does it privately. And she says in some areas of Eastern Europe it has looked on in the same way as going to a spa. Yeah.

What is she using it for though? Because it's not for sewing fingers back on. No, exactly. So that would be on the NHS or whatever. This is pain release. gout, baldness, all sorts of stuff. Oh, so is this stuff that doesn't work? I don't know about baldness.

Is it just that people see you from a distance with all the leeches on your head? I think, oh, he's got a full head of hair. That's a coupé's moving around. It works from across a dimly lip bar, but up close the results do fall off. I mean, that does sound like old school leech work to me. It does, yeah.

Whereas modern leach work is quite specifically for the getting body parts back on, isn't it? Leeches, they share something in common with tinned salmon, which is then they're now being used to tell us about the environment. So in China, they took 700 terrestrial leeches that they found, all the same species, and they are going and taking the blood out of them and diagnosing what animal it was taken from. Question, sorry, that will interrupt. Terrestrial leech. Is that something that's not an alien?

You have to listen to Dan's other podcast To find out about extraterrestrial leeches And the ones that you won't find in the water of bogs and stuff They are land-based Land-based, that's cool That's me guessing, yeah So some of them feed on deer, for example The story of how they came back into use

Is a pretty amazing one I actually listened to a podcast on leeches An episode of Sideways Which I love, by the way, you should listen to it, Matthew Seid And he was talking about this story So in 1985, there's a four-year-old called Guy Condelli whose ear is bitten off by his grandparents' dog. And as the surgeon remembers it,

the surgeon Joe Upton remembers it, the ear arrived in the emergency room half an hour before the boy. So I don't know what kind of thing happened there. I said, we're going to reattach you to the boy. So they've got this here, they've got this boy, and they can repair the arteries fine. This is where Leachers come in. It's so useful.

It's for vein repair. Because as Joe Upton described it, to try and sew veins back on, imagine sewing wet toilet paper together. They're so floppy, they just keep flopping and they kept on reattaching the ear and it kept on going purple and black as it filled with blood because the veins couldn't carry it away. Old Upton, he'd read about leeches as a treatment. And he tracked down the Welsh biopharmar place where they bred them for use in pharmaceuticals, so they hadn't been used actually the way they are now. And he got some scent to him. and this is a completely new idea. He's just thought, you know what, let's attach a leech to this guy's ear

and see if it works. That's amazing. So amazing. And he just about gets the leeches out in time and says literally as soon as he puts them on this boy's ear, the ear goes from black to a lovely pink ear color as the leech basically repairs the veins. Or it allows the blood to flow through the veins.

It widens the veins. It means that the blood can flow freely, which gives them chance to repair themselves. The body's very good at repairing itself. It just needed a rest. The ear just needed a rest. So apparently now these days, if you have finger or ear or penis surgery, what they'll do is for the 10 days afterwards,

you keep getting a leech just put onto the place that needs repairing. So over the 10 days, that's how they fix it. Yeah. It's just incredible. Yeah, they are. They're amazing. Have you heard of the B-Dale Leach House? No.

This is in North Yorkshire. I don't B-Dale. Yeah. So, Yorkshire, and it's a little building, but it looks like a miniature fortress, because it's got crenellations on the top. Your castellations, you know, it looks like a castle. I love that you just corrected crenellations to castellations and I think people would appreciate that.

Because people will have been listening to it and gone, I don't know what a crenellation is. And then you started to repeat yourself, they'll have gone, oh, thank God, he's repeating himself and telling me what it is. And then you said an even more obscure word. Like these bits. I've just drawn them to the guys. Yeah, I know what they are. We all know what crenellation is. I thought that was a crenellation, not a castellation in that.

That's what I thought as well. I'm not sure it's the former, it's definitely the latter. So I think we've got distracted from the fact this is a house built for leeches. So they would be kept in there because to collect leeches for the market, you collect them from the wild, you collect them from rivers and from bogs and swamps and you normally just walk through barefoot and you come out and you've got a load of leeches on you and that's the leech collector's job. Gosh.

And then you'd take them to the leech house and drop them off there so they'd be kept alive and then there's a sort of staging post for them. and this is the last leech house in the UK and it's still there and it's got a stream diverted to run through it it's on the banks of a little beck It doesn't still house leeches, does it? It doesn't still house leeches

But it had a fire to keep them warm in winter And it had There were special containers of moist turf and moss For the leeches to live in Oh, here we go How'd I find this back? It's amazing how Andy searches on Google for moss leeches

And Dan searches for extraterrestrial leeches And it goes, Did you mean terrestrial leeches? I didn't, but okay, yes. What is it? Okay, it is time for a final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that, in some American states and cities in the late 80s, children could be sent to prison for six months for the crime of owning a pager.

Ooh. What's pager, Granddad? I don't know. Anna, you're a hundred years old. So this is from a great newsletical pessimists archive. by Louis Anslow. It was brilliant article. And it was all about how there was this panic about pages,

which are electronic devices. Can you tell us a bit more about them? Yeah, sort of primitive. You could do very, very primitive texting on advanced models. In the early ones, you just got a beep, and you knew that you had to do something in response to the beep. So like a doctor might have them. It would beep, and they're like, I have to go to the hospital.

Exactly. But then later they would be able to send you like a couple of words. Yeah, exactly. Or numbers or something. But you wouldn't be able to send a message back. No. It's purely receipts. To send the message, someone had to pick up a phone, call a number and kind of direct your pager to be beeped.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there were all these headlines in the 80s about these powering the drug trade. Maybe youths who own pages are getting paged and they're going to pick up the drugs or whatever. And they probably were useful for drug dealers, to be honest. But it wasn't most pages in schools being used to pick up cocaine. It's that most drug dealers did use pages, but not. Not most pages were used by drug dealers. Exactly that.

It's exactly that. That wasn't necessarily what the right wing press thought. No. And so New Jersey banned them for under 18s on pain of six months in Choke. Which is such a long time for owning a pager. Michigan did the same. And thousands of young people were arrested and suspended and handcuffed and things. I couldn't find anyone who was sent to prison for that.

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

which as we say, some of them were, but if they're not, they're just losers. Because I associate owning a pager with, like, nerdy businessmen. What I associated with actually is Ross in Friends, who famously has one in Series 1. Does he? And so what kind of kid owns a pager? In the 80s they were so cool.

They were so cool. They were so cool in the 80s. Because drug dealers used them. And because your parents hated them. And because politicians hated them, to have one was the ultimate status symbol. James is speaking as if. I was alive.

You were desperate for a page. No, this is in America. It wasn't in the UK as far as I could remember slash read. But basically, the reason they were good for drug dealer, is before you had them, if you wanted to get in contact with someone to buy your drugs, you had to give them your landline number.

And now you're giving them effectively a mobile number so the cops wouldn't know where you are. But because they became associated with the bad guy, kids were wearing them around their necks as like a status symbol. Wow. And there was so cool, there was a market for fake pages. So you could buy a cheaper pager that didn't do anything, didn't send or anything like that,

but you would just wear it around your neck and say, look, I've got a pager when it wasn't real. Would you occasionally have to say beep to make people think that you're going, oh, that's my dealer, yeah, yeah, yeah. I read an article that was written in 1977 about pages, just talking about how awesome they were. They would say that if you were in a queue for a restaurant and the matrily saw a pager on your belt,

you would be able to go up the line. There's stories of parties where the hostess of a party, and this was in Washington, became nervous that she hadn't invited the best people in her social group there, because she couldn't hear the beeper pagers at her party. These pages are fakes! Well, what then became even cooler than the beeping pager was the wiggler.

And the wiggler was the one that doesn't beep out loud, but like a phone on silent, vibrates. So she thought, okay, maybe if it's not beeping, it's because I've got the extra cool new kids here. I've got the wiggles. I've got the wigglers. Yeah. It is interesting how transformative that is.

Just what you said, James, about it going from a landline to a mobile. People communicating in new ways that cannot be tracked as easily. It made a huge difference. And then I read one article in 1993 that was talking about the drug business using pages. They interviewed a cop and they said, now we're finding dealers with flip phones.

Maybe that will be the next rage. Maybe. Who's to say? We probably should say pages are still in use. They were until a couple of years ago. No, well, there's this old factoid about the NHS is the only place where you still get faxes and pages use. they were slated to be phased out in 2021

but Matt Hancock said that was going to happen didn't they remember him and if you're outside the UK and you don't know who Matt Hancock is good for you and still I think about 80,000 being used in the NHS as of last summer yeah yeah so I also

kind of work yeah and if you're in a hospital and there's no reception in a room it's useful and it is obviously it's used for the doctors who are in rooms where there's incredibly thick walls because of x-ray and all sorts of all that stuff is what they're basically fighting further than a mobile signal so it's...

And a lot of NHS stuff deal, a crack. Yeah, so yeah, yeah. But we're also using pages in ways that we don't realize. All of us. All of us have had, all of us have had probably our hands on a pager and not known it in the last... This thing up my bottom, I keep vibrating. Anytime you go to a restaurant and you order up at the bar and they give you an item that says, when this buzzes, come back, that's when your meal is ready, that's a pager. Yeah, that's pager technology, just using a different form.

I have one of those that I hang around my neck. And you get a beep on it and it lets you know that your cans have been opened. Do you know what they stopped doing? Because they've been around for decades, actually. I think they've stopped doing this, although I've never tested it. They obviously have a range that you can't go out of. And they used to shout at you. So pages often used to speak instead of beeping.

And if you went more than 100 feet away, they'd shout, You are out of range. So it was just so embarrassing if you go and try and sneak into the shop next door. Actually, just a normal one. I can't say this is true of all of them, but they have a range of about half a mile. Yeah. So that's quite long. That means in most restaurants you could just go to the pub.

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

and they'd have a series of messages that they could send. So if you were the wife calling, the message would be programmed to come up, call your wife. Or if you were work calling, it would be go to the office. Or if you're a doctor, it would be go to the hospital. Which is also your work. Yeah, yeah. So you don't need those two messages if you are a doctor. But if you're not, you know, useful.

Anyway, I was reading a really good article in the New York Times from 1976. which is talking about the pros and cons of pagers. And it does say the problem is almost every beeper wearer has a story to tell of the beeper going off at the wrong time. And this is an issue with them. So for instance, a salesman we spoke to said that one evening he was having a very pleasant conversation with a young woman. And just when he felt that he was making an impression

and he was getting somewhere, his pager blared out, call your wife. Honestly, what a nightmare. The pager is definitely the bad guy in this. And they did actually speak to an answering service in New Orleans, one of the interchange services, which said we have 1,400 pages in our system, and not a single one when the wife calls,

ask them to say the message, call your wife. They all said, I'd like the message, call your answering service, please. What? To come up or just, you know, go to work. Every man thinks there might be a situation where I don't want the message to come up, call your wife. That is outrageous. That is men.

Answering service is such an awful euphemism for wife, isn't it? That's how I think of myself. Have you guys heard of Gaydar? Heard of it? Yes, I have. The idea that gay people can tell whether other people are gay. Yeah, but in 1999, someone invented a device, which has been described as a kind of electronic pager, which was called Gaydar. And what it would be was for guys who were walking through big parks and,

If they saw someone that looked good looking and they didn't want to embarrass themselves by hitting on them, they would have their gaydar go off because they had a gay dar as well. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. So it was an electronic device that you kept on you.

Well, what if I'm with my wife? What's that coming from your ass, Andy? Yeah, so they invented it. This guy called Graham Lees was one of the inventors. And so he went to test it out in a park and he walked through the park and unfortunately they discovered quite quickly no one else had one

buzzing around the park crying well I assume there must have been someone else that was in the park and he didn't know they were testing unfortunately they hadn't fully tested out the frequencies and it was at the wrong frequency so instead of spotting someone else

who was wearing one of the gay dars he was suddenly chased by a horny badger there was squirrels there were squirrels that were coming after him he then as he was running away from the sorry no badger Has ever horny chased a person with a vibrator? We all have vibrating phones now.

We're all being chased by badges at the day. The frequency is a specific frequency. There's a love note for badges, is what you'll say. Exactly. He set off car alarms as he walked by because the frequency just met a certain tone that made them erupts. It's the one special frequency that works for all cars and all badges. Yeah, badgers, squirrels and car alarms. You often come back to your car, there's a badger humping it.

The alarm's going on. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on various social media accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland on Instagram. James. My Instagram is no such things James Harkin. Andy? I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter. Yep. And you can get to all of us as a group by going to Ware Anna.

You can get us on no such things. A fish on Instagram or at no such thing on Twitter or you can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. You'll find a link there to Clubfish, our private members club where we put up lots of bonus material. You can also find all of our previous episodes, bits of merchandise as well. Or you can just come back here next week for another episode. That's where we'll be. We'll see you then.

Goodbye.