No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Chatty Cow

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Live from Amsterdam, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss how to clean warship guns, the anti-Valentine's march, and interviewing a cow. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:04 I'm sorry and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chisinski. My fact this week is that there was a Disneyland in England 569 years before there was one in America. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:00:57 It must have been very bad for. It's just a slide and a swing. Just a field overrun with mice. Is that like I'm saying? Fields. So you're half right. This is from a book, a new book called A New Dictionary of English
Starting point is 00:01:19 Field Names, which is set to be... That sounds like a hell of a read. Welcome to Anna Tushinsky's Book Club. Membership 1. This... No, it sounds great.
Starting point is 00:01:34 And the Telegraphership. actually did a review of it, this obscure book, and basically it's this guy who's gone back and traced 45,000 field names from various things like old tithe records and things like that. He's called Paul Cavill, and he's warning that... And he's single, ladies.
Starting point is 00:01:52 He's out there playing the field. I'm not having this, because I'm a huge fan of Paul's. He's warned that these field names could be dying out. No one seems to be naming their fields anymore. Can you believe it? Oh, no! Call the Appentress. And yet they used to.
Starting point is 00:02:23 So it's a really important thing. I'm actually surprised farmers don't still name their fields. Because the reason you do it is if you've got to say like, oh, if you're like, you know, where's the collie? Oh, I left him in, you know, that field that's like three along and five up. It's much easier to say, oh, I left him in Disneyland. And so this one was called Disneyland because it was in 1386 he found the record, as in the record was in 1386.
Starting point is 00:02:46 He hasn't been writing the book for that long. And it was the Disney family, and they were called that because they were originally from a place called a Dissigny in France. And so that was why it was called that. I guess they had one field. But yeah, they all used to be named. Well, there are still quite a lot of fields which do have names.
Starting point is 00:03:03 So there is a UK field named database with over 200,000 fields. And do you know what the most popular name is? What? Big field. Yeah, I saw people on London. So on Twitter, they were sort of, they was asked, does anyone know of field names that might not be logged or just, is there one near you?
Starting point is 00:03:25 And a lot of people responded, my favorite one was from a guy called Tim, who said, we have a first humpie and a second humpie so named as they're both humpy, and one is in front of the other. There was Sodom, Sodom Field and Gomorrah Close. Those are field names. That's quite creative.
Starting point is 00:03:43 So they did seem to be quite creative sometimes. They had, well, they had ketchup piece, in Northamptonshire, and that actually was a mushroom field, because ketchup, the original ketchup, was made of mushrooms. So the first ever ketchup was made in 1727 out of mushrooms. That's ketchup, please. There was apparently, there was a field called Please, Your Honor, and this was in Essex, and it's thought apparently to be the place where the Lord of the Manor arranged to meet local girls. And you don't want to think too much about the connection there. And actually for the locals
Starting point is 00:04:18 it was useful to know these names right? Because if you had a field with the word die-cor-sitch in it, that meant that you knew that there was water in it so you knew it was wet and boggy. And if it was called yes, your honour or whatever you need to leave it alone on Friday
Starting point is 00:04:34 nights, I suppose. But it meant that you knew something about these fields before you went there. Yeah, yeah. Like if they were a weird shape there was, you got things like footed stocking and ladies use gown tail if they were shaped like what those things. Okay. Could you get in trouble if you sold your field with a misleading name? If I had a tiny field and I called it
Starting point is 00:04:55 big field, could I be sold for a misselling? No, because I think only the biggest idiot purchaser is going to buy a field off you without coming and checking it out. Not even asking for the measurement. It's certainly about it. Hey, it's called Big Field. I'm not telling you anymore. I'm in. What was the book called? The book is called a new dictionary of English field names. So that's the new one, because there is a book called English Field Names
Starting point is 00:05:19 A Dictionary, which is a previous book of English Field Names. And that is by a man called John Field. No way. And it's not just a list of names in his own family. That is amazing. We need to move on to our next fact very shortly. Oh my goodness. We should do some Disneyland stuff, I guess.
Starting point is 00:05:46 Or some Disney stuff. So between 1993 and 2010, Miramax was owned by Disney, which means technically these are Disney films, pulp fiction, Richard Jones's diary, scream, gangs of New York, and Mansfield Park. Disneyland actually has a special kind of invisible green.
Starting point is 00:06:11 I don't think you can be invisible and green, can you? Or can you? Well, no, not really. but it was designed to conceal the less glam bits because obviously the park needs to have unsexy stuff like bins and fences and things and it's not part of the cool Disney fantasy, is it? So the designers came up with a particular kind of green
Starting point is 00:06:33 which you don't really notice. And they call it no-seum green because you can't really see it. Although I don't know what happens if you're looking for a bin in Disneyland. It must be quite irritating. So there's a thing about Fields. which is that they have all... Not all.
Starting point is 00:06:52 There's a thing about fields, which is that a lot of them have changed shape in the last 40 years. So they've gone from like ladies gown to undone, stocking or... Exactly, yeah. Well, they've gone from rectangular to circular. Really? So if you look at the farms
Starting point is 00:07:08 in America from above, they are circular. All the fields are circular. Crop circles. No. It's the aliens. No, no. It's the aliens. It's not the aliens.
Starting point is 00:07:19 They're here. No, we know what it is. It's circular fields because it's better for irrigation, so it's more effective way you can have a well almost in the middle of the field, you know. Yeah, you have one of these kind of squirting fountains that goes in a circle, right? So it only hits. Yeah. It's really efficient.
Starting point is 00:07:36 And we know the guy who invented it, but it's creating a massive problem because it's sucking up all America's water because it's so good that it means that farmers then plant more intensively and they grow crops which require more water. because they've got this more efficient system. So there's a thing called the Ogalala Aquifer, which is under the Great Plains in America. It's a huge underwater pond, basically,
Starting point is 00:07:59 which covers 174,000 square miles. Wow. It's one pond for a given value of pond. And it's being emptied really rapidly, and it's going to take hundreds of thousands of years of rain to replace it. So there's a problem. Wow. So they shouldn't have been so good, basically.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Because they are good farmers, the Americans. So they're the world's number one exporter of food by value, which is kind of unsurprising. They're a big country. Do you guys know what number two is? Netherlands. These guys know. Is it Belgium?
Starting point is 00:08:34 It's Belgium, yeah. Yeah. Denmark. Denmark. It must be Denmark. They're number three. The broad Dutch can't grow a thing, though. It's embarrassing. No, it is the Netherlands.
Starting point is 00:08:45 And this is kind of unbelievable. Are you so good at farming? So the number by amount, the world number two, exporter of food by value, and they have 270 times smaller landmass than the US. And apparently they've just been all these incredible farming innovations over the last sort of 20 years. So there are greenhouses that are like up to 175 acres big, one greenhouse. I think all the greenhouses in the Netherlands take up the size of Manhattan
Starting point is 00:09:15 or a bit bigger than Manhattan. Wow. And yeah. Wow. So here we were making fun of that field book. And yet everyone in the audience is like, give me a copy. It's amazing. The Netherlands is so good at farming,
Starting point is 00:09:28 there is now a black market in cow poo. It's really more of a brown market, isn't it? It's because there's loads of... The Netherlands as a country produces 76 billion kilos of manure every year. Okay, and who's buying it? Well, you're only legally allowed to produce a certain amount because it's quite pollutive stuff if it's not treated right
Starting point is 00:09:52 but there is manure fraud where people trade it secretly or they spread it on their land at night to avoid being spotted Wow It's obviously a good fertilizer but you're not allowed enough too much of it Oh really? Any poo smugglers in tonight?
Starting point is 00:10:08 That does sound like a euphemism for something, doesn't it? That's quite a cute name for your baby or something Do you call your baby that? I feel like you could Pooh smuggler Yeah, to call you a baby a poo smuggler. That's what they're doing all the time, isn't it? They're not smuggling poo.
Starting point is 00:10:27 Yeah, and they're in their bottom. That's why you smuggle things. How often at an airport did the people go up and go, what's this then, sir? It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that every year, in Japan, there is an annual anti-valentine march
Starting point is 00:10:58 held by a group known as the Revolutionary Alliance of Unpopular Men. Are they recruiting? I don't think they'd let you in on the... So yeah, this is an annual thing that happens in Japan. These men are
Starting point is 00:11:16 sick of what they say is romantic capitalism, and of course they're single, and they go on street marches to to sort of say this is too much. And it's currently being led by a guy called Takayuki Akimoto. And he likes to
Starting point is 00:11:32 have placards and he likes to take to the streets. They only do it once a year, but obviously they like to have anything that has groups of people together to be protested against. So Christmas is a big thing as well. So they protest an annual Christmas March. But unfortunately in 2018
Starting point is 00:11:49 they couldn't get the permit for the park they wanted to do it in, so they had to do it indoors in a room instead. So no one really saw that one. And they had to clear all the video games out of the way. I mean, apparently there aren't many of them, are there? No. It's a handful. It's double figures.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Yes. Yeah. I hope it's double figures. Yeah. It's quite controversial in Japan, isn't it? The whole Valentine's Day thing, people have really gone off it. And it's because this is something we've briefly mentioned before, but actually the 14th of February in places like Japan, Korea, Thailand, is just a day when women are supposed to give presents to men,
Starting point is 00:12:25 and then exactly a month later, men are supposed to give presents to women. But apparently it's really an obligation, and so women are getting really pissed off, because they feel like on the 14th of February, they have to give chocolates, for instance, to all of their male colleagues. And so women are saying, you know, I'm spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds every year on colleagues I don't know or like, just giving them chocolates.
Starting point is 00:12:46 And then on the 14th of March, the men have to do it three or two times more, so then they have to spend even more. It sounds like it's got kind of out of control. Yeah, but I think, you know, it's not that bad, especially for countries that export vast amounts of flowers. Yeah. But there's this whole vocabulary of the chocolate.
Starting point is 00:13:06 So this is called giri choco, or obligation chocolate, basically. Obligation chocolate. Nothing says, I love you, like, obligation chocolate. And there's also Honme, which is chocolate for your true love. And there are now Tomo Chocco, which is friend chocolates, and the best kind, Gico Choco, which is chocolate given to yourself as an act of self-love. Wow. Oh, that's quite nice.
Starting point is 00:13:35 And apparently... When you say self-love, you just mean... I just mean... No funny business. That's what it sets on the card when you get your chocolates, you send to yourself. All right, no funny business, man. You know, in China, they also have a group that is like the Alliance of... unpopular men in Japan,
Starting point is 00:13:54 they have single people who try to pull pranks on Valentine Day in order to stop people having a good night. So there was one case in 2004 where a group of single people in Shanghai purchased every single odd-numbered seat for a
Starting point is 00:14:10 cinema. That is strong, isn't it? That's really good. Yeah, so yeah, it was a movie called a love story, Beijing Love Story, and yeah. In the 17th and 18th and centuries, Valentine's was slightly different. For some places in Europe, you would choose your Valentine by drawing lots in a village. So basically it would be Valentine's Day and
Starting point is 00:14:36 everyone would write down their names and they put it in a big hat and then you'd pick one out and that would be your Valentine. And some people said that then the courtship was obliged to last until the following Valentine's Day. Whoa. You don't want to get old John the Pooh smuggler, do you? Oh no. Actually, this is a bit like how Romans did it. So Romans basically had invented the origin of Valentine's Day, which was Lupecalia,
Starting point is 00:15:08 which was around that February time, and that was sort of morphed into Valentine's Day by a Pope a few centuries later. But yeah, what they did was, first of all, the men sacrificed a goat and a dog, and then they got the hides of the animals they'd sacrificed, and they chased after women whipping them. And then the women wanted it. They queued up to be whipped, as they believed it made them fertile. But after all that happened, everyone was naked, and then... What?
Starting point is 00:15:35 You've buried the lead on this story. I thought you'd assume it's ancient Rome. And then everyone picked names from a jar, just like that. And the name that you picked from a jar was the person you were paired up with to do sexy stuff with for the duration of the festival. And that was their valentines. And it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.
Starting point is 00:15:56 There's another old English technique. for Valentine's Day, which was your Valentine would be the first person you laid eyes on on the day. Okay, so this led to some people hiding below the windows of the person they wanted to date. And then as soon as they woke up,
Starting point is 00:16:13 just going, surprise! And that's actually mentioned in Hamlet. Is it? Yeah, Aphelia says, tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day, all in the morning be time, and I are made at your window to be your valentine. Wow. Yeah. That's so cool.
Starting point is 00:16:31 Yeah. Valentine cards? Okay. So there was a tradition in the 19th century as well as sending nice cards of sending horrible valentines to people. They were called vinegar valentines. And there were specific cards for all kinds of things.
Starting point is 00:16:48 So there were cards where you could say the recipient was drunk or ugly or stuck up, all kinds of stuff. There were specific cards for grocers being rude about them, saying you've cheated me on my gross. which doesn't feel strictly relevant to Valentine's Day, but it was just a good opportunity. There was one with a picture of the man in the moon saying this is the only man who smiles on you. And they were sent without postage paid, so you had to pay to receive it. And they were more popular. Apparently by the 1880s they were more popular and better selling than actual Valentine's scars that said nice stuff.
Starting point is 00:17:30 And they're so weird if you look them up, there's one that's a coiled snake with with the head of this gentleman wearing a top hat and it just says, beware the snake in the grass. And there's another which has, they had these really good rhymes quite often. So there's one whose rhyme is, you're as vulgar a cat as I'd wish to meet and what's more, you're devoured by pride and conceit.
Starting point is 00:17:49 But I fancy before very long you'll find out that everyone thinks you're an ignorant lout. Imagine that on Valentine's Day. Well, at least it's something. Roses are red, violets are blue, tell the police, old John smuggles poo Very freebie
Starting point is 00:18:11 I feel like old John is now more important to this podcast but I am Here's a kind of fun thing that you can do on Valentine's Day There's a French inventor who has invented To make part of the experience of the day When you're in a couple Even better, it's a flatulence pill So it's designed so that you have it
Starting point is 00:18:33 At the beginning of the date and if you need to go and have a fart, you don't need to leave the table, as I do. My wife, no? It's usually about this time of the podcast that you do, guys. Guys, I'll be back here. When I bring my mic, stupid move. Sorry, so what effect does it have?
Starting point is 00:18:54 It starts you from farting. No, no, it scents your fart. So it makes it so it comes out smelling gingery or rose-like or violet. How much more disturbed would you be in? by a date if they're a smelled of ginger. We need to move on to our next act in a second. In 2015,
Starting point is 00:19:13 Seattle Aquarium had a Valentine's event. In fact, they have this every year where you can watch octopuses have sex. But the one in 2015 they had to cancel, in fact, due to cannibalism concerns. Because they were worried that their male
Starting point is 00:19:30 octopus called Kong was too big for his partner and that he was going to eat her. It's awful when that happens when one person is just a bit bigger than the other and they accidentally eat their partner. Should we move on to our next fact? It is time for fact number three and that is James.
Starting point is 00:19:51 Okay, my fact this week is that during World War II the guns of the ship, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, were cleaned by wrapping a priest in a large cloth and pulling him through the back. like a human pipe cleaner. So cool. It does not sound very true, does it? But this is true.
Starting point is 00:20:19 And this was... So I read this, first of all, in a book which is called a field guide, but it's not about field. It's called a field guide to the English clergy by Fergus Butler Gaily. And it's about a guy called Lancelot Fleming.
Starting point is 00:20:34 And this guy was pretty amazing. He was a priest, and he was a priest in the services during the war, but there's loads of amazing things about him. He met his first wife after a massive drinking binge where he picked up and put on a motorbike helmet and then saw her in the street and said to her, I'm a space bishop.
Starting point is 00:20:58 And three years later, she married him. People weren't even going into space at this point, were they? No, he was a man ahead of his time. Wow. But they did know that space exists. Yes. I guess they assumed you'd need to wear a helmet there. I guess so.
Starting point is 00:21:17 Did he volunteer himself for the cannon cleaning? Yes, he did. He was a very slight man. So it was only for the small cannons? Yeah, so I looked at Wikipedia to see what the cannons were on the HMS Queen Elizabeth and they had 166 inch guns,
Starting point is 00:21:34 two, three inch guns and four, five centimetre guns. And I don't think it was those ones. He could have cleaned. them a bit. Five-inch gun? No problem. For anyone
Starting point is 00:21:54 thinking of writing in, I know that's the diameter, not the length. I thought it would just be an incredibly... Anyway, so... They also had some 15-inch guns, which you could just about squeeze
Starting point is 00:22:09 in if you had really thin shoulders and a 21-inch torpedo tubes, so I think it might have been one of those. Chaplains in the... Army, just very quickly, the modern day chaplain in the U.S. Army is flame resistant. What cool is that?
Starting point is 00:22:25 Okay. What do you mean about that? So, this is from Mary Roach's book, Grunt, and she points out, the man of cloth has various different cloths that he can wear when he's going into, say, a tank, or if he's just out where there's combat. So if he's
Starting point is 00:22:42 sort of just traveling with a field artillery, he he will have his cloth, which will be moderately flame retardant, insect repellent as well, and 25% Kevlar. If he's in a tank mission, he's like really fire resistant.
Starting point is 00:22:59 It's a really strong fire resistant, but that's too expensive for day-to-day use. And then when he's back at just the camp, he's just wearing normal clothes. But yeah, he's got three different outfits for not catching on fire. Yeah. Very clever.
Starting point is 00:23:14 Fetch the asbestos priest. And he also, he doesn't carry any weapons, but he does have an assistant with him at all times who has a gun. So that's the protection. And they do, they have all these things that they have. Like they have portable confessionals, should they need to have a quick confessional out in the field? They have containers that are turned into chapels,
Starting point is 00:23:35 and they have extended shelf life communion wafers. Wow. It's very cool. No one likes a stale communion wafer. So I was trying to find out about more priests. there was someone called Hugh Barrett Leonard who was a British clergyman who had a title which was Extraordinary Confessor
Starting point is 00:23:52 which I think is a proper title but he really pushed it so once when a woman asked to hear confession outside a church he just held up a tennis racket between them that's amazing The telegraph ran his obituary
Starting point is 00:24:10 and it said that although he mostly heard confessions in his room he was prepared to do so behind a hedge That's so good We have such a tradition of weird clergy in the UK, don't we? There was a guy called the Reverend Edward Drax Free and his congregation tried to get him out of the priesthood because he was repeatedly drunk
Starting point is 00:24:31 and he was stealing lead from the church roof and to stop them from getting rid of him he decided to lock himself in his study with his favourite maid, a brace of pistols and a stack of French pornography That's a real slam on the maid, I think. They offended. There was another guy from the 1800s called Reverend Robert Hawker,
Starting point is 00:24:55 and he was both a priest and a mermaid. That was the thing he really wanted to be. So he made a wig out of seaweed, and then he was naked apart from oil skin around his legs, and he rode out to a rock, which was called Bude Harbour, and he sat on it, and he just would sing. and then go home and, you know, go to church. Didn't his sort of mermaid rain end, or man rain end,
Starting point is 00:25:21 when he went out and he did this as a prank for the locals, and everyone was looking at him through their eyeglasses they had at the time, and then he overheard one of the bigger burlier farmers going to go, Roy, I'm going to go get my gun, we've got to shit him down, and he ducked underwater and never tried the prank again. Some stuff on maybe cannons or guns or something like that, That's what the fact's about. So the canon kind of came into Europe in the 16th century.
Starting point is 00:25:46 Before that, they used treboshaes, which was where they flung stuff along. And a lot of people liked them because of their fallacism for obvious reasons. So at the siege of Mirandola, the Pope at the time, Pope Julius, was quoted as saying, now we'll see whose bowls are bigger. Mine or Louise? And they also thought, because they,
Starting point is 00:26:11 was so phallic in shape, they thought that if you could make them excited, it would stop them from working. And so at the siege... Honestly... What? Yeah. At the siege of Chekiang in 1861 to 1862, typing rebels had prostitutes
Starting point is 00:26:29 take off their trousers and mooned the forces in the hope that it would cause the cannon to misfire or burst. Honestly, it's history, Anna. That feels like a flimsy excuse by the Taiping rebels. Wow. Well, some ship's guns have things called tampions, which comes from exactly the same route as tampons.
Starting point is 00:26:53 Okay. And these are basically plugs for the guns, and it's to stop the guns inside rusting when they're not being used. And there used to be an old method of doing it, which was really cool to stop rust. They would just put a cannonball inside the barrel and then slosh a load of olive oil inside.
Starting point is 00:27:08 And so then, when the ship's bumping up and down, the cannonball rolls the olive oil up and down the battle, and it doesn't rust. Oh, cool. That's very clever. That's very good. I read about a, it's not a cannon. It's a gun type, but it wasn't shooting bullets.
Starting point is 00:27:23 This is a thing that would shoot into the air a bunch of mines that would be attached to parachutes. So mines like you would get in the ground. The idea is that this was to stop ships from being attacked by planes. So the planes would come, the parachutes would latch onto the planes, tangle up, swing the mines into the plane and explode the plane. So that was the idea. It's an incredible idea.
Starting point is 00:27:43 The problem was, is they kept launching these into the sky, and the airplanes could see them, and they knew it was coming, so they could get out of the way, so it never got them. And what actually they didn't really count on is there's a lot of wind out there, and very often the wind would blow the mines on the parachutes
Starting point is 00:27:59 right back to the boat that launched them, and they suffered more British deaths from that than they did. Wow. When was that? I believe it was in the Second World War. Really? But we can edit that out. The torpedoes.
Starting point is 00:28:15 So you could have torpedoes and ships. And they've just invented a new torpedo that can fire humans. What? So this is, I believe, even though I haven't seen it, it's in You Only Live Twice, James Bond gets in a torpedo gun and gets fired through it. I read on the internet. That may be true or maybe not true.
Starting point is 00:28:33 But apparently there's this new thing where you can get in a little kind of torpedo-shaped thing with you and your mate. and it all fire you off and it helps you to get closer to the enemy. It's over a range of 10... It says 10 NM which I don't think is nanometers.
Starting point is 00:28:52 Oh, nautical miles. Nordical miles. Hang on it torpedoes, you ten nautical miles? Ten nautical miles, yeah. How do you survive the landing? Well, you're underwater the whole way. Underwater? It's a torpedo.
Starting point is 00:29:07 But these... Some of the earliest torpedoes were... You got it? But some of the earliest torpedoes were underwater ones. And there were... Oh, my God. Some of the earliest torpedoes were rideable. Oh, would they?
Starting point is 00:29:26 Yeah. In fact, some of the very first ones had two-man crews where you would get on it and motor yourself along, and then you would leave the torpedo there next to the enemy ship, and then hopefully sail around and back. Yeah. I got one last thing, which is on religion and boats. bringing the two things in together.
Starting point is 00:29:43 This is from this year. Two students from Christchurch Academy in Jacksonville, which is in Florida, they were swept out to sea. And it was two of them, and they thought they were going to be lost if they were going to die out there. And they spent their whole time praying to God to be saved. And they finally were saved by a passing boat. And that boat was called Amen. How cool is that?
Starting point is 00:30:06 Very nice. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that between 1910 and 1912, the Washington Post frequently tried to interview the president's pet cow. And was she just very coy, didn't give interviews? No, she was very chatty, according to the reporters of the Washington Post. So this was a specific cow.
Starting point is 00:30:39 She was owned by President William Taft, who was president at the time. She was actually the last cow ever to graze freely on the White House lawn. Her name was Pauline Wayne, which is a weird name for a count. But they ran over 20 stories about her in this short two-year period. So one of them, the reporter from the Post, asked her if she was milked without her consent. And it reported that to each query, modest Pauline returned from her soft brown eyes a glance bespeaking reproach and indignation. Which is to say in Bovine, he did not.
Starting point is 00:31:16 It's very hashtag me, moo. She was very famous. She was very famous cow. You could buy souvenir milk from Pauline Wayne. She was, and she used to go on tour, didn't she? Yeah. In fact, she got lost at one point, right? So she would go on tour around the country,
Starting point is 00:31:37 and so her milk could be sold at agricultural affairs and stuff. And once she was accidentally put on a standard cattle car with the masses, with the masses of cows, instead of her usual, like, private, luxury cow coach. And she was taken to the slaughter. I think she was missing for two days and there was panic across the land and she was just saved.
Starting point is 00:31:58 This was in 1911, I think someone just spotted her in time and said that looks like the president's cow. How do you tell the difference between the president's cow and a non-president's cow? She kept on singing the stars and stripes. When she first came to the White House, she was actually a president from Wisconsin's senator to Taft and when she first arrived
Starting point is 00:32:18 she was pregnant. The president offered the calf to a local farm. because he couldn't look after them both. And the Washington Times said that Pauline has not been consulted. But as a government employee she is subject to the executive mandate. It just feels like
Starting point is 00:32:36 in 1910, 11 and 12, there just wasn't that much going on and they really... Well, we don't really hear much about Taft, do we? Because who was... It was, what, Theodore Roosevelt before him and Woodrow Wilson or someone after him, who were quite famous, and he just doesn't really...
Starting point is 00:32:52 come up much. He's mostly famous for being very fat, isn't he? Yes. He's the fattest ever president, right? He is, although we're not quite sure about Trump. But Trump is definitely in the top two, I think. Yeah. Yeah. He's mostly known for a myth, isn't he?
Starting point is 00:33:08 Which is he was said to have been stuck in his bathtub. He went for a bath and he couldn't get back out again. But it's a complete lie. But that's one thing that a lot of people will say, oh, William Taft, the guy stuck in the bath. Yeah. He wasn't that famous. Like, Theodore Roosevelt was really famous,
Starting point is 00:33:24 and one of the ways that he carried on being famous is he named the teddy bear, or it was named after him. The teddy from Teddy Roosevelt comes from the teddy bear. And when Theodore Roosevelt left office, toy manufacturers still needed to sell toys, and so they came up with something called a Billy Possum, which was named after Taft. And we all have one of those today.
Starting point is 00:33:49 How awful for your pet count of you? have been more famous than you as the president. And she wasn't his first cow, was she? He had another one who died in 1910, I think, and she was called Moolie Wooly. And she died because she, so he loved them so much, he used to keep them stable with the horses,
Starting point is 00:34:09 and so she shared the horses food, and she died after eating too many oats. Because she'd never been told the oats were for horses, apparently. And even if they had told her, she wouldn't understand. No. It's a very human tragedy. I think this is true.
Starting point is 00:34:26 You know the name Fido for a dog? Yes. Sort of archetypal dog name. This comes from Abraham Lincoln's dog, Fido, which I didn't know. Where did he get the name from? Do you know? I don't know where he got it from. I guess, I mean, it looks like Latin, I trust. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:42 But Lincoln's dog Fido was also assassinated a few months after President Lincoln was assassinated. No way. Way? By a dog? Yeah, by a dog. Wow. It was at a dog theatre.
Starting point is 00:34:57 Yeah. It's like cruffs. I'm afraid I don't know who assassinated it. But it was a deliberate assassination. Yeah, I feel like using the word assassination to describe Fido's death, trivialises the death of Abraham Lincoln, but... No, I think we need to elevate Fido's death.
Starting point is 00:35:18 Just on pet cows. There's one quite famous cow, Emily the Cairth. and this is a cow who's very well known in the 90s. So in 1995, she was off to the slaughter in Massachusetts. And she escaped. So the workmen at the sort house were having lunch, I believe. And she leapt over a gate and fled. And the workers saw her and chased after her, couldn't catch her. And she wandered the state for 40 days. And the police were sent out with instructions to kill on site. And they couldn't catch her. And she foraged in people's backyards and stuff. And it's thought that people sort of helped her by leaving out bits of grass in their backyards.
Starting point is 00:35:56 Leaving out bits of grass. Maybe some of their backyards already contained grass. Where did they leave? Where did they leave the grass on the lawn? That car must be wandering around going, I can't find any grass anywhere. I can't see the grass for the grass. So sorry, she spent, maybe it was made of invisible green. So she spent 40 days and 40 nights, effectively, wandering in the wilderness.
Starting point is 00:36:25 Yes, she was the Jesus of the Cowboys. She was seen once running with a herd of deer. A miracle, a holy miracles, go on. She alluded to capture. And she ended up in an abbey. So there you go. So there was an...
Starting point is 00:36:40 Wait, are you sure she didn't end up in an abattoir? Because that just sounds more likely. No, there was a place called Peace Abbey, which was an interfaith movement, who saw the story, went to the abattoir and bought her for a dollar. She's still on the run at this point and then they went to try and find her and they caught her and she lived with them for a further
Starting point is 00:36:59 eight years happily and she ended up being a bridesmaid and two weddings that is 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 said in the course of this podcast so you can find us on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shreiberland Andy
Starting point is 00:37:19 at old John the Pooze Muggler James I said do you say the normal one as well no it's fine it's fine You'll just have to keep in the poo smuggling bit now. I'm really going to cut that out and just have that answer on 20 years. For the next 20 episodes. Who is the mysterious old job the poo smuggler?
Starting point is 00:37:48 He sounds like Andrew Hunter Murray. James? At James Harkin. And Shazinski. 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. of fish.com. We have everything up there from our previous episodes, upcoming tour date,
Starting point is 00:38:08 bits of merchandise. Thank you so much, Amsterdam. That was awesome. We'll see you again. Good night.

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