No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Chatty Cow
Episode Date: August 9, 2019Live from Amsterdam, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss how to clean warship guns, the anti-Valentine's march, and interviewing a cow. ...
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
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.
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
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,
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
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?
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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,
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?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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...
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?
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,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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?
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,
bits of merchandise. Thank you so much, Amsterdam. That was awesome. We'll see you again.
Good night.
