No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Cheesus Christ

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Live from Newcastle, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss dogs that escape, robbers who can't escape Detective Cumberbatch, and where best to escape the dreaded 'girlitis'.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a Weekly podcast this week, coming to you live from Newcastle! Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. starting with fact number one and that is my fact my fact this week is that Harry Houdini's dog was a professional escape artist Did they call him Harry Houndini?

Brilliant. Very nice. They should have, no, they called him Bobby. And Bobby was Harry Houdini's dog aka the only handcuffed king dog in the world and Bobby headline the 14th annual society of American

magicians dinner. This is an annual thing that they had. Harry Houdini was the president at the time. And he taught Bobby to be an escape artist, so he made him little tiny handcuffs that would go around his wrist. Imagine if you were the second on the bill to that dog. You've been invited to the Society of American Magicians.

This is your big chance. And you have to warm up for a fucking dog. Yeah, exactly. It's so funny. But he could do, I mean, it wasn't just the handcuffs, he also had a little tiny straight jacket that was made from him. He could escape from. It sounds like an incredible act.

Apparently, I mean, according to Houdini, he said he was a dog-gone hit from the evening. Yeah, he wasn't known for his jokes. Come on, don't give him shit for that. He did that and he didn't go for Houndini? Come on, oh, my goodness. But yeah, so he loved pets, generally. He had a lot of pets.

He had a talking parrot called Laura. He had a pet turtle called Petty. He had an American Eagle called Abraham Lincoln. And my favorite one is that he had, He had a lot of parrots. He had one called Pat Houdini, and he taught this parrot how to pick locks. And Pat, after Houdini died,

according to the story, Bess, his wife, was living in the house with Pat. Pat picked his own lock, got out of the cage, and flew away. Really? It disappeared. Wasn't it because of Bess that Bobby came to them in the first place? She bought Bobby from a butcher when the butcher,

it was a butcher's pet, and the butcher wouldn't let her give it a bone. And so I guess she thought, I really want to give this dog a bone desperately. I'm going to buy it so I can. Is that true? That's a slightly confusing story but yeah. Magical dogs

just while we're on them, there are so many magical dogs. Have you heard of Oscar the Hypno Dog? No. Oscar the Hypno Dog was a recent performing dog he played from 1989 to 2001 and then he had to retire for health reasons.

Apparently his owner said he could no longer hold the penetrating stare necessary for stage. Basically, he had these, I think it was a chocolate Labrador, and he had these incredibly melting brown eyes, are beautiful, and the story was that anyone who looked at Oscar, the Hypno Dog's eyes will fall into a deep trance. And he went missing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1995, and they put up posters all over the place saying,

Oscar is missing, be very careful. Do not look into his eyes. That was the Edinburgh Fringe that they put that up? Oscar performed all over. But can you imagine a word? time in the world to put up missing posters than at the Edinburgh fridge. Can you take one of these?

No, thank you. I'm all right. He was just allowed to wander around the audience, Oscar. And there is... His owner was the hypnotist, obviously. His owner was called Hugh Lennon and was a brilliant hypnotist. But there is an account that Oscar was just free to walk around the aisles of the theatre in the interval and things like that.

And he saw a man eating some crisps. And being a dog, obviously he wants some crisps. So he just sat and stared at the man hoping for some crisps. And then the man crumpled over in his chair in a deep catatonic... Hypnotic trans. Wow.

Crumpled like his very crisp. Yeah, sort of dogs doing cool tricks goes back such a long way. It seems like as soon as we decided, man decided to befriend the dog, we started making them do weird stuff. It was really like the 14th century, the Middle East and the 14th century,

in the marketplace, there'd be merchants who'd train their dogs to put on proper plays and stuff, dramatic performances, and they'd dress them up, and they'd act out parts. I read a thing that in the sixth century, So, you know, 1,500 years ago, there was Byzantine Chronicle

who said there was a showman who, his show, was bringing his dog to the marketplace, and the dog would collect rings from audience members. I guess he handed over your wedding ring or whatever and crossed your fingers, and then he'd bury them, and then he'd have the dog dig up all the rings and return them to the correct person. Oh, wow.

impressive. In 1670, Philip the Duke of Ollion in Paris, he possessed a dog who knew how to sort books, alphabetically by author. Cool. Apparently. So what do you think there is to the level of truth

that these dogs were, I don't think psychically, but we're learning to do with things. Here's a famous one that we do know how they did it. So there was a famous dog genius in the 1820s called Monito. And they basically,

they could spell, they could play cards, they could play dominoes, they could do maths. Like with the maths, it would be, what's two plus three? Is it one?

is it two, is it three, is it four, is it five? And when you said five, he would go, like that. And the way that we know that he was doing it is his instructor would have in his pocket a tiny little toothpick, and he would just pring, pling the little toothpick, go bling, bling, bling, bling.

No one in the audience could hear it, but the dog could hear it, and as soon as he heard it, he knew he would have to bark. That's very clever. Yeah. There is another thing where people think that dogs are doing this,

and they're actually not, but the dogs are picking up on signals that the humans don't realize they're giving off. So there was a thing, the Hunsplechschule, Asra, which is also known as the Nazi talking dog program, which, John Bonderson,

you know, friend of the show, has written about before. He wrote a book called Amazing Dogs, and they were convinced that dogs could be taught to count or talk quite well. And what were the Nazis going to do with this information? I don't know. It's such a good question.

It's not because, like, the British, supposedly, you know, lovers of dogs, you know, famously. Maybe they were going to turn the against their owners. That's absolutely true. Yeah, yeah. Well, there were lots of headlines, things like Heel Hitler, or the Third Reich, K-9? Nine?

Yes. Anyway, they didn't have a... John Bonison clarified that the Nazis did not have a legion of talking machine-gun, toting hounds, so the programme is... There is famously, I can't remember all of this, but there's famously a Nazi monument in London. I think there's one. Right.

And it was a Nazi dog. And the dog died, in London. It was like the German ambassador's dog and they gave them a proper Nazi funeral and they put a little kind of thing up and that's the only Nazi memorial in the whole of London. Wow. Really? It's still there. It's still there, yeah. That's a bit weird.

Well, I suppose the dog... Are you proposing, are you proposing we tear it down? Maybe you're proposing we get a few more. Well, I'm just surprised in the big moment of all the statues going down that no one went, can we just lob this one in his world?

Fair enough. The dog didn't know what it was doing in its defense. And Cecil Rhodes did, is all I'm saying. Fair enough. Do you know the movie Air Bud? It's a movie about a dog that becomes a basketball sensation because it can play basketball. It's a kid's film.

True story, or? It's based on, yeah. Based on, kind of, because it turned out that Bud, the dog that was hired for the movie, it wasn't CGI, Bud could play basketball. This was a stray golden retriever that in 1989 was found roaming the mountains of Yosemite

and the person who found him and called him Buddy, he trained him in a lot of different sports. So he trained him how to catch a baseball pitch. I don't know how that's possible. He then set up a hockey net and he showed him how to block shots coming into the net. But then he taught him how to shoot basketball

and he went on the David Letterman show and he displayed it and how he did it. He became quite a national star. I'd like to have seen him do Paul Volt. Yeah? He might have done. But there was no CGI use. He was playing real basketball.

He was shooting hoops. And was it, you know, was LeBron James frightened for his career? Or how could we talk about James Marlike? Guys, you're going to have to get on board. You knew what you were coming to. You bought the tickets. I just got one more thing on sort of the risk to performing dogs now.

Yes. Because now people are, you know, motion capture. is really good. So there is a film called The Call of the Wild, based on a book by Jack London, out last year or the year before, stars Harrison Ford, and it's about this man and his dog best friend. And they didn't use a dog for it. They used a guy called Terry, who just wore a motion capture suit. Terry Notary is his name, and he just would go around on all fours for the whole film, pretending to be a dog, and then they CGI'd the whole thing. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. There's a scene where they're lying together, you know, like the dog is in Harrison Ford's lap,

and it's very moving. And it's just a guy called Terry. The production photos are unbelievable. And Terry, he's a serious motion capture dude. He's an Andy Circus-style guy. So he said it was about trying to be present for Ford and let him forget, really forget that I was a human and be a dog and dissolve into it.

Harrison Ford said, Terry Notreweek does a great tennis ball. Wow. Is there a scene in the movie, and I really hope there is where the dog takes a poo? on the grass. And then Harrison Fod

has to pick up Terry King. You can see in his face and he's not happy in that scene. He's putting the bag around. Oh, fuck. Terry! Listen, we need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number two

and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the First World War MI5 employed 90 girl guides. They tried Boy Scouts at first, but found they couldn't be trusted. So what did they imply them to do? Well, lots of stuff.

So this was girl guides, age 14 to 16, and it was very shortly after the girl guides had been founded, and they were paid ten shillings a week. They were at nine hour days, and they were asked to sort of carry messages between floors, to carry messages across town, and they had to swear an oath that they would never open the messages and read what was inside them.

And yeah, they tried it with boys, first with the Boy Scouts and they'd found they were too boisterous and too mischievous. Not what you want in a spy. It's really cool. Newly formed Girl Guides going around the MI5HQ. They were a company, you know, because you get companies of Girl Guides. They were the special MI5 guide company. And they got quite seriously involved with the war, you know, like back of house capacity. But they worked in the... To begin with, but then it was quite sad at the end, wasn't it? The front lines. Over the top now.

Do I get a bunch for this? Just throwing brownies at the enemy. Yeah, okay, yeah. Point taken. But they worked in the postal censorship office, and that was also where they dislodged Boy Scouts from the role that the Boy Scouts had that. Poor Boy Scouts, I mean, they clearly had really muffed it.

But they also, this is the most amazing thing, the girl guys, they acted as messengers for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Sixteen of them were invited to witness the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The leaders of Europe. and 16 girl guys were there. I just think that's incredible.

But yeah, they were, they were very cool. But I think they were a little bit goody-to-shoezy, shockingly enough, girl guys as they were. There was an MI5 employee who said they used to sort of be always lurking in corners, but being useful, but, you know, just sort of always there. You can imagine what's this 14-year-old girl doing in my office? Well, they had to always wear their outfits, didn't they? Like, they had to wear their hats, and they had to wear their...

Their skirt was not allowed to be more than eight inches off the ground. And so they dressed in that... You wouldn't just see a random 14-year-old girl. You would know the word. You'd know. But apparently in their breaks, this MI5 employee said, The Girl Guide retires her attractive little sitting room where she converses on high topics with her friends.

Oh, I know. So sweet. So sweet. They were quite controversial when they first came about. Girl Guides, Girl Scouts. Were they? Yeah, they were... So initially it was just thought to be a boy's thing. and Baden Powell had set up the Boy Scouts.

And there were a few moments where, particularly in Crystal Palace in London, where a bunch of Boy Scouts got together, thousand in order to just do a big display and say we're here. And completely unsanctioned, these girls came along, dressed up in the... The Boy Scout costume at the time, because they were young the Girl Scouts.

Yeah, and declared themselves to be Girl Scouts. And Baden Powell suddenly was like, hang on a second, this might be a thing. He just assumed, because any time that they were trying to do it, the reviews, they got reviews, were bad. They were saying, there were complaints saying that there were mannish girls

and girls not being peaceful if they were in a uniform. They were worried that it was going to start this whole new different thing. And so they were really against it. And the girls said no, screw you. Yeah, they're very plucky. It was led by a team of, I think, six or seven girls. And this was a huge march.

It was the first Boy Scouts March, 2009. The Boy Scouts had just been founded. 11,000 boys. And these apparently 2,000 girls also turned up and led by these six or seven girls who just decided we want to get involved with this and pretty much went up to Baden Powell, he went up to them and said

we want it and to his credit, Baden Powell was always really pro. He wrote a lot of stuff even before this saying how girls can be just as brave as boys over and again they've proved it. It's just not part of their education and within about a week six thousand girl guides had registered, didn't they? Well he thought

at first he might just let the girls into the Boy Scouts and it would just be the scouts but then in the end he decided they would do the girl guides instead. One of the reasons that they did that is because he was always worried about something that he called girlitis. And that was whenever his Boy Scouts got to a certain age, they started not being very interested in setting fires. Oh dear. Yeah.

Wow. It's illegitimate concern. Yes, let's face it. Wow. Gosh. Yeah. So. Memories.

Okay, I said, all right. Why are you trolling? Stop drooling. I'm not drooling. Can I tell you one more thing about Girl Guides in war? First World War, specifically this one. They were very helpful in both World Wars, actually, the Girl Guides. And one of the things they did, along with the Boys Brigade, Scottish organisation, and the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides did a lot of collecting of Spagnum Moss.

during the First World War. Oh, Jesus. Christ, all right. It's very interesting. It was used for wound dressing, as I think we may have mentioned once or twice on this podcast before. And they were the ones out there in the peat bogs, picking up the moss, collecting it, so it could be used to dress wounds,

and there was even a poem about it. What good news? We don't have time for that, I don't think. We do, and we will. Mrs. A.M. Smith of the Edinburgh War Dressing Supply Organization wrote this very brief poem, all right? The doctors and the nurses look north with eager eyes and call on us to send us.

them the dressing that they prize no other is its equal in modest bulk it goes until it meets the gaping wound where the red lifeblood flows then spreading swelling in its might it checks the fatal loss and kills the germ and heals the hurt

the kindly Svagnum Moss blood upon what a poem oh dear pretty good there was a concern so it was controversial when they were formed and you know

lots of push back. And one of the reasons, other reasons that they were separated is because it was thought that Boy Scouts wouldn't like the idea that girls were joining in their games and it made them kind of effeminent, silly. And someone wrote to Baden Powell

very shortly after they were formed saying they thought it was ridiculous this idea that you could have Girl Scouts given that girls aren't even allowed to run, hurry, swim, ride a bike or raise their arms above their head. It was very strict parenting that that man was enforcing.

Hurry, you're not allowed to hurry. You weren't allowed to hurry as a girl, apparently. In 1909, yeah. Whereas you couldn't put your hand up in class. That's why they didn't do as well in education. Couldn't do the YMCA. No, no. Couldn't do the Mobot.

Although that wouldn't become a problem for another hundred years, so it was probably fun. I don't think the YMCA dance is much of an issue in 1909 either. Well, another dance actually got them into trouble. They always seem to, like when you read in the news, it always seems that Girl Scouts are somehow involved in some weird controversy. So 1996, the American Society of Composers, authors and publishers threatened to sue them over royalties for songs

that members would sing during campfires. So they said to them, you're not allowed to sing our songs unless you're paying a royalty. And the idea was, yeah, groups would have to pay $250 for public performances for the rights to songs that they wanted to sing. But what were they? They must have been singing pop songs then, right? Yeah, it was pop songs and so on.

God, was it the Rolling Stones who were complaining? is it Paul McCartney? It was... It was the publishing companies. And so there were cautions. There were copyright infringement penalties that they said. They said, well, we'll charge you 100,000, or you will get a year in prison.

Like, they were really strict things. And it was a dance that stopped all of this nonsense happening because footage was shown of them on TV, dancing the macarena with no music. And there was such a backlash from the public going, don't make Girl Scouts dance the Macarena without the fucking song. At least with the macaroni, you never have to put your hands above your head, do you? Exactly.

He is only, yeah. One thing that neither boy scouts nor girl guides were allowed to do. In official literature was masturbate. They were given official books. They're not allowed to do it in literature. Sorry. Full stop, in or out of literature. The Girl Guides Guidebook said,

don't masturbate, it can lead to blindness, paralysis and loss of memory. Sorry, didn't it? said in the guidebook then. Really? Really? I don't think it said the word masturbate, but I think it was clear what the... Because a lot of it was taken from the Boy Scouts guidebook. It was pretty much copied directly over.

Wow. Yeah, I know. I don't recall ever seeing a no masturbation badge on a scout. Have you not? No. You're not trying hard enough to earn it then. There was advice, actually. The Gold Guide's guide's guide book is funny, reading it now.

So here's a great bit of advice from it. It is said that you can tell a man's character from the way he wears his hat. If it is slightly on one side, the wearer is good-natured. If it is worn very much on one side, he is a swaggerer. If on the back of the head, he is bad at paying his debts. If worn straight on top,

he is probably honest, but very dull. We need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that there is a fictional Victorian detective who was created to be the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. In the only recent adaptation of the stories, the detective in question was played by Benedict Gumberbatch.

This is the fictional detective Thorpe Hazel, and these are the Thorpe Hazel mysteries by an author called Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch, and basically he is a railway-based detective. He only solves crimes that involve the railways, and he only solves them through the medium of railway timetables. He's incredible. That's awesome.

He's awesome. He's a vegetarian railway detective. That's very important in the description. And I'm very proud to say, I have a copy here of Stories of the Railway by Victor Lorenzo White Church. The Thorpeze or Mysteries are in here. Wow. And I just want to read you a brief poem about Moss from that book. No, it's basically he's a book collector and a railway enthusiast, and it's always his knowledge of train timetables that saves the day.

So if you want to get a book collector. away with something, just don't commit the crime on the railway, just drag the victim a hundred yards from the train track. Well, that's the problem. That's where Sherlock Holmes gets you, right? Yeah. If you do something on the railway, this guy gets you, everywhere else is Sherlock Holmes. They divided up the turf.

Is it like having your own spots of the city, you know, with like drug dealers? Like, this guy's fucked off when Poirot has the Orient Express crime going on. It's really charming. And the author was also a railway nut, obviously, in the Victor White Church. He was a vicar and basically loved railways as well. And so there were loads of vickers who were very productive around this time,

maybe because they had cut down the requirement to deliver a two-hour sermon on Sundays. Suddenly all these vickers had time on their hands. Well, the other thing about this guy, Vicks Her White Church, is he was a vicar in charge of the Mission Church at Williston Junction Railway Station. So he was well into his trains.

I really like the way that he wrote his stories. So, like, most people would kind of, like, think of the end of the story and then work backwards. he would get his characters, come up with a murder, describe the whole murder, and then go, right, from here, I'm going to work out what happens. And he would solve the made-up murder in his head as he went along.

That's really cool, isn't it? You're sort of reading the murder mystery as well as writing it. Exactly. Great. Were they big at the time, as in were they... These stories? Yeah, to the level of Conan Doyle's. They were not as big as Arthur.

We would have heard more about Thorpe-Legro. The book was originally... The book I've got is called Stories of the Railway. It was originally called thrilling stories of the railway, and at some point, some editors has decided, we can't sell these as thrilling stories of the railway. So just don't back it up. It's false advertising.

I'm sorry. He was the veggie thing. It was interesting that he made him vegetarian. And not only vegetarian, but very fatty. So we've talked before a bit about how the turn of the 20th century vegetarianism started to be a bit of a thing. In one of the stories, he asked for directions to a vegetarian restaurant, which is like the proper earth.

days of vegetarian restaurants. And then he goes there and he lunches on rice pudding and prunes. So they weren't quite up to the standards that we have today. But he was really into this weird physical fads that came with it. So in one book, White Church writes, he carried vegetarianism to an extreme and was continually practicing various exercises of the strangest description, much of the bewilderment of those around.

And so there's one scene where a friend comes upon him and describes the sort of crime on the railway to him. and as the friend starts talking Thorpe begins some exercises and as you know he's been spoken to it's like Hazel Thorpe smiled and went on whirling his arms around his head I've just read that story

have you? It's the story of Peter Crane's cigars and it's not very thrilling but it is a story it is a story of the railway yeah and then what happens Anna well all I know is that he mentions a timetable

and suddenly Hazel thought goes you begin to interest me said Hazel stopping his whirling gigs and beginning to eat his Blasmon. It's mostly written in a foreign language. Blasmon was a kind of biscuit. What it is is there's a cigar smuggling operation.

We don't have time with this. I really like sort of fictional detectives all this time because lots of people were following Arthur Kermondoyle and trying to come up with like a detective with a gimmick. So there was a fictional detective called Max Carados. I don't know if you guys came across. No. So he is blind, but despite that,

he is so talented that he can read fine print by touch alone he can also fire a pistol at targets accurately because his senses are so good in one of the books he can smell when someone is wearing a false moustache that's so cool it's great it's really good it's weird because the person wearing a false moustache doesn't need to be doing it in the first place

if the detective's blind that's absolutely true there were lots of rip-offs of Sherlock Holmes at the very start in the first 10 years or so there was a detective called Sherwood Hoax, another Shylock Oms, Kerlock Shomes, sheer look gnomes,

Kirlick Combs, and Shamrock Jones. That's so good. Have you guys heard of the Detection Club? No. Oh yeah, it's so cool. Oh, man. It's a British club for detective writers. So Victor White Church of Thorpeazel fame

was a member himself. Lots of people who have as Agatha Christie was the president for many years. and it has these sacred rituals that it enacts. It's really exciting. So a procession will enter, if you're joining the club for the first time. Procession will enter, led by a figure wearing a scarlet cloak

and carrying Eric the skull, okay? And you have to swear an oath to join. And then once you join, the president says to you, if you fail to remember your promises and break even one of our unwritten laws, may other writers anticipate your plots, may total strangers sue you for libel, May your pages swarm with misprints

And may your sales continually diminish Yeah And their rules are, they're strict You know, the rules written down in the 20s, I think Early 30s were Your detective should detect crimes Using their wits and not placing reliance On divine revelation, feminine intuition

And mumbo jumbo jimbo, jiggery pocary, Coincidence or Act of God And also you can't conceal clues from the reader But you know, the skull That you put your hand on It's not Eric. they sexted it recently and it's Erica

Oh Wow Yeah There's a guy called Ronald Knox Who I love He's another He's another clerical detective author

Actually And he wrote these ten commandments Of detective fiction Which are quite fun So one of them is Not more than one secret room or passage is allowed Per detective story

And also twin brothers And doubles generally Must not appear Unless we have been duly prepared for them. Anyway, he did this really cool thing, Ronald Knox, as well as being the detective author. 1926, he interrupted all broadcasts

on the one radio channel on the BBC, basically to announce that there was a riot in London. It was a spoof. People didn't realise it was a spoof. And it was bloody terrifying. So he said things like, the crowd has now passed along Whitehall and at the suggestion of Mr. Popplebury,

Secretary of the National Movement for abolishing theatre cues, is preparing to demolish the houses of Parliament with trench mortars. The clock towers just fall into the ground along with Big Ben. The noise you just heard was the Savoy being blown up.

So theophilus Gooch has been intercepted by the remnants of the crowd and is being roasted alive in Trafalgar Square as I speak. And then it was snowing, so no one could get the news for days. So the BBC just received thousands of letters saying, what's going on? Oh my God. That's incredible.

We're going to have to move on very soon. I just want to quickly mention, There's a thing that we wrote about in the book of the year, which was, do you remember there's that story that Benedict Cumberbatch, he was in an Uber with his wife, and suddenly he saw a robbery that was happening outside on the road. It was a deliveroo driver who was being attacked by some four muggers who were trying to get to him.

So he hopped out, and he went, and sort of tried to stop it, and it worked. Classic shell of me. But so he successfully scared away these muggers and helped this deliveroo. person. But the thing is, is that this robbery was happening on Marlebone High Street, which is just down the road from Baker Street in London. Can you imagine the robbers as they turned around

to see Sherlock Holmes right next to where he should be looking around at them? You feel honoured. You'd say, thank you. That's true. I was just trying to mug a Deliveroo driver. I'm not sure this is a Holmes level crime. I was just thinking that, like, you know, this guy was all about his railway time tables, like an Uber driver who would solve crimes would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

Yeah, that would be really cool. But is it based on the star rating that you have? Yeah, it could be. No, how could it be? No, it could be like... Three stars, he drove a bit too fast, but he did tell the murder of my wife, so... Just one tiny thing, which...

PD James? Brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant crime author. Died only a few years ago. She was once doing a signing. and an Australian woman came to the front of the queue said her name was Emma Chisett, right? P.D. James signed the book to Emma Chisit,

only to realise this Australian woman had been asking how much the book cost. Emma Chisett. Emma Chisett. Emma Chisett. Oh, no. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Himalayan chewing gum is made out of cheese. And there it is. Looks like sausages a little bit. Like ladies' fingers, maybe. Like baguettes. So in what sense is it chewing gum? It's chewing gum in the sense

that it's called Himalayan chewing gum and that you chew it a lot. It's the world's hardest cheese that we know of. It's called chirupy. And because it's so, so hard, you put it in your mouth and if you're like a yak farmer

or something, you're just having your daily yak farm, then you put it in your mouth and you just chew it and chew it and chew it. and the saliva slowly makes it softer and softer and softer, and it's hours and hours that you chew this stuff, and eventually you can eat it, and so that's why they call it chewing gum.

It sounds nice, but it does sound unbelievably tough, as in there was a BBC journalist who tried it, he chewed his piece for seven minutes, seven minutes, didn't leave a scratch on it. Yeah, it's really hard. I have had it, but I've not had the hard version, I've had the soft version. Oh, gosh.

Do they ease you in on that? Basically, this stuff, they've kind of dried it out for ages and ages and ages. I think they put it in like an animal skin or something and dry it out for ages. But if you have it early on, before they do all that, it's more like cottage cheese, like Georgian cheese. And it's the national dish of Bhutan. It's called Emadazzi. And that's the type that I had. And it's basically really, really, really, really hot chilies inside a bowl of this cheese.

And it is delicious. It's one of the best things I've ever had. and they don't usually let foreigners eat it because it's too spicy, that's what they say. Oh yeah, that's how they flatter every foreigner who walks in. Those British people can't handle this one. Very impressive. It was in Bhutan's Nando's

and they put a very nice little flag in the top of it. Did it have a lemon and a herb on it, is what I want to know. But chirpy as well is sometimes used these days as a dog treat because it's so chewy. I think even in... America, I don't know if you can buy it here, but in America you can buy this cheesy dog treat that they can just keep chewing on.

Right. I read a very spurious sentence about it, I thought, in one of the articles, which said, since it's rich in protein and fat, it makes a great substitute for vegetables. I don't know. That's why we're eating our greens.

Can I tell you about the fight club for cheese? No, you can't tell us about the fight club for cheese. That's the whole point. Oh, yeah. Oh, shit. Damn it. Yeah, it's the Cheesemonger International, which happens in the USA. And this was a description in the FT.

It involves 50 young cheesemongers pitting their skills against each other in a frenetic battle of curd nerdery. It happens in San Francisco. That does sound cool. It does sound fun, yeah. The charismatic founder, Adam Moscovitz, is called Mr. Moo,

and compares in a cow onesie. Ah, okay, a bit less cool now. cool. I wonder who's called him the charismatic founder. Sounds like something on his own website. Him and his onesie at the top. You know Barata, the more delicious version of mozzarella?

Yep. I didn't really know what that was, but it's... So it came about as a way of using up leftovers, and the way they did it, this is in the 1930s, it's in Apulia, it's the only place you can make it.

Cream would be scraped off the top of milk, and it was usually chucked away, and instead, they mixed it, with stretched mozzarella curds to make that really creamy, soupy inside. And then they blew mozzarella into a bubble. So they got mozzarella, and they blew like a bubble gum bubble, and then they stuffed this cream inside.

And this was just to preserve it. So this meant that when you had like a day's journey to get to market, then this apparently insulated it from the heat of the sun and meant that the cream and cheese didn't go off inside. So when you prod that open, but I just love that they blew into it, like a little, you know. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. Bubble.

Like a bubble Liquid soupy stuff from cheese This is an interesting new innovation That's happening around the world And I wonder if it's going to take off In Wisconsin They've been doing this

So they make a lot of cheese there And they have a lot of master cheese makers there as well So as a result of having a lot of cheese They have a lot of excess brine That they need to get rid of And what they do is they liquefy it And they pour it on the side of the roads During winter in place of salt

And it works way better than salt It's great for them because they're getting rid of a lot of waste and they're using it really efficiently. Does it not make the entire state smell of cheese? It stinks like shit. Yeah. I think a lot of Wisconsin smells of cheese already to get that. I could switch.

Oh, yeah, okay. But what's really interesting is, A, it's just a great way of just recycling the materials in a good way. But also, there's typical salt they would use on roads. That would freeze at six below zero, whereas cheese doesn't freeze until 21 below zero. So it's actually even just using. in the sense that the colder it gets, it's still useful.

But that's why you never get cheese ice cream, tragically, isn't it? Oh, really? Yeah, no. So, there was a big story, a big story in Germany last year, and that was that someone was living above a cheese shop, and she was very, very upset because her house smelled of cheese all the time. She said the smell of cheese was coming through her electrical sockets, and it went to court

because she said that they should just stop selling cheese all the time basically she was like putting signs up saying this place stinks of cheese I was a cheese fucking cheese shop but she was putting that he said that she had been hiding cheese behind a fuse box to frame him anyway so they found in favour

of the cheese seller but he's decided okay I want to be a good neighbour so I'm going to move away anyway but because of this story, no one will let him move into their shop anymore and he's stuck in the place and she's stuck living above him. Oh my God. Isn't that bad? Will you re-home Mr. Stinky cheese selling? We've got to wrap up in a set, guys. Anything before we do? St. Hildegard of Bingham, who was a friend of the podcast, mystic, from the 12th century. She always thought that all

cheese should be dried. She really liked her cheese. But she also thought that cheese was, like cheese making, was how children was made. So she wrote that at first the semen inside the woman is milky, then it coagulates, then it

becomes flesh, and then it becomes the body. So is cheese just halfway to becoming a human? Is that what she's saying? I guess it's what she's saying. Yeah. Wow. She was a wise woman, but she did get some things wrong, didn't she? Hildegar. No restaurant.

It was a disaster. But there was a guy called Tertrion, who was a father from the second and third century. He was like a priest, and he thought that the birth of Jesus was a bit like this. So Jesus had been born in a kind of cheesy way. So like, away, yeah. So like the Kurds... Away, away in a manger. So the Kurds like cheese.

The Kurds liked... A cheese, Jesus had grown into his shape. And then he kind of got kicked out of the church because of this crazy stuff that he was harsh. Well, he went to another sect called the Montanists and he kind of became really big in the Montanists and they decided that as well as bread and wine and Holy Communion, you could also have a little bit of cheese

with your wafer. Look, we need to wrap up, I'm afraid. Okay. 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 we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter. M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yeah, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there. Thank you so much Newcastle for being here tonight. We'll see you again now. Goodbye!