No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Glowing Ballet Dancer

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Live from Philadelphia, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss crash test moose, radioactive slippers, and the multi-presidential inventor of chewing gum. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a Weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Philadelphia. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the star of the film Candyman, where a character has bees coming out of his mouth, negotiated a $1,000 bonus for every time he got stung. He ended up with $23,000.

Wow. Yeah. How bad is it to be stung by a bee? Do you think you'd be deliberately angering the bees so that you got a few more stings and a bit more money? Or not? I would. Yeah?

But that says more about me than it does about it. Yeah. Although in the mouth, I imagine it would be a lot more painful than normal. So this is Candyman. This is Tony Todd. This is a kind of cult horror film And one of the inspirations was from the Johnny Carson show Where there was a man called Norman Gary

Who was a bee-based performer And he had an act Where he played the clarinet while covered in bees And people love this And he then became the bee wrangler The official bee person on Candyman And I think it's him and Tony Todd They're the only two people to have done all three Candyman films

Is the star and the bee guy Can you explain what Candyman is? Because I haven't seen it. It's, Dan, you watch it as a child. It's a horror film. It is a guy who has a hook, and if you say his name into a mirror five times,

he kills you. So in theory, you shouldn't do that, but people, they do. How many times have we said it so far on the stairs? But it was written by Clive Barker, the great horror writer. I think he did Hellraiser as well. And the bees that they use,

actually, there is a logic. It wasn't bees that were just ready and furious and waiting to sting. They made sure that the bees were only 12 hours old. So imagine you've just been born. And you're suddenly in a Hollywood movie. It's incredible. And so, yeah, so they went into the mouth. And the idea is that the stings wouldn't be sharp enough.

Even when he was stung, it wouldn't have the sting of a, say, 14-hour old bee. And once they'd done each take, the bees would be vacuumed up using a tiny bee vacuum Did you know that you can get a B vacuum cleaner? How's that different from a normal vacuum cleaner? I think it's just a little bit kinder on the bees, I would guess. It was a mini one. It was, yeah, it's different because it's a B size. Not like a bee would use it as a vacuum cleaner.

And they'd be sucked up and then return to their dressing room to await the next take. Wow. They didn't have their own dressing room. Do you mean a wooden box? I think, yeah. Oh, you've seen our dressing room tonight. It's full of bees.

but actually the main thing is with this bee bearding thing which is what the clarinetist did okay so what you do is you get a queen bee and you put it in a little cage by your face and then all of the other bees kind of come along because they like the queen bee so much and they hang around your face and the way that you get them off normally

is you spend maybe a couple of hours getting them on so you have a massive bee beard and then you just jump in the air and when you land all the bees just disappear no they don't disappear they just stop holding onto your face That's amazing. And does that not irritate them?

A little bit. You might get stung a few times, but then you walk backwards and someone's kind of firing smoke in your face so that they're getting a bit sleepy, a little bit drowsy, and then you can get away. That's so crafty.

Isn't it really? That's so weird, because Virginia Madden, who I think was the lead female character in the film said it used to take ages for their bee rang to so sweet the bees up. Well, yeah, because what they did with them is they kind of smeared their face in pheromone.

And so the bees just really did not want to leave them. She said that basically you have pheromones on them, so they're all in love with you. That's nice, isn't it? She was allergic to bees, I think. She was very slightly, wasn't she? The director said, no, you're not, you're just afraid. This guy, Norman Gary, the bee wrangler,

he has a Guinness World Record that is obviously bee-related, but it is for most bees in a mouth. Wow, really? Any guesses? I would say about 14. 14. 14? 14. 14. 65. 65. 65. Yeah. 66.

Okay. By an incredibly dubious method, Dan wins. But you're still out. He had 109 live bees in his mouth at one time. And you have to, you get a sponge soaked in sugar. And they like that, obviously. So they always seek that out. So that's, you can sort of. of train them to go where you want them to go

with that sponge. So then he put it in his mouth. You have to close your mouth for 10 seconds for the record to be valid. So they're all in there. And then you put a mesh cage up to your lips. You blow them all into the cage at the same time. Then you close the bag. And then you to do the count, you have to allow

them to escape one by one while you tell you them. Until then, you don't know if you've got the record because you just got a load of bees in your mouth. It's easier to count them out than it is to count them in, I guess. Yeah, I can see that. Hey, I was looking into horror movies generally because I realize I just don't know much about sort of like the behind the scenes of movies.

I found this really fun fact, which is The Omen, the movie The Omen, so Damien, it's now the classic name for, yeah. So he wasn't meant to be called Damien. Oh, no, really. Yeah, originally the screenwriter, David Seltzer, he wanted to name the Antichrist Domlin, D-O-M-L-I-N.

And the reason he wanted to call him Domlin is because he knew a Domlin who was a totally abominable. noxious brat, he said. It was the child of a friend of his. And it was his wife, the screenwriter's wife, who went, you can't fucking do this to Domlin? Immortalize him as the Antichrist in a movie.

They're not going to go, well, it might be another Domlin. Yeah, exactly. So it's Damien. But yeah, it should have been Domlin. Wow. But now all the Damians get that. It seems unfair. But at least there are all the Damians.

There's not just one Damien in the world. Who knows it's about him. They used to have a lot of horror movies within Sexin, like this one Candy Man with the Bees. With it, between 1966 and 1978, there were six major films featuring bees as the main horror in that film. Wow. One of them was called The Swarm, and the Sunday Times has said it's the worst film ever made. Richard Velt in the Wilmington Morning Star said, The Swarm may not be the worst movie ever made.

I'll have to see them all to be sure. but it's certainly as bad as any I've ever seen. All the actors involved in this fiasco should be ashamed. Apparently is absolutely awful. It's got Michael Kane in it. It cost them tons. It was really expensive. The budget was like 20 million.

It came out in the same year as Star Wars, which was made for a lot less money. And it was basically about a load of killer bees. Now, the American Bee Association decided to do a cease and desist to the swarm for defaming the American honeybee. and as a result at the end of the movie there's a disclaimer saying that the killer bees in the film there are no resemblance to real crop pollinating honeybees

that is so good some resemblance I was reading about the Swampaign too it does sound absolutely amazing it's two hours and 40 minutes long which is hefty Michael Kane said that he only did it because his mother needed a house to live in

it's quite sweet but also they kept finding all the way through the film because they filmed it with nearly a million bees. There was a big, huge cast, basically. Huge cut, what the credits at the end? B1, B2, B3. But the cast and the crew, they kept finding little yellow dots on their clothing

because of all the bees. And Michael Cain would eat that before eventually being informed that that was not honey he was eating, but that was just bee excrement that he'd casually been snacking on throughout the filming. Wow.

That's when you do need a bee with a little vacuum cleaner, don't you? the cleaner bee another horror film which involves sort of animals going nuts was the birds and that they had a bird trainer in the birds

and in fact he's a guy called Ray Berwick and he trained all birds in all films that you've seen with birds in for about 20 years so like the Birdman of Alcatrazas is another big one and he had such cool tricks so you know if you've seen the birds

but there are lots of scenes where the birds fly towards the lens of the camera and attack it and they put meat in the lenses of the camera so the birds would fly at it. But it was quite weird because there are no special effects in that. So they just had these birds attacking them all the time.

And the lead actor in it set, it was Rod Taylor who was the lead actor, who said there was one particular raven who absolutely hated him. And ravens do take against people. We've discussed this before. So he said he'd get up, go on to set every day. This raven would immediately turn up next to him

and go, and then start just biting him, manically. And every day on set he'd say, look, is Archie working today? Archie being the Raven and he'd always turn up and it was really sad because Tippy Hedron who was his co-star also

had a relationship with a raven but she had a really nice one so a raven befriended her loved her they couldn't actually use that raven in the film because it was too nice but imagine if you watch the movie and they're all attacking her but one of them is just kind of on her shoulder just leave them alone

leave him alone okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact My fact this week is that as well as using crash test dummies, Volvo tests its cars with a crash test moose. They have a crash test moose, which as far as I can tell is called mooses. So this is done in Sweden. They have a 790-pound moose surrogate,

and they make it from a stack of 114 rubber discs. And the idea is that it's sort of sitting in front of a car. So rather that it's not the moose inside the car as a crash. crash test dummy. It's sitting in a distance and they ram the car into it and it splays itself all over the car. So it's just to show the damage that's being done to the car. Actually, it's really important, isn't it? Because if you're driving along and there's an animal in the way, a lot of people say, really, the best thing to do is not to swerve out of the way because you might hit a tree or another car. You basically should keep going. But with a moose, you definitely shouldn't do that.

And the reason being on the shop, people here know, but basically they've got spindly legs and a massive big fuck-off body. And so you go into those legs and they just, like, matchsticks just go and then the body just hits you at the right height to go right into you. And it's really, really dangerous. There is amazing footage of the crash

tests happening and it's, yeah, the top of the car just gets taken out basically. But I think there are, yeah, did you say there are two of these? No, I thought there was one. Only two on the planet, but they are both in Sweden, basically. Well, you do need it in Sweden because that's where they have a lot of moose, of course. I'm not saying it's a bad idea.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's a very good idea. I'm surprised there isn't one in Canada, to be honest. Yeah, you think so. But the thing with moose in Sweden is there are so many moose in Sweden that if you're travelling across a highway, you will pass within a thousand feet of a moose every 23 seconds on average. Whoa. But it's just one moose and he's really fast.

Isn't that amazing, actually? Yeah. They do have really cool. So there's a place in rural Virginia called the, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and it's their testing centre and it's where they do a lot of crash testing for cars but they occasionally

will have sort of fun derbies between different cars well what do you mean? I've really oversold that basically I wasn't even that excited about it well for their 50th birthday they had a grudge match between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009

Malibu and what do you mean they just crash into each other? Yeah yeah it was to show how much safer cars are these days because the beautiful old 1950s car, the whole front just really crumples and the other one doesn't. Wow. It's a good news story in many ways. You have died in style, haven't you? In that nice old car?

I guess so. But they really had to persuade people that safety was a good idea for cars. Like, death in car accidents kept creeping up and up and up and up. And the car industry kept saying God, yeah, it's awful, but what are we going to do about it? And they really had to persuade

them. So Ford introduced a car in 1956, which had a steering wheel. where the steering wheel, if you hit something, the steering wheel column would deform on impact. This is a good thing because it means you don't get hit in the middle of the chest by a spike of metal, basically. The car was not popular.

Despite being sold with that, it was very much outsold by other cars which had very dangerous steering columns. Do you know the first crash test dummies were live humans? Really? So there was this, this happened a few times actually, but from like the 1950s they started testing like the crash impact on human body. and there was a researcher called Lawrence Patrick

and he basically volunteered himself and he made the point that actually that people have been talking about using inanimate objects or things like the dummies we have today but you can crash a dummy into a car as many times as you like and go oh look it's really dented here and its heads

exploded and his foot fell off but you don't actually know what that would mean if it was a live human you don't actually know if the dummy's dead but would this kill a human and so he So this guy from 1960 to 1975 was a human crash test dummy

and he used to do things like he took a 50 pound metal pendulum to the chest repeatedly and that was to test the steering column so he used to break ribs and things like that part of his job was hurling his knee repeatedly against a metal bar That's amazing

Yeah he took over 400 deceleration rides And that's where you sort of simulate the feeling of a crash And yeah it sounds horrendous And him and his students would lie down they'd have stuff like what's called a gravity impactor where you'd have to be lying down and you had kind of this metal rod suspended above your cheek

and then it would just jab you in the cheek would be like a robot jab you repeatedly and harder and harder in the cheek to see how much you could take and one did you say that you couldn't take it anymore they went well let's make cars that don't inflict more than that but let's bring it right up to that point

and he was that guy was Lawrence Patrick you say and it was one of his students called Harold Mertz who went on to develop the first or the standard crash test dummy, right? So it was based on all that kind of stuff. Oh wow, because he had such a traumatic experience here. Dummies are, they are getting older. We're all getting older, Andy.

Who are getting older? The dummies. They're being made to be older now. Oh, they're made older, as in when their first... Oh, right. Yeah. How does that work? As in the bones sound as strong.

They're a bit more fragile, basically, because people are getting older. Again, back to your point, James, we're all getting older. But drivers, drivers are getting, society's aging, so, you know, the crash test dummies which simulate, you know, a strapping young person in their prime are not a realistic way of simulating

what's happening if you're driving and you're 120 years old. No. And fatter as well, they're getting, aren't they? Because we're getting fatter. Or, and sort of more varied. There's this problem with dummies, and it happens with all technology where it says the standard dummy's been made for the average man. And so then we've proven the...

that's how strong this car is. And it's always a man and it's always Western man. And they finally clocked onto the fact that not everyone on earth is a Western man. And so obviously, like women tend to be lighter, different parts of their body, a bit weaker. And so now they finally started making dummies that are like very in size. But one of the things is they've had to get fatter. I think the average American has put on just over two stone in the last 20 years, 25 years. Okay.

So the dummies are about to follow suit. Yeah. 28 pounds 28 pounds well that's not much way to put on over 25 years you're actually keeping quite fit if that's all you put on in that period you don't

gradually put on more and more weight each year that's not how it's but that's not like a healthy world sorry as a man in this farties yes you do I've got something that you might like then there is a theory that crash test dummies explain the Roswell landings Jesus. What?

So this is a claim that was made about crash test dummies that people might have mistaken crash test dummies being used in parachute drops if you're testing a parachute and you want to see how hard, you know, someone hits the ground with that particular parachute. Yeah. So maybe the Air Force were collecting in crash test dummies and mistook them for alien bodies being collected in. Right.

Because that's where a lot of military testing might happen. And these were six foot long things and they were hairless and they were made of a weird rubbery substance. Yeah, yeah. So it's not a widely adhered to theory. No. It's obviously aliens, but it's still. Yeah.

I can't believe you thought that would excite me. What I wanted you to say is aliens are real. Speaking of theories and adhering, this is a chain of tenuous, very tenuous. Google has invented a new thing, which is human flypaper. And the idea is if you have a self-driving car, you put this fly paper on the front of your car. And one of the problems are one of the main ways

that people get injured if they get hit by cars, it's not even the first impact is where you get thrown and you end up hitting your head on the floor or stuff like that or you get run over and so they think that what might happen is you drive along, you hit pedestrian instead of throwing them over

they stick to the car oh wow and then you can slow down and then they can just unstick themselves there must be so many situations though where you're late to somewhere and you're like I'm sorry I'm just going to have to go and you're on passing cars on the highway

with a dude stuck to the front Oh, I found a great moose-related headline Because I was looking up some Moose facts as well This is a headline from South Dakota Is it Kilo land or Keloland? All right No one knows and I think it's fair to say No one here cares

Okay Let's say, Kilo Land news This is a genuine local news headline in South Dakota Moose moves from one field into another field. This is a real local news story. It goes on, be on alert driving near the Marion Road exit

on Interstate 90. A little after 5 Thursday night, a combine scared the moose. Clearly just one moose involved in this whole state. Scared the moose out of one field and into another. This is the same moose that's been hanging out

in the area north of southwestern Sioux Falls since Monday. So maybe there's a reason that nobody here has been to South Dakota is all I'm trying to say. Should we move on? Let's move on to our next bag. It is time. for fact number three, and that is

James. Okay, my fact this week is that Americans used to make their slippers radioactive so they could find them in the dark. Now, I must say probably not many Americans did this, but I think definitely some of them did. So there is an advert

online for this product which you could buy in the 1930s called Undark. Okay, and it's like a paint, and it contains radium, which is radio... Sorry, can we just clarify that it wasn't online the 1940s was it? You're absolutely right. It wasn't online in the 1930s.

It was a different medium back then and it's been put online now. Got it, just checking. I saw it online in the last few days. But yeah, I think it was in magazines and things like this and it was called Undark and it says, the advert says,

does Undark really contain Radiant? Most assuredly. So it's real radioactive stuff and the whole point of it is you would put it on things so you could find them in the dark. So they said that you were putting on watches and clocks, on push buttons,

on the buckles of your bedroom slippers, on house numbers, flashlights, compasses. Well, flashlights, I don't know why, because you can turn... Well, you need to find it in the dark. You need to find it in the dark. You're absolutely right. And basically, in the 1930s, they were putting radium on everything.

No, even though not realizing, perhaps, that it was killing people. Yeah. Yeah, they were obsessed. It was a craze. and like the newspapers constantly contained it I think George Bernard Shaw said the world has run raving mad on the subject of radium

and of course there was very famously the radium girls who were the people who worked in sort of 19th and the radium girls were there and they had to paint radium onto clocks to make their hands glow in the dark and they would lick the paint brushes and so they would swallow a little bit of radium

every single time they did that which was extremely bad for them it turned out. At worst, still, they would paint, like, little messages on the teeth for their boyfriends. Yeah. Like, their clothes would glow in the dark, so when they went out clubbing,

or whatever they did in the 1920s. They would always wear their work clothes because it meant they shined in the night clothes. They were, like, human glowsticks, dancing in the clubs. Wow. They were properly with glows. So it was a big scandal. By the 1920s, they started dying,

and people realized it was probably because of all this radium. And when they exumed their bodies years later, They were still glowing from all this radium. It was amazing. And they'd open their cupboards in the morning, yeah, and all their clothes are just glowing. Absolutely bizarre. And then, of course, because they were getting very sick,

there were lawsuits. And it was due to a guy called Leonard Grossman, who was a lawyer who worked pro bono for the whole time. And it was after eight appeals that they managed to get the companies to admit that they were wrong and managed to get something back. Although the last one, the last radium girl, died at the age of 107, not so long ago, only in the last 20 years, I think. But she quit within a week of working there

because she hated the taste of the paint. Yes. And she was counting herself lucky, age 107 in 2014. But they weren't to know, I suppose, and it must have been so exciting. And also uranium had the same thing when uraniums then became a thing, and this was this other very, very dangerous nuclear substance

people got very into. There was a time when hamburgers came with free shares in uranium mines, like a little happy meal. But it was a share in uranium. Really? Wow. There were some, right?

You know, is it pronounced boogie? You know, B-O-U-G-I-E? The sort of things... Bougie. Bougie. Sorry. There were radioactive boogies, which were wax-covered rods to be inserted into the penis. Sorry, I didn't know this word boogie until now.

Is that what it is? Bougie, yeah. Well, there's a modern meaning of boogie, which is a bit different to that. Is that what Bougie nights that movie's about? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It basically is about.

that, isn't it? Wow. Some people said if you fed your chickens, radium, then their eggs would incubate themselves. Wow. Not true. We have, weirdly, you mentioned the curies earlier. So Mary Curie.

She was in the news this year. She's in our book, our new book. Yeah, because someone, it was her birthday, and the cake arrived, surprise cake, and they opened it up, and on the cake was a drawing of Mary Curie. And she was confused because she had no idea who it was. It turns out that there was a mishearing over the phone.

What the parent had actually asked for was a cake of Mariah Carey. And as a result, she had this Nobel Prize winner on her cake with no idea who it was. All I want for Christmas is uranium. Marie Curie, Pierre, her husband, died. in a traffic accident and then years later she started dating again and she had an affair with a married man

which was very scandalous at the time and it led to this huge core celebrity there were either two or five armed duels over this affair that she had and the wife of the man she was having the affair with her name was Madame Longvin she had someone break into Curie's house and steal the love letters

all of this about Mary Curie Nobel Prize winning you know And the letters were stolen. And then they were leaked to the press. So suddenly this is a huge story. And her lover, Paul Longvin, had a duel between him and a journalist who'd insulted him. And there's a letter from Einstein to Marie Curie saying, don't worry about all this.

This is irrelevant. It's really cool. Because it was just before she won the Nobel Prize. So her Nobel Prize was slightly overshadowed by this huge story. Yeah, yeah. Three days before she was due to go and collect it, the story broke. And they were saying,

oh, maybe don't come and collect a Nobel Prize because this is scandalous. But then Einstein wrote her a letter saying, forget all that. You've got the award. Get the award. Wow.

Yeah. She used to be always called on to test the radium products. You know you were saying at the start, James, that a lot of products called themselves radioactive. But they didn't always have it in. Is that right?

Yeah, they very often just pretend and then put a bit of different glow in the dark stuff in it. She would be called to verify that stuff contained radium that it definitely was deadly, basically. It would be like, my child's toy says it's radioactive.

can you just check Mary Curie that it is? Do you be like, yep, definitely got lots of radium in it. Good luck to that kid. Wow. She actually fell on a little bit of hard times after a while and she didn't have enough radium to continue her research because radium was really, really expensive. There's not much of it in the ground, so it's really hard to get.

And so there was a fundraising campaign led by American women and Curie traveled to the United States and she was presented with one gram of radium by President Warren Harding in 1921. a single gram. Okay, and it doesn't sound like a lot of that, right? But it was cost them $100,000

for a single gram of radium. And that, at the time in 1921, was about the average budget of a Hollywood movie. Wow. So for one gram of radium, you could make a whole movie. That's so cool. Isn't that amazing? They did, because when they were trying to refine it in the foot,

like before they'd even discovered it, they were using a thing called pitch blend, which is a kind of uranium ore. it's got radium in it, but it needs to be refined a lot. They went through seven tons of pitch blend, and they ended up with one gram of radium after all of that refining. That's incredible. This is why there was a ballet dancer and choreographer called Loew Fuller,

who in 1904 created the radium dance, which was a really famous dance at the time, and she wanted all the ballerinas to be wearing head-to-to-to-costumes made entirely of radio. And she was sort of mates with Mary Curie, and she wrote to her and said, can you make me a bunch of ballerina's dresses made entirely of radium? And thank God, Mary Hiri said, I'd absolutely love to.

It sounds like a great idea, but it's just too expensive. And so she had to make do with a slightly less glow in the dark other material, and the ballerinas lived to see another day. Have you heard of magic radium massage? No.

This was a 30s product, which is curious, because if the radium girls were dying at the 1920s, then you would think... Aren't they still used a lot of radium until 40s and 50s, I think? Well, the magic radium massage, this ointment, when

massaged into the sex parts. This is the advert, acts as a healthy tonic and stimulant, tending to give firmness and strength to the organs. It is especially effective for improving the circulation in the genital organs when they feel cold, clammy and lifeless. That is useful.

If you need to get up to go to the toilet in the night, you just follow your cut. Where did I leave that penis? Yeah. It's time to move on. to our final fact of the show, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that the man who introduced chewing gum to the world had already been President of Mexico 11 times.

It's crazy. It's a very strange career trajectory. This is probably the most famous, maybe the most famous of Mexican ever, General Santa Anna, in the 19th century. He was president constantly. He's sort of hated in three, different, very specific places. So the US hate him, the Mexicans hate him, and Texans hate him. And I know Texas is part of the US, but some people say that they don't, they pretend they aren't.

But yeah, he's, so he was at the Battle of Alamo, and he was disgraced there because he was very, very brutal. And then that was what led to the cry, sort of remember the Alamo, which led to him, him and his troops being defeated at Jacinta later. But anyway, he had lots of sort of military defeats, and somehow they kept on making him president again. kept on being exiled from the country. And when he was finally exiled from Mexico permanently in 1869, he went to New Jersey and all he brought with him... That's not the joke.

The joke is not... That's what you do when you hit rock bottom. Wow, you can just say New Jersey in America and you all have. It's good to know. So he went to New Jersey and he brought with him as insurance a ton of this chickle gum

which they all chewed in Mexico and the bloke he was living with said oh what's that gum? Can I try and make something out of it? I'm going to try and sell it. And he tried to make sort of tires out of it and toys out of it and masks and Wellington boots. None of it stuck, as it were.

And so eventually he saw Santa Ana chewing it one day. And so he thought, okay, I'll try and sell it to people and tell them to chew on it. And they loved it. And their chewing gum was born, or popularized at least, in the West. He was quite amazing, wasn't he, Santa Ana? So after the independence from Spain in 1821, basically a whole country just kept having these coups and counter coups and whatever.

And he just kept reinventing himself to whoever was taking over. He said, oh, I'm with these guys. And then they would make him president. So at one stage, he started off as conservative and then he became liberal. Then he became a Democrat. And then he became a dictator. And all those times, each time he became the president. Wow.

And by way of comparison, Donald Trump started off as a Republican. became a member of the Independence Party then was a Democrat and then was a Republican again hasn't been a dictator yet but yeah he's like he just kept reinventing himself

so he could get the power it's really amazing isn't it interesting he didn't go to either of his own weddings he couldn't be bothered to turn up basically or he was travelling or busy or whatever so he just deputized someone by can I just say I mean you are about to get married

certainly am. It doesn't work that way anymore. So he married twice, mostly for, we think for money both times, because the women he was marrying had very large estates, and he was in need of cash. So the first wedding he had, he empowered his father-in-law to be as his proxy.

So basically, her dad would walk her up the aisle. He gave her away to himself. Basically, yeah. Wow. Do we know if he sort of, jump round the other side of her at the crucial moment. Just put a different hat on that's something. He actually lost Texas to the US,

possibly because he was having sex and a tent. Really? So this is the tale is that at the Battle of Jacinto, he was distracted by a Texan woman, so it was a ploy on her part. She's sort of this folk hero. And this was reported at the time by an English journalist. And apparently this Texan woman snuck into his tent

and seduced him and shagged away. And then he lost the battle. he was in the tent, not in charge of his troops, and then had to leg it. How long was that sex session that he lost? The battle famously only took 18 minutes. Did it? That's not too bad, in my house.

My wife will be going, you hear that? 18 minutes. He can do 18 minutes. Now, you can always use a proxy if you have to. Sorry, it's okay, honey. Your dad's on his way over. Did he still have his leg? at the time? That happened.

He did have his original legs at that time. Because he... One of the other things he was famous for was losing a leg in a conflict called the Pastry War which was against French forces who had invaded Mexico. I think that's why it's called that. So he was wounded and he had his leg amputated

and then four years later as a kind of political move, he had it disinterred and he held a state funeral for his leg so he got to attend and it was a really fancy funeral so the leg got taken to the capital in a coach and there was a beautiful monument constructed and there was cannon fire and poems were read and then the leg was eventually re-buried yeah how should is that for his wife that he shows up to a funeral for his leg but not to his own wedding it's fair but then on the bright side for her two years after he'd done that it was exhumed again by his opponents and dragged through the streets with people chanting death to the cripple so yeah he was obsessed with this leg he used to um Before he'd even done the big state funeral,

he used to carry it around waving it above him in parades. Really? He even, he gave it two funerals. He gave it a small funeral on his little hacienda before the big one. When it first got lost, he was always reminding people, like one of these really annoying, like you couldn't, he'd always let it drop into conversation. But the pastry war, do you know why it was called that specifically?

No, I don't. It is related to the French thing, but it's specifically because there was one French pastry cafe in Mexico and it was owed a big debt by the government and it wasn't being paid and so this pastry chef called the French government said Mexico owes me all this money it's not paying and so it got a bit out of hand and war happened

Oh man because of that the French ended up really overreacting so they did you write them up and said they owe me an arm and a leg and they negotiated down to half of that you know you can visit his leg in Illinois well his fake leg it's in a museum in Illinois

and it's there's like a chicken dinner there as well because supposedly he was eating chicken at the time so it sort of like sets the scene so when you say his fake leg you mean there's prosthesis yeah yeah exactly someone galloped off away when he wasn't looking took his leg and it's now in Illinois it's been there for years yes so this was another fight

this is the later battle that he actually lost, wasn't it? Yeah. When he had the prosthetic leg and as you say, he was eating a chicken dinner in his tent and the battle was lost again.

He really lingered over it. He spent about 20 minutes eating the chicken dinner, disaster. This guy needs to stay out of tents. I always think it's really weird though because in that thing where the soldiers came along and they took his leg and they also took $18,000

and the chicken dinner, but everyone that always talks about the chicken dinner. It's so weird. And then he got another leg, and he got a peg leg. So just a piece of wood for a prosthesis. And then that got stolen as well. It got stolen and was reportedly later used by Lieutenant Abner Doubleday as a baseball bat. Wow.

Hey, so this fact was also about the fact that he introduced chewing gum to the world. Can I mention a couple of chewing gum things I found? So chewing gum, obviously we had chewing gum. That was around for a while. And then bubble gum arrived. And bubble gum was invented. in Philadelphia. Yeah.

How cool is that? Did you guys know that? Probably, you didn't know that. Okay, so bubble gum was invented here. It was by a guy called Frank H. Fleer, although he didn't invent bubble gum itself. So double bubble was the first ever bubble gum that came out. You guys, yeah.

There was no bubble before. No, chewing gum was just chewed, and then he was like, let's take it big. But he went straight to double bubble. There's no single bubble chewing gum. Oh, I see. Well, no, no, there was a prototype, which didn't worry. Yeah. So he's not the inventor of double bubble. He is the inventor of its prototype, blibber blubber. Stop. Absolutely true. Blibber blubber was the original bubble gum that he invented. But unfortunately, it didn't quite work out. So the problem was, is when you blew the bubble...

No one could say it for a start. Blubber blubber. Blubber. Blubber. So, yeah, so Frank H. Fleer. So the problem was, is that you would blow the bubble. It would pop and it would go all over your face. But the stickiness of it was... too much that you needed a solvent to actually take it off your face. So when he was marketing it initially it was with this little product that would make sure that would come off. So it didn't work out. Never sold, never made it actually to shops.

But instead, then someone who's working for him said, let's take it differently and that's how we have double bubble. Wow. Yeah. So when was that? This was 1906 that he toasted this. Yeah. Because there was one other claimant to the invention of bubble gum who is Waldo Seaman who...

Wow. What did he call his? And it didn't go down very well. With chewing gum, make sure you never swallow. That's how I'm saying. So Mr. Seaman was... Waldo Seaman. Working for a tire company.

Where's Waldo? Which Waldo? That's a much more difficult and more. adult version of the books, isn't it? He's easier to spot, though. You turn the lights off, but you shine and talk. It glows in the dark. That's the best UV-Seeman,

Wes Wally bubblegum joke that's ever been made. That's the only one. No. Top ten. Anyway, he was a very serious guy who wanted to be taken seriously. His business was in making plastics and rubber and polymers, and he worked for a tire company. And so when he made this,

thing that blew bubbles. The tire company thought, well, that's a huge defect. We don't want tires that are bubbles. So stop making it. And so he had to stop making it. But interestingly, did you know that tire manufacturers, Goodyear tire and rubber, for instance, are the biggest provider of the rubber core of chewing gum today. Is it? Because it's not made out of that chickly stuff anymore. It's made out of like petrochemicals, basically chewing gum. Yeah, essentially. Yeah. It's like made out of kind of rubber in the middle. That's amazing. So actually when like cars drive over the road they should be able to just pick up the chewing gum

and just become part of the time. Eventually you just have a massively high car. The ancient Greeks had chewing gum, a kind of chewing gum, yeah. So as you say, it was popularized when it became nice, but the ancient Greeks were going around chewing mastic gum sometimes. That was a thing. And it was really horrible back in the old days

because it used to be made with paraffin. so it's very bitter and very brittle and unwholesome The one thing that you might do if you had some paraffin chewing gum Is you'd have a plate of sugar next to you And you'd just have to repeatedly take it out of your mouth Dip it in the sugar and put it back in Oh nice Yeah

That sounds all right No not not not I've explained it wrong We're going to have to move on in a second One more thing about chewing gum The University of Copenhagen is currently working on fertility chewing gum So... Is this another Waldo Seaman invention? That's the second best

Waldo Seaman bubble gum based. No, it's for women to chew so that you know where you are in your menstrual cycle. So if you chew it, it reacts with the, I guess, the enzymes in your saliva and it turns a particular color, depending on how far along you are and whether you're in the perfect time to conceive.

Then do you have to keep pulling it out of your mouth and looking at it and then putting it back in again? I think there's a... Well, you have to take it out at least once, yeah. But that is cool. If it happens, that's going to be great. In 1904, they had a big craze in America of chewing gum parties.

Cool. And the idea of what you would do there is each guest would come along with a big pack of chewing gum, actually lots of packs. And then everyone would sit around and chew their chewing gum until it was soft. And then they put it on a plate, and they would sculpt it into things.

Cool. And that was the game. That's kind of fun. Well, this audience doesn't seem to think it's much fun. Wow. Philadelphia is a bit too good for that, apparently. Okay, let's wrap up. Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast. We can be found on our Twitter account. So I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter.

Yep. And James. At James Harkin. And Chisinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to a group account, which is at No Such Thing. You can go to a website, no such thing as a fish.com.

You have everything up there. There's future tour dates. There's all of our previous episodes. There's linked to things like our book. And last thing to say is, guys, thank you so much. That was so much fun. We'll see you again. Good night.

Thank you.