No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Hedgehog Circus

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Happy New Year! Enjoy a  bumper compilation of deleted bits from 2019 - all the facts, flubs and terrible terrible puns that somehow didn't make the edit. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now, before we start this week's show, Merry Christmas, I hope you've had a great Christmas. When I edit every single week, there's sometimes bits that are just, don't quite fit in with the rest of the show. But maybe they're just really interesting, maybe they're really funny and they don't fit in. Maybe it's just one incredible joke about hedgehogs that was just so good, I thought it would detract from the entire rest of the show if I left it in. And so I took it out. I take all those bits. I snuffle them away like a hedgehog. does with nuts or whatever it is that hedgehogs eat. And then at the end of the year, I put them all together for the best-of show. And this one is a real bumper special.

It's over an hour. I really hope you enjoy it. It's us just messing around. And we'll see you in the new year with one of our normal shows. But in the meantime, enjoy this one. And happy new year. Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. What do?

I don't know if I'm doing it too. I'm just trying to put you up. Oh, okay, cool. No, sometimes because I think you're like, it's the volume thing. So I'm like, oh shit, should I just start again? No, no, it was just being a dick. Cool. All right.

What? Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, as in the first Siamese twins to be written about in the West. They were really interesting. So they had a system where they were both married and they would spend three nights each with each wife. And their great, great granddaughter was the first, was the youngest ever recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for music. But yeah, how weird is that? 2013. Do you know her name, Bernie Chance?

Yeah, she's called Caroline Shaw. Do you know her? Never heard of it. Oh, okay. She's done work with Kanye West. Has she? Do you know him? Never heard of him.

But the thing that tore Chang and Enga part is that Chang developed a drinking problem quite late in life, and suddenly... Oh, no! But wait, hang on, if you develop a drinking problem, surely your Siamese twin also develops a drinking problem. They were joined at the chest,

so I think they had different livers. Okay. But it's still quite annoying if you're constantly attached to a drunk. Yeah, tell me about it. We haven't been torring for a while, yeah. There's one thing that sunny days are good for. Well, actually, there's loads of stuff. Going for a nice swim, a sunbathe,

but mostly asking someone out. So it's good to ask someone out on a date. And this is a French study, obviously, and this French study found one attractive man. and they sent him round to ask out strangers. How did they find one of those in France? They had to recruit one from Scotland. Sorry, Scotland.

Looking forward to Aberdeen next week? I don't mean that. So yeah, they recruited this attractive French man and made him ask out lots of strangers on the street. And they found a huge difference. So when it was sunny, 22.4% gave him a positive response. And when it was cloudy, so not rainy, just cloudy, then 13.9% did.

That is quite a big difference. But they did warn that it's not necessarily that, you know, we feel more prone to say yes on sunny days. It might be that your flirting skills improve in the sunshine. It could be also that he was very bad herd-eye. And when it rains, it kind of washes down his face. And everyone's like, no, I'm not going to come out with you. You just got ink color over your face.

It's not raining. Maybe when it's cloudy. It's cloudy. We don't know about this guy because maybe when it's cloudy, he insists all wearing his Donald Duck-shaped raincoat. What's wrong with his wet gut? Donald Duck actually is a very sexy character. Are you sure he's the right guy for this study?

I don't see him making a difference. Trousers off, he's ready to go. In France, there's been robots that have been designed to help out with any kind of fights that might happen between, let's say, football teams who happen to be watching the match. in the same area. So in this case, there was a match going on between Russia and England. And there was a robot put in place called Allentim, or Alantim, and his job, the robot's job, was to basically stop the fight. But not only that, they can see by using data whether or not it thinks a fight is about to break out. So it can alert the police if it thinks that something is going to go wrong. Unfortunately, before it could do any of its stuff at this match,

someone beat it with a baseball bat. Yeah, and they couldn't revive it. So that was Alantam's career. Because Alantam's had a rough time. Is that the same instant that there's a video of on YouTube, which is where people are, it was in Russia and in Moscow, in fact, and there's a home video of people who are driving in their car, normal people got a video,

and they see someone drive out in front of them in a side car, with a side car. So on a bite with a sidecar, and in the sidecar is a robot. So there's some chuckling in the car that we're in as the viewer, because they're like, what the fuck is that robot doing? and then they see that robot get cut up by another car and then both disappear around a corner and then you as the viewer

so these guys in the car with their home video follow it round that corner and at that point the bike with the side car has disappeared and Alam Tim slash Alan Tim will never know he's dead now spoiler it's just standing by the side of the road and the guy who's cut him up gets out of his car

pulls the baseball bat from his passenger seat goes up to him and knocks his head off Oh, I've not seen the footage, yeah. So is this, like... It could be, I've... It wasn't at a football match. No, I should quickly say this was in Moscow. I said it was in France.

This was in Moscow, and it was during the 2016 matches of the World Cup. But what happened to Alantam is they set up the first ever robot cemetery to bury him in. Yeah. Yeah, it was seen as like, don't do this to robots. Have you seen it? No, I've not seen anything, apparently. This robot cemetery, well, I look at these pages that I click on. I don't just close my eyes and hope for the best.

Right, this cemetery is a piece of shit. If it's made to give robots a proper burial, it says it was spired by the murder of a lantern. And it's called a cemetery. If you look it up, it's a cardboard box full of parts of robot. It's in the lobby area of some kind of random conference building. And she said, the person who said it up said, it's great, the cemetery's been really popular.

We're already getting lots of requests from people to bring in their own dead tech. a red toy car and some batteries. Wow. It's a plastic bag. If you're a hedgehog who's running a circus, don't say roll up, roll up. That one's going to come. I'm just going to stand that.

Really boring circus. There was another Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the famous one, who Kingsley Amos said was one of the best English novelists born in this century, in the 20th century. and she was the problem with her obviously she had the same name as this extremely famous elizabeth taylor and when her book mrs lipping coat came out in 1945 it was almost the same time as national velvet came out for elizabeth taylor the actress and then they interviewed her towards the end of her life and she said i've had a rather uneventful life thank god but sometimes the more eventful world intrudes into my life i get fan letters to the other Elizabeth Taylor.

Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one to shake them. But I have not got a bikini. It's actually slightly insulting from your husband and say, you know how you could really repel these people is actually send that photo, love. I've got a fact about people who are interested in Nazi memorabilia. So there is one guy who, he does just seem to be an obsessive collector,

but the Guardian profiled him a few years ago. He's called Kevin Weakcroft. And he grew up a multi-millionaire. He's the out-to-a-hue fortune. And he has the world's largest collection of Nazi memorabilia. He sleeps in Hitler's old bed, which he says he has changed the mattress. Does he use a Lisa mattress? I do.

That's the last time they asked us. He owns 88 tanks, which is more than the Danish and Belgian Army. combined. Wow. Yeah. Jesus. So they're quaking in their boots, the idea he might invade? Yeah, I mean it's more the historical pieces, obviously, and they wouldn't be much good today for invading anywhere.

Okay. It is weird, isn't it, collecting Nazi memorabilia? You've got to ask them questions, I think. They did ask him a lot of questions. They're doing the right thing. But they concluded he was just, you know, he was a collector rather than a Nazi. If you ask some questions and people answer them,

That's absolutely fine. I'm just saying you've got to ask the questions. There are lots of things he could collect, though. Why did he choose that? Did they ask that question? I can't remember what his answer was, but I'm sure it was a good one. Which I really liked the Nantes and wish they were back. I was reading that, so I was looking into just general shrimp, like eating shrimp particularly, because they're eating it on the space station. Did you know that there are shrimp recipes available from the rapper Coolio. I did not know that.

Yeah. He released a cookbook a few years back called How to Become a Kitchen Pimp. And it's got, I mean, there's great chapters, appetizers for that ass, salad eating bitches,

um, vegetarians, question mark. Okay. Whatever. That's... And then he has a whole chapter for shrimps, which is called It's Hard Out Here for a Shrimp, which is a, some will know, is a famous song, It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp.

Yeah, so, and there's videos of people trying out his recipes, and he doesn't come across great with his choices of what to do. But yeah, but if anyone needs a Culeo shrimp recipe, yeah, it's there. It's what a lot of people here came for tonight, I think. So hedgehogs, there's a hedgehog Olympic Games, which is from, I found this up from a book called A Prickly Affair, which is by a guy who, who's really into hedgehogs,

but he was talking, I think they're in America somewhere and he was saying one of the competitors is a guy called Zugg Standing Bear, who was one of Gerald Ford's bodyguards, and he's now a champion, and he now has a champion hog called Buttercup, which he competes at the Olympic Games.

And he reported of another one who's a woman called Dawn Rowbell, who says that she communicates telepathically with her hedgehogs. That's got to be cheating, isn't it? Yeah. You can't do that. Is it in the Human Olympic rules

that you can't, communicate telepathically. No telepathy is, yeah. Because what would you say as well? Throw the javelin really far. Yeah, yeah. Faster you're saying, faster. You can't cheat in the Olympics. Well, actually, we have learned over the years that you definitely can't. You can't cheat by whispering in someone's ear in the Olympics. But she does say that her hedgehogs call themselves star children. They call themselves that. Yeah, they refer to themselves. Oh, I see. Well, telepathically. Yeah. Sorry, what are the events at the Headhrog Olympic Games? I think sort of racing and hopping and jumping.

I actually don't, so I didn't read in this article he didn't detail what the events were. Okay. Because they run quite fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not as fast as humans. No, you could beat a hedgehog.

Yeah. That's why the interhuman and hedgehog Olympics have never taken up. But actually, what people don't know is that hedgehogs are allowed to take part in the human Olympics. But they've just never qualified. Yeah. Never reached a qualified type. I found just a couple of animal smells. So male silkworm moths,

they can sense a single molecule of female sex hormone from a mile away. I'd never understand what they mean. I know, I don't get that. Because presumably you need the molecule to get into your nose before you sense it. Yeah. And so how can it be a mile away? I've just never understood that.

It's the same with sharks. Sharks and blood. Yeah. I just don't get it. Yeah. I know. That's the thing. All the things I read about animal.

smelling like albatross can smell fish from the air. That makes a lot of sense though because that's the scent molecules that are the problem. So the scent molecules are coming off the fish, that's fine. Then it goes through the air and then up to the albatross's nose. But if you're smelling a molecule, that's the thing that causes you to smell. It's a mile away. I think it's a distance though with the albatross is what is amazing scientists because the molecules break up with whatever direction the wind is blowing in.

It is incredible. But at least we understand how it's possible. I guess it must be that the molecule is entering the, was it a, moth, did you say? Yeah. It must be that they can, when a molecule released by a female, a mile away gets in their nose, they can tell the direction it's come from, or it retains

its potency, or they can still detect it even though it's travelled a mile. Yeah. It must be what it is. It must be something like that. You can't sound a molecule from a mile away from the molecule. That's true. But that's the thing, it's like, when you're in the sea and you cut your finger, right? And there's a tiny little blood goes in the sea. Then supposedly, Jaws is

able to tell it's there from like 10 miles away, right? That's the whole point of it. Yeah. But surely he has to wait for the blood to get to him. Which will take ages, right? If it's travelling through water. Well, currents, though. Currents happen.

Yeah. There are things. It's like me looking at that wall on the other side of the room and saying, I can feel that from here. And it just doesn't, in order to feel it. It has to come to you. Absolutely. You have to go to it. Exactly.

We have to meet. I mean, Anna, that was a stunningly vivid example of that wall on the other side of the room. Where do you get these ideas from? I'm a creative kind of guy. Did you know the ISS is battery powered? I didn't know that. Is it AA or AAA? There are actually no A's at all.

They are the size of fridges, the batteries on the ISS, but sometimes they have to change the batteries. How do you do that? You take these fridges out, you rub them a few times in your hands, and then you put them back in again. So there are 48 batteries, and it's for when the station's in shadow, because there are big solar sales for when it's in sunlight

but these are nickel hydrogen batteries and they are slowly being swapped over for new kinds of batteries which are run on lithium so they all have to be changed and you get two astronauts out there who have to take a fridge out of position carry it back to the right place and then put the new one in

which is it really is and they have to strap them to a palette they weigh about 200 kilos but obviously in space you don't you don't feel that however that is stressful And also, if you slightly dent the back of it, the connection bit, it won't fit in. And then you're absolutely stuffed. And they're trained, obviously, and taught about it.

But a lot of them change the batteries without having practiced it on Earth. Yeah, having practiced that kind of thing. Yeah. Gone work in MFI for a weekend. Moving fringes around. I remember reading earlier this year that there are massive batteries all around the British countryside, which we use whenever our electricity goes off. Do you remember there was a massive batteries?

power cut when two things got hit at the same time and loads of people went off. Apparently what happens then is these batteries kick in and they're just kind of hanging around there's like about 50 of them, absolutely massive batteries. That's so cool. Isn't it cool? I didn't really read any more about them so I can't really tell you anything. It's annoying because the way you're painting it, I'm now sort of imagining going on a row or a walk and finding a giant juror cell. Funny battery just standing up in a field. That's what I imagine it is. Let's assume it's that.

I always say this is not a fact. It was just a thought I had today, which is what happens to rain when it rains on a cloud? Oh. So you get higher clouds and lower clouds. Does it get collected by the lower cloud like a sponge or does it go through the cloud? Like it darts through and just passes through the... Some of it might become the cloud and some of it might go down through the cloud. It's such a good question. It's a good question. Clouds are not like sponges, I should say. No, but I guess because it's water, I just didn't know if it just sort of collected like a, like sky puddles, basically. It probably depends. Yeah. It probably depends how big the droplets are.

Because clouds are very small droplets. By the time it's big enough to fall as a rain drop, that's really big. It's gotten quite heavy. So actually, yeah, that's right. So it will be too big. If it's big enough to be falling, it'll be too big to be staying as a cloud. And it also, yeah. And it would never rain on a cloud anyway, would it? It would only have a snow on a cloud? No, it isn't basically all, doesn't all rain start out of snow? Yeah. No. It's always, if it's raining outside, it's all snow, which happens to have melted on the way down. You're kidding.

It's always snowing if you look at it that way. Yeah, that's very cool. Didn't know that. Just one more actual effect of climate change as it's happening is that some clouds may go extinct. What? Yeah, this is how big the effect we're having. So stratocumulus cloud decks, they're the very low clouds, which reflect a lot of solar radiation back into space. And if levels of carbon dioxide, I'd go up my...

much more, this might suppress the actual formation of these clouds. So you won't get them anymore. Oh, no. We can no longer make hilarious animal shapes in our imaginations out of clouds in the sky. We all still have clouds. It's just this one particular, it's not going to be a sunny day every single day. But what if this one particular cloud is the only one that ever made those shapes? Oh, absolutely right.

It could be that. It could be the animal shape cloud. Anna Tysinski really bringing home the eco-crisis that we're in at the moment. You're welcome, Extinction Rebellion. Say it loud and say it. cloud. I went on to the to the, um, a website, CNN's most secretive jobs. And they had the usual things like spies and restaurant reviewers.

Um, another one is award show auditor. Oh. Apparently you have to be very secretive with that. What's, um, it's for results. So you don't tell, you know, you don't screw up and give La La Land the right. Um, envelope. So, um, what you need is a bachelor's degree in an accounting. or related field and experience in accounting or auditing.

That's all it says you need. And I've got both those things. He just told us. Yeah. Oh, fun. Apart from that, you're doing so well. Damn it. That's awesome.

Hey, how about a made-up language? Yes, please. How about Dothraki? Oh, yeah. So all languages are made up. Oh, here he goes again. All conspiracy theorist. They are at some point.

That's fair enough. Sorry. recently made up language made up language yeah um so obviously so many people have heard it being spoken because of game of the friends you know being big big this year so tens of millions of people have been hearing it is more than welsh irish gaelic and scots galic combined but i did not know the language is full of little easter eggs so um not many people speak it actually speak it one of them is the inventor david peterson who's really he sort of makes languages for Hollywood as his job.

Oh, wow, cool. And obviously there are not many jobs in the world. There are not many jobs in that industry because it's such a rare thing to be commissioned to make a full language. So he has a little fun with it. So the Dothraki word for Eagle is Culver, and that is based on Stephen Colbert, for reasons I didn't get to the bottom of. Yeah. And there are words based on his wife, not Colbert's wife.

David Peterson, the inventor. The word for very attractive, for instance. so David Peterson's wife is called Erin so in Dothraki Erin means kind or Erinac means kind one Lucky's not fucking bitch Because he's really Renting through these languages

I think I read and I So I hope this is right But I believe as well that he's a Monty Python fan And so there's points when there's armies coming towards Some like a scene in in Game of Thrones where they're yelling at people coming towards them. He takes the words that were used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when they're yelling, you are French, Cal, whatever those words are.

I can't remember what they are. But yeah, it's Monty Python dialogue translated into Dothraki used, yeah. So I've got a fact about modern trains, which is about the Queen, who, as we know, has the Royal Train. So when she's traveling on the Royal Train and when she's been traveling overnight, there's a special instruction that gets given out and that is that the Queen has a bath at 7.30 in the morning

so if the train is going then the driver is ordered to avoid any bumpy bits of tracks so that her bath doesn't slosh around too much bumpy tracks first of all do we have bumpy tracks or are they all flat? I think you get bumpy bits don't you? You get corners. You don't get corners.

Well like you do not corner like round bits but secondly how do you avoid the bumpy bits. You can't swerve in a train. You get lifted off onto a boat. Then you gauge and then it comes back down again. I think the Queen's freedom of movement is just severely limited as to where she can go. She can only go to the flat bits. She can only get to the flat bits. Queen's going all directions. It's very good point. That's weird knowing when the Queen has a bath. I think you'd be freaked out as the train driver. Every morning at 7.30 you'd think, oh, she's bathing now. Don't make

any mistakes. She's naked 10 yards from me. It's a weird thought. It's a big train. I don't I don't think it's only 10 metres. She's like in the cab, in the tub. He puts the bath next to the driving seat. More coal. He's watching the vehicle back. One more thing about Lurol, which is more just a rant than a fact. Colored Lurol disappeared off the face of the earth, right?

Uh-huh. So in... I think you can still buy it. You can still buy it. In 2004, it was 30% of Lurol that was sold. Now it's under 10%. And I was reading an article in The Telegraph about why this has happened about how angry people are about it

because people used to buy their loo roll to match their decor, right? And now they did. They did. That was a thing. There was someone who wrote into the telegraph saying, why is it impossible now to buy blue lavatory rolls? Unless we find some soon,

I will be forced to redecorate my bathroom. There was another one, correspondent in bletchingly, who described a priest friend who used to change the hue of his loo rolls to match the liturgical seasons. green for Trinity, purple for Lent and Advent and pink for saints days. Well, there's a lot of Saints days, isn't there?

Yeah, he was doing a lot of blue roll changing. I suppose the other thing is, like, you don't really get coloured sinks and stuff like that, do you? Like, in the 70s and stuff, you'd get avocado sink. Yes, yeah. In fact, that was the first time I knew the word avocado. Because we didn't have avocados when I was growing up. You didn't really get them in the 70s and 80s. But we use the word to describe the color of people's toilets.

Yes. So when people started eating them. I was so confused. You break your teeth. I have one more drink that William of Orange drank. So I'm talking to William of Orange, who was married to Mary. So he was the King of England. There's a few other ones, but this is that one.

He drank Benedictian Posit, which was a mixture of warm milk, eggs, cream, and ale. with nutmeg and custard on top. And he drank this on his wedding day because it was what everyone who was rich and posh used to drink on their wedding day. And the priest would come along, he would bless them, and then they would give them this benediction posse.

And people wouldn't leave until they'd drunk it. Charles I second waited until the bride and bridegroom had finished off their bowl of posse, and then drew the bed curtains himself on the day of their wedding. Oh, really? So I read that he stayed in the room shouting encouragement. during the there are lots of stories

saying he was shouting during the consummation but we've ascertained before that consummation doesn't mean they're actually having sex partly I mean the bribe was only 15

at the time but yeah that's the story so we think Charles might have been there because if he'd drawn the curtain he could have stayed on the outside

shouting encouragement couldn't he yeah that's true you know when you were younger and you just were a word that's the story

going to be here we go you know when you're 15 and you marry the king of England someone draws the curtain but they still give you instructions. You know, when you go to the loo

when you're a kid and you're just learning to go to the loo on your own, and your mum stands on the other side of the door and she's like, you know, have you wiped your bottom? Maybe, so it's sort of like that, you pull the curtain, but you're still outside saying, you know, put it there. Put it there. No, higher, higher. No,

not that high, no, lower, that's the nostril. Split the difference. There's another old Scottish one, which is, if you're fishing and you catch a boot, that can go either way for you. If it's a left boot, that's bad luck. You're in serious trouble. Fish are not going to come to you. If you get a right boot, you're in much luck and you have to nail it to your mass to say, look at my right boot, come fish. And that's... In both instances, you're in a cartoon. And in neither

instance, have you caught a fish, which presumably is the aim. Yes, but your boot business back home is going. You've caught a soul. Yeah. I was quickly just on rudeness, I was reading Danny Wallace's book about rudeness which is called Fuck You Very Much. The surprising truth about why people

are so rude. And he did some of his own research and he asked what people had done because like Anna was saying, if people are rude to you, you automatically are rude back to them. It's a weird kind of contagion thing. He was asking people what they had done when someone had been rude to them. And answers included, I rubbed fries on their windshield. I turned all their possessions

upside down. I let a dog lick a sausage. I was serving them. And I slept with their partner. That's rude. Was that all the same person? And that had a very bad day. I was looking at floors, some floors. So the world's flattest floor is, owned by NASA. It's in Huntsville, Alabama, and it's made of this kind of resin. And it's a bit like, do you know, these air hockey tables? So there's a cushion of air on it. And whenever, what they do is they kind of get like a sofa on it or anything, they can do it with anything, but the funniest one is the sofa. And they have little air coming out of the sofa, and then they

push it along this extremely flat floor, and it just kind of glides along. It's really, really awesome. And the way that, and what it's for is to see what it's like in space. So, because it's like there's no friction, so things just keep moving. If you push them in one direction, they just keep moving. And I think we might have said before that NASA around there also has the world's biggest door. And they also have the world's most perfect bowls, which is a pair of mathematically perfect spherical bowls. If they are one point, they're really, really small.

They're just 3.81 centimeters across. And if you scale them up to the size of the earth, then the highest, Hill on there will be 1.5 metres high. Wow. That's how perfect these balls are. And is that because they're such perfect spheres in space? They're imitating the sun? They're using them for possible future gyroscopic motors.

They don't know what they're for, do they? Someone thought of the phrase the most perfect balls in the world, and they thought, better make those. You know the saying, beer before wine, you'll feel fine? Oh, I thought it was... Wine before beer feeling queer? I always get mixed up. Well, it turns out that neither of them works.

And this is thanks to a scientist who got 90 students drunk and found that none of them felt fine. No matter what. He was struck off. No matter what, a combination, he got 90 volunteers and they had... I bet he did. There were only 70 people in his class. They all had two and a half pint. There was a first group we had two and a half pints of lager and then four big glasses of white wine.

And then the second group had the same drinks in reverse. So you've got beer then wine and wine then beer. And then there was another group who had only beer or wine up to the same level. And they all felt terrible the next day. One and ten of them threw up. What a bunch of lightweights. I knew you guys would say. Can I just say while we're on trains?

This is so apropos of nothing. But when I was in Japan, I noticed that the train drivers, they always point and shout stuff at themselves, while they're driving the train, wherever they go. So if you're near the front, you'll always see this because you can see the driver.

And just every, like, three or four minutes, they'll just point at something that doesn't appear to be anything at all, and they'll just yell something that I don't understand, right? And are they yelling to the passengers or to... No, they're yelling to themselves, and I read this today of what they were doing because I looked it up.

They have a thing where every certain amount of time, they point at, like, just a thing around the tracks. It doesn't matter what it is, and they shout where they are and what they're doing. And the reason they do it is so they can concentrate the whole way. Because if you're not doing that all the time, you'll just kind of my daydream or something like that. But if every five minutes or so, you have to point and shout something, you're never going to kind of not think about stuff.

That's wonderful. Isn't it great? Yeah. I think it's stupid. Has anyone ever read the story of Cry Wolf? What happens when there's actually, you know, a huge bomb in the middle of the track and they're pointing and shouting? There's a bomb. Everyone get off the train.

Everyone get off the train. And everyone's like, oh, it's just the standard five-minutely shouting. He does. Maybe he shouts something. Maybe he doesn't always shout, Bob on the track. Maybe he's normally shouting, I am concentrating now.

But what I was thinking is, if you're driving on the motorway, then every time you go past a junction, if you were to point at it and shout the names of the places that junction goes to, then it would help you concentrate and you get less sleepy at the wheel,

I think is a really good tip. Good plan. Also, your geography of the UK would probably improve. Definitely. You'd keep noticing all these irrelevant places. Yeah. That's true. Have you guys heard of hook swinging? No, no.

This is another Indian ritual practiced in the 1890s, not very much in the 20th century. But basically, in order to make it rain, if there's a drought, farmers would find a willing volunteer, and then they would sew large hooks into his back, and they would lift him 50 feet into the air. Sorry. What? You would be lifted up into the air on massive hooks. It's very, very, very painful. To make it rain.

To make it rain. And it causes you lasting damage, obviously. It's extremely painful. However, you were allowed to keep the hooks afterwards. Bonus. But only for three months. What? You were allowed...

Why would you keep them? Well, you were allowed to keep the hooks and the cord and the knife for three months afterwards and beg with them and show people, look, I went through this for the community to show your bravery, but only for three months. So when you said you had to find a willing volunteer, that actually does feel like the hardest part of that. Where were they finding these enthusiasts? people. It's a good point. Also, I would probably just trust that that was the guy who was held 50 feet in the air

with hooks, even if he didn't have them out of his back. I imagine he's a local celebrity. I imagine no one's like, oh, did that happen? Oh, okay. No, I didn't read about that. Actually, a lot of people thought that chess wasn't... Well, there were a lot of people who thought that chess

wasn't a particularly intellectual game compared to something like Wist, for instance. And that was because the argument was that chess has a finite number of moves. There's only a certain number of moves you can make. It's quite a high number, but it's finite. And in Wist, you're playing with your wits and stuff like that.

And it was kind of like if you're doing something which is really regimented, maybe that doesn't help the creative part of your brain. That's what they used to say. Like, for instance, there was an argument in Scientific American in 1859 that Napoleon the Great loved playing chess, but he was often beaten by a rough grocer in St. Helena. What, rough in what way? They didn't specify.

It wasn't an asterisk. Didn't shave much. Right, okay. I don't really know what rough meant in those days. It says neither Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, or any of the great ones of Earth acquired proficiency in chess playing. It seems to help people with an intuitive faculty for making the right moves, but at the same time, these people have often possessed very ordinary faculties for other purposes.

So they thought it was only a very intuitive faculty for making the right moves. So they thought it was only a very specific kind of person who'd be good at chess. They wouldn't necessarily be good at other stuff. Whereas whist players, all of those people you mentioned were keen whist friends. I mean, if that's what they thought of chess, imagine their response to angry birds. Well, you do know pop culture. I know pop culture. I've read about it.

There was another old rule that used to be in place, which is that you could use a baseball bat, which had a flat side to it, like a cricket bat. Okay, yeah. It was just to help with accuracy, I think. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, that was kicked out. So that was between 1885 and 1893. I think that was for power, wasn't it?

Was it? You can get, like, you can get a bigger hit on it if you've got that big flat surface area. Then they ditched it straight away. I can't remember why. Maybe it just made the game too easy. I think it was that. Because in cricket, for instance,

a full toss is a very easy ball to hit. Yeah. Yeah. Why then in cricket do they have the other side? of the bat in a triangle formation? Well, good question, and I don't know the answer, but I would guess that it's so that your sweet spot is a thicker part of the bat.

So you want your edge to be very small because you don't want to edge the ball so they can catch it, but you do need it to be thick so if it hits it right in the middle, it goes miles, so you want it to be thick in the middle and thin on the outside. I don't know for sure. I think it's because if you flip around the bat at the last minute,

then you get a mental angle on your bat. and that's a technique they used to use but they've never used it since right? I don't know why they don't use it anymore. This is just a brand in fact nothing to do what we're saying, but just hedges. We were doing a live gig the other day

and someone told us in the audience that if you go to Liverpool, there's a hedge of all the Beatles there sitting outside the station but Ringo is really hated there so people keep trimming his head off and they have to weigh ages for Ringo's head to regrow

and then someone immediately choss it up again. So sad. On mud, so there's the disorder where you eat soil or dirt. It's called pika, I think, where some people eat mud. But in southern parts of the US, eating mud is a traditional thing that some people really enjoy. And I didn't know this still happened, but it does. So it's in southern states, like kind of Mississippi and Georgia, real deep south states.

And people eat kind of clay. And it's a very specific thing called like white mud or white clay. And it's clay-rich dirt. And they love it. and it's part of the diet. It's often poorer families. It's black and white families. And there are various theories about where it came from.

But I was reading an article in the New York Times from 1984 saying, this is so tragic the tradition of mud eating will disappear in the next generation. And then an article from a couple of years ago, it hasn't disappeared, guys. It's still there. Is it because it's like higher minerals and stuff? We don't really know. I think it's maybe it's just a traditional thing, but they like the taste. Are there recipes?

There are some recipes. Well, sort of recipes. If you count the fact that, for instance, people who like it will keep it in jars and sprinkle it with salt and vinegar. That's a recipe. That's a recipe. Well, I thought you said they like the taste of it. Why are they putting salt and vinegar on it? James, I like the taste of chips, but that doesn't mean I don't enhance it. You're so right. Sometimes they substitute it for baking soda or for starch because they can't get to the right kind of soil, right kind of mud.

But apparently it's not quite the same. And there was an interview with someone called Mrs. Glass who said she's been off the dirt for a full year, even though she still gets really strong cravings. But she's been off the dirt because her husband said it makes her mouth taste like mud. Which does make sense. It is one of those pregnancy cravings that you hear about. It is, yeah. Yeah.

My mom had that. Did she? Yeah. Mud and coal, I think. She didn't eat coal. Women do. But she just had the craving. Usually it would be charcoal.

Like, cousin, you'd get bits of charcoal and you could. chew on it. But not a large lump of coal. No, you wouldn't go down a mine. No. My dad got home

from work every day and she was a black face full of the coal basket. Equally, if you're having cravings for, you know, um, gherkins,

you don't eat a billy in the gherkins. You just think it's small about to get your cravings started. Yeah, it's true. It just was a funny idea of like replacing minors with pregnant women

who, they know where the coal is because they have the desperate cravings for it. They're just chewing through the rock face. Yeah, but none comes back up. That's true.

Just on big shoes. Yeah. On shoes. Used to be a big thing, and they're called Krakofs. So Krakovs were shoes that were really popular from about the 13th century to the 15th, 16th centuries. And they're called that after the assumed place of origin, Krakoff in Poland. And they were also called Poulin, which is Polish, Polish shoes, Polish things. And they, so it was just fashionable to have these incredibly long shoes.

And they were gone for sort of eight. eight, nine inches. And then eventually there were various edicts passed that said you had to limit your toe length to two inches, which is still quite long. And it was partly because it was seen as showy, like we've talked about the sumptuary laws before, and partly because it was quite difficult to pray, apparently, because it's quite hard to kneel down when you've got a 10-inch toe poking out. But you can always see if somebody's in a toilet stall.

There's no doubt. Yeah. You can usually tell that just from the engaged side. You're poking your head under that little groping. gap between the grounds. Also, you know, you might be to use them to wipe as well. Oh, you've got to be flexible for that. They're longer now.

You know they're using bacteria to solve crimes now? That's a cup show I want to see. No, they are using it to solve crimes because we all have this fingerprint, which is our huge cloud of bacteria that we're walking around with. And they're all individual. And so police have started thinking, maybe we can, and take the bacteria that's left in a room that's been burgled and then match it to a database of other people's bacteria

and if there's a match, they did the robbery. But it's quite cool because it's a very good plan. And they've experimented with it by staging a load of mock burglaries. Which just sounded like the funniest science experiment to be part of. So there were 400 study participants, some homeowners and some who had to pretend to burgle their homes. And they had to properly act it out. So they did stuff like they rifled through all their drawers

and they carried away their TV. they all had to open the fridge and kind of have a sip of the Coke in the fridge because that's something that burglar's do apparently sometimes. Have a sip of the Coke in the fridge? Yeah, burglars always do that, you know. Do they? It's a signature move. The one thing the burglars do a lot is poo in houses, don't they?

Sorry to bring it back to poo. I think they might have asked them to do that as well. Maybe it didn't make it into the study write up, but... Apparently that does happen because you're so stressed your body just wants to defecate. If someone's left a poo in a house, you probably don't need to swab for the microbiome. But so do all of our... We're looking for a corn cob who come into this robbery. I'm done.

You can ask your question anyway, though. Well, I was just going to ask, so if the four of us are in this room, we all have our bacteria, what did you call it, the cloud, is it where it, the biome, will all be so different, so noticeably different. Well, the thing is, the more you hang out with people, the more your biome is similar to theirs because you end up sharing bacteria. Yeah. And there is a thing, yeah, we're basically all the same microbiome now, probably.

Well, not really the same. But they are still really individual. Yeah. People develop really differently. And you develop it in like the first three or four years of your life, I think, specifically the stuff that you're, the bacteria you're going to want. But the other thing is you can get a hotel room. And I think it's within something like two or three hours.

That room will be indistinguishable from your actual house from the microbes in there. Oh, okay. Yeah. And also, because I always take all my furniture to the hotel room. I always do a poo in the car. Just make it feel like home, isn't it? Oh, good. That's crazy, they're using that for crime.

That's crazy. That would be really weird if you could see if you spent all your time, for example, with a dancing partner, like on Strictly, if your microbiome came closer to your dancing partners than it was to your real life partner at home. I'd like to see that headline in the Daily Express.

Sean Walsh's microbiome. We're going to have to move on to our next fact in a second. I've got one last thing that I like, which is that in 1956, there was an English composer who was quite well known at the time called Malcolm Arnold, and he actually wrote an overture for vacuums. So when you saw it, it was vacuums on stage. It was three vacuums. There was one floor polisher, four rifles, bizarrely,

and then an actual orchestra. And it was a piece that he put on called a Grand Grand. and it was dedicated to US President Herbert Hoover. So that was quite a nice thing. Very good. Just on them losers, as you were just saying, Anna, in the campaign. Okay, Dan. You know, let's do this backstage.

Just some other rainmaking ceremonies. Because they've always existed in hot countries, I guess, because people need rain. And they are quite a big thing in various parts of Africa. So in South Africa, the Lovid. do people have a rain queen and the rain queen is basically their ruler, well they always have had traditionally. Long may she rain. Long may she rain. Indeed. And she, that sort of implies that she's sort of urinating on her people as a replacement for rain, which she doesn't do.

That's file my little pun. Sorry, you've got disgusting images. So this is this woman who isn't allowed to marry herself, but she can have female wives, inverted commons. And so she also has to bear at least one child, at least one daughter, because you inherit it from your mother. So she has to bear one daughter by a royal relative, interesting rule. And then age 60, when she hits 60, is assumed that her powers of making the rain come, or sometimes stopping the rain. Her powers are perceived to have waned, and she's expected to commit suicide by poison. Oh.

And so she has to do this. And there was this really controversial scandal in 1959 when the reigning rain queen refused to bloody commit suicide. she was 80 and people kept going come on you've lost your power to now do the thing so your daughter can take over and she understandably was like I don't want to and so this sort of ruined the tradition for a while but it's being brought back so the next rain queen when she comes of age when she turns 18 in a couple of years is coming back into the fall have they fixed the succession procedure I think they might have tinkered

with it a little bit around the edges yeah it's more optional these days Rain dance is quite big in North America as well historically. They're probably the ones we know of most or we hear of most. The hoppy snake and antelope ceremony is quite a common one. And people wrote about this a whole lot because it was performed in August. It was to ensure abundant rainfall, but it used live snakes. And they did loads of different ceremonies all the time for loads of different things, but this was the only one that used live snakes.

And so this was the one that became really famous. And that's why the North American rain dance became one of the more famous kind of ceremonies that they all had. And it's because it had snakes in it. And snakes were exciting. They are? That's very cool. Do we know what they did? You would dance around in a circle.

I mean, me saying that makes it sound like I'm just doing a throwaway comment of what you did. It was very important. But yeah, yeah, basically it was dancing around in a circle with live snakes. Was the snake in the middle of the circle? Or were you holding the snake? I think you were handling the snake. In fact, I know you're handling the snake. Okay.

Yeah. Otherwise, the snake might leave the circle. Get a bit bored. Probably doesn't believe in this, you know, silly. It might have been ahead of us scientifically. There was a Cypriot rain ritual in ancient times where you had to do a rain dance. And then after the dance, you had to spit on the back of a turtle. Okay.

In the book I was reading, it said that henceforth, it became popular as a spit turtle. Such a rubbish job to have. That's awful. That's like at school if someone spits on you once you get known as spit-hambing or something. Was it allowed to keep the saliva on its shelf for three months and beg of it? It's a museum in Kansas. It's a very small museum, but it pays homage to all the losers of presidential campaigns. So it's got a picture of them, a bit of a biography.

And it's run by this lady who, when I was reading the article, She was very excited about the last election that you guys had because she really wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. And I don't know if it's because she didn't want her as president. It was more that she was excited to have the first woman ever in her museum of losers. And she was really proud of that. Finally, a woman will be in the losing museum.

We have to find these silver linings where we can. Do you know how you can weigh a whale? No. Oh, well. At a whirlway station. Well, no. So it used to be that to weigh a whale, you would have to get one that's been beached

or one that's dead, something like that. But he's really hard to weigh them in the wild. But they've got this new system of drones. Wow. Which are able to estimate the weight of whales from the sky. Cool. So they no longer have to shove a set of weighing scales underneath the beached whale.

Well, mostly it's just that joke doesn't work anymore. Another joke, ruined by the scientists. of the world, you bastards. I actually also have a French. This is very tangential though, but it is a French and fast food fact. In 2016, there was a McDonald's in France, which was subject to an armed robbery. And two guys burst in with guns. They were armed, but it was obviously very terrifying for all the customers,

and they wanted all the money in the till, which is about 1,500 quid, I think. But unfortunately, for the two robbers, also dining in the restaurant, were 11 off-duty members of the French S-A-S. The French paramilitary special forces And they're really, really good And they kept their cool They didn't do anything during the holdup And then when one of the robbers was leaving

He tripped a bit And immediately they pounced on him And then they shot the other one in the abdomen But still Well, they took him to hospital I don't think he died I mean he was but then sent to prison For armed robbery

Okay So it's a funny story with one Quite bad sounding injury at the heart of it Why did they wait for him to trip? What if he didn't trip? They didn't immediately want to start firing their guns in the restaurant because they thought, well, there are customers here and we want to... Yes.

Customers here enjoying their meals, trying to blank out the armed robbery. I'm imagining that Ronald is stood there with his massive clown shoes and he kind of trips that. I don't know what would have happened if the guy hadn't tripped. I'm sure they would have thought of some other way of resolving the situation. I know, yeah, yeah. I'm sure that's not the strategy of all of the franchise. Do not make a move to one of them trips.

Do you guys know that chess pieces, the pawns, they used to have jobs, each of them? Well, did they work as? So in the Middle Ages, monks tried to represent them as citizens. That was the idea. And so you had an agricultural worker. You had a farrier. You had a weaver. The fourth was a businessman.

It was a doctor, an innkeeper, a policeman. And the last one was a gambler. Wow. But policemen. Yeah, but policemen. I like that. That would have made blindfold chess a lot harder, wouldn't it? If you had to remember all every individual porn. Farrier E4. Also, you would think they would have pawn broker and pawn star.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not sure it had been invented in the Middle Ages. What, palm brokerry? Pawn brokerry had been, I think. Well, the queen didn't used to be a piece either. So the queen wasn't a piece until about 600 AD. And then she was really rubbish for ages, because, you know, queens were, quite inferior, you know, a male should be the leader. And this

only changed in the 15th century when the queen came along, who was actually decent, and people started to say, hey, queens can be powerful. And this was Queen Isabella of Castile. So it was Isabella and Ferdinand. And basically, their relationship mirrors the one of the king and the queen on the board where she... He could only walk one step in any direction, and she was

legged it everywhere. He was always running and hiding behind the butcher and the candlestick maker or whatever. Was it, but no, behind the Castile. The castle. He castilled. Yes. No, she, so when they got married, she forced him into this really humiliating marriage where she got much more authority than him.

She used to ride out to command troops on her own, leaving him behind. She was made queen of a particular country or state and she didn't even bother to tell him about it. But yeah, then they changed the queen and made her more powerful. And one argument to say this is why that happened is that in Russia, the queen remained impotent until the 18th century when Catherine the Great came in. And then she got a lot of power there. Wow. Just, this is not to go out really, but I just found out that I found a paper called Reservoir Dogs and the implications for disease control. Because obviously a reservoir is the animal that the disease lives in.

Oh. And this is from the early 80s, which is before Reservoir Dogs came out. And no one knows where the name Reservoir Dogs came. You're kidding. Yeah. So my theory is that Tarantino was reading a very obscure medical paper about rabies in Zimbabwe. that's where he got the name from. Nobody knows where the film's name comes from.

No, when he was selling it, he claimed that it was a gangster term for a rat. But actually, that's not true. And some people think he might have misheard the name of the title of the movie, Arovoire Les Enfons, which is a French movie. Yeah, it is. It's not very similar to reservoir dogs, is it? No. And also, it doesn't sound very much like reservoir dogs.

Nope. I believe your theory. It's not all. Just one thing. about someone who dealt with syphilis, and this is in the early 18th century. It was a guy called Daniel Turner, and he was the first person ever

to use the term syphilis to refer to the illness. So it came from actually an epic poem written about 100 years earlier about a guy who got it in short. And so he... The guy in the poem was called syphilis. He was a shepherd. Yes, exactly.

So the poem about a shepherd called syphilis. And so then this doctor said, okay, well, let's call this disease syphilis. It's like a boy named too, but worse. Sue's poor sister and so he also wrote about the use of another new word that he coined the condom

so it's spelled UM but I think they're the same thing and he said that's the most effective thing to prevent its transmission this was 1717 but I was reading the report he wrote on it and he said the condom is the best if not the only preservative that we have from syphilis but by reason of its blunting sensation I have heard people say they've chosen to risk

the clap rather than engage cum hastis sick clipiatis which one person got that and we're so sorry that you've got that I actually really want to know if you did get that

did anyone get the Latin for that no well I really enjoy the idea of putting really rude stuff in Latin to make it more appropriate but it means with spears thus sheathed would you have a sheath for a spear to have a sheath for a sword sure that's a really good point

or it's a tiny sheath just for the head of the spear but both of them feel impractical in the battle situation let me just get my sheath had the aden thought it through you're completely right he was feeling so smog about the Latin translation have you guys heard about James Harrison no James Harrison he's an 81 year old

Sorry, this is a few years ago now, but at the time, he retired from being a donor, a blood donor at 81 years old. And he'd been donating blood for every week, virtually every week, for 60 years of his life. And he was known as the man with the golden arm. And in Australia, he had a very rare type of blood, which they reckon there was only sort of like 50 people or so that had it. And it was very important because mothers who were pregnant, they would have recess positive blood. But if the baby had Reese's negative blood, which would be inherited from the father, that would go against the baby and it would start killing the baby inside the womb. So they used his blood specifically to save all of these babies. And the Australian Red Cross believe that over the years he saved the lives of 2.4 million Australian babies from the 60 years of giving blood. 17% of women are at risk of this in Australia. And every single batch of anti-D, as it's called, is from this guy. Wow. Yeah, so he's an absolute hero and he's just retired.

Kind of mean to retire, to be honest. Come on, mate. Stick at it. No, I've done a good long time saving children and now I'm going to stop. Wow. Crazy that, right? I was reading a tiny bit about dog research because dogs have been researched on it in historic medicine for so long because they were just a useful thing that was always around quite tame.

And so you know Pavlov of dog fame? Yeah. He had some breakthrough dog research, although his most of his breakthroughs weren't what we now think of him as doing. So obviously we think of the Pavlovian dog responses, a behavioral thing. But really, he was interested in dog digestion. I think it's that kind of thing that he got his Nobel Prize for in 1904 and not the experiment that people know. But one of the things that he did was he looked at, it was really interesting in dog saliva and when dogs generated saliva. and he did this thing where he created fistula's in the esophagus of dogs

and so a little hole with a tube attached which meant that when dogs ate it would just come straight out again of its neck and not go into its stomach to find out what would happen if they weren't getting the, you know, if they weren't filling up their stomach as they ate. And so we had all these dogs with food just, how frustrating would that be?

You eat your food and it's full straight out of you again. What is going on? That's like a torture that you'd be given by the gods in the afterlife. It is, isn't it? Forever hungry. Yeah. Yeah. He also used to sell quite a lot of dog saliva, I think.

What for? He made quite a lot of money out of it. Yeah, he had a dog gastric juice factory. That's just a dog. That does make him sound very evil. I think he wasn't a nice guy anyway, a lot of people say. But this one particularly, he just had these dogs working to produce loads of saliva. you bottled up and sell it.

And what was the purpose of selling it? The idea was that it helped out with things like dyspepsia and stomach companies. So you would drink it? Yeah, yeah. Oh, Yumbarelli. Before you were saying that you would kiss her, Doug. And now you're like... No, I said Yomberlelly.

Oh, sorry, it's a word I'm not familiar. I just have a couple of things about saliva. Right. Humans. Obviously, when the plague was around, so the 1400s. in the 1500s, that was a massive thing where kissing almost became taboo because they thought that that's what was spreading it. So they stopped. But what I didn't realize was the alternatives to not kissing to make sure you still had great sort of sexual contact with your partner

in the face. And alternatives. Oh, my God. Alternatives. We're licking, sniffing. And nibbling of eyebrows. Sorry, wait a minute. So you couldn't kiss because you didn't want to get any bacteria going over, but you could just lick someone's face. I think you'd lick their forehead or their ear or, you know, go for just, yeah, general away from the mouth lakes. But sorry, eyebrow on the... Nibbling of eyebrows was a, yeah, was a safe alternative, supposedly at the time. Wow. So would you lick someone on the cheek if you didn't really know them and lick them up the middle of the face if they were your partner? And if you're in France, you'd have to lick them on both cheeks.

That's so true. Can I just tell you about a news story from 2012, which was quite good. So this was about a leak in a statue of Jesus. And it was in a Catholic church in Mumbai, and the toe of Jesus started leaking. And so a miracle was immediately declared. It was obviously holy water because his toe was crying. And so lots of people came and visited. That's way more emo.

Lots of people came and visited this sobbing toe and the church promoted it as a site of pilgrimage and you know it was quite good for tourism in this relatively backwater of Mumbai and then this guy called Sanal Edomaruku who is a rationalist a buzzkill went to investigate

and he found that it was moisture from an overflowing drain that was being fed by a pipe issued from a nearby toilet and he was investigated for blasphemy by various police then has fled to Finland where he's been in exile for the last seven years. Yeah.

So, when Jesus cries, don't say it's a toilet. Not quite right. It's weird though, isn't it? Like, if you have water coming from your, if I have water coming from one of my toes, I would say it was probably sweat. Yes.

Not like holy water or tears or anything. No. I have, I mean, I've embellished with the tears. It was holy water. It was holy toe water. Yeah. Tolly water. Very good.

Can I just do one more quick thing about leaks? So here's a family thing, which isn't really, it's not a legal thing, but I read it the other day and I think it's kind of cool. In medieval Scandinavia, they would have civil wars and families would often put brothers on opposite sides of the battles so to hedge their bets so that one of them would survive the war. Wow. That's cool, isn't it? It's quite clever. It's dark. It's dark, but it makes sense.

It does. So you want to continue your genetic line And so exactly You want to make sure that there's someone Or someone to look after you in old age Or to look after the farm or whatever So you would put yeah one brother on each side But the thing is with war

It's not like the winning side in a war Every single person survived And the losing side everyone died You can very easily put them on either side And they're both killed And then you look like an idiot and a twat But what would often happen afterwards Is like the losing group would be punished

Yeah okay But if you put two on the same side It gives that side a tiny extra advantage. It does, but then if the neighbours have got three kids and they put them on the other side. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's always a problem, isn't that?

The answer is not to have a war. Or any kids? Yeah, yeah. So there are enclave countries as well, aren't there? Which are countries wholly inside other countries. Oh, yeah. So Lesotho in South Africa, literally in South Africa, actually, is one of them. And one of them is San Marino, this tiny country inside Italy.

It's like, so Italy has two smaller entities within it, the Vatican and San Marino. And this is kind of off the beaten track a bit, but in 1999, Samarino was really worried about its male citizens being ensnared by sexy foreign women. And it banned them. Banned all women? It legally legislated. It banned any female domestic servants younger than 50. What? When was this, do you say?

1999. I'm serious You are joking No no because there was this sort of panic in San Marino About foreign women coming as carers and domestic servants And marrying the elderly men they were looking after And maybe not with their best interest at heart Maybe there was some financial motive or something

So it literally just banned any female domestic servants under the age of 50 Assuming that once you get to the age of 50 you're probably fine 1999 I know I don't know if it's ever been repealed as well actually Well, only one way to find out if there's anyone under the age of 50 who fancies a trip to San Marino.

And then prison, yeah. I found someone who was the arch enemy of gravity. So he was a man called Roger Babson and he was an American businessman. He was a Newton fanatic. He made a lot of his money

using Newton's principles in business. You know, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. And he had a sad life. He lost a couple of close relatives. to drowning and he instead of blaming the water conditions he decided gravity was the culprit because it pulled them down so he described old man gravity as our enemy number one he wrote this essay he said broken hips and other broken bones as well as numerous circulatory intestinal

and other internal troubles are directly due to the people's inability to counteract gravity at a critical moment and he founded a gravity research foundation to basically destroy gravity if he could. And how is that going? It's ongoing. They now have slightly pivoted away from that and they just sort of research it.

I did read about that guy. He's pretty amazing. He believed that there was a metal alloy which had anti-gravity properties. And if they would be able to find it, they'd be able to, like, he said they'd be able to coat airplanes in it to make impossible for them to crash. But he didn't say how they'd be able to land.

but he actually this institute that he put a load of money in it was both him and Captain Birdseye he put the money in I don't know if you have that in America actually Captain Birdseye but he's like a frozen food guy but he was real and he made a load of money from frozen guy that feels to me like the bigger headline

is the Captain Birdseye is not here but just so you guys know anyone who's now listening to this podcast back in England has just gone what the fuck Do you guys not have Captain Birdseye? Guys, you don't know what you're missing. He's great fun. He sells you fish fingers and he sort of pals around on boats with children.

They got Captain Crunch. They got Captain Crunch. Captain's different. Captaincy is no qualification for this. There is probably a secret club where Captain Crunch and Captain Birdseye hang out together. Bitching about gravity. So he was an anti-gravity. Yeah, he was.

And when he first put the money into this, him and Captain Birdseye. They paid for three people to sit in the US Patent Office just looking for any patents that were anti-gravity inventions and then as soon as one came in they would go and find that person and go, have you found it? Have you found it? And they never did. Oh. There's a grant that his company give to lots of universities and one of the rules of receiving the grant is that they have to get this monument

where he has words about his personal, but it's quite coded but it sort of says I don't think gravity is a thing. conquer it. So they have that sort of planted at these universities. But a few of the universities from what I've read the students like to push it over. I try to find a site called, I tried to find if there was a YouTuber like with an A at the end. Oh yeah. Website for tuba people. There isn't sadly. Well, there's a niche. Then I tried to find YouTuber like for potatoes. Oh yeah. Is that? No. Well, there might be but to be on it's so hard to search YouTuber with an ER, which potatoes in mind.

You have to put minus quite a lot of things. You have to put minus Pute Pie minus. Exactly, Zuella and all of this. I did find a guy who made a self-driving potato two years ago. Did you hear about this? Bizarly no. Yeah, of course. I saw that on YouTube.

I've been looking at the chess records. Sorry, not chess records, the record company. The Wikipedia, you know, chess was a record label. Was it? now we do hang on no it's a music record label

I think there was a record label called chess that was an extremely esoteric joke I think yeah it was you meant to unconfuse us

and you've actually confused us a lot more what I meant to say was I've been looking at the Wikipedia page for the records in competitive chess yes it was a musical

called chess yes I think there was a record label I'm sure there was there makes sense there are so many record labels aren't there anyway

I was eating an apple and I don't mean the record label There's a company called Love Honey That makes sex ties and stuff like that And they recently revealed the weirdest search terms They've ever had And that included pepperami lube

A few others Pies for Women to Get Haughty And pickled onion cum doms Wow No No Probably not Probably not this time

Pope Gregory issued a special decree saying that Satan was half cat So not all popes have been fans of cats Yeah, wow Because there was Pope Paul the second and he was a 15th century Pope Who had his cat treated by his own personal doctor And then Pope Paul the 6th had his cat dressed up in mini cardinal's robes Apparently, although I've never seen a drawing And I don't know if we have evidence of these tiny cat cardinal robes

But It's called the Vatican, not the catacan Yeah. Very nice. Oh, now, come on. That was good. I was reading about, so, Spartacus, the movie Spartacus, starring Kurt Douglas. So Kurt Douglas has Michael Douglas as a son, but then he also has Eric Douglas.

And Eric Douglas is a lesser known, you know, he haven't really heard of him, right? So he was in the industry as well. And there's a very famous story of him going to London to do stand-up comedy. And he did it in a London club. and he started telling jokes and he was getting nothing from anyone. And he got really angry on stage for the fact that he was getting nothing. So he suddenly turned on the crowd and he was furious with them. And he was saying to them, do you know who I am?

I'm Kirk Douglas's son. And someone in the audience stood up and went, no, I'm Kirk Douglas' son. Fantastic. I was looking at very, very loud things. We mentioned Crackatoa a while ago, and we said it was the loudest noise ever. I looked into it a bit more how loud it is. So that was the volcano that went off in the late 19th century. 16, I think.

Was that Tambora? Oh, it was 1883. Yeah, yeah, 1883 it happened. But the Crackatoe was the equivalent of hearing a noise in New York that happened in Ireland. And it would take four hours to get to you. And it was, so there was a ship 40 miles away from Crackatoa whenever. went off. 40 miles away, the ship was blasted so much that half

the crew's eardrums were shattered. And the captain had no idea what was going on. He wrote in his diary, I am convinced the day of judgment has come, just because this noise was so loud. Imagine having the wherewithal to write, update your journal on the day of judgment. You've got like

10 minutes left to live, Max. What are you going to do? Well, I better report this. It used to be a thing where the vacuum cleaner was only in one place in your home and you would attach huge tubes to it so the vacuum cleaner had its own spot in the house I mean it stays in one place in my home certainly so you didn't move it around

you didn't move it around you just have a great long tube to the bit you needed sucked at or cleaned but then Hubert Cecil Booth who was a huge figure in the vacuum cleaner invention process he created a giant vacuum cleaner for cinemas which was hidden basically inside the walls of the cinema. So it's in the building and there are pipes going through the walls to all sorts of different like power points vacuum sockets in the cinema and when you want to clean you find the vacuum point in

the floor and you open that up and it's just constantly sucking away. Cool. Wow. And you just attach the hose to that and get hovering. So were there ever accidents where it was opened at the wrong moment and a whole audience got sucked into it? Thousands. That's why they stopped it. Too many deaths. I can see that. You know hedgehogs can get balloon syndrome? Why have you said that? Like it's something we all know. Oh, wow.

I've seen one with it. It's amazing. I've heard of it. It's mainly just referring to balloon syndrome as like they get flu. You know they can get balloon syndrome. Oh, yeah. So, sorry, balloon syndrome is a condition that hedgehogs can get there. And basically it's because they have lots of space under their skin.

And this is to allow them to roll up. it helps them roll up but if air gets trapped under their skin and it keeps getting in they can just blow up and up and up and up and up and then they can be the size of a beach ball so and then the best thing to do is genuinely to pop a needle into it and drain the air you're kidding can you take one of their own needles I don't know probably yeah probably could oh that's the ultimate irony isn't it it's like being a balloon made of needles yeah yeah oh so sad but if they learn to cooperate then they'd be able to puncture each other's balloon syndrome so that's the lesson we've learned here right? If they join forces, they'd pluck a needle out of each other. Yeah, that's a good point. You know they've got drawstrings around them? What? Hedgehogs. No, they kind of, they have...

I'm thinking of money purses. Oh, sorry, I'm thinking of money purses again. No, they have this muscle called an orbicularis, and it's a ridge of muscle which goes all the way around. It's like a skirt, basically. And it's what allows them to roll up. So they just tighten the orbicularis, and the drawstring just closes. And they can stay like out for hours.

But when they run, they hitch up their skirt, basically. And they have these weird long legs. So if you look up footage of a hedgehog running, it's got much longer legs than you're used to because it's still lifted up in skirt all around it. No way. It's bizarre. You guys heard of the game,

Campaign for North Africa? Yes. That's incredible. I don't think we've spoken about it before. Campaign for North Africa, the Desert War, 1940 to 1943. It takes, roughly, they've worked out 50 days

without breaks to complete the game, and you need 10 players. It comes with 1,600, hundred cardboard tokens. Yeah. Wow. And it's so, it's so detailed.

The map that you play on it, it stretches out 10 feet. Yeah. That's how big it is. Big table, basically. But so it's mostly sums the game, the campaign for North Africa. It's made by a guy called Richard Berg,

who, you know, just wanted to develop the most complicated and realistic game possible. But isn't, if it's 10 feet long and it's the campaign for North Africa, is that just an old desert? Yeah. Yeah. Is it? It's not a great game.

Wait, are you saying? I just think you can make it smaller. Yeah. Oh, you mean cut out the desert? Yeah, cut out of the desert. If you cut out of the desert, you haven't got a game, have you? But, so for example, there is a thing in the game which you have to do. You just get a sheet of paper, and it's mostly some.

So every game turn, 3% of your fuel evaporates. Unless you're the British before a certain date, because they used rather inefficient means of storing their fuel, they use drums instead of jerry cans. So if you're British before a certain date, 7% evaporates. every turn. Amazing. If you're Italian,

you have to have, you have to distribute an extra water ration to your troops so that they can boil their pasta. Otherwise, otherwise, there is a greater risk that they will become

disorganized and dessert. It's incredible. They worked out that if you played this game as a hobby, so the game, which is the Desert War in 1940 to 1943, if it was done as a hobby, you could make it last longer

than the war itself for playing it. And it was a game. more traumatic. Shall we finish? You know how you were saying about how you would give lamb's blood to someone to make them more lamb-like? Yes, yeah. Another thing they kind of thought was a good idea was if you had fallen out with your

husband or wife, your discord might be settled by giving each other your blood. So I might swap blood with my wife and then it would kind of bring her to my point of view or the other way around. Wow. And would you make you make me? Maybe sneakily inject the other person with your blood. I think you'll find I'm right, darling. Wow, I do believe you're right.

That's weird. No, it would be like if you've been, if you'd had problems in your marriage for a long period of time, then it might kind of solve things. Well, so you're saying it's the last resort. It's a last resort before getting divorced. This is one thing you'd try. And did you have to swap?

When you say swap, do you mean I can just give you a little cup of blood and you can give me one? Or do you have to put it properly in? It was a proper transfusion. Yeah. Well, that's kind of like I did the Blood Brothers thing with my best friend when I was younger, which is basically a mini-transfusion, isn't it? It is. It's a very, very small transfusion.

It was quite small, yeah. And the idea behind this of, like, the blood giving you whatever it came from, that began with Samuel Pepys, who at the Royal Society was telling about a guy who only lived on women's milk, as in breast milk. And apparently, he used to be angry and fretful, but by taking this woman. women's milk, he became a good-natured patient and found himself so well, and they thought he'd somehow got the characteristics of a woman, like drinking breast milk. But if that was the case, then every baby would... You're right. Well, you don't see many babies with moustaches, do you?

Very good point. Like all men have. Like all men have. Just one more thing. There was a guy called Petro de Abano in the 13th century, and he said that he who drinks menstrual blood, or that of a leper will be seen to be distracted and lunatic, evil-minded and forgetful, and his cure is to drink of daisies powdered and mixed with water of honey and to bathe in tepid water and to copulate with girls. Sound like he was building up to an excuse. It was the weirdest day off ever. But menstrual blood was thought to be quite a negative thing quite a lot, wasn't it?

Although Pliny thought a lot of fun stuff, but thought that one of the things you could do, was collect the menstrual blood of someone, and I don't know how you go about doing that, and then you sprinkle it over your crops because it kills all the bugs. Because it kills everything around. But not the crops. It doesn't kill the crops.

Crops love it. Bugs hate it. Wow. And also in Papua New Guinea, there's, so in an island called Wogayo, which is a tiny little island of Papua New Guinea, then menstrual blood is thought to be cleansing, and it's thought to be kind of a good thing to menstruate.

And men, want to do it. I mean, this is really disgusting. Sorry guys, but they will sever their willies in order to mimic the menstruation of women. I heard they just sort of cut them a bit with crab claws. Oh, they don't, they don't come off. Sorry, they, sorry, it's just the word sever. When someone says his head's been severed, you don't think, oh, we'll need a plaster for that, wouldn't he? Sorry, you are right. They didn't chop them all the way off. Because you can only do that once, really. You need a very willing and patient crab too, don't you? Yeah. You think what?

You think it was attached? Well, yeah, I imagine so. Oh, okay. It's cruel if you cut off the crab's claw to cut your own penis off. I know, but you can at least control the claw at that point, I think. Maybe the crab wants to emulate menstruation as well, so it's actually quite grateful. Probably not. Okay, we'll somehow get something out of that.

So you're right. He did kind of move his face a lot, didn't he, Garrick? That was one of his main things that he did when acting. There was a guy in 1756 who said that his real. style went too far, his over fondness for extravagant attitudes, frequently affected starts, convulsive twitchings,

jerkings of the body, sprawling of the fingers, and slapping of the breast. Were no good. And he was a really good friend with Hogarth, the artist, and so he was probably the most painted man in England at the time, because Hogarth used to paint him all the time, but

Hogarth used to complain because he moved his face so much all the time that he couldn't paint him properly. Oh wow. Really? There's one portrait of him, which is in the British Museum, I think. It's called a mechanical portrait, and it's a picture of him being painted by Hogarth, but in the space where his face is, there's one of those spinning wheels behind the picture,

and you can have 30 different facial expressions as you wheel around. He is very interesting. He ran Drury Lane, which was one of the theatres that he had for 30 years, and no plays that were new plays at the time, have survived. It's a very odd thing. Because there are a lot of plays in that time. And he was someone who he was doing a lot of the scheduling.

And despite his absolute love for Shakespeare, he also had to do things that he absolutely detested. Pantamime, he absolutely detested. He hated clowns. But, oh, no, he didn't. He didn't. Nice. Oh, no, shit.

Oh, my goodness. Everybody, he's behind you. This is what we have to deal with. God, that's just a proper insight into how bad I feel about facts all the time. Oh, he didn't, random guy? Okay, you're right. Mustn't have checked my facts, you're definitely right. He, yeah, so he made the start of an evening be the thing that would be the clown. And he, so, like, the pantomime clown stuff would be...

That's what we do, too, Dan. Yeah. Slavdug, okay. So what I was saying is, I will get to the... You will. To what's probably a wrong fact. But so before a play started an evening,

they would have an appetizer, which would be a harlequin-style clown, a grimaldi, who would come on and do a bit. He absolutely hated that. He, at one time, he was at a puppet show, and he had to leave because he thought the applause for Mr. Punch was so repulsively. He was just like, I've got to get out of here.

But he had to keep it in because people loved it, particularly King George III loved it. He'd never laugh so hard, apparently, than when he was seeing a clown swallow a whole carrot on stage. And that was the reason for keeping it. Everyone in this audience is thinking, God, I wish that was what was on tonight. He apparently swallowed a lot of carrots.

It wasn't just the one as well. Amazing. But we've all been there. Okay. Let's move on. Before you find your prints, you have to swallow a lot of carrots. Water you are abroading.