No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Luigi Board

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Live from Up the Creek in Greenwich, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss ring mutts, King Tuts, reincarnation and the Restoration.Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Up the Creek in Greenwich, London. I am sitting here with Anna Toshensky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that some shows at the Roman Coliseum featured sausage dogs. People fighting sausage dogs? It's so unclear. It's so unclear what the actual thing is.

Maybe. I mean, the thing is they would be quite far away, as in you wouldn't get great visibility on a sausage dog from that distance. If you were in the back, you'd have no idea what was going on. Yeah, that's true. But maybe it was a swarm of sausage dogs against one Christian, you know. That is possible. Would you rather fight a thousand Christian-sized sausage dogs?

A thousand Christian-sized sausage dogs? Or what? Or not. They often didn't get a choice. Fun fact, in the Coliseum. So we should say there's a study, there's been an archaeological study done recently, and these are dachshunds, vener dogs,

whatever you want to call them. And they were the kind of precursor, the prototypes of the... these dogs because the modern breed only emerged in about the 18th and 19th century. But they were basically this kind of dog. If you went back in time when you saw one, you would think it was a sausage dog. Exactly. The thing is, we genuinely don't know what they thought. The archaeologists have been crawling in the sewers under the Coliseum for a year.

They spent a year crawling in the mud on their stomachs. And they found lots of stuff. They found seven coins, which does not feel like a good return on investment. That's not a good wage, is it for the year? And they found some bones. They found some leopard bones. they found some lions and ostrich bones, but they also found these dogs.

And we don't know, were they part of staged battles, which is great fun, or were they acrobats, which is also fun. Which is a slightly more boring explanation, which is that they might have been used to kind of hunt rats, okay, because when you're at the Coliseum, loads of people there, you're eating lots of snacks. It could be that they try to stop their rodents. I mean, I'd rather think of them as acrobats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all speculation. Did we not write stuff down? back then, because I'm pretty sure we did. How is it that sausage dogs have escaped history, yet we are... That's a great question. There was a lot going on at the Coliseum.

It was a mad shit for about 500 years. You couldn't write every single thing down every day. I'm sorry, if I walked out at the end of an evening at the Coliseum and I saw Gladiators fighting, I'm not saying that. I'm going, do anyone see the fucking sausage dogs? No, but there was so much more weird stuff than that. Like, the real acrobatts did amazing things.

And one of the frustrating things is, we don't have that much information because people write about it in fragments. Sometimes we've only got little bits of writing. There was the Pataurus, which the sources we have suggest was a giant seesaw. And we think it was used at kind of half-time in the Coliseum. So there's huge seesaw, and you'd have two opponents competing on either side, and one would jump onto it, and it would fling the other one up in the air.

I think about 30 feet in the air. No, stop it. Apparently. They'd go through hoops of flame, I think one of the sources said, and then come back down, and then the other one gets flung in the air. There is an account of them falling to their death sometimes, as will happen. Wasn't there an account of them putting criminals on there?

And the idea is the lions come in, right? And they're going to attack the guy who's at bottom of the seesaw. So you're always trying to get to the top of your seesaw, so that he's at the bottom. I think that sums is speculated that that might be what they were used for. It is, the problem is, as soon as the other guy gets eaten, you're fucked, aren't you, basically? Oh, yeah. The weird thing is, this is all the halftime shows, though.

Lots of what we're talking about now is the halftime shows in between chariot races and then maybe other fights. Yeah, all the gladiators. But a lot of the Damnatio and Bestias, so being killed by wild animals, basically, organized by a group of people called the Bestiari. There are lots of sources claiming that the bestiari were incredible trainers of animals,

and they would train animals to kill people in incredibly elaborate ways that referenced myths for people. So they would recreate death scenes. You guys remember the story of Prometheus, he stole fire from the gods, and then he was punished, he was chained to a rock, and a liver would fly down every day

and peck out his eagle. Eagle would fly down every day. But they recreated it the opposite way around. Exactly. Supposedly, one bestiarious spent months a month training a single eagle to remove a man's organs. Wow. I don't think, I can't believe that's true.

Wow. Like, yeah. The halftime show sounded amazing. They kind of sound like a modern half-time show of, let's say, a basketball. The Super Bowl, maybe. Super Bowl, like, it's really show-stoppy kind of stuff. So they would do things where snacks would fall from the sky. And including from, I mean, they're not from the clouds, obviously.

But they were sort of launched, kind of like how the people that would stand in the middle and shoot out t-shirts out of rockets. They had a toga cannon? Exactly. So they had this. Yeah. Well, what they actually had, though, which is amazing, is you got this wooden ball where on the inside you would win something like a t-shirt or

as, but I know they didn't have t-shirts, so it was very progressive. No, but it would be food or it would be money or it would even be the deeds to a house, you know, or an apartment. Yeah. So a lot of people really fought over it. But were there bad things in the balls as well? No, I don't, no. It's a happy ball.

So, like, if you open. in the bowl, you might get a t-shirt, or it might be you have to go on the seesaw. Yeah, exactly. It did sound pretty cool, though, didn't it? They had, possibly, we think, like the spectators would have water sprinkled on them. Because they had toilets with running water. So they would kind of get the water from the river

and kind of get it to go through the stadium and go through where all the toilets are. But they also had huge... We think because they had this in Pooler, we haven't seen it in the Coliseum, but it's very, very similar. They had huge, huge towers with loads of water in. and that water would kind of sprinkle over everyone to keep them cool. And they also had a retractable roof.

I know, they were more than 2,000 years ahead of Wimbledon. It's so amazing, isn't it? Here we go again. They just had a canvas roof that they could bring over whenever it got to that local. The Valerium, I think. And it was operated by about 1,000 sailors who would pull on the ropes because they're used to pulling a rope sailors. But, yeah, and you'd have advertising up,

and we've got the, I want to say, etching, in the stones, but we've got the evidence that you'd advertise, there will be shade, vela errant, you know, there will be shade for you. It's incredible, although Caligula liked to wind it back so he could watch people just boil up as they watch. Absolutely classic Caligula. It sounded hectic working there, though,

because basically you could be a part of the show if anything went wrong if the emperor decided. So Claudius in particular, there was a biographer called Soutonius who wrote about the fact that Claudius, if he was watching a show, and something went slightly wrong, and everything was operated underneath in terms of the, if the gladiators were fighting,

all the animals that came up into the stadium, they were all in the hypergeum, which was underneath, which is this extraordinary kind of like the backstage of a theater where they have just a crazy amount of stuff that you wouldn't realize to make shows happen. That was happening underneath. And so if something went wrong where something came up at the wrong time

and it pissed off the emperor, he would just say, whoever the staff is down there, they're now in the show, get them up there to fight the lions. Anything that went wrong, if the catering went wrong, get the caterers in there. So he just kept adding people to be killed in the... Right.

I heard that sometimes hecklers would be thrown to wild animals to kill. That's fair enough. We should start that. I like the hypo gym because it's like... It's like whack-a-mole, isn't it? Because a lion would pop up somewhere, and then he had to go and fight it,

and then some monkeys, and then a sausage dog. Yeah. But the whole point was that there wasn't spots you knew that they would pop up. There were so many spots that, like the whack-a-mole, you could be facing this way, expecting a lion, and then it comes behind you. Apparently, the system to bring them up sometimes was so supercharged that the lion would be lobbed into the... Stop it, come on.

That's the count I read. Oh, my God. There's so much speculation about this stuff. It's amazing. And the first, the best seats were reserved for the emperor and the vestal virgins. All right. They got the best seats. And then if you went a little bit higher up,

you would get the senators, and then you would get the knights and the nobles. And then the very, very furthest strata was for commoners. And then they built one more, even right at the very, very back strata. Do you know who that was for? Commonest. Women is exactly right.

No really? Yeah, I'm afraid so. Because they gave us the best few. Well, yes, exactly. You wouldn't be able to see the sausage dog, unless it was flung really high. It ceded a lot, it's seated 50,000 people, the Coliseum, roughly. And I went to Wembley to see a show.

And that gives you, like, if you were watching a sausage dog, Dan, as you said, like, because I went to see, I went to see Billy Joel at Wembley. And my wife booked me this ticket as part of a Christmas present. And I said, what are the seats like? She said, I didn't really check. I'm sure they're good. You couldn't be further away from Billy Joel, that's possible. It was so far away that when the gig was playing,

we could hear the song and the screens that allowed us to see him, which genuinely he's sausage dog size at that distance. It was out of sync with the visuals. And I was like, oh my God, Billy's going to be so angry because, you know, so much money spent. That's how far away we were. Sound and vision were travelling at a different rate that they were not in sync.

So if you counted the number of seconds between the time he opened his mouth and the time you saw it, you could tell how far away is. Exactly, yeah, yeah. You could tell when you're going to get swept by lightning. That's right. Amazing. Well, you say 50,000 sounds big,

but I just don't think we ever make a big enough deal of the fact that this Coliseum basically replaces Circus Maximus, which was its predecessor, sat 250,000 people, still the biggest ever stadium. It's just, I found that just amazing. That was Rome as well, but it was, you know, they got bored of it. That was where they had lots of chariot races

and then chucked the Coliseum in, which they never called the Coliseum. They called it the Flavian amphitheatre, and we think the reason they changed the name is quite funny. So it started being called the Colosseum in sort of early medieval times. And we believe it's because the Colossus at the time was the Colossus of Nero, this gigantic 100 foot tall classic Nero statue of him, which had, as Nero went out of fashion, its head kept changing.

So whatever emperor was in power at the time, they'd shove his head on the statue. And eventually someone wrote a poem about the Colossus, saying, so long as the Colossus stands, Rome shall stand. When the Colossus falls, Rome too shall fall. And when Rome falls, so falls the world. And then almost immediately after that was written and published,

the Colossus fell. And we think they went, well, shit, everyone's going to think the world's going to end. We better change what the Colossus is. And so then we think they named the Colosseum, the Colosseum. Because it was right nearby. And they said, let's just pretend. Wow. That's really cool. I've got some stuff on sausage dogs.

Of course you do. Sorry. Very nice. We've actually got to move on. No, no, no, absolutely not. Don't go near it. I thought this fact would go in a very different direction. I've basically only got sausage dog stuff now.

Do you guys know where the sausage dog capital of the world is? So in Germany. No, it's as of this year. It's in the UK. Oh. It's almost totally ungetable. Is it Maidstone? It's on the coast.

On like Maidsteadstone. Is it? No, it's not, it's, I don't know, I don't even know why I say it. It was in Southwold this year, in Suffolk. They had, well, a lot of, you know... Ports people in the audience. This year, Southwold hosted the world's largest ever single-breed dog walk when 2,238 sausage dogs turned up for a walk.

Whoa. At the same time. That's a lot. The size of one gladiator Christian. You said turned up. Like, A, there were posters up around town, and the dogs just trotted up on their own. I know, and they have one person to walk, all of them.

It was a nightmare. Do you want to hear a fact that it's not about dachshund? Yeah, and then we need to move on. Okay, okay. So I was reading an article in researching this about a dachshund, which was caught on CCTV in Germany, and it was the only police lead for a case, a crime case, because it had an unusual lead,

and they couldn't see the face of the criminal, and they could only see the lead on the dachshund, and that was the police thing. So it's such a confusing case. Do we have any leads? Yes, we've got this. One lead, I've told you. But I only mention this because of the final paragraph, which I loved,

but is not Daxon-related, but it was in this story. So here, I'm just going to read it verbatim. It may not be the first time a pet has provided key evidence. In 2017, a woman in Michigan was convicted of killing her husband, partly on the testimony from their parrot, which kept repeating, don't shoot, in the dead man's voice. Spooky. In his voice.

Supposedly in his voice. I've never heard a parrot that can do voices, but this one good. Wow. Amazing. But he didn't say don't shoot Mabel, did he? Oh yeah. So we don't know who he was talking to. Yeah, yeah.

How did that help convict her? Okay, well, tune in to Anna's new true crime podcast where she frees this woman. It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1920s, spiritualists started complaining that Tudan Kharmu was appearing at their seances too often. Just sort of spamming them.

Was he disruptive or was it just, there's too much of this? Sometimes. Yeah, he seemed to have quite bad mood swings, which I guess he was a teenager. So this was... Go to your pyramid. No! Fuck, go to your tomb!

Sorry, there we go. This was in Tutankhamun's second heyday which was the 1920s I guess so he was his tomb was discovered in 1922 it was this huge deal and he became this massive celebrity

obviously no one had ever heard of him before this and at the same time seances were very popular spiritualism was very popular and so he kept on popping up and there was an addition of a journal called Light a journal of spiritual progress

and physical research and a letter in it said we are getting a little tired of Tutankar moon. Messages purporting to be from him, which consist of vague generalities, are quite worth us anyone could compose them. And saying basically, you know, either give us good evidence of your identity,

I don't know how, write some hieroglyphics or something, but hard to do on a Ouija board. You need the expansion pack for that. Yeah. You need the right font, don't you? Some wingdings on that. Yeah, they said we don't want just random celebrities claiming to turn up, either we want the good evidence,

or we want their message to be of such high quality that their identity becomes unimportant. Some very fine teaching comes from these visitors, and it's being spoiled by Tutankarmoon. And the thought was, wasn't it, that the reason he started coming up because of this heyday thing is because of the attention was so great on him that he was like invoked back into existence.

That was the excuse, wasn't it? Yeah, rather than why is Tutankan not been like breaking into everyone's seance prior to that? It's because, well, he didn't know he was needed prior to it. As in he was like, they were claiming he was a bit of an egotistical attention seeker. And so he was up there like, well, no one cares about me. And then they started caring. So he decided, fine, I'll come and visit you now.

So what was he saying? What were the messages he was ringing? So sometimes he was angry. His tomb had been violated. And he would smash everything up. He injured a medium. He broke lots of Egyptian sculptures that were in the room. And then sometimes he was a nice guy.

It's a really depressing. I wonder who a modern equivalent of that would be, as someone who's very, very famous. Well, they did it. In 2003, there was a pay-per-view Princess Diana seance. I don't know if you remember that, yeah. 2003, God.

Yeah, but pay-per-view. Why do you sound appalled at pay-per-view? If you're going to see Princess-Dat, you don't have to pay for it. Because it's event television, it was sort of... It was a... Normally it would be a huge event that you would have pay-per-view because, you know... Got it. Right.

But you're saying it should have been BBC, Den. License fee only. Prong time. Absolutely. Okay. Pudger cards at the BBC. They just can't afford it. But check this out. This is a seance that I'd never heard of before.

This was a medium who was quite famous called Lillian Bailey. And she claimed that she had a spirit guide who was called William Headley Wooten. And he was a captain during World War I. He died in World War I. And she would use him in order to bring other people to talk. And she received a request one day to go and do a seance. But they said, it's a bit high profile the person. So what we're going to do is we're going to pick you up from your place.

We're going to blindfold you and we're going to take you to the place. So she was sat around the table and then she wasn't allowed to take the blindfold off. So she did it. And at the end of it, having contacted someone, she took the blindfold off and sitting in front of her was Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother and a few other of the royals. And what it was is it was not long after the king had died and the Queen mother was obsessed with the idea of contact.

So the Queen was at a seance. Wow. Imagine taking that blindfold off. Bloody hell. And she just slowly put it back on. Take me home. But she kind of used that in the future as a kind of she's the Queen's official medium.

Yeah, yeah, by royal appointment. That's who she said she was. And the Queen Mother often would book sessions with her afterwards to try and do it. And the person who set it up, which was not in the movie was a man called Lionel Logue who was the therapist

who treated the king for his stammer in the king's speech. He's the one who set up the seance. Wow, they should have put that in. Yeah, definitely. What a scene. Oh my God. Do you speak in a séance

when you're one of the guests or do you only speak when you're the media? You're not really supposed to, yeah. Okay, I just thought because that would have given it away. Not enough people speak like the Queen and Prince Philip and the Queen Mum to conceal your identity. Maybe they put an accent on. Not like an Aussie accent or...

Yeah, like a copny or Irish or something. German. Whatever they're best at. Actually, speaking of Germans, there was a big thing in the war, wasn't there? There was a medium called Helen Duncan. And she was a Scottish 25 stone working class mother of six who swore, smoked and drank whiskey. She sounds great, right?

But at the time, she was like in the upper classes in London, they thought she was an absolute genius. They thought that she could speak to the dead. She was really, really important in the high society. And then in 1941, she was in a seance in Portsmouth, and she claimed the spirit of a sailor told her that a certain ship had been sunk. And it turned out that that ship had been sunk, but it hadn't been reported yet. And so obviously she became, they were really worried about her.

First of all, maybe, you know, she is somehow getting, messages from the dead or maybe she's getting messages from the Germans or... Yeah, they thought she might be a spy who was ceding the information. And of course she got done for witchcraft. Yeah, she was the last person or the second last person, the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act. But she got imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. So what was she being imprisoned for?

Being a witch. It's absolutely incorrect. Not being a witch. That's absolutely right. So the Witchcraft Act of 1735, was not about persecuting witches. It was the first act that acknowledged witches are not real,

and so people pretending to be witches are the ones who need to be punished now for faking it. And so she was punished for pretending to be a witch. That's brilliant. God, that's a real catch-22 situation as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Have you guys heard of Colin Evans?

No. Colin Evans was a Welsh spiritualist in, I think, the 1920s. And his big thing was claiming that he could levitate. So he would get an audience, probably an audience around this size, few hundred people, he would request the room went completely dark. The audience would sit around him

in pitch blackness and they would chant, they would all chant the same thing, an incredible atmosphere, something amazing to be proud. Levitate. Levitate. Levitate. Levitate. Now the lights down? No, it was completely dark and then he provided proof of it. He would take photos of himself at the very moment

where he was levitating. But the thing is, he was just jumping. He would just jump, take the photo, and then land. That was quite impressive. That was the whole act. When was this, sir? 20s?

Photos took a long time to expose back then, to capture something. No, no, no, you had a flash photo in the 20s, or it might have been 30s. Exposure times were right down. Was he smiling in the photo, or was he serious? He was very serious. But his feet was slightly blurred, and that also gave away. But also, I suppose Dan is right that the technology must be new enough that people didn't, like, catch up. Right?

Didn't assume. I guess. And it was also, even if you were in the room, you'd see a tiny flash of light and Tim. Oh, so that would provide the light as well. Mid-jump, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always think that back in these olden days, the seance days in the 1920s,

it must have been so much darker than it is today. I just think there was less natural light around. Maybe we didn't have a moon back then because basically all the tricks they did were based on it being pitch black. Maybe you'd have one candle, you know, just a bit of a bit of, atmosphere, one candle?

No, no, you want any candles? Well, because you had things like seance trumpets, which were these trumpets through which the spirit spoke. They magnified their voices, and they used to float around in the middle of the room, and they'd have glowing rings on their back end and front end. And the way they floated

was the medium's assistant would just be holding it up, but he'd be wearing black so no one would see. And it's like, how dark does it have to be that you can't see? And the ectoplasm, probably the best thing about all seances, the weird, like, physical manifestation of spirits, which was kind of white stuff. Goose stuff that would come out of orifices of the medium.

I mean, it's got to be pretty dark for you to think that's anything spooky, because usually it was handkerchiefs that they would stick up their nose as far as they could and then kind of pull out. There was one amazing medium, Mary M., who produced ectoplasm with photos of Arthur Conan Doyle on So she said Arthur Conan Doyle's coming out of my nose. It's just after he died, look at this, and then pulled this tissue out of her nose with a photo of him on it,

which someone pointed out later, was the same photo that had appeared in a newspaper about a week earlier. It had obviously been stuck on. Oh, my God, yeah. Arthur Conan Doyle solved an incredible case where someone was claiming that they'd contacted a celebrity from the other side,

which was, there was a book that was released called The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We've spoken about it before on the podcast. I actually wrote about this in my book as well. I got obsessed with sayances. The theory of everything else out now. Is it available in selected stars? It's actually in most shots.

So, yeah, and they have lots of copies. So if someone could buy one. But no, I got obsessed with there was a period where there were people claiming, because seances were so massive that celebrities who were dead, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, all those were, they were dictating

from the other side, new novels, new works, and they would go on sale by real publishers, and people would buy them. They'd be reviewed in the New York Times, even if skeptically they got sort of space. And there was one book, which was the mystery of Edwin Drood. It was the final Charles Dickens book that he never finished, and he didn't leave any notes of what had happened to the character

and who had killed Edwin Drood. So a guy called TP James actually finished the book by contacting Dickens from the other side, and he said, this is the final book. They published it. There was a new forward written by, Dickens as well to explain the process. They had a new book that they were working on together

called The Life and Adventures, a Bocley Whipple Heap. It was a very exciting thing. And it was Arthur Conan Doyle who said he didn't contact Charles Dickens. The reason Arthur Conan Doyle knew that is because he himself did a seance in which he contacted Charles Dickens and asked him, did you finish this book? And he said, nope, wasn't me. Just on the Ouija board.

Was that right, Ouija? Ouija? Ouija? Ouija? Well, whenever I use them, I say Ouija. And there's also the squeegee board, which is a home thing. Anyway, so it was invented by someone called Helen Peters, which was a medium.

And then there was an entrepreneur called William Fould, who took over the business. It was so popular, again, around the time of the 20s and 30s. At one point, he had several factories all just churning out Ouija boards. They sold thousands and thousands of them. And he only sat up in such a big way because the board had told, told him prepare for big business. So, yeah.

And then he, but this is the really spooky thing. He went up on the roof of one of the factories to see a flagpole being replaced, right? And then he fell off and died. Oh, my God. He just fell off. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

And then did he, he came back and said something? No, no, no. But still, it makes you think, doesn't it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, the reason I think that it's pronounced now Ouija is there's a YouTuber called Sex Kick who went on to you.

Yahoo answers and search for various different spellings of Ouija board and found, how do you make a Luigi board? Have you played the Luigi board and can you burn a Luigi board? And it seems, and quite a lot more, and it seems like there's a lot of people in America who think that it's not a Ouija board, but a Luigi board. That's really good. It's coming through.

Who are you? It's me. Okay, it is time for fact number three. and that is my fact. My fact this week is that, according to his various biographers, Pythagoras could talk with animals, be in two places at once,

had a shiny golden leg, and was able to tell fishermen the exact number of fish they'd caught in their net just by looking at it. So this was a side... I could do the last one, I reckon. Well...

But it depends how many there are. Maybe not a trawlerman. Two. Screw you, Pythagoras. I'm genuinely really shocked that we've done 400 plus episodes and we've never ever mentioned Pythagoras. And I'm doubly shocked that after all the years of us doing this stuff, I didn't realize what a mad life he supposedly had

according to the stories of his life. We all know him for his theorem, very famously. He was a mathematician, he was a philosopher. I didn't realize there was a cult around him that sort of put him into a sort of, paranormal territory where he was able to reincarnate. But he wasn't really a mathematician either. That's the weird thing.

Because I thought he was a mathematician. He wasn't really. He was kind of a mystic and then cult leader and political figure. But the cult were very into numbers, weren't they? So that was part of it. Exactly. And numbers are very math-related. So they're math-adjacent.

Not when you're doing algebra. Great point. Yeah. Oh, didn't you get a long way? Look at a jesus. But no, he wasn't really a mathematical... Like Pythagoras' theorem had been come up with about a thousand years before him,

and, you know... Oh, actually, related to the first ever episode we did a fish, there's a Pythagoras fact. Is it? Yeah. One of the people who proved Pythagoras' theorem in a new way that had never been demonstrated before was...

President Garfield. President Garfield. Was it, really? Really? Lying in that hospital bed, being fed through his ass. You've got to do something to distract yourself. Yep. That's a confusing sentence.

if you haven't heard the first episode, the first episode. I'll just have to go back and listen. It's a great teaser, yeah. They were obsessed with numbers, as you say, and numbers, every number had a different personality. Now, I don't know, because I couldn't find out anywhere

how high up this went, because it can't go forever, but masculine numbers are odd numbers, and feminine numbers are even. Even are considered the only perfect numbers, although odd ones are equated with divinity, so all the genders are doing well out of this. Oh yeah, quite sweetly, the the feminine number is two

and the masculine number is three and then five is the marriage number but yet all these numbers meant specific things to them. Yeah, it went about as, I think it went as far as 10 because they had this... Not how far is it? They had this special thing where it's like, can imagine like a snooker ball triangle

where you have one, then two, then three, then four and that added up to 10. This was very special to them. And they had a poem or a hymn really. Blessers Divine Number. thou who generated gods and men, the mother of all, the all comprising,

the all bounding, the firstborn, the never swerving, the never tiring, holy ten. Right. Yeah, they love ten. Yeah, yeah.

And they love triangles. Blake's snooker must have in hell, actually. Pythagorean. I get it, the right angle thing. What do you guys think he was like? Like, let's imagine we're living in the time.

Okay, well, I can say, so, like, a lot of the things that you've said there about the golden thigh and talking to animals. They were written much, much later. Exactly. But some of the things that were written at the time when he was alive,

they said that he did believe that the souls of humans could return as animals. Yes. So he did believe in reincarnation. We know that because people said it at the time. And also that he had his own kind of wisdom, he had his own kind of learning. So we know all that kind of stuff happened.

Golden Leg, maybe not. Okay, so what about, is that, because there's a story about a dog? And he was passing someone in the street, he believed that people could come back in the form of animals and all this, as you just said. So he once stopped someone who was beating a small dog in the street because he recognized in the barking.

You should be in the Coliseum. No, he recognised in the barking, the voice of a friend of his who died. He'd then been reborn as a puppy. Yeah. The whole story does kind of imply that if he hadn't recognised the barking as a friend of his, he wouldn't have thought anything was amiss. Must have been a bad dog. Just leave it.

But what does he then do with the dog? You're turning this into a very different kind of talk show type of podcast Jerry Springer style. We don't know what he was like. What's the dilemma sorry in this? My friend is a dog. My friend's a dog. Stop beating the dog.

Okay, I'll stop beating it. Wouldn't you be like, Greg, what's up? Come hang out. Have dinner at ours. You're just going to be like, all right, see you buddy. Enjoy your new life. Great to hang out. Sucks you're a dog.

Catch you later. Stop harming my leg. You never did that before. He did love numbers, but he hated irrational numbers, or at least he didn't believe they existed. Is that why they're called irrational, because he was so irrational about them? He had an irrational loathing of them.

Sorry, they're the ones that go on forever. So they're numbers that can't be expressed as a fraction or a ratio, which I only realized when I was doing this research, having kind of known this, irrational eye ratio, then numbers you can't express as a ratio. So, five, six over two. Yeah, you idiot, can't believe we're all thinking that. So if you take 22 divided by seven,

it gets to quite close to 3.14 something, but it doesn't get to pi, which is 3.141, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which goes on forever. And that would be an irrational number. And he didn't believe in them because he loved finite numbers. And they were on a boat one day, on a cruise or something. and one of his followers called Hepasis

proved the existence of irrational numbers by saying the square root of two is one which, not is one, is one, is one. This is why I got no further than GCRC. And he, according to, reports, was tossed overboard. Yeah. Really?

So you've got to be careful with strict teachers. Was it, they killed him? Yeah, they killed him, yeah. They killed him, yeah. They killed him for proving that the square root of two is it a rational number. Yeah. Supposedly, yeah.

But he had... Made him walk the blank. But he believed in reincarnation, so he probably thought he'd bump into him on the street. As a cat of somebody, Greg! Greg, dude, I don't know what happened

with my temper that day, but wow. It was a fun cruise, though, wasn't it? When you joined his cult, you had to say nothing for five years, and that was how you got to the next level of the cult.

And also, he had... If you'd have gone four years in 11 months, that's a tough one, isn't it? And you bag your fuck. Yeah. But he had a system for his followers, right? So there were the Mathematicoi, who were the senior followers, right?

And he would meet them in person, and he would discuss proper maths with them, hard maths, and they would think a lot, and they would do a lot of, you know, they'd do the big stuff. And they had to make sacrifices. They had to give up meat, women, they're all men, and private possessions. Okay? So that's the senior tier. And they never touched white roosters.

Is that true? Yeah. Wow. Okay. I'm out. You'll have to give up meat, women and private possessions. Fine, fine. Anything else?

There's one thing. I'm out. A couple more rules. Don't eat your brain. Don't eat your brain. Couldn't find out really anything else, but I suppose that's all you need to know. Don't break bread.

Don't poke fire with a sword. Never urinate into the sun. I've heard don't urinate into the wind. Never into the sun. You might put it out. And we say that they couldn't eat any meat, which was mostly true, but they did still sacrifice an oxen

whenever they proved a mathematical formula. Sorry, what am I being sacrificed for again? Normally it's to appease a god or something. This doesn't sound important. You're being put into a pie. Oh my God. That's sympathy. That is sympathy.

That's the best joke you'll hear for months. But then he also had these junior tier followers who, people who basically hadn't subscribed and they were called the Akusmatikoi. Is this like a Patreon? It was a Patreon. It was genuinely he had a subscription service. So the Mathematikoi were in.

And then the Akusmatikoi, he would only speak to them from behind a curtain. Wow. And they weren't allowed to see his face and they couldn't learn any proper maths, like any detailed maths. But that was really because he wasn't the real Wizard of Oz, was he?

He was just an old man. This thing of him hiding behind a curtain so that you couldn't see him as he was talking, there is one of the stories of his death is directly associated with that. So someone on the lower Patreon level was part of that, couldn't see his face, got so angry that he couldn't see him,

was furious that he burnt down his house. Wait, but Pythagoras's house? He burnt Pythagoras's house down, and then he chased him into a field. So Pythagoras was in the lead, he's going good, he gets to the field, he's escaping this man, this is how the story goes, and then he notices that the field is full of beans,

and Pythagoras refuses to step on beans because he believes that beans, much like dogs, are the reincarnation. Greg? I thought what you were going to say is that the guy's chasing him went round two sides of the field and he went diagonally across it.

So he gets to the field of beans, and he stops and he thinks, I can't step on these beans. I'll kill the beans with my feet. And so the man catches up. And rather than going, fuck it, I'll just stamp on some, you know, beans. He just stands there while the man cuts his throat

and kills him. And that's the death of Pythagoras, according to one of many accounts. I think there's another version of the story where loads of his followers gave their own lives so that Pythagoras, go, Pythagoras, go, you must go, we'll give up our lives

while we're killed. Right. He still gets to the edge of the bean field. Listen, I can't do it. I can sacrifice them. I can't sacrifice you. He supposedly had the power to write words on the face of the moon. Oh yeah.

And I forgot to write anything more about that. As in, did he ever do that or was it? I'd love to tell you Andy, I'm afraid. I'm just, that's a single sentence there. That's just... And for just 2.99 a month, you'll be able to see the words I do write on the face of the moon. All right, I need to move us on to our final fact of the show. It is time for our final fact.

Final fact, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is when the website Health.com listed the fattiest foods in every state in the US, entrance included North Carolina's liver mush, New York's garbage plate, and Indiana's fried brain sandwich. See, they never read Pythagoras in Indiana today.

So, yeah, this is a fact just about the disgusting things you can eat in America. Yeah. The fried brain sandwich sounds really... Yeah. Weirdly, like the others are slightly euphemistic... Well, not even that euphemistic, but fried brain sandwiches are literally exactly what they sound like.

Oh, okay. Who's brain? Well, it used to be cow brains, but after my cow disease came in, they're now pig brains. One little tip, if you... When you bred the brains, as in you put the breadcrums on there,

make sure you have cold hands, otherwise they can fall apart. So that's a little bit of a tip. and the best place to get them is Hilltop Inn in Evansville and that has been dubbed recently in 2009 actually the manliest restaurant in America. Ah! I know I'm a man but I don't actually want my restaurant to be manly.

No. It's not even in my top five criteria for a restaurant. Shall we go Indian, Chinese or manly? Exactly. This list is incredible though. So you read out of some of the most amazing sounding ones But even the other things on it, the Colorado, the Jack and Grills 7-pound breakfast burrito

is the least healthy food in Colorado. Connecticut, the two-foot-long hot dog. And these aren't just in one place. Lots of them are available in lots of different places. Yeah. There's the quadruple bypass burger. 8,000 calories. I've had some of one of them.

How do you? Yeah, in Vegas, right? It's not impressive to have had some of one of them. So don't put your photo on the wall for that, mate. They'll put some of your photo on the wall. Did you hear about the Luther Burger? This is in Georgia in the South? This is a, right, it's a normal burger.

The Luther Burger, it's a normal burger. It's got egg, it's got bacon, and it's got cheese, as well as the burger. So far, so meh. But it's not served between a bun, can you guess? Luther, between two church doors. That's right. Yeah.

It fills the gap between the north and south doors on the transet. It's amazing. No, someone in the audience, murmured actually, is between two crispy cream glazed donuts. Oh, yes. And was that part of his Protestant theology? The donut thing?

It was the 96th theorem, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Shall I just quickly say the other two, very quickly. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, liver mush is a savory sliced loaf made from pork liver, scrap meat, often from a pig's head. spices and cornmeal. Nice.

Okay. And they have a livermush eating contest in wherever it was in North Carolina every year. They also have a livermush pageant but in last years... Hang out, yeah, yeah.

Contesting of what? I mean, are there floats? It's... Really feels like putting lipstick on a pig really trying to make that attractive. It's basically a festival and they have lots of things but they have basically

the local children or young women. that kind of... Dresses livermush? Oh no, they just dress as normal. Is it like a livermush queen? They often do that kind of thing. That's the kind of thing, yeah.

And the liver mush eating contest where last year the winner managed to eat some. And garbage plate is from Rochester, New York, and it's basically... This actually sounds really good. It's a choice of any meats, so even though I am vegetarian, but let's pretend I'm not.

It's like hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, any kind of stuff. You shove a load of French fries on it, shove a load of beans on it, macaroni cheese, and then cover it in a special sauce. That actually sounds quite good to me. Really depends on the special sauce. It does well.

I think it's hot sauce. Okay. Yeah. I love, we've mentioned it before, James. You've been there, but I just love read about it every single time, which is the disgusting food museum in Malmo, Sweden. And it just collects food that is utterly horrible.

And James, you tried a few things there, which tasted horrible. I was reading an article by a guy, who went there in 2019 called Arthur de Meyer, and he described, sort of, he gave a bit more of a sort of explanation about these particular foods. So you can have an Icelandic shark dish there

called hacarl. And he said it was eating it was like gnawing on three week old cheese from the garbage that had also been pissed on by every dog in the neighbourhood. That was one thing he had. I had that there, by the way. Did you?

Did you vomit? No, I didn't vomit at all from any of them, actually. Although I reched quite a lot. Does that count know? No, no. But the Hakka one was funny because the guy told me that it was seeped in urine and I ate it and you could really believe it.

It tasted, it did taste like piss. Right. And then I actually put it in a QI script and it turned out to be completely untrue. It was a natural urinary taste that it had. It didn't add any urine into it. Okay. So we cut it.

There's another one. The South Korean wine. Did you drink that? Actually, I think that's behind. a sort of glass because in order... You have fresh turds of children specifically and the owner of the museum, one of the founders of the museum,

he actually went about scooping up his eight-year-old daughter's poo in order to make this concordion. That doesn't count. It's like if you're buying it from South Korea as a special thing, that's one thing. If you're actually making it from your own... Homebrewd. But it says it has to be fresh

and no turd is going to be fresh by the time it's gone from South Korea to Sweden. I don't think turns are ever fresh. That's not... They absolutely are. They can be new. No. You can have...

I see what you're saying. If you're at a fresh deli, you wouldn't expect to see it, would you? They're safe at least five days after their best before date. I'm telling you. Okay. Gosh.

So I got slightly distracted from this because someone wrote in, actually, to the podcast email account, podcast. At QI.com. And this is from Evelyn Keeley, and it's that Oklahoma has a state steak. You know these official state things they have?

They have sorts of absolutely mad stuff. So Oklahoma's state steak is the ribby steak. The state drink is milk. This is a complete bracket, but they've got a state astronomical object, which is the Rosette Nebula, 5,000 light years away. I've no idea why. Such an unrecipricated relationship.

Yeah, I know. Twinned with. But they've also got, right, this is what sort of brought me back to the actual fact, which is a state meal, okay? And the state meal is this. It's some chicken fried steak, followed by barbecued pork, followed by fried ochre, squash, cornbread, grits, corn, sausage with biscuits and gravy,

black-eyed peas, strawberries, and piquan pie. That's the state meal. Cool. A lot of that sounds good, just not in the course of one. One meal? Actually, just speaking of many courses with meals, there is a footballer called Robert Levendoski who plays for Poland and whenever he eats a three-course meal, he always eats his dessert first.

Isn't that cool? Does he have a reason for it? Yes. He's Benjamin Button, isn't he? This is a new-ish kind of diet and the idea is you eat a very fatty dessert and then you eat your main course and then you eat your starter. And the idea is, what happens is if you eat a normal meal, you'll have your starter in your main course,

and then the dessert will come, and it looks really good, and you're like, oh, go on, then I'll have it, and you find some extra space for it. But people are less inclined to do that for their starter. And they tend to choose better main courses as well. And so there was a study done with people who were either told to eat in the normal order, or they could have a cheesecake and then choose their main

and choose their starter, or they could have some fruit and then choose. their main and then their starter. And they found that the people who ate the cheesecake first have 30% fewer calories than anyone else in their meal and that includes a really fatty dessert that they had. That's brilliant. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's like a trick. It's like you're tricking your mind. We've just cracked it, haven't we? You've just cracked the whole food thing. That's amazing. The whole food thing. I just think, if that works. Retire.

You think I've had a sticky toffee pudding so I think I'll just have a salad for the main. Thank you very much. But do you want to finish your meal with a nice bowl of soup, or would you rather finish with a chocolate cake? I'd rather finish with a starter. A starter's everyone's favourite course, isn't it?

Oh, okay. Nope. See? Yeah, yeah. Okay, way fewer than a third of the people in the room said, yeah. Sorry, that's not proof. You'll always get at least one yet. You are one of those people who goes to a restaurant

that goes, oh, I think I might have 12 starters. Quiz question. Oh, all right. Great. Can you guys name a processed food product that the Earl of Sandwich was responsible for inventing? Okay. I'm not going to do it, Andy.

Oh, sorry, a processed product. A food or drink product. Oh, fuck, I'm giving it away. Or drinks, did you say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, is it a liquidized sandwich? It's the MNS new liquid sandwich.

It's fizzy drinks. What? Yeah. So he commissioned Joseph Priestley, the chemist, to work on ways of making stale water more palatable and to keep water lasting longer because of ships. Ships would have stale water, it would go horrible. It's a problem.

People don't want to drink their water on board, so they might be dehydrated. So he hired Joseph Priestley, and Joseph Priestley created carbonated water. And as a result, it's slightly acidic carbonated water. So that means it's slightly antimicrobial, and it means it lasts longer. So that is actually the product that he is kind of responsible for. And the sandwich was way, way earlier, and he just popularized it. You might remember this. I got married in the room where he invented the sandwich.

Did you? Yeah, he did, didn't you? That was such a cheap meal as well. Interesting fact, everyone, like you're eating your ham sandwich. It's a homage. And enjoy your glass of Coke. Can I just say, Andy?

Crisps are available for purchase at the bar. Which will be a meal deal, which you can pay for when you leave. It's not a free wedding, I should have mentioned. Andy said to us before the show started, guys, I'm going to tell a personal anecdote tonight. Was that your personal anecdote? It was my personal anecdote.

Pretty good, yeah, you see it. Nice. He never tells anything. That was huge insight. It was very brave. Wow. Well, done. Well, the guy from the council

made such heavy weather of it in the room on the day. It was practically more of a sandwich talk than a wedding. It was most of the ceremony, yeah. And do you wish to be sandwiched between the holy laws of matrimony? Can I just mention one other food, American state food that I didn't know about? Again, we'll be very familiar to people from these places, but in places like Oregon and Washington State,

there's, now it's spelled G-E-O-D-U-C-K. G-E-O-D-U-D-S. Gooduck. Goody duck. Yeah. Weird, to start with, is gooey-D-D-U-D-D-Spelled completely the wrong way. And I've never seen one. They're the biggest burrowing clams in the world. And they look, they've got kind of a normal-ish-sized clam shell about the size of your palm.

And then it looks like... Looks like a slug's coming out of it, right? Yeah, but it looks like a slug who's tried on a dress, 12 sizes too small for it, is coming out of it. You've got a slug, the length of most of your arm, coming out of this bulging out of this tiny shell. And, I mean, it looks so phallic. It's very hard to get around the fact that it's... it is. And this is a delicacy. They live up to 150 years. So, and their entire lives are, they're born, they burrow really deep with their shell into the sand. And the reason they've got this huge phallus on them is so that it can stick up and just pop out of the sand on the bottom of

the seabed. Wow. So it can collect up what it needs. Wait, the phallus is collecting. Oh, no, no, it's not a phallis, it looks like a phallis. Oh, sorry. Oh, I got to go to go sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually its mouth. It's blimey. And it's a, it's a siphon. And he's going to be doing some Googling tonight. It's a really creepy slogan. It's not a phallus. It's a mouth. I don't know why.

Whose slogan is that? It's the slogan of the gooey duck. And, yeah, it's actually a siphon. So it sheds salty liquids, actually, that it doesn't need anymore. In fact, in water. I know it looks like a phallus, and it's shedding salty liquids. but I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, it is a mouth. If a gooey duck looks like a fallace and quacks like a phallus.

Luke, we've run over, I need to wrap us 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 have 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. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at q.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No Such Thing isafish.com.

All the previous episodes are up there. There's also links to all the merchandise that we've got. And also Clubfish are very secretive behind-the-scenes place where we do extra episodes and compilations and gossipy chat. It's really fun. So do check it out. But we'll be back again next week with another episode. So we'll see you then.

Thank you so much up the creek. That was awesome. We'll be back again. Goodbye.