No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Accidental Stuffed Crust

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss pizza, poetry, complaining and conveying. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hey everyone, before we begin this week's episode of Fish, we just want to remind you that the four of us are heading back out on tour as of this September with our massive 10th anniversary show, Thunder Nerds. It's going to be so good, guys. We're going all over. It's an Earth Sandwich tour. We're doing the UK, we're doing Ireland, and then we're going to the New World. To Australia and New Zealand. Those shows are almost entirely sold out in the New World. But Old World dates, there are some tickets left. So we're going to be. playing Bristol, Dublin, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, London, London again, and Manchester. That's right. So if you want to come and experience the dorkery in person, it's a wild night, we record a live podcast, we include extras, we've just written and performed our first preview of it. It was smashing, incredibly exciting. You're going to meet characters from the archives of our show. You're going to find out how we put all the show together. We're going behind the scenes,

and it's going to be a wild night. So come, be with us. in one of these big old rooms, and let's have a massive night out together. Just head to no such thing as a fish.com slash live. You'll find the links to every single one of those shows. Buy tickets, and we'll see you there. Yes, we cannot wait. It's so much fun. No Such Thingasavish.com slash live.

It's the perfect thing to do, or the perfect gift to buy someone you love who likes fish and is happy to see them us on stage. Cool. On with the show. Bye. Always end strong. Okay.

On with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Tyshinsky. 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 Anna. My fact this week is that in the swimming races at the first modern Olympics, the American competitor drops out because the water was too cold.

That is amazing. And how things have changed now, because they've had to change some of the swimming events because there's feces in the Sen. Oh, wow. Actually, well, similarly, now we have a lot of water events happening in the Sen, which is natural. water and this was 1896 and the swimming events happened in the med so that was surprisingly chilly very nice yes i think it was partly because the olympics had gone three times over budget and so they couldn't really afford to build proper swimming pools or set up those venues and so they thought the entire mediter radio yeah all that the med is of course hotter than your big oceans but this was happening

earlier on in the year in march or april depending on which calendar you were using and And it was surprisingly cold. It was surprisingly bad weather. And this competitor was called Gardner Williams. And this is all recounted by one of his fellow competitors who was there at the time. So there's some question as to whether this definitely happened. But his mate who was there competing with him said, this is what happened. And as this guy called Tom Curtis tells it, this guy had won many races in warm American swimming pools.

And he was blissfully ignorant that the Mediterranean is bitterly cold in April. So a boat took them out. He dived headfirst into the icy water. and in a split second his head reappeared, he shouted, Jesus Christo, I'm freezing. And with that shriek of astonished frenzy, he lashed back to the float. But it sounds like it wasn't even just the coldness. It sounds like the waves were crazy as hell.

The winner of the match describes 12-foot waves crashing down onto him as he was swimming towards the ending. Your lanes were only shown to you via hollowed-out pumpkins that were floating in the ocean. I love this. I think it genuinely was really cold because the guy who won was called Alfred Ha-Hoss, I think, and he wrote of this event

that the icy water almost cut into our stomachs. We called him ha-hoss or Hajjos or Hayos. Oh, Hajjos sounds actually like clear. He was Hungarian, wasn't he? Oh, there we go. He was actually known as the Hungarian dolphin, so he could just call him that and save the pronunciation issue.

Brilliant. So the Hungarian dolphin, He was also later the manager of the Hungarian football team. He learned to swim when he was 13 years old after his father had drowned in the Danube and he decided that he should learn how to swim. And when the Olympics started, he was at the local university and he really, really struggled to get permission to leave and go to the Olympics. And in fact, when he came back with his medals, he said, the dean did not congratulate me.

He said, your medals are of no interest. me, but I am eager to hear your replies in your next examination. Of course, like in those days, the Olympics wasn't that bigger deal. No, it was totally, I think. It didn't even exist. It didn't. It's like the first, if I just went off to a made-up competition, if I told you guys, oh, I'm going to be away for three weeks because I'm going to the global haiku slam event.

We would totally believe it. Yeah, but if you Google it and there was no evidence of it. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. I think I sort of understand it. Although in fairness and it was in the newspapers. If you look back in the newspaper archives, you can see that in America they were reporting on it.

They report on this guy that Anna and Richardly mentioned Gardner Williams at the start that he's going. And then you don't really see any mention of him in the results. So that does bear credence to the idea that he jumps in the water. It was too cold and he jumps out again. Yeah. I saw one amazing article in the Boston Globe. This was from the 12th of April 1896.

And they said that when Gardner Williams arrived on the boat in Athens. He came onto land in his trunks and a purple robe and announced to the press, Leander swam the Hellespont, and I will swim this here. Oh, sentences you regret. I have a feeling it might have been

satire. They didn't admit at any stage that this was a satirical piece, but I think it might have been, because they mentioned another guy called Hoyt, who was a pole volta, and they said that he was practicing over a statue of Zeus outside his hotel, and that he knocked the god off his pedestal three times,

but cleared him at the fourth try. So I can't tell if it's real on that. I believe there was so much mad stuff happening at these at the first ever games. As in the 1,200 metre event, it wasn't like you started, you got in the water and then you swam along the shore for 1,200 metres. You would taken 1,200 metres away from land.

Yeah. And then you were just ditched in the ocean. It was about surviving. Yeah, if you don't finish the race, you die. That's it. Yeah. It was only, because we are saying the water's quite cold, it was only, I think, about 12 degrees,

which is chilly, but just. If there are world swimmers out there, they'll be like, come on, guys, you pussies. I would say in the med, if people are swimming at the start of April in the med, you usually look at them and go, oh, that's a hardy soul. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Can I tell you guys about my favourite competitor from the 1896 Olympics? Yeah, go for it. Please.

Have you heard of Italian runner Carlo Iroldi? I did not hear of him. No. Oh, great. Okay. So he walked to the games. He was from Milan and they were taking place in Athens

and he was a great long distance runner, right? The previous year he'd done a 600 mile race in lots of different stages. So really good long distance running. He hears about this marathon. He thinks, that's a piece of piss. It wasn't 26, easy. So he thinks I'll do it.

But he didn't have money for a train or a ship or whatever for a Italy degree. So he thought, I'll just walk. I'll just walk there. And he briefly got a boat at one stage, but he did walk or run about 900 kilometres from his home to Athens, right? So what's the comedy thing that happens at the end?

If you're writing this as a script. He arrives at the start line. Yeah. And he's forgotten his shoes and has to go back. That's good. That's good. They've moved the venue back to where he had originally walked from. Yeah, it's in Milan.

Yeah. It's in Milan, yeah. No, what happened was he got there in time for the games, amazingly impressive, and then he was asked, oh, by the way, have you ever competed and won money for athletics? And he said, oh, yeah, I did win the Melanta Barcelona race last year, which was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kilometres. They said, oh, sorry, well, you can't run then.

Bye. No. Disqualified for being a professional. That's really sad. So your favourite competitor at the 1896 Olympics was not, in fact, a competitor. That's right. That's right. He was a cheat. He was an attempted cheat. Can I give you my favourite competitor for the 1896? Six Olympics.

This was Sumner Payne, who was a pistol fireer. He won the 30-meter-free pistol. And when he got home, he arrived a little bit early and surprised his wife with his medal. Hey, honey, I'm home early. And she was in bed with his daughter's Dutch music teacher. And so he chased him out of the house, firing his gun, bearing in mind that he's just won a gold medal at the 30-meter free pistol. Chases this guy out of the house.

The guy runs away and the police arrest him and put him in jail. And then in the court case later on, he was let off because they realized that he was such a good pistol shooter that he obviously hadn't meant to shoot the guy. Brilliant. If he meant to shoot him, of course he would have hit him. So they said that he's shown restraint and he got free. Because when you said he runs out of the house firing his first pistol, I'm thinking of him like being Yosemite sand. Do you know what I mean? I think there was some of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was too distracting. Sorry, what was that? So, listener, what happened there is we are recording this over the internet on a particular system. And when Andy did his Yosebani Sad shooting the guns in the air, a load of balloons came up. How do I make it happen again? I just, I was doing like, you have to not be trying. It knows if you want it.

Wow. What was that? That was incredibly distracting. That was brilliant. I think if I do a thumbs up, it makes a thumbs up on the screen. There we go. It does. Let's not do too many others.

Andy, no, don't take your pants. Oh, Andy. Two other things from the original Olympics that I quite like. The Greek team won gold in gymnastics. And they would not win another gold in gymnastics for 100 years. So it wasn't until the 1996 Olympics that they got their next gold. And the other thing is the hurdles, they used to jump. with two feet over it at the same time,

rather than doing that one leg and then the second leg coming over it. Yeah. So according to what I was reading, I haven't seen any footage. The Greeks did, I think. I think the American hurdler rocked up and saw the Greek doing that and thought, that's absolutely hilarious. You're screwed. I'm going to win this, which you did.

Because the Americans were all into college athletics at that time, weren't they competing for like Harvard or Yale or whatever? Yeah. And they were like really seasoned competitors compared to some of the other people who literally just rocked up and went, I might just do this then. Yeah. In fact, they were largely from, as you say, Harvard,

and it was the Boston Athletics Association, which was responsible for getting most of them there, which I mentioned because there's a really funny thing that was actually mentioned in this article by Tom Curtis, who was the hurdler who won gold. He said that they had a chant, which it's hard to know how it went, but I think it was BAA, ra, rah, rah, rah.

So Boston Athletics Association. And according to him, no one in Europe had ever seen cheering in unison before. So everyone was incredibly excited by this. And King George, the king was presiding over it all, like he judged if there was a tie. He was there. King George was so excited that the Americans did this chant. And King George's aid came up to the Americans and saluted them solemnly and said,

His Majesty, the King requests that you for him will make one more that funny sound, as he wrote. And they had to do it again. And then he gave them a celebratory breakfast the next day, which again, he said to the Americans, Would you mind doing that funny chant you did again, please? Wow, so much fun. So funny. Yeah, he was quite involved, wasn't either King.

He decided that no one should measure any of the long jumps because he thought that, oh, that's just the kind of thing professionals do. So we don't want professionals at this. It's an amateur athletics thing. We'll work out who's the longest just through looking with our eyes, but we're not actually going to measure it. And so we don't know what the longest distance was in that Olympics. We know who won it.

We don't know what they jumped. Really? That's really good. I'm actually reading up on how we do find if things are too close and, you know, like a photo finish, you know, what technology is out there now. But the swimming, they use a very interesting process in the pools, which is they have a pad that the swimmers need to touch. And I think I've worked out a hack, push out a wave that can move at a force of 3.3 pounds because that is the amount of poundage that you need in order to activate the pad to make it lock the timing. Fortunately, they've worked out. Sorry, Dan, just to say, the way that swimming works is you're kind of pushing the water backwards

in so that you go forwards. And if you push the water forwards and make a wave, you're actually going to be sending yourself backwards. Well, that's fine, because then you just stay at the back of the pool, and you just concentrate all your effort and blasting a wall of water at that pad, and then relax. Or the final 10 meters, turn around and swim the other way. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, that's okay.

That's one for a try next time, Adam Beattie. But it's pretty amazing how quickly these things are logged. Yeah, the speed is extraordinary. And I think it's completely pointless, because when you're coming down to those five margins, who cares? It's a draw. I just think if human eyes can't see it, just call it a tie. I agree.

If the King of Greece can't tell, clearly who's ahead is the title. You know, South America was thought not to have played a part in the first Olympics until very recently when we found evidence that they did. Chili always claimed they'd sent one athlete. It was very chilly in that water. Go on. It's like your joke signifier now, Andy, that noise, just so we thought it's happened. Yeah, yeah.

Anything I say without that is actually meant to be taken deadly seriously. That's really good to know. There was a Chilean guy called Louis Suba Casso, and he didn't get any medals, so there's no written evidence of him being there because they didn't keep very good records. It was only if you got a medal, really. And then, I think in about 2014,

apparently the forensic Chilean police force, who were like facial recognises, examined a couple of photos from the 100 metre sprint, and they confirmed using their facial recognition skills that that was, in fact, him. Now, it was the Chilean police. One load of nonsense. A, just if you're a super recogniser,

you can just say, oh, yeah, that's the guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, definitely. It's so ripe for abuse, system. Secondly, slow crime day in Chile, wasn't it? You caught everybody, have you? You caught every shoplifter or whatever. You've cleared your backlog back to 1896. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that Japan is currently planning a 300-mile conveyor belt.

Is this just for people who've done a huge supermarket shop? That's right. Yeah, yeah. How far into planning is it? Oh, it's early stages. It's very early stages. Oh, is it just someone, is it like a Boris Johnson saying, oh, let's do this? I don't think anyone in Japan is as unreliable as Boris Johnson. So I think it's already a better plan than all of his. But I think it's a very ambitious plan, definitely,

because I think the longest conveyor belt at the moment in the world is quite a lot shorter than this. But the idea is that it would be effectively a road linking Tokyo and Osaka. and the conveyor belts would be either along the hard shoulder of roads between these two places or in tunnels under the road. And it would be in big pallets. And it's really sensible, actually. It's not just a sort of kind of wacky plan. It's because there's... Another difference with the Boris Johnson approach.

It's because there's forecast to be a really big shortfall of drivers. Like lorry drivers. Lorry drivers, haulage and all of that. In some remote areas, it's going to be a really acute problem because lots of... Lots of bits of Japan have falling populations and it's important to be able to keep supplies going obviously to all bits of the country. So the idea is if you free up drivers between Tokyo and Osaka, they're free to service lots of other bits of the country.

And also it's a generally good idea to free up roads of freight because the idea, you reduce pollution on the surface, you reduce congestion, free up the roads for non-commercial travel, all sorts of things. So it is currently in the early state. It's basically at the moment it's a line. It's a long line on a bit of paper. Right. Is it a conveyor belt that goes back around?

As in if you miss collecting your freight at the end, does it head back to Tokyo? It's like an airport one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You have to wait at the end looking out for your Amazon package. Do we know how fast it's going to go? Incredibly fast. 400 miles an hour. Come on.

No, I don't know. I don't know. Because there is a limit of how fast a conveyor belt can go, really. Practically there is, because if you put some. something on a conveyor belt that's going more than, let's say, 20 miles an hour. The stuff's just going to fly off. Yeah. I was wondering if it was going to go fast enough to be worth getting on it yourself

if you needed to get from Tokyo to Osaka. And it probably would be, wouldn't it? That would be incredibly cool. The fastest conveyor belt, actually, I should say, is, can you guess how fast it goes? Mouse per hour. Is it for people? No, it's for Riddish Lignite Rocks. Oh, okay.

my calculation. Okay, I think about 20 miles an hour. Okay? 50. 50? 50 miles an hour? It's going to be a lot, isn't it? Otherwise, it wouldn't have asked? Dan, is it somewhere in between or are you going to go

massively high or massively low? 400. No, so I think it's got to be lower. I think lower than Andy's. I would say 15. It's 33 miles per hour. Wow. 15 meets a second. And yet, again, the reason that it can't go faster,

presumably you could in theory make it go faster but if you put the rocks on they're just going to fly off yeah how you're going to collect your sushi off that belt when you're sitting down for a meal yeah yeah yeah yeah just breaking your teeth I think the longest one so far is about 100 kilometres it's about 60 miles and it's in the western Sahara well controversial

oh great can I just say I always thought that was the longest conveyor belt as a QI researcher you just kind of know these things oh yeah yeah that's in your induction pack isn't it But that's, okay, I'll just say what that one is. So that's phosphate rock in Western Sahara, and it's a 2,000 tonnes an hour of phosphate rock has moved along that, and it's been mined and now it's going to be refined.

Yeah, so it is really, really long, but it is made of lots of units, and each unit is only 11.7 kilometers long, and then they attach together a bit like Legos. But the longest, just one conveyor belt is between India and Bangladesh, and that goes 35 kilometers. and it was the only man-made structure built after partition that links Bangladesh and India. Wow.

The economists tried to follow it and what they do is they followed this conveyor belt, followed it, followed it, followed it, and they got to within like a few hundred metres of the border and the soldiers went, nope. So actually no human can go that way. You'd have to put yourself in a box if you ever wanted to make that journey. Or a cake. Big cake. It's not used for that. I think that's going to stand out amongst whatever they're trying to.

sporting from the mine. So it's like Lignite rock Lignite rock, Giant birthday cake Lig night rock Lig night rock Wait hang on

go back to No no you just say Oh someone down the other end the lines having a birthday That's nice Well you had to do an emergency Stop on it

And Andy just flung out of the cake Fully naked Oh dear So Andy is yours A continuous conveyor belt then Or should we alter your fact To is planning a three-mile long conveyor belt?

I don't think the Japanese system will be one belt. So it'll be a system, won't it? I think as long as it doesn't have to dismount and then be remounted by a human, I would allow it. Okay, nice here, yeah. There's a pitch for one in Britain.

There's the film called Magway, who wants to do the same kind of thing. It would be around London, and it's on magnetic surfboards. So I think this would be floating parcels delivered around London. Don't put water on it. That's a magway, mogwai joke.

Oh, that's good. And it can't carry anything after midnight. Isn't that Cinderella thing? It's also a Gremlin's thing. Okay. The swimming at the Athens Olympics had to happen after midnight because previously all the coaches

were floating in the water. That was laboured. James, I want to borrow my joke noise for that. What was it again? So I was learning a bit about conveyor belt terminology Because I'm sure as we all have We've all spent a long time today On websites that sell conveyor belts

And do you know what the most important bit of a conveyor belt is called? The rubber? The belt? The belt? It's actually, no, it's not the rubber bit, it's the bit under the rubber, which is made of interwoven fabric Which is responsible for the tension and the weight carrying

And it's called the carcass Oh, lovely. That's good. Those conveyor belt websites, they all do nick from each other, don't they? The history of the conveyor belt It's been really copied and pasted quite a few times. It has. But I think I can tell you the original source

and it is the most important history of conveyor belts ever written. It's called Belt Conveyors and Belt Elevators. It's by a guy called Fred Hetzel written in 1922. Okay. A lot of these copy things seem to come from him. So I think 1795 is often cited as the first modern conveyor belt by a guy called Oliver Evans who did it for his flour mills to transport.

brought flour around. And Evans also invented the first ever car in America, but by accident. How, okay, how do you do that? All inventions are always, oh, he was carrying the ingredients of a car and then he tripped over and they fell, assembled themselves on the conveyor belt. Yeah, and it just drove him the rest of the way. Wow. Well, it's, um, this one I've just used by accident quite loosely. It was called the Oructaw amphibulose. And it was also the first amphibious vehicle in the world. It was a huge steam-powered machine that is supposed to dredge stuff from the bottom of water. He built it in his warehouse.

But then he had to transport it to the river in Philadelphia in order to show it off and do the dredging. So to transport it, he attached four wheels and he rigged up the wheels to the steam mechanism for the dredging. And he drove it through Philadelphia. And there, by accident, he's made the first car, hasn't he? That's quite cool. That's quite cool. Is it Thomas Robbins Jr., who is largely credited with the sort of the modern conveyor belt that we use these days? He supplied his conveyor belts to people like Thomas Edison to use in his factories and so on.

And he also was the first, I believe, to use vulcanized rubber. And there's quite a nice link because Thomas Robbins Jr., his granddaughter, Louisa Robbins, married Austin Goodyear, which must have been a powerhouse couple. It's like a royal family of vulcanized rubber and conveyor belting. Have you heard of the Trotoir Rulant Rapid? This was at the Montparnasse Biennacht station. It was a high-speed walkway. You know those ones you get at airports? Oh, yeah.

They go really slowly, don't they? I think we can all agree. Oh, love them. Sure, we all love them, but they could be gingered up a bit. Dan, are you the kind of person who just gets on them and then just stands there with all of your luggage, just blocking the way so none of those people can walk on them? No, but I had an accidental layover in Abu Dhabi, and I thought there was going to be full of stuff for the kids. There was nothing.

It all had shut since COVID. And we spent, no joke, four hours running on the travelators, back and forth, to tire out the kids. Well, Dan, you would have loved the trotoir roulette rapid, Montparnasse, Bienvenue, because it was fast. It went at seven and a half miles an hour, which is, that's jogging speed, I'd say. Basically, it was so dangerous. It had to have bounces at the beginning, saying, No, you are not ready for the Trot-Aroulon-Répeat. It's too much for you.

Go away. There was an acceleration zone at the beginning and then a deceleration zone at the end. And it did nine years in service, but there were so many accidents. Hang on a second. I have a question. If you're on a traveller that's shared by lots of other people,

how does it accelerate you at the start without accelerating everyone else along the way? Great question. I think it might have been a belt that gets you up to a few miles an hour ready. And then the next zone is going a few miles an hour faster than that first so. You see what I mean? So you don't just step onto a thing

going at jogging speed because that would be a bit mad. I think we've said that in the past that this was an idea that was put about in America when they first invented conveyor belts. Yeah, the walkways. The walkways where you would like

step on one which was two miles an hour and then step onto one that was four miles an hour then one that's eight miles an hour and before you know it, you're going at 60 miles an hour in a walkway. Yeah. But here's the thing, you're one, Andy, with the acceleration speed

is assuming that you're just standing still and that is the seven mile an hour speed that you're going at. But as we experience in Abidabee, when you run on these things, the speed that you get when you're running. So I wonder what speed you could get on a seven mile an hour travel later. Wow. It would be your normal speed plus seven miles an hour. So what's my normal speed?

I guess is the big question. Yeah. I mean, the sky's the limit, depending on how good you are running. I don't think the sky is the limit. I don't think you can run infinitely fast just as long as you keep trying. How did conveyor belts really change the world, would you say? Supermarkets? No, no, before that.

Like industry, big industrial plants, really. Yeah, exactly. And all of those, aren't they? Assembly lines, basically, isn't they? Yeah. You know, it's like the idea was, let's say you're making a car, your Ford, what would happen is you'd have your carcass of a car just sort of hanging up. And then if you're the guy who does the left wheel,

you'd have to go over to the car and attach to the left wheel. And then the guy who puts a windscreen wipers off. and would have to walk over and do that. But if you have a conveyor belt, then the carcass can move along and everyone can just stand there and do their thing. And by the time it gets to the end of the conveyor belt, it's done. So Ford was the first place to really do that,

and that was why they became so massive. And originally, the conveyor belt was pulled by a rope, so you would have a person on the end, and they would be pulling the car along while everyone was doing their thing. And the really interesting thing is that the idea came to them from a slaughterhouse. So one of the guys who was working at Ford

visited a slaughterhouse in Chicago and they had a thing called a disassembly line where someone would get an actual carcass, and pull it along on a rope and then the first person would take out the heart and then the next person would pull off the legs. They would take all the bits of the carcass off to be used.

And this was their system. And then Ford thought, well, what if instead of taking bits off the carcass, we put bits onto the car. And that's why it's called a car. Is that? We're all dancing around it. Conveyor belts are responsible for naming one of the big American products out there.

Literally the conveyor belt suggested the name. Really? Yeah. And that is Hershey's Kisses' Chocolate. Oh, yeah. And it was when they were manufacturing it, the sound that the motion of the machine made when it plopped the chocolate onto the conveyor belt. It sounded like a little kiss.

And so they thought, oh, these are kisses that are coming out. And so they became Hershey's kisses. So, yeah, it was literally suggestedly named. It's better than Hershey's plops. But also, it's like the little tube comes down, doesn't it? And it goes very close to the conveyor belt and then drops it off and pulls up again. So it's like it's kissing the conveyor belt. Which is not like plopping.

No. Sounds like it's still, they must have had a wet conveyor belt. Oh. I'd never heard a convey about my kissing sound. She's gentle wet plops. We've all had American chocolate. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact is that graffiti in toilets is called latranalia,

thanks to a professor in 1966 who thought shithouse poetry wasn't technically correct. Because of the novel poetry. It did seem to be. I did like this fact because it did seem to be that his objection was just that it wasn't technically correct, right? Yeah, yeah, that's all it was. He was an American folklorist called Alan Dunds.

And it was a fine term, but he just thought, it's not all poetry, you know. So he wrote, by the way, this paper, which is called Here I Sit. And it's a history of scatological graffiti, anything that we found from the ancient world all the way through to current day. And he gave us this word as a result. Which we use now on a daily basis. It's very common. The contribution he's made.

Dunn's had in his paper, he had the theory that the reason that people write stuff on toilet walls is because they have a desire to smear things with their excrement. And apparently this is the socially accepted form of that impulse. Right. Whereas my newly invented turd crayon actually allows you to indulge both impulses at the same time. Yeah, yeah. I thought this was from the paper Theses on Fecese's. Am I wrong?

Maybe he republished. Right. I mean, James is in my book, for instance, was released in hardback under the name Everything to Play for and in paperback under a load of old balls. Jesus. Do you have a podcast as well? Actually, now you mention it.

Oh. I just felt like a really relevant example. Yeah. That's really relevant, Anna. That's good work. Guys, you're being weirdos. And look, I don't mind. We can be weirdos.

We can be weirdos. but. I'm so sweet for you to publicise Dans thing. Yeah. What a good mate. So Dunns or Dundees. I actually don't know how you pronounce his name. I'm going to say Dundies just to contradict you guys.

Yeah, go for it. He was a pretty interesting guy. He was known as the Jokes Professor because he made his lectures, you know, witty and funny, included lots of riddles in them. And he wrote some seriously controversial stuff, like a thing about how the German national character

is inextricably bound up with anal. erotic fixation, which made him contentious. In Germany, I imagine. I think largely in Germany, yeah, some of them objected. Some of them loved it. Fortunately, he only wrote it on the back of a toilet cubicle. In his own feces. Yeah, so, yeah, had a limited impact.

But he had this weird moment when he, just before he retired, which was the year 2000, he got a letter which his wife opened and read, which I don't know what the dynamic is there, but she said, gosh, you've got this letter. from a former student who says that what I learned in your anthropology class has influenced me every day of my life, so I'm in closing this check for you. And she said, and it's $1,000, darling. And so he said, wow, that's, gosh, how lovely. And then she said, hang on, I don't know how she miscounted, maybe if she was an idiot.

But she said, oh, actually there are more zeros than I thought. It's actually a million dollars. And a former student just left him a million dollars. If you've been enjoying this podcast for the last 10 years, feel free. Which of us is willing to give out a home address to receive that million dollars? I will, but you have to read my letter to me because I don't just swamped. That's very funny. Wow. One of the things is I think there's been too much academic study written about latrinalia

and we need to pare it down because everyone, every Tom Duggan Harry's written a paper who doesn't know what else to do thinks. How interesting and I can really easily access this. I'll just go to my uni toilet. And it's always about the gender difference because obviously mostly you get men's and women's toilets. But it does seem true that sex is definitely the most common topic by far. There was a study in Nigeria, which found that 46% of men's and 37% of women's graffiti was about sex.

And women have more insults, but also more supportive. Yeah, there was a study that was done in 2016 by a guy called Scott Kelly, who works in advertising. And he just got curious about it. and he had people going into toilets all over London, I think 100 toilets, and he asked both men and women to report back on what they found. So some of the results showed that women were more likely to express feelings of love support and men were more likely to draw penises.

That was the large opening thing that they found. The penises that were found on the walls of women's bathrooms had longer penises than the one on the men's walls. Not sure what that means. Was that because all the men were saying, this is how big your penises, you dick, Ed? and then taking the piss out of someone. I think it's because the men were tracing around their own penises

when they were drawing the pictures on the wall. Whereas women had to do it from memory. It's how many show support mutually, I think, is insults and scatological. There's a lot of correcting. You see someone correct someone else's writing or repost. Yeah. I saw it an article about Lancaster University.

This was Dialogs in Solitude, and they talked about someone who'd written Filed FC. and then someone else had written our shit and then someone else had written hot underneath and they went into all sorts they were like

here is an assertion made by A with the illocution signaling identification with the college football team B contributes a negative evaluation of the group in question denigrating the identity

of the other and consequently ameliorating in group identity there is then support for A by C shifting this negative evaluation by the addition of hot which changes shift

into an intensifier in shit hot. If anything, proves my complaint about academics wasting their time and ours, it is that. It is remarkable, isn't it? I mean, literally. Just get a lie. If that's been done with public money, I'm a little bit fixed about that.

The entry for dictionary in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica was written by a guy called Alan Walker Reed, and he was also very big in Latrinalia. He wrote a book where he was, went around the Western United States picking up graffiti from toilet walls, but he had to publish it privately in Paris because no publisher would take it

because it was so filthy. Oh, wow. Trust the Parisians. Isn't that amazing? And even then, they only made 75 copies and there was a disclaimer on the front page saying this should be restricted to students of linguistics.

Wow. So funny. Wow, Paris was the point. Wasn't it Paris that printed Ulysses as well. Uly's. Yeah, yeah. It was the place to go if you had something filthy

that you wanted to print. Maybe Lady Chattelies lover. Did that have to be printed in France and then shipped over? I think so. You might be right. I remember. Wow.

Paris actually, I think, had the first public urinals in public, as it were, you know, like the ones we have that raise up the street now that you can do in London. I think, because I was reading about them because obviously, you know,

this is about public toilets generally. And there was an early 19th century prefect of the city called Rambuto. A prefect? Like a, like a, Like at private schools? Yeah, he wasn't head boy, but if people still liked him. Just go around telling other Parisians to do up their cravats immediately.

So Rambooteau, the prefect, ordered the construction of these things because people were weighing on the streets too much. And it's just so interesting that immediately it gives privacy to people to transgress and being gay was not legal then. And so that sort of gave an opportunity to be gay in private. and by 1862, police were recording the locations of all the glory holes in the public toilets that had been made. They were keeping a record. So that's like, again, I didn't know glory holes went back that far.

I remember probably said it on here, but the oldest glory hole in Australia is in Perth Museum. Really? And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. As in brought in? Wait, that's where it was. Was it just? No, it was found in a public toilet and they brought it and put it into the collection. Oh, wow.

Hole? As in, like, what's the... You can't. Anything is potentially an ex-glary hole. I'm holding it. I'm holding a glory hole here. Can you see it? The Roman stuff we haven't talked about.

Is there actual evidence of it? I know there are sort of quotes about it. Yeah. Well, as in graffiti in ancient Rome. Do we have actual walls that were written on? I think in Pompeii they do, don't they? Yeah, Pompeii they do. Oh, yes.

And that, weirdly, that got me on to it. Have we talked ever about the Latin Thesaurus that has people have been writing since 1894. This is amazing. Okay, this is some people in Munich. They're making a dictionary of Latin, right? From 500 BC to 200 AD. And what their aim is,

is every single word ever written in Latin ends up in this dictionary. So this is how I found it. Researcher Marika Otink said, if a word is just on a toilet in Pompeii in graffiti, you'll find it with us. So literally every word. They started.

doing us in 1894, the German government set it up, they might be done by 2050 if they hurry, but they think it's probably actually a bit too ambitious. Right. How are they being so slow? I mean, all dictionaries are supposed to have every word in them. I think it's every single word has an entry and a branching

tree of how it relates to all the other words it's related to I see. The most recent work they published was P, they had a P, but they did skip N because I had a lot of words in their they have to go back at some point And to do N, it's so annoying. They have a lot of like, are they called hapex ligamonons or something,

where they have one example of the word, they just don't know what it means, right? Because if you've only got one example of a word being used, unless that is in a dictionary, say this word means this, it's really hard to ascertain exactly what it means. If all uses of the word milkshake are lost in future in 500 years, apart from in the song, my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. There'll be feverish, scholar debate about what a milkshake was. What is it?

Yeah, exactly. You can infer things. So if you've only got a word that's on a toilet wall that says ex-person's name is an absolute questionable word, you know, you can infer, can't you? It might be legend. It might be asshole. I suppose that's a good point, yeah. I didn't consider legend as a possibility.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Pizza Hut in Hong Kong sells a pizza, topped with ham, mushroom and snake. Almost... Disgusting. It's like pepperoni, though. If you slice the snake finely enough. Oh, sorry.

I was thinking the mushroom part was disgusting, but now I see, actually, the snake is the unusual bit. Yes, so this is Pizza Hut in Hong Kong. They have done a team up with a restaurant called Sir Wong Fun, which is arguably the oldest restaurant in operation in Hong Kong. And this restaurant has lots of specialties, which includes snake meat. And so the Hong Kong Pizza Hut decided, well, why don't we put some on our pizzas? And I don't know how popular it is.

I wouldn't eat it. Do you know what kind of snake? Oh, what a good question. I do not actually. It's like scampy, isn't it? There's all sorts of stuff in there. You can eat. There's lots of different species of snake that are eaten.

So I actually don't know. For instance, we even at Viper in England. Really? At various times in our history. We have a few cookbooks with Viper recipes in them. Wow. I actually wonder why we don't. There must be something.

It must not be that tasty. Otherwise, why aren't we eating Snake? I don't think it's very tasty. Kenelm Digby, father of Everard Digby, friend of the podcast, come up with a recipe of a Viper wine at some point. I think he did with cock ale as well in the same book. Yeah, interesting. Apparently, just on the taste of snake,

according to the Oxford companion, it's of food. They say generally, the obvious resemblance between eels and snakes make recipes for one suited to the other, but snakes are leaner. Right. They taste a bit eely, apparently. Do you know when the best time to eat this pizza is?

And I don't mean in terms of like, you know, 7 p.m. I mean seasonal. Ooh. Oh. Snake season. When the snakes are big? Yeah, so it's when the or. Autumn wind begins to blow.

And the reason is because they've fattened up the snakes at this point in preparation for hibernation. So you're getting your snakeiest topping when you order it then. Ooh. So fat. Pizza Hut are very good at this kind of regional specialising, aren't they? Are they? Well, I found a few other examples from around the place. These are a bit less visceral.

I mean, Pizza Hut Middle East did eat cheeseburger crown crust pizza, which has a ring of miniature cheese burgers around the edge of the crust. Sounds great. Fine. Well, all right. How do you think about this one, James? Pizza Hut Malaysia,

which offer a kind of squirting crust. Okay. Isn't that a stuffed crust that you've squeezed? What's it squirting? Garlic sauce and cheese. Isn't that just a stuffed crust? For some reason, it's more impressive than a stuffed crust. It's more of a blast zone, apparently.

Oh, okay. Okay. I had a little look at the stuffed crust, and it's a fascinating tale. Did any of you guys see this? No. The inventor of the stuffed crust has actually had a full-on documentary released about him

called Stolen Doe. Brilliant. He's called Anthony Mongiello. He invented it in the 1980s and Pizza Hut stole it. He once accidentally made a pizza badly, made the crust too big, saw there's this big hole in my crust,

let's stuff it with cheese. And he mentioned this to his dad, who actually had invented a machine for molding mozzarella, So there are a big cheese inventories. He accidentally invented stuff crust after his father invented an incredibly complication industrial component to mold mozzarella. What are the odds? I'm so annoyed.

I'm so annoyed every time. Yeah. It's a co-lab. That's a co-lab. I'm sure he invented it thanks to a combination of circumstances which are not like, oh, are you troll in my pizza? What can I fill it with? Well, I don't have a snake to hand.

That's all else. It's a little more organic than that, isn't it? You've grown up in a family where cheese is a big thing. You're often talking about it, especially squishy cheese. Completely. I'm just saying circumstances are a bigger factor than accident in that. No one's claimed an accident. I haven't claimed that he invented it by accident.

He very much invented the stuff crust intentionally. Okay, okay, good. With money in mind. Well, like the invention of the car, which just somehow magically happens. The crucial thing, he's got a patent. Then he called up pizza places. He called up Pizza Hut and said, look, do you want this stuff crusting I've invented? Pizza Hut said, no.

Eight years later, what shows up on Pizza Hut's menu? It's the stuff crust. And what did they claim? They were probably just making a pizza and noticed that there was a hole in their pizza tripped over, so lots of Luella London in there. They didn't even attempt to claim that. They basically offered him 50 grand

and was like, we're like, you know, and he was like, get stuffed. That's what it should have been called this documentary. Stolen Doe is very good as well. I think Get Stuff would be the Pizza Hut response documentary in the documentary rap battle. Oh, yeah. But he decided to reject their offer and sued them for one billion dollars.

One billion. It's always a great number to sue. Yeah. It is really cool, isn't it? It's very Dr. Evil, but it's destined to failure, which it did. Oh. He didn't get anything. He got nothing.

Wow. Just take what you're offered, guys. That's the lesson of this. Just very quickly, do you know how they cook pizzas at Pizza Hut? Did they put them in a pizza oven? They use a conveyor belt. No. They do. Really? Yeah. It goes on a little conveyor belt and heads into the oven and it comes out the other side cooked. Like those things that make toast in hotels. Yes. Yeah. Like that. That's very cool. It's silly because you can't adjust the toastedness, can you? You should be able to adjust the speed.

Well, you can adjust the toastedness. There are dials. And also, I mean, the problem is they often only toast one side of the bread. So you get toast that's charred on one side and bread on the other. Guys, you guys are going to terrible hotels. Yes. Jens, we'll go on tour together. It's annoying when you go off to the local Hilton with your fancy toasting machines. In 2012, they launched a promotion Pizza Hut where if you were in the American presidential debates and you asked the candidates

whether they preferred sausage or pepperoni on their pizza, you would win free pizza for life. Okay, did anyone do it? No, because there was an outcry. I think it was, you know, degrading democracy. Ha, little did they know. And they moved it online and just instead randomly selected

someone to win free pizza for life, which I think was also a swiss because what is free pizza for life? Oh, well, they always, what they do is they work out the average number of pizzas that someone eats in a year. And like, that's always down because they include people who just don't eat pizza. Yeah. And then they say, okay, well, the average person eats one and a half pizzas a year. If we include everyone who lives in Mauritania, who's never heard of a pizza. And so, yeah, they give you a voucher for like 12 pizzas. Yeah. It was a, it wasn't that quite, it was a free pizza a week, but only for 30 years. I think after 30 years, you are probably

done. I think if you're eating that many pizzas, that probably is your life expectancy. I would like the right to have 9,000 pizzas now. Do you know what I mean? It should be any number of pizzas you want for eternity. I agree.

Do you know which country eats the most pizza? Which is so surprising. Italy. Italy. Lovely. I'll accept James's answer as less wrong, but still wrong. What would it be? I think it must be, do you mean per capita? Per capita, yes. Ooh. Interesting.

I think, and it's quite hard to explain why, and no one has adequately done it. So my theory is that this place perhaps doesn't have access to that much. Good, fresh food. Because of its geographical location, you're quite far away. East Ireland. Oh, okay, I take it back. Norway eats by far the most pizza. So 11.4 kilos per person.

Next is Canada, 8.9. So that's so much. Most of it is frozen pizza that you buy from the supermarket, and half of those are this brand called Grandiosa. And I really want a Norwegian to write in. I think when we went to Norway, maybe I'm conflating two places here, but I feel like there was quite a lot of these 7-Eleven places

where you could just buy slices of pizza all the time. Oh, that's good. I think that might be part of it. Buying by the slice is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Is it good pizza that they're? I think it's not, I think they like it to the extent that when a, the company that makes Grandiosa, which is called Staburet, when they produced a pizza themed song called Respect for Grandiosa in 2006, it was at the top of the country's music charts for eight weeks.

Oh my God. I also think it's not particularly good pizza. Yeah, but it doesn't prove it really. It doesn't prove the taste thing, does it? No. Should we mention proper, true, true a pizza from Naples? Yeah. Because it's very serious in Naples.

So there is the Associationse Verace Pizza Napolitana, and this was set up in 1984 by the 17 most eminent pizza clans in Naples. So. It's how rough on the 18th most eminent? I know, I know. And there's a guide to Neapolitan pizza, what it needs to be to become accredited. So even if you're anywhere around the world,

you can make a proper Neapolitan pizza, but you have to adhere to this guide. It's 27 pages long and it's incredibly strict about the kind of things you need. What is it? Is it like just like literally cheese tomato and basil or something? Yeah, there are lots of rules about the dough and the scorch marks and that kind of stuff. And this dimensions, like maximum dimension is 35 centimetres across all of this stuff.

They claim that even Roman and Sicilian pizzas are just sort of bastardised for catchers. I mean, they're probably very proud of it. Well, I think like modern pizzas were invented in America really, weren't they? Because like basically what happened was Italian immigrants or immigrants to America had this thing called tomato pie, which is basically like a pizza. But the cheese would go on the bottom and the tomato would go on the top. What? And then they kind of over the years, especially in New York, they kind of added toppings and they swapped the cheese and the tomato around. and they created what we would now know as a pizza.

Oh, sorry, I thought you meant the cheese went on like the underside. And the Tato went on the top side. Like a sandwich, a bread sandwich. Yeah, like, well, how do you hold this? That's disgusting. And so then what happened was American tourists would go over to Italy and they'd want pizzas like they knew at home. And so Italians would start making pizzas in this American Italian style.

And so that's why now, even in Italy, most of the pizzas will be this kind of modern style of pizza. That's very interesting. You know, it's so weird. You mentioned New York. It wasn't until September 20th, 1944, that pizza got its first proper mention in a newspaper. And even more exciting, the article uses what they say is the rare use of the plural of pizza, which is pizza.

Pizza. Oh, nice. Nice for you, James. Yeah, yeah, we'll do that from now on, pizza. I actually, I did find another mention in from 1935 from New York. Oh, yes. about a pizza restaurant, describing it excitedly as this new invention. Yeah, so I think it might have come up a little bit.

But it was like a calzone, I think. It was stuffed, which I think they often were at this time. And it said that pizza is best served as a side to roast beef. How interesting. Because you know calzone used to mean sausage wrapped in a tube of dough was a calzone. Like a toad in the hole? Well, like a sausage roll, basically. Oh, yeah.

And then eventually it became a folded over pizza, but really a true calzone should be just a sausage roll. Sausage stuffed crust. That's interesting. And the word pizza originally was pita, like pita bread.

And it gets a name from the old word for pitch, you know, like a pine pitch that you might paint onto a ship so that it doesn't, so that it's waterproof. And is that because

you're painting the tomato pitch onto the boat which is the pizza in this instance? No, it's because when you paint pitch onto wood, it kind of comes into layers

and quite a lot of breads and cakes are quite layered. And so you have in lots of different languages you have pitch cakes and pitch breads. In the Middle East it became pitta and then that came to Italy and they called it pizza. That's great. The 2024 World Dominoes Championship

is this Domino's Pizza? I'm talking pizzas. The game, the game Domino's. It's sponsored by Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut. No. Is it? Is it? And they've run adverts. People who like Domino's Love Pizza Hut. That's so good. That's stunning.

Dominic. Very clever. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this show, we can be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. I am also on Twitter like Andy's Andrew Hunter M. And my Twitter is at James Harkin. Yeah, and Anna, where can they get to us as a group generally? You can go on Twitter to add No Such Thing or Instagram to at No Such Thing as a Fish or you can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our website. No Such Thingasafish.com.

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because we will be back for another episode and we'll see you then. Goodbye.