No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Anti-Schmetterling Schnibbles

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Dan, James and Andy discuss shining holes, glittery voles, Baker's burial and Basque butterflies. 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 Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from three undisclosed locations around the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, and the reason we are three today is Anna is on holiday, so I am joined by Andrew Hunter 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, that is Andy. My fact is that scientists are trying to save water voles by feeding them glitter. Yes. Oh, nice.

Yeah. I thought plastic was bad for the environment. Yeah. Well, yes. They're not feeding them plastic. It's not only feeding them plastic. It's not like they're just shoveling glitter into these poor voles. Basically, they're very endangered water voles in the UK.

If you've never, if you're listening from outside the UK, we have these charming little things, ratty from Wind of the Willows is actually a waterhole, it's not a rat. But they're really, really endangered for various reasons. And so conservationists are now try to track them, work out where they are. They're quite hard to track because they're quite elusive. We normally track them by looking for their poo. But obviously, hard to find like a small poo on a riverbank.

As the old saying goes, it's like looking for a poo on a riverbank. And so they're feeding them this edible, like sort of biodegradable glitter, the kind of that you get on cakes and things like that. I suppose it's kind of useful because even if you find a poo on a riverbank, you don't know who it belongs to. It could be a mouse or a vol or a fisherman or whatever. But voles are very organized with their poo. They have actual toilets. So I think to an educated eye, you would know immediately you were staring at water volu.

Yeah. And they are on the decline, aren't they, Andy? It's 90% down at the end of the 20th century than what we had before. So what they're doing now, they're feeding them glitter. They've been experimenting on captive voles to see if these produce extra sparkly poos, which will be easier to spot. And the experiment, very pleased report has worked. 24 hours later, as the Beebe report put it, a tiny glittery poo was spotted. So look out for that on the riverbank near you.

It's quite cool as well. They seem to be able to differentiate between different families of voles with quite an easy way, do you know? Different colored glitter Different colored glitter So, you know One family might have silver poo And then you've got another With gold poo down there

And that's how they can differentiate Who's packed together And where they're going That's going to become a status symbol In the Waterville world, isn't it? It's like the silver poos Are not going to hang out With the gold poos anymore

We'd like to invite you to join Our Platinum Pooh Club Here's an interesting problem With this study I think That if you're trying to count water vol poos to count the number of water voles, there is a problem because water voles tend to eat poo. Not only that, they often eat, or they sometimes eat poo directly from the aides.

So it's not like you have a bit of time to find it before it gets eaten. Have a little self-respect. That's too keen, isn't it? That's a bit too keen if you're... It's too keen. That's sticking your mouth under Mr. Whippy's ice cream machine, isn't it? before it hits the cone. Yeah.

Wow. And they do, they have these latrines where they all go. And so they, but they also do, there's another method that was pitched to find them in 2020 because it is really hard to find them because they're on the riverbanks and so on. It's just hard to survey, especially steep riverbanks, which was giving them floating toilets. So they were given these rafts made of floating polystyrene. And the idea is they'll think that is a terrific loo. I must use that little floating platform as a loo.

It only works if they don't have fantastic loos already. If they've already got a great loo set up, then they won't use your platform. Yeah, clever. They've set those up largely because you can't walk around looking for water voles. You often mess the local environment up. So if you ever see a platform, look around. You might see a bunch of men with binoculars sort of honing in on the little platform. They're not perverts.

Weirdly. Like, you'll see them and you'll think, what a bunch of perverts. But actually, they're looking at watervol poop. They're heroes. They're conservation heroes. Yeah. It's better than the old way. So an old way of doing it was you would put radio colors on your voles

and you can kind of track them that way. But they found that when you did that, there would be way more male voles born. And that's because a female vol who is stressed will give birth to males. And that's like an evolutionary thing because when your population is under threat, you need more males.

So what they found is that when the females were wearing these radio colors, They were just way more males born. Is that why I have so many boys? Fenella was so stressed during all the three pregnancies. It's not, certainly during the conception, I think she must have been, yeah. Have you been talking to her? How do you know that even? Can we talk about mink?

Yeah. Can we please talk about the American mink? Oh, okay. What is, I wasn't expecting bushback on that. What is a mink? Like, what, as in is it a vole? Do you see the big sort of jacket, the big coat that Andy's wearing at the moment? Yeah, yeah.

Very flush collar. It's perfect for this 31 degree heat that we're living in in London at the moment. Pure mink. Pure mink. Yeah, the mink really wicks away the sweat. It's really good. It goes really nicely with the dismembered polar bear head you're wearing as a hat as well. Okay, guys.

So basically, when Kenneth Graham wrote Wind of the Willows, I wrote Rattie, there were loads of water bowls all over the UK. Then, in the last hundred years, one of the main problems, like, there's a little bit of climate and a little bit of habitat stuff. The main problem seems to be goddamn American mink coming over here, eating our voles. They were farmed in the UK for ages. They used to be hundreds of mink farms everywhere. And obviously some of them escaped and blah, blah, and they bred. And the main problem is, right, if a water voles hole looks like this, I'm just holding up my hands for Dana James here.

It's like this size, right? When you say water voles hole, you mean the hole to the house where they live? I apologize, yeah. If a water voles hole was this size, you'd spot the poos a lot more easily. So, like, an owl comes down. Obviously, an owl can't get through this spot. It's just not possible. But a mink is basically like a furry drain pipe.

Like, it's perfect. It's the right size to just get into the burrow. And they have no defences against them. So they can just be eaten like dozens and dozens. A mink can just dispatch dozens of voles, basically. It's a big problem. But basically, they've worked out now. They need to eradicate mink from England, you know,

because they're, they're, invasive species and they've done a trial where they've eradicated them from 5% of England, which is quite big when you think about it. So get this. I just love how this trap works. James, you'll love this. You get a hollow golf ball. Okay.

A bit of a waste of a golf ball. Is it like a training golf ball? Did you ever get those? Oh, you can get those little plastic ones with holes in. I think it's like that. So you get that. You put that inside the trap. And inside that hollow golf ball is a cigarette filter containing one or two drops from

the mink's anal scent gland, which you have harvested... This is getting better and better for me. Cigarette filters, anal glands, golf balls. This is like my luxury items when I go on desert island discs. So you've harvested the anal gland droplets from the last mink you caught. So it's a very sustainable system. So you put them in the cigarette filter, you drip it on, and then you just set a mink to catch a mink, basically.

And then the trap door closes when the mink. goes in and the trappers then get an email saying, you have caught one mink, and then they can just go and kill the mink, basically. That system of using the holes for them to burrow through is also another way, by the way, that they've been trying to monitor and work out how many voles are out there. So they get a tube and they will pad it up all the way on the inside with sticky tape. So when the water vault goes through, bits of hair gets stuck into the hole, and then they can look inside and go, Oh, yep, there's been a vol. Does it not strip off its fur?

Comes out completely naked. It's a not effective way of doing it really. Actually, that's a good way to make the mink coats. Just get them go through that tunnel. Jesus. Collect the hair. I just want to say for the listener, just in case you didn't get it that it was a joke earlier.

Andy is not wearing any animal products today. No, my underpants are fur, but you weren't to know that. You know who stopped mink in the UK? Well. Because they used to be hundreds and hundreds of farms, and they were mostly farming them for their fur. It was pretty cruel, actually. It wasn't it. Chris Packer.

It's a current MP, actually, who's got a really appropriate name, Labor MP. Oh, okay. Arnold. God, this is tough. I'm going to tell you, it's Maria Eagle. Oh, that was getable. If we'd have sat here for four and a half hours. Well, let's say Anna's here three and a half hours, because she's good on MPs.

I reckon we could have got that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's cool. And she basically had a private members bill where she got them cancelled. And then animal rights people would free thousands and thousands of mink. They'd break into the mink farms. And then in one of the stupid, like, they were being kept in very cruel conditions. But the answer is not to release thousands of incredibly dangerous carnivores into the local environment.

Like, oh, wow. I've mostly got mink stuff for this fact. I must say, Andy, due to the fact that this fact was about water bowls and glitter, my mink material is quite scant. I'm not so hot on it either, though I am excited for your new quiz show where a single question requires three and a half hours of guesswork before we get to the answer. Can I say a thing about glittery poo before you move on? Tardagrades sometimes have glittery poo. Do you know what Tardigrade is? Like these tiny little, they're known as water bears as well. They live in water. They're kind of ubiquitous. They live everywhere you look.

They're kind of indestructible. If you fire radioactivity at them, they don't die. They go into space. They don't die. They're like superhero animals. Right. But these tiny little minuscule bugs. But they found some with glitter in their poo. And they wondered where on earth did they get it from?

And it turns out that they probably swallowed their own mouth. Interesting. That's because they have these kind of crystal-like teeth in their mouth called silets. They used to grind little bits of invertebrates. And then every now and then they molt. But usually the teeth would just go out onto the floor. But sometimes they accidentally eat their. own teeth and then they end up with really glittery poo.

Wow. You can swallow teeth. I've swallowed teeth before. What? No. I'm sure I swallowed my first tooth, like my first tooth that ever came out, my first milk tooth. I'm sure I accidentally thought a hell of a story if it was someone else's. I'll tell you what, hell of a story for the, um, for the tooth fairy who has to go sipping your shit afterwards to give you 50p. It has to go under my pillow. This is not, it's not good. No one wins. Oh little Andy, what's happened to you? your bed. No, no, no, let me explain. I swallow my tooth. Just normally when you shit the bed, you shed it further down. That's the problem.

Like, it's very, it's a bad old night when it ends up under the pillow. The word glitter comes from the Vikings. That's cool, isn't it? You wouldn't think that. No. But it just meant something that shines or shimmers, and obviously Vikings went on the sea a lot and the sea shimmers a lot. So they used the word glitter to mean that. And then obviously, glitter as we know it today, was came in the 20th century. Yeah. Glitter has its foundations in New Jersey, and that's where most of the glitter is made these days. And there's a company who I think of the second largest company called GlitterX, who gave an interview to the New York Times. And it's insane the protection. It's as if they're protecting KFC's secret ingredients or Coca-Cola. They won't show any journalists how their glitter is made. They won't let them hear how it is made. It's crazy. It's a really crazy article. The journalist, she asks, who is the biggest market in the the world for glitter products, expecting it's going to be something like Carnival or whatever, and they say, we can't tell you that.

And she says, why not? And they say, we can't tell you why not. Let's just leave it at that, shall we? Interesting. I think it's the US Air Force. It's going to be military. It's got to be military. They have things called chaff tubes.

And this is a thing where they fire out tiny little bits of glitter out of their airplanes. So if you got a missile that is kind of locked onto you with radar, fire a lot of glitter out, then the radar kind of gets confused and the missile. It's quite a sort of fabulous way of like winning an air war. You know what I mean? Like it's quite showbiz, you know. You've got a mig on your ass.

Go sparkle mode. Yeah, I'd like that. It's possible they don't want to say because it's used for stopping counterfeiting. So in the same way they're using it on water voles so that they can monitor where they are, companies like a big manufacturer as a plywood will have tiny bits. of glitter inserted inside. Yeah, because I'm always getting my counterfeit plywood. I'm always going to the plywood shop and going,

this isn't the real stuff. Have you got any cheaper plywood under the counter for me, mate? What do you think the counter's made of, mate? Yeah, no, absolutely. It's used in so many different products just to stop global counterfeiting. And then just really quickly, it was invented by Henry F. Rooschman. who was a German immigrant who was coming to New York on a boat in 1926, and he was hired as soon as he got off the boat

because the captain of the ship noticed that he was a brilliant machinist and he went straight to the guy who was the charge of the Westinghouse company, which was like a big electronics company at the time, and said, you've got to hire this man. So the guy literally walked off the ship and straight into a job. And he worked on the machine that cut out. You know, like if you take photos and you might get a big, reel of photos, you need to cut them into smaller photos. He worked on one of those machines,

and then he noticed he had lots of little bits of plastic left over and that they shined in the light, and he called them Schnibbles. Wow. It's kind of an accidental discovery, Andy. Was it? Was it now? Yeah. That's it. Legit. I prefer Schnibbles. I think that's a great name. Guys, I'm so sorry. I have one more thing to say on Vols, but it's important. It's actually important. There's a group in South London who are involved in the vol reintroduction thing. They're called Citizen Zoo, and they have a scheme called Get Involed.

Vold. It's better written down. And one thing you can do is you can make a small donation and you can name some water voles. So, very pleased to announce that I've made a small donation of company money. Oh, right, not your own money.

Because remember when we sponsored that explosive finding rat or whatever it was? That was my own money that paid for that. It wasn't your money. Oh, okay. Well, I thought you guys would want to be in on this, so I will be in voicing. Anyway, there are now two bowls somewhere in South London called Everard and Digby. Oh. Yeah.

Lovely. Perfect. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that, according to Tongan mythology, The island of cow was almost stolen one night, but the god Taffacula bent over and the light shone out of his anus so brightly that the thieves fled in fear. The classic manoeuvre. So I was reading an article in live science about volcano that went off in the Pacific last year.

And the headline was, Shining Anus Volcano in Tonga coughs up cloud of smoke during a recent eruption. and obviously that kind of caught my eye a little bit. So I read this article and it said that this island called Tofua, it's got like a ring, almost like the top's been cut off, and there's a ring and there's a lake inside it. And then nearby there's another volcano that looks like a perfect triangle. And the story goes that there were three deities called Tuva Vata, Sisi and Fingar,

and they were going to steal Tofua, so they came and they came and they, They tore off the top of the mountain, and when they tore it off, a lake appeared. But then this Tongan god Taffa Kula came along. He bent over, showed his anus. It shone so brightly. They were struck with fear. They threw the top of the mountain in the air. It landed and became this other island.

And that's how the two islands sort of came to be. And then in life science, the final sentence says, it is unclear from the account why Taffa Kula's anus shone like the sun. Okay. Well, this story was taken from a book that was written by a man called Edward Winslow Gifford. And it was published in 1924 all about Tongan myths and tales. And there's quite a few. It's all oral tradition told to this guy.

And he noted it down. And there's about five or six different versions. Sounds more like anal tradition. Hey. So there's a bunch of different stories in this book. And he writes out the different interpretations that are given. And one of the things that is mentioned in one of the stories is that his name itself, Taffa Kula, is...

No, I'm not going to... Stop laughing, Andy. I'm pressing on. His name is Taffakulu, and his name translates as red edges. And it says he had a red anus. So it's quite possible that just the anus itself was so red, brightly red, that it was mistook for the light. So we have a partial explanation. The song Roxanne by the police was actually originally called Taffercula. You don't have to put on the red light.

No, please, Taffa Cula is fine. The cavity sent is over. Wow. So, I mean, it's just a story, I guess. But it's quite an amusing story. And I think quite a lot of Pacific cultures have origin myths, which have parts of the body in them, slightly different to the ones that we might have. So in Hawaiian culture, there's a goddess called Kohae, Kohelele.

whose name translates as Capo with a travelling vagina. And there is a crater on Oahu, which is named after her vulva. And the idea is that Pili, who's the goddess of volcanoes, she was being attacked by a shapeshifting man with a pig's head. And then Capo came along, lured the attacker away by throwing her vagina onto a ha'u. He ran away from Pili.

She managed to escape, and the vagina became this crater. She threw her hoo-ha onto O'Hahu She did Sorry, I didn't listen to anything else You were saying I'm excited to have realised that What a move!

What a move! I had a bit of a scan through the Tongan Myths and Tales to see if there were any other stories that involved anuses and I could only find one other and it's to do with a tale of an island called Ua, E-U-A-U-A-U-A

And there was a great warrior called Tertaki. And basically, he had all of his wife's relations killed. Really bad move, really annoyed her. She decided that she was going to kill him. And so her method was she met him on top of a mountain, brought up a coconut, half a coconut full of water. But she only filled it halfway through. So as he drank it, he had to lift it right up to get all of the water in. And when he did that, she pushed him off the edge.

He managed to grab her and they both plummeted to their deaths. She fell to the ground, but unfortunately, he got snagged on a tree on the way down, where the branch went right through his anus and came up out on the other side. And a bunch of warriors who were coming to back up the wife saw him sort of levitating in the air, looking incredibly intimidating and fled off the island because they thought he'd reach sort of like God-level status in his anger. A lot of stories, right, they have a kind of meaning to them. Like, Esop's fable, have a really clear, slow and steady wins the race.

What is the meaning of this story? I'm not at a guess. I'm entirely sure. But there is still a cave on that cliff face where it said to has happened that is called Tutaki named after him. Don't attack women. Is that the motto of the story? It's a good motto.

What about the motto being, even in the worst of situations, when you've got a tree impaling your anus and you just died, some good can come of it? That's a really nice message, actually. That's a really good message. Or the flip side is to the Warriors. If your opponent looks in. intimidating, double check that he's not actually impaled through the anus by a stick. Really good.

Tonga, for a lot of people, might seem as if it's just one place. It's not a bunch of islands. It's down in the Pacific. It's about 170 islands gathered under this one sovereignty, right? And James, have you been there? I've always been thinking this is a James Harkin place. I haven't been to anywhere in the South Pacific. The Empire of Tonga at one stage spanned more than a thousand miles,

which made it about the same size as the Zulu Empire and the Aztec Empire. Pretty good. Of course, well, for Tonga, most of it was ocean. Right. So it's a little bit less useful to have a huge empire if most of it's the ocean, I guess. Yeah, that's sort of cheating. Yeah. Tonga was originally known as the Friendly Islands.

Okay. And that was after Captain James Cook arrived there in 1773, and he arrived during a festival and he was invited to join in. And he thought their locals were so friendly that he should call it the Friendly Islands. unknown to him, apparently the reason that they didn't kill him because the chiefs could not agree on a plan on how to kill him. Bureaucracy, amazing. Are they all standing around a diagram of different ways,

like angles of attack and things like that? One of them's holding a spear, one of them's holding a tree that he might put up his anus. What's on the board, guys? Don't worry about it. Just go back to the festival. I shouldn't actually be, this is a restricted bit, actually. Yeah, I visited his house when we were on tour, Captain Cook.

Oh, that's right. It's in Melbourne, and they brought over the entire house to Melbourne. In fact, it's a house he never lived in. It was his parents' house. So it's a slightly confusing place. But a good afternoon out. There you go. I was looking into some more of the weird sort of moments throughout the history of the Tonga Empire.

And for a three-year period, the king of Tonga was a piece of wood. So basically what had happened was the king, Talatama, had passed away and he had no children. And so this broke the line, and this has happened in the past where it then goes to another clan or so on. And the brother of Talatama thought, this can't happen. So he created a piece of wood that was painted and a bit shaped like a doll and said, this is the new king. And so the new king was put onto the throne. And then the new king, after a while, was given a wife. It sounds like it was a real human, as opposed to a piece of wood, because they don't mention it's a wooden wife. And then the piece of wood died after three years,

but it left a son with the wife. And that was the brother. And then he took, he took control. Yes. How does a piece of wood die? Well, how does an anus radiate light? There are lots of questions of the Tongan world that we don't have the answers to. You know, this is back in the 12th century. So this sits in that world of myth and legend. But it is a story that is known there. So the brother was trying to create an opportunity for himself to become king.

Yeah. So he creates a sort of quasi-father figure in this piece of wood, marries it to some poor woman. Then she has a baby who happens to be the guy who wanted to be the king of the king. first place. Is that it? It's exactly that, yeah. Very nice. Skillful. Do they have to do a paternity test? No, we didn't. You don't look anything like him. You haven't got his knots. Are you guys familiar with the practice of perineum sunning? Jesus. Well, I mean, is it exactly what it sounds like? It's exactly what it sounds like. And it's to do with the claim that if you get 30 seconds of sunlight directly on your bottom.

I mean, right, right in there. It's the equivalent. This is the claim that's made, okay? It's the equivalent of a full day of sunlight with your clothes on. Now, interesting. Okay, that's useful to know. Does that work with tanning booths as well?

Well, it's very hard to get your legs up in the booth, isn't it? But surely they can direct a beam just straight in. You're right, actually. Well, don't do it, basically. You might get sunburned. You've got quite thin skin down there. Don't do it. Please don't do it.

This fact was about a light putting off burglars. Do you think lights put off burglars or not? Yes. Yeah. Well, you might be wrong. Oh, interesting. So there have been various studies done. There was one at the University of Loughborough that found that if you have a burglar alarm with a light,

you're more likely to be burgled. But they're not sure it might be because. Berger alarms are put in places that are more likely to be burgled anyway, and so that's why it happens. But there was also a study at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, weirdly, at UCL, and they found that when you turn the streetlights off between midnight and 5am, there are a lot less cars broken into in a certain area. And that's, they think, because it might make it more difficult to see if there are any valuable goods in your car. And they might get scared.

It's spooky. dark. Yeah. It's spooky being out of the dark. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And there's,

I've got one of these security lights. And we're saying that maybe I should turn it off. Well, there was a study in 2019 that found correlations between light levels and unsafe places. And what they found is that when you have the lights on in a certain area, that means there's almost more dark places for people to hide. Do you know what I mean? Because the contrast between the light and dark is more.

So you're walking around the light. you think everything's fine, but there are going to be some dark areas where people can hide. Whereas if it's always dark, your eyes would be more accustomed than you'll be able to see things. So basically the jury's out a little bit, I think. Okay. That's interesting. That's like, you know, the classic movies where prison guards have that one beam of light that they look for escaping prisoners going around, and they're always in the dark. What you're saying is that kind of impedes the hunt.

They should turn it off. Don't worry, guys. I know what I'm doing. I've read a study from the University of Lafra. Which insists that if we turn off the lights, it'll be safer. Dan caught in the middle of the prison yard with his pants around his ankles, going, I thought there were some medical benefits. Not trying to escape, just trying to get my 30 seconds of daily son.

It's midnight, Shriver. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that for over 20 years now, fans of the Doctor Who Act Tom Baker had been regularly visiting his gravestone at a cemetery in Kent, despite the fact that he isn't yet dead. Wow. Yeah, so this is, I found this out in a brilliant autobiography that Tom Baker wrote many years ago called Who on Earth is Tom Baker? I started on the final chapter, which is where I found it. So Tom Baker, many years ago, was living in a little town in Kent called Borton Malher.

And he lived in a house that was directly opposite of church, St. Nicholas's church. And he used to go and do his bit for the community. He would mow the grass in front of the church. And he decided, this is where I want to be buried. So he paid for a plot, but it seemed that there was a deal that you could get a headstone at the same time. So he bought one. So it is engraved Tom Baker, 1934, 2, and then a blank space that will one day be filled in. It's all moldy.

It's got muscle over it. It's weather beaten. And people come and visit it. And quite often, back in the day when Tom Baker was still living there, he would often pop up behind the people who were looking at it and say, surely he's not going to die. He's just going to turn into Peter Davidson, isn't he? Yes, that is.

That's a little Dr. Hugh joke for anyone who's ever watched Doctor Who, which is not me. Yeah. So he is, we should point out the connection properly, Dr. Hu. So Tom Baker was the fourth doctor. He was the longest serving doctor in all of Doctor Who's history. So he's kind of more associated as the doctor than most of the other ones. I'm just going to tell you, because he is quite a quirky character, and I'll just give you a little bit of insight into how weird he is.

In this final chapter in the book, when he talks about it, the story that he uses to tell the story is that he's mowing outside the church, and there's a man standing there, and the man says, oh, hello, and he makes a point about his mower, his lawn mower, He says, oh, it's very nice. And he's acting all weird, and Tom doesn't know what's going on. And he goes to bed that night, and then two men in Balaclavers break into his house, and they start searching for stuff.

And Tom Baker doesn't know what, and he's petrified, and they call the police, and it's a traumatic experience. The next morning, he goes down and he sees his tombstone, and it now no longer just says Tom Baker, 1934, 2, and then blank. It now says Tom Baker, 1934, to wanker. And someone's just written that in chalk on it. And so he rubs that off using some grass cuttings and some sheep feces that he finds and sort of takes that What is the story, Dan?

What is the story? The point is that this is the mind of Tom Baker. He becomes convinced that the balaclava people were there to get his lawnmower. So he moves his lawnmower up into his room and he sleeps with it every night alongside an axe that sits on his bed in case they come back in. And it's not so he can kill them. It's so he can chop his own head off before they get a chance to do it. That's Tom Baker in a nutshell.

That's the final chapter in his book. Wow. I mean, Dan, can I just say, you just waved a copy of the book at us. I've got a library copy of the book here. Who on earth is Tom Baker. I started at chapter one, like a dweeb. The first words of chapter one are, because he's got this amazing voice, hasn't he? He's got a very, very recognizable voice.

My first ambition was to be an orphan. And it's sort of, what? You know, and it's because he was growing up in the war in Liverpool. And apparently if you became orphaned, you would get presents from the Americans, which I did not think was a scheme they ran, but whatever. Yeah, they were handed out minx, weren't they? Left, right and centre. So he writes,

The only drawback was that to qualify for the goodies, your ma'am had to be in heaven. So I prayed hard that a bomb would drop on mine as she trudged home from the Sefted Arms. He's got a very weird anecdote style. But he's a hero, isn't he, to a lot of people in this country? If you're overseas, Tom Baker, a household name, he certainly was.

He certainly has a kind of higher status in the nerd world. But he's old. He's, you know, born in 34, so he hasn't been on TV for a long time. Did he do the voice over for Little Britain? Was that him as well? He did. That's right. Yes.

When he was 15, he became a monk. Yes. Kind of interesting. Like you? Like me? No. Well, you were kind of semi a monk, weren't you? I went to a Catholic school.

That's what I'm thinking of. But he was part of the brothers of Plour Mell. Yeah, he left becoming a monk when he just got a bit too horny and went on a sort of shagging spree. He said he wanted to commit every single one of the Ten Commandments, and he didn't want to do that while being a monk. He would break them. Well, wait a minute. I mean, Dalshodden they'll kill is one of the biggies. So that's a pretty tough one.

Could be an animal. Well, maybe after he coveted his neighbor's ox, maybe he killed it after that. That's possible. Yeah. I don't know. I think he likes a good story. I think that's the main point. Yeah. He claims that he once tried to kill. Hang on. We're on that commandment. Oh my God. This does work. Okay. This does work, actually. He claimed that once he tried to kill his own mother-in-law while he was working at the family rose-growing business.

What did he do? Did he push her off a cliff so that she landed with a rose-up pheranus? That's it. That's it. Apparently he threw multiple hoes at her. Oh, you mean hoeing implements? Hoeing implements, exactly, exactly, because they were to hand, I guess, in the garden in the gardening business where he was working. He was sort of plucked into the world of Doctor Who from being a struggling actor. He was working on building sites even as they were filming, and I think possibly even as it

was going out. And he was a very dominating character. It's very interesting because he's very eccentric, very lovable, but when you read into him, He did have very much a dark side to a lot of how he treated people. And they used to say that it was great filming Doctor Who, but it was great only if Tom decided it was a great day. If he decided it wasn't, then that was a bad day. That's like recording this podcast with Anna, though, you know. That's just the price of the mention.

Well, actually, do you know what? There's a character who the whole of Doctor Who really, I think, is indebted to. And it's someone who I, every time I read about her, I think, this is the Anna Tashinsky of, of Doctor Who. Verity Lambert. Verity Lambert was the producer of Doctor Who. And the reason she became the producer of Doctor Who was she was an assistant on a show that was airing live called Armchair Theatre. And she was working in the background. And there was a guy called Gareth Jones, who was meant to appear on screen and deliver some lines. But he had a heart attack and he died before he came on. So all the actors were standing in the scene, looking off screen at a man who's

now on the floor, not knowing what to do. And the main director ran into the studio and he said, Verity, you're now in charge, you're now the producer. So she had to suddenly run the whole ship while he was on the set and he was writing the script, rewriting it, because it really relied on this character who just died in real life to be part of it. And while she did that, the heads of BBC saw her talent and went, I think she can be put in charge of something that's new and great. Can I ask how this is the same as Anna Tashinsky, who's basically fucked off on holiday and dumps us in it this week? There are a few discrepancies in character. No, I can see it.

I can see it. I mean, when we make jokes, we frequently die metaphorically. And Anna has to keep the show going while we do that by making sarcastic comments. Yeah. When they were putting the show together, the guy, Sidney Nolan, he said the reason he wanted Verity Lambert is because she was to use phrase of his, full of piss and vinegar. And that's what he wanted. He wanted that as part of his team. And it was a kid's show given to her, which was amazing because when they said, are you going to have kids? Because this was a big concern of the BBC back in the day. There

used to be a marriage bar, which was lifted in 1944. But if you were female working at the BBC, if you got married, you had to leave your job because they thought you would have kids. And so that was the question to her. And she said, I don't know any children. I don't want children. I I don't fucking like children. She's like that. Yeah, it's the direct quote. And she was put in charge of what was a kids program. And she's responsible.

It's really largely down to her for fighting for it, that it became a thing. I'm still struggling to see where the Anna bit comes in here. Absolutely. Maybe the piss of vinegar bit, I guess. I see her as full of piss and vinegar. She just won't let something slide. She'll stick up for anything that's not right. That's Anna.

She'll stick up for anything that's not right. That does sound like Anna actually. Well, she's my biggest defender. She's right. By the way, Tom Baker, not the only great Doctor Who actor out there. I just want to give a quick shout out to John Pertwee, who is also one of the doctors.

He had an amazing life. He was an advisor for Churchill. What? Yeah, and he used to be in the war rooms with him, and he used to do a thing where at the end of the meetings, when everyone had left, including Churchill, he would scour the floor for all the cigarette butts that Churchill had thrown during the meeting onto the carpet.

Then he would put them in a golf ball. That's how you catch a Churchill. Yeah. Yeah, he would sell them to his friends just for like a little tidy sum as a bit of memorabilia of Churchill. Seems like treason? Feels like his mind is not 100% on the effort of defeating the Nazi. I don't know. Tough times.

Oh, sorry, that's just John scrounging faggends from the floor. Like, we've had a load of facts sent him by a guy called David Lever, who's a huge Doctor Who fan. I just wanted to give him a little shout out. And he sent so many amazing facts, I can't do them all, I'm afraid. But one of them I just really like is this. When the deadly assassin, brackets, now regarded as one of Tom Baker's best episodes, was released. The head of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society hated it so much, he immediately disbanded the society. This was the last time Doctor Who fans ever got disproportionately angry.

Yeah, they do weird things when they're angry. There was one guy. I got this from the John Higgs book, Exterminate, Regenerate, which is so good. It's all about Doctor Who. And he said that when it got cancelled, one guy got so angry that he ripped off the TV aerial from the outside of his house, and he sent it to the BBC as a protest. So good. Okay, it is time for the final fact of the show. And very excitingly, all the way from northern Spain, it's Anna.

My fact this week, coming to you from the tiny and beautiful and very hot Basque village of Segura, is that the Basque language has at least 50 words for butterfly, one of which means soul of a donkey. So what does that mean, Anna? Oh, we haven't recorded this bit. Sorry. Actually, she has sent me another file, so let's listen to that. Other words for butterfly include courtesy of my Basque friend here, Julesen. Bichilote.

Pichilote, Pichilota, Picheleta, Picheleta, Micheleta, Michelot, Michelote, Michelot,

Chimelot, Chimeleta, Cimirita, Cimirica, Inguma, Yankoyo, Jinko, Parnpalo,

Maripampalona, Marisorgin, Machita, amazing, pin pin pin pin pin pinnettie, bin pilipocia, pinpiliposha, sorgin bichi,

sorgin bandatari, sorginae amazing, falafala, Galapucci, abekata, tacheta. Very nice.

Has anyone done any research on this? A little bit. It's just, I mean, there are various different claims. Some people claim there are 80 words for butterfly. Some people claim it's

100, but, and also, it's not like these different words mean big butterflies, small butterfly, yellow butterfly, all of that. They all literally do just mean butterfly, but I have not, why, in fact. I feel wasted. I can't find that either. My favorite word for a butterfly in Basque is pin-pillin poucher, because that comes from the sound that the wings make. That's nice. That's, like, really nice on a matapiaque one. Does it? I've seen, I've heard butterflies flapping. Does that sound it to you guys? It's flippity flopting. It's floating about. Pim-pillipa-poucher. You need to get a bit closer. So Basque, we said where the Basque region is, for international listeners who are not from the Basque region. It's at the top of Spain slash south of France.

I think it's seven provinces historically where the Basque language is spoken. There's lots of traditional Basque culture. And the language is so weird, isn't it? It's a language isolate. Like, it's not related to anything on either side of it. It's really peculiar. Yeah. So what does that mean? Can we not trace it to anywhere? I think it's believed to be pre-Indo-European.

So lots of the languages that came over from Asia, basically, are related in various different ways. And this is a kind of survivor, almost, the weird outcrop that just has lasted since before that period, which is obviously, you know, thousands and thousands. of years ago. You get lots of people who have theories that it's related to other things. Like I went on the University of California website and they said that it might be related to Ainu, which is Japanese isolate language. And what they do basically is they look at lists of the words and they go, actually these words are quite similar. But I think if you really look at it deep down,

it's not really related to any other extant language at all. Right. It feels too neat that it would be related to another isolate from the completely other side of the world. Yeah. Almost too odd. I think the idea being that Basque were often seafaring people and they might have gone seafaring over to Japan as well and taken their language with them. But again, like, I don't think it's true. We have a few words from Basque in English.

Do we? Do we? Yeah. Silhouette. The word silhouette? Yeah. So there was a guy called Arnaud de Silhouette. He was a finance minister of France.

And he basically was in charge of. big bit of austerity so no one could afford anything and so they came up with these like really cheap ways of doing portraits by cutting out black things and they named it after him and his surname was basque yes interesting he was from the basque country uh anchovy maybe anchovy really yeah Arizona sarsaparela Zorro and a lot of people think bizarre comes from the basque word for beard although that's a little bit dubious that one but yeah Zorro is a cool word yeah Zoro comes from the Basque word Azaria meaning fox. Oh, nice.

I didn't know that. It just is so different. So French welcome is bienvenu. Spanish is bienvenitos. You can kind of see where they might be going there. The Basque is angiotoria. They just totally unconnected. I love it.

And we should say even within the Basque region, there are five different dialects. Like I think it is quite hard for non-Bask people to learn simply because there aren't many things to cling on to. Like if you're English and you're trying to learn a fair few European languages, there are lots of links. But in fact, there's a story that the devil wanted to send particular people from the Basque region to hell. So he tried to learn the language. But after seven years, he had to give up because it was too difficult. Again, the meaning of that one.

It's like these Tongan ones. It's like, okay, Basque is hard. I suppose that's the meaning? And then does that mean that after seven years, he decided, well, I'm going to stay out of the Basque? country? Yeah, it doesn't have this thing of like, oh, we're God's chosen people, like Yorkshire. I think it's just that he, I'm presumably just a translator or something. I don't know. Because God spent seven years in Leeds, didn't he? And by the end of that, he'd say, Aeok me, Doc. That's why Yorkshire are God's people.

Traveling to Iceland has become quite nice in the last 10 years for people from the Basque region. And that's because in 2015, they officially revoked a law that allowed for citizens of Iceland to kill people from Basque on site. On site. On site. No questions asked. No questions asked. It was just a completely legal thing. This was due to an incident.

No questions Basque, more like. So, in 1615, there was an incident in which a bunch of... I like it, Andy. Thank you. Oh, no, don't get me wrong. It's wonderful stuff. Basically, what happened was, is there was a big dispute between whalers and the people from Basque were heading out. This is in 1615, and it resulted in a dispute where they killed a bunch of these Basque whalers.

And it's just been in their law that you can kill on site since then. And 2015, they actually had governors from the Basque region, the Icelandic Minister of Education get together and officially revoke it. So it is now illegal. I think in practice, in Iceland, it was illegal to kill people more generally. Yeah. I think if you'd have killed someone from the Basque country and said, oh, no, look, it's in the law. I'm allowed to do that. They might have said, yeah, but you're not really, are you?

Maybe. We've had other laws invented since then. But, Dan, did you hear the thing about the ceremony, the repeal ceremony for this law? Who did you say it was a couple of local bigwigs? You had the Icelandic Minister of Education. and then a governor from Basque. Well, they were one of the descendants of a murdered whale hunter and one of the descendants of one of the murderers.

Amazing. So they got to be, you know, they were closely involved in this ceremony. Did they let the Basque Bigwig kill the Icelandic Bigwig as a bit of a blood feud thing? Yeah, it was nice. It was really sweet, actually. It was very touching ceremony. Harpoon through the anus. That's right.

God, damn! Jeez. Do you want to hear some Basque Proverbs? Yes, please. All right. When the fox is engaging you in conversation, keep an eye on your chicken. That's good. I was hoping keeping on your waterhole was going to be the end of the same thing.

Oh, what a pair, a snail and a slug. Okay, that one's less clear. I think it's when two people are being, they're both difficult. Two lazy people have found each other and it's like, oh, God. Yeah, yeah, nobody's helping you. A lot of donkeys need a lot of straw. I'm not even sure that's a proverb, actually. I think I might just be like a logistics thing.

Okay. In other places, dogs go barefoot too. Okay. That means that no matter where you go in the world, there'll still be some things that you recognize. Exactly that. It's basically saying things are largely similar in most places, which, again, is not a slumber of a proverb, I think.

For a people who very much decide that they're very, very, very, different from all the other people who live around them, as the Basques do. Yeah, absolutely right. They probably say to me, the words are big, but the acorns are small. You have a small penis? I mean, they would say that to me if they got to know me well, but no, that's not what I'm saying. I think it's like, you're all mouth and no trousers. Ah. That's a good one. All mouth and no trousers. I don't even know what that means. It's when you have a lot of talk but you're not matching it with big action.

All mouth and net dress. All fur coat and no knickers. That's another great one. Do you know that one, Dan? Nope. Wow. Speaking of knickers, the word basque

refers to a piece of underwear. Does it? Yeah, like a basque is like, it's almost like a sexy corset. You know that? Oh, no, I have heard of that. I have heard of that. Yeah.

Yeah. So you don't spend enough time in Anne Summers you two. Or I spend way too much time. I'm not some of one or the two. But apparently it was first called that in French because it looks a little bit like traditional Basque costume. And also the French thought that the Basque people,

especially the women, were a little bit racy because they wore short skirts and they had earrings and their national costume to the French at the time looked a bit, uh-la-la-la. To put it in French. They had a big problem with witches in the 17th century, the Basque region. Oh, yeah. Huge problem actually.

They had a lot of witch hunting. And there's a very famous bit of history which is called the Basque witch hunt effectively. And it's like hundreds and thousands of people in the Basque region confessed that they'd been to the witch's Sabbath. And I'm afraid to say they had had sex with the devil. Did you learn the language by that? I think it was the language of love by that point.

You'd fly in basically either on a broom or a goat, apparently, if you couldn't afford a broom. And you'd worship the devil a bit and then you'd I think you would dig up dead witches and eat them. That was the thing that supposedly happened at these kind of witchy fiestas. If you were old and you had no teeth, the devil would lend you his own dentures. Children would be like the story's disgusting. It's disgusting.

Also, the thought of the devil with his teeth out is quite a funny one. You're immortal soul. This is such weird reports. Like, children would be given velvet-clad toads to guard at these fiestas. witches would dance with toads as large as chickens. It's just, I mean, it's mad. It's a completely mad episode of history. It's probably just people being tortured until they confessed.

I'm afraid it was mostly, wasn't it? Yeah. The Basque version of Santa is kind of interesting. It's called Olent Zero. And if children don't want to go to bed, a sickle is thrown down the chimney, and the children are told that Olin Zero will come and cut their throats if they don't go to sleep. Yikes! and what happens is they mostly go to sleep I imagine.

One last thing, maybe. Butterfly, where the English word butterfly comes from. Because butterfly is quite a nice word in lots of different languages, really. Yeah, but I'm thinking Papillon. Papillon in French. Fala, in Italian. I think in German it's something not quite so beautiful as it. It'll be an 18 consonant.

It'll be really mechanical. Yeah, yeah. But in English, butterfly, we don't really know where butterfly comes from. So there's an idea that they would, if you left your milk uncovered, they would come and drink the milk and steal your butter and stuff. But I think the best version is it comes from the Dutch old word for a butterfly, which was butterschaeter,

which was because butterflies had yellow excrement. And so the Dutch called them like butter, Buttershit. And then we stole that name. And then over the years, like a lot of these things, their word shaiter just turns into fly because you're being polite with your kids. Yeah. That was really funny.

I've just Googled. German for butterfly is schmettling. Schmettling, that's right. Smetting. That could have, like, that could have been a warplane, you know? I've got a bunch of schmettlings on my ass. Deploy the chaff, deploy the glitter. What was the glitter called?

They were called Schnibbles. Snibbles. Deploy the snibbles. Deploy the end of shmettling snibbles. They come out of the back of the plane with a big banach. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

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