No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Cristiano Ronaldo Eating Pistachios

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Live from Manchester, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss postcards, pistachios, postcards and a glamorous guillotiner. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Manchester. Anna Tishinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that theories for the origin of life on earth.

include primordial soup, primordial sandwich, primordial soup and sandwich, primordial pizza, and primordial mayonnaise. Mmm. Is there a primordial salad option, please? For a primordial vegan. Yeah. No, so this is, I was reading about the origin of life, and I think a few people might know about primordial soup that is the idea where you might get a puddle or something and there's loads of molecules in there and somehow they self-arrange and then those self-arranged molecules manage to replicate and they make life

now there's a lot of problems with primordial soup so people have come up with other theories so how do these molecules get in the right place primordial sandwich is you've got two rocks and they kind of squish the molecules together uh primordial soup and sandwich you've got the soup and you've got the rocks and that's all kind of all together Primordial pizza, you just have a rock and the molecules are on top. Very nice. Primordial mayonnaise is like a load of fat bubbles

and the molecules grow in the fat bubbles. And for all I know, none of them's true. Yeah, because we all know God made us. Thank you. Is this one person just kind of just tossing all this shit out?

Yes, it's me. Lots of scientists have talked about all these different things, but I'm the one who's kind of put them together in a jovial little sentence. A nice menu. Have they called them those things? Yeah, yeah, they're real names.

Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, they're real names. I didn't think you had the imagination to come up primordial pizza. Okay. Is there one that's most likely, you know, what are we getting? I think at the moment, yeah,

kind of the soup and sandwich is quite liked by people. So it's not soup and sandwich per se, it's a soup sandwich. It is a bit, isn't it? That doesn't sound quite as appetising a soup sandwich. So it sounds like it's a sandwich floating on some soup. A primordial crouton, if you will. Yes.

Very nice. I thought it was a soup in between two bits of bread. That's what it is, unfortunately. Oh, that's a sandwich. Oh, that is, that's fucking out there for a theory. So the idea of primordial soup, which was the first one of these theories, it was thought of, first of all, by two people, actually, independently, a British guy called JBS Helden.

and the Russian scientist called Alexander Opparin And the interesting thing about him He came up with primordial soup But then later in life he edited a book That contains at least 113 different recipes For actual soup It makes he suspicious about the primordial soup theory Because it sounds like he's just really into soup

Yeah He's biased He's just pushing his next career Yeah It's such a weird switcheroo To go from proper organic chemistry stuff to editing a cookbook. Yes, it would be weird, apart from it was in the Soviet Union

and all sorts of weird stuff was happening. Basically, they had this kind of propaganda cookbook that they would give to all, well, all married couples would get one, basically. You know, it was the right kind of Soviet food that you should be eating. And at the time, they'd just done Sputnik, and they were kind of pushing themselves as scientists in the Soviet Union as best scientists in the world, and they thought, well, our cookbook should also be really scientific.

So we're going to get our best scientist who's this guy operant, and we're going to say you're going to edit it. That makes interesting. That's like that Michelin bloke who makes foam shit. Yeah, exactly. Blumenthal. Hester Blumenthal? Yeah. Is it like him?

Yeah, he basically does chemistry, doesn't he? It's like if Professor Stephen Hawkins did a cookbook. Right. Okay. Yeah. I thought you meant the actual Michelin Man when you said that. I really threw me for a second. A lot of marshmallow-based stuff.

That cook, by the way, it was called The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. That was its name. and it was published in 1939, and as you said, James, it's all kind of like 400 different recipes, all good Soviet fare. But unfortunately, because it was the Soviet Union, the book kept on being purged.

And so there were all these strongly radical changes in direction. So it used to be a very internationalist book. And then that went out of fashion. And so they just cut all the international stuff. It was borsh, every page, borched. Yeah. Yeah. And then there were lots of quotes from Stalin all the way through the book.

And then Stalin died, cut all starving quotes gone yeah I must say I know that there's at least 113 different recipes for soup because I read through the book and just search for the word soup or borsh or we all know or whatever and that's as many as I found there might be more for all I know

but yeah wow and yeah this was a really important but like you say it was the book of tasting healthy food but sometimes just known as Kniega just the book that's how famous it was this book it's just called the book and everyone knew what you were talking about Oh, that's awesome.

Oh, wow. Hey, there's that old thing, it's the sort of thing that Einstein said, which was, he said that his second best idea that he ever had was to boil his eggs in soup because then you're saving up on some washing up. You're using one less thing. And, you know, that's a thing that I think...

Is that good, though? It feels like you get like an eggs come out of a chicken's bum, right? Yeah. Well, not technically, actually, interestingly. Okay. We're close. I'll tell you later. It's come out of the same place as the feces come, right?

That's a good point. And so do you really want that in your soup? That's a very good point. When you boil stuff, it gets rid of all the stuff in. Yeah, but you're not going to do a shit in your hinds, are you? It's like... That could take off as a saying, though. Yeah.

You've really shat the hinds today. Actually, there is a thing called yellow soup, which is basically poo-in soup, which was a delicacy in China. back a long time ago. So I think it was in the fourth century. There was a Chinese recipe for yellow soup, very popular. It was put forward by a doctor,

and he said this guy called Guy Hong gave this recipe for broth that involved drying and fermenting a healthy person's poo and stirring it into a broth, and then you give it to a sick person, and it makes them better. And of course, the good thing about that is, it bloody works.

Yeah, really. We've discovered now with fecal transplants these days. I mean, sorry, can we just row back the whole it works thing. This doesn't sound like that would have worked. It probably didn't work. He had the right idea, though. I think he was on the right track.

Yeah. Yellow soup. Worth a try, I would say. Fair enough. Don't boil it too much, otherwise you might lose the microorganisms for the transplant. Yeah. Well, you should have called it

Brown Windsor. But that was already a soup. Is it? 1,500 years later. Brown soup was a really weird soup. It was this sort of mythical soup. It wasn't mythical. It was real, but it wasn't in many places.

It was just sort of a horrible cheap soup that was in lots of restaurants around the turn of the 20th century and it kind of had a posh name so it sounded classy but it was basically leftover meat and the ingredients were... Sorry, was it called brown soup?

Brown Windsor. Brown Windsor, sorry, posh name because Brown is not a posh thing but once you put it next to Windsor. Isn't that gruel? That sounds like gruel. It's not gruel. It's definitely soup.

Hmm. Yeah. What do you think it sounds like... What a spectrum we're on now between gruel soup broths to you, you know. Well, I had gruel. Have you had gruel? It's just like porridge, isn't it? Just like crap porridge.

That's why I thought I was. What do you mean by having gruel? What are you talking about? It's not what thing. Oh, you were in a... When you were living with Mr. Bumble, you were in... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, God, that sounded so rough. I can't believe that badly you bullied Oliver. That was harsh. Yeah. Did you ever get that second helping that you wanted? I had gruel and I don't... I'm not sure that many people have gruel. When did you have it?

And what was it? Oh, I went to this party where the table, you had to play a game, and on one side of the table was really good food and on the other side was gruel and so it was like the worst kind of food and if you lost the game you moved down a seat and you went all the way down

and I had a partner who desperately wanted to go to the good food as everyone else did but I'd never had gruel before so I was like surely we got ahead that way and I kept making us go that way and she threw an entire glass of red wine all over my shirt

yeah you know like in the movies that's an overreaction did you get to eat tasted though I did. And you enjoyed it? It was horrific. It was the worst thing I've ever tasted. It sounds like Brown Windsor. I thought you were going to say that you kissed a gruel and you liked it.

The room's been divided. Do you know, soup? Could maybe cure malaria, which is a big deal because it's a big old killer. And this was discovered by some schoolchildren. So, and this is in a study that was authored by schoolchildren. It's the only study I've ever found authored by school children. And it was a really short time ago. There's a parent at a local school in London called Jake Baum.

And he also happened to be a professor of cell biology. And he decided it would be fun to suggest a class project where all the kids brought in a vial of the soup that their mom made them or their dad made them whenever they were sick, whenever they were ill. And then he'd suggested that in their science class, the science teacher must have hated this parent. He suggested they spin out all the soups in this centrifuge,

which I guess the school then had to invest in. and then test them on a malaria parasite and see, because, you know, soup traditionally chicken soup is supposed to make you feel better, there must be something in it, is this old wife's thing. And they did indeed find that five of the soups reduced the growth or the sexual development of the parasites

by over 50%, which is exactly the same as malaria drugs. Wow. Isn't that incredible? So what, do we have to inject ourselves with this soup? We would, but the problem is, so this is published in the archives of disease in child, did in 2019, but none of the parents had written down the ingredients of any of the soups they sent in. So we have no idea.

Just inject any soup into yourself, just in case. My soup has got paracetamol in it. Yeah. That's hilarious. Do you know in 1782, if you were in Haymarket in London, you could pay your very own money to go and have a bath in some soup? Oh, wow. Yeah. This was a thing in the 17th and 18th and 1870s.

century in the whole of Europe, not just in the UK, that people just seem to bathe in soups. Wow. Really? And it was supposed to be good for you. It was supposed to like, you know, it was very healthy. Instead of just normal water, you were getting some of the vitamins into your body. What flavour, any particular? Veal or other broths.

So that could be literally anything. James, would you rather a bowl of soup that had a chicken's pooey egg sitting inside it? Yep. Or a bowl of soup with Andy sitting inside it? What flavour is the soup? Wow, tomato, let's say. Oh, no, I don't really like tomato soup. Okay.

It goes great with Andy, though, so... I get your point, yeah, definitely. That's weird, because I've never... You know, you read novels written in the 19th century, 18th century, and never once have any of the characters been described as bathing in a tomato soup? That's because it's so catatio. It's like everyone was doing it all the time.

It's like why you even write it in the novels? Got it. It's like referring to cleaning your teeth. But the other thing is that at the moment, in the UNesson spa resort in Hacone in Japan, you can go into a ramen bath. So it's still happening in Japan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Apparently the collagen in the pork broth is supposed to give you healthier skin. Hmm. You would not eat in that spa restaurant afterwards, though, would you? You piece of vicious. We do need to move on though to our second fact. It is time for fact. number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the world's oldest postcard was sent

by a writer called Theodore Hook. He sent it to himself. Wow. What did it say? Wish I was here? So it was sent in 1840, and it was sent in London, in Fulham, and it was a postcard where you could see people who were working at the post office around a big inkwell, and the idea was that that was satirizing the post system. So he sent it to himself, so that means the only other person who's seen it would have been the postman, right? Yes, exactly.

And he'll see this and he think, you bastard. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly. And it was, you know, there wasn't a big laugh here, but back in the day, that was huge satire. I would have had people on the floor. So yeah, and so there was other postcards thought to be the oldest, and then this came up in an auction

and it sold for including commission in VAT, 31,000 pounds, 750. So it's, yeah, a really expensive item. And I think partially as well because Theodore Hook was quite an amazing prankster of the 1800s. He achieved what is known as the Burner Street hoax, which was one of the greatest hoaxes that London ever had. It was a hoax where he said to his friend,

I bet you I can make one single house, the most famous house in London, and they bet some money on it. and he said, go for it. And he managed to do it. So what he did was he sent out thousands of letters to people, workmen, all over the country, and said, can you arrive on the morning of this day, August 27th, in order to do something to the house? So this one woman opened up her door on the morning of August 27th to a chimney sweep, and she said, I didn't order a chimney sweep when she turned in away. Then another chimney sweep came, and she turned him away. Ten more chimney sweeps came,

turned away. Then carts carrying large deliveries of coal came turned them away. Then cake makers delivering large wedding cakes. Then doctors and lawyers came. There were vickers. There were fishmongers. It was just getting bigger and bigger. And eventually the Duke of York came along.

There was the governor of the bank of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury came along. And you know, there's a lot of what's real and not real in this story through the passage of time. Imagine opening your door and seeing the Duke of York outside. I think we can all agree.

It's bad news. But this was 1809. Maybe he was just delivering some pizza express. This just sounds like when you're at home in the middle of a Wednesday and all of your neighbours are out. And then the host one knocks on the door. And he goes, can you take number 10s? Can you take number 12s?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seventy-nine packages. He was a crazy guy. And the thing was that he just, they randomly chose that house, didn't they? It was like, literally, they just went through a phone book if there was one in the day or whatever. was and went, oh, let's just choose that house. So she had nothing to do with it.

She had no idea, yeah. She was absolutely befuddled. And so this was 1809. So this was a number of years before the postcard was sent. And so by this time, when the postcard went out and it saw that it had Theodore Hook's name on it, it was assumed he must have been sending it to himself as part of a prank.

We don't actually know that he sent it to himself. That's the assumption. But it is correct, because it would be weird to receive the first ever postcard because you wouldn't know what it was, really. It would be a baffling thing to experience. You're right, yeah. But you'd figure it out. It's not like...

This is 1840? You'd go insane. Well, wait a minute. And he leaves your wit permanently. I know what you're saying, but this is just a one-off. He sends it to himself. So someone else must have been the first person

to get a postcard, right? Oh, yeah. They all ended up in asylum back in the day. They were populated by postcard recipients. History of the postcard is amazing because they were invented in the late 19th century and they sort of, you know,

there were various stages of innovation. The biggest thing, innovation came in the divided back period. Sorry, it was known as the divided back period, which is where finally, for the first time ever, you get a picture on one side and then the back of the card is divided into address and message, right? Before that, one whole side had to be for the address and the stamp. It was serious. And then the message had to go on the other side next to the picture. Nightmare. Once you got nice picture postcards, it took off like nothing had ever done before. It was incredible. In 1910, in the UK, 800,000.

million postcards were sent. And the population is not lower than it is now. That is a lot of people, postcards per person being sent. I think it's 25 postcards per person per year, around about that time. Wow. I think a lot of people were doing a lot of postcarding as well. It wasn't everyone was doing that, was it? It's like some people are sending three a day, four a day, stuff like that.

Because they had like loads of posts every day, didn't you? Yeah. So you could send, I could send you a postcard. And he's saying, what the fuck are you doing in my soup? Yeah. And then the same day, you could say, send one back, like saying, I'm just having a nice time, thank you, or whatever. I'm going for my health.

So it was, we know the exact date. March 1st, 1907 was the official birth of the modern postcard when they put that singular line down the middle that separated message. What a day. If I could go anywhere in time, I would go there. The reason that they did that, of course, is because what they thought was, if you put the message and the address on the same side, then in the post office, they would just get distracted by reading all of the messages. Or there might be some sexy messages in there and they'd get embarrassed.

Yeah, they were a bit scandalous. People objected to postcards back in the day because of this idea that the postman or woman could read all of your dirty secrets. And in fact, aside from that, there was lots of other controversy. So they were thought of as killing the art of writing because, you know, they're short of them. They were basically the text messages of their day. There was an article written in 1884.

So quite soon after postcards had taken off, saying, who now? writes letters. We all dash off hasty notes or hurriedly scribble a postcard. The epistolary art so dear to our grandmothers is becoming extinct.

And that's 150 years ago. They were whinging about that and they haven't shut up. Well, it was true. Winky face. You know, you could get postcards made of moss back in the day.

Oh, for fuck. Jesus. Sorry, just a little moss fact here. Someone made of wood, but birch bark. Canada had leather ones. and Ireland had cards made of peat moss. How do you write on that? They processed the peat moss in some way to make it

that you could write on it. That makes sense. How? I don't know. But nonetheless. They banned those in America, I think. I'm not sure about the moss ones, but definitely the wood ones they banned in America.

You could only send paper or cardboard ones. That's because they jammed the post machines. So they had leather ones. They had wood ones, like you said. And the thing is about the wood ones. They tended to have really terrible jokes on them. So you might go to an exposition about wood or something and get a wooden postcard

and it would say the exposition is more than oak A It's ash tonishing I would spruce up and come You walnut regret it Is that you walnut regret it? You know what it wasn't? They missed that one

Lazy A trick missed Well that's what you get for going to a wood symposium I'm going to say We do need to talk about the saucy seaside postcard. I'm sorry, we have to. What is it? The saucy seaside postcard is a great institution of the

20th century, which is just a slightly rude postcard with a slightly funny little saucy. You'd recognise them. They're always like bucks and women bursting out of red swimming costumes, a very 50 style with a raunchy, rude comment underneath. Okay, cool. Thank you. Yeah, exactly.

So, kind of... Sorsy. Sorsy. I've never said the word saucy so many times in my life, but I love it. And basically, one artist in particular, Donald McGill was one of the great artists of this. He did about sort of nine a week until he died. It was incredible. But there was trouble because there were seaside censorship boards

which assessed the sauciness of the postcards and banned them if they were too rude. So there was a Blackpool board that you had to submit all your postcards to before they could go on sale. There was another on the Isle of White. And the members were things like there was a solicitor, a vicar, a bank manager and Mrs. Gloria Swanson of the Blackpool Hotel and boarding house association

and they would sit in judgment over the postcards and if you had one for example there's one of a girl talking to a bookie at a race course and she's saying I want to back the favourite please my sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways okay that's I think that's a good joke

but Mrs. Gloria Swanson absolutely not banned and these kept going until the Isle of Man committee lasted until 1989 wow but then he got cancelled basically Yeah, he did. In the 50s, really, wasn't it?

When they properly just clamped down, he was found guilty of breaking the obscene publications act and, you know, fined and... It's incredible. His reputation destroyed, very sad. And they went bankrupt. And also the other weird thing that we should mention about him is that he only had one foot.

Okay. And he lost his foot, his other foot, in a rugby accident. Ah. Which I didn't know was even possible. But, yeah. Just on the sort of censorship thing, That was a thing not just for postcards. I'm sure I must have mentioned it on the podcast a long time ago,

but the lead singer of Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant, I think his name is. He used to work for Marvel, and his job was whenever comic books came in, he would have to cover up the cleavage line on women that were acceptable in America, but not here. I mean, that was, you know, in the 70s and 80s. Yeah. It was good work if you could get it. He wouldn't say no to that job.

He was a 15-year-old intern. He'd be loving that. You know, the other amazing thing about postcards is that back in the day, it was the source of sometimes allowing you to see... Source, very nice. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Allowing you to see an image that you would otherwise have never seen. So newspapers, back in the day, I'd say in American newspapers, largely completely text-based.

So if it said something like an accident, train, crashes, or something where you might rubber-neck it, you know, it's like, I'm curious to see a disaster. A photo would be taken and it would be printed onto these postcards. and people would send each other these postcards just to show them a news event as opposed to having anything to say. So it became a huge source of being able to just... Source, be able to see everything that was happening in the world prior to newspapers allowing us to do that.

It was basically Twitter, wasn't it? Yeah. Or text message, that kind of thing, WhatsApp, that kind of thing. It was just like people sharing information. It was quite weird that when people used to send, you know, postcards of burning buildings and screaming car crash victims and then they wrote on the back, Wish You were here.

It wasn't on time But there was like political stuff as well wasn't there The suffrage movement There was a big battle of postcards Of that So there were a lot of anti-suffrage postcards Where they would like mock the suffragettes And say you know

If you're a suffragette you'll never get married All that kind of thing And then there were pro suffragette Postcards where you would have like Really iconic women on them And try and push people in that direction And often both types were made by the same company Right

Oh, clover. Both ways. We're going to have to move on in a sec, guys. I don't think the suffragettes would have approved a that child cabinet. Not sure I prove it. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the first man to kill people by guillotine was briefly so fashionable that French people would dress up as him. It's called Charles Henri Sanson, and he was the chief executioner to Louis XVIth, and then he was the executioner of Louis XVI, in a very weird job, Switzeroo. It was like, undercutta boss.

Well, that went wrong. Yeah, and French Revolution, obviously, that was a time of great social change, to put it mildly. And he was very famous during the period known as the Terror. And he had this uniform, it was stripy trousers, tricon hat, green coat, quite dashing. And he was just so fashionable. in Paris at the time

that he became some of people dressed up as and fashionable because of his awesome stripy trousers and tricord hat or because of what he was doing I think because the guillotine I'm not so sure actually

because he was really really fashionable like you say he wore blue trousers to sound off with but they were so worried about him being so fashionable that they banned him from wearing blue trousers and from then on he was only allowed to wear green trousers and they said the blue is the colour

of the nobility you're not allowed to wear them Right. You'd think if the French Revolutionary Committee were telling you off for dressing as the nobility, pre-revolution. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, okay, that's fair enough, right, right, I see. Well, it's not fair enough, it's bad.

I don't approve of Louis XVIth, or the French Revolution. I just want to have one time. No, we know what side you're on now. But the early days of it, there did seem to be a bit of color coordination going on and the color being red. So the account that I read was you had the person

who was about to be killed had a red t-shirt on. T-shirt? Yeah, cool. They had some converse, didn't they? It's not fashion. Is it in Star Trek where all the red people die, or am I? Oh, yes.

I'm so far out of my comfort zone here. Yeah, so he had a red t-shirt on. He had Nike cap. Can we just give it some time-appropriate names? So what did they wear back then? Just no tea, I think. Ah, okay, so, wow, that's very pinniquity to pick that up. The t-shirt was invented in the 20th century.

It's a very anachronistic thing to hear T-shirts in the French Revolution. People are going to think that happens was sort of a stream. Or did I just bust a time traveller? What colour were his jeans? So he had a red shirt on and Charles. Is that the name? Charles? He had a cape on which was red. And the guillotine itself was red.

So red was very much the... dominant theme. I guess it doesn't show the stains. Was the guillotine definitely read pre-execution? It wasn't just... I think this was for the very first, yeah, execution. I guess maybe they were just trying to hide the gore. And unfortunately, when they did it,

because this was new and they had huge crowds that came to see it, because everyone was so fascinated by all of these public deaths. The crowds were really disappointed because it was really efficient and quick and over like that. And they were like, ah, we brought sandwiches. we were going to be here a while and it was just like

it was too efficient people rioted three people died in the riots about how efficient the new guillotine was really yeah the worst thing about that one so that guy who was killed in the first guillotine he was called pelletier they decided okay we're gonna

we're gonna stop hanging people because we think everyone should be killed exactly the same way because you know where the French Revolution it shouldn't be that the nobility get a good way of dying and the other people don't So everyone's going to be killed with a sword, with an axe. And then this guy, Sanson, decided, well, actually, my axe isn't good enough for that. I won't be able to get through enough people, so we need a new way of doing it.

And so they came up with this idea of the guillotine, but this guy had already been found guilty and was already sentenced to death. And he had to sit there and watch it be built. Because he couldn't be executed until it was built. Did he have to go through the kind of brainstorming meetings with them saying, what about this? I feel like you'd like steal a screw or something, would you? Yeah. But Sanson, the executioner, he was part of this extraordinary dynasty of executioners. So six generations of his family performed this role.

Great grandfather, grandfather, father. All six of his brothers. All six of his brothers were also executioners in different bits of France. Wow. Yeah. Mad. It's really bizarre. And they called them just by the name of the town they were the executioner.

So they didn't even call them by their first name. They would call them Riem or Leon or Eton or Eton. Yeah. It's just, it's bizarre. And when you read about his life, he mostly had a series of protracted workplace disputes with his bosses, who were either the royalty or the revolutionary committee. So he was saying, look, I'm broke,

there are so many people to be executed, my working conditions are bad, I need a budget increase. He was asking for a budget increase from the Minister of Justice, which was days after he had executed the previous Minister of Justice. That's when you've got leverage. Absolutely. Yeah, he just had all of these disputes

like running irritating disputes. He once sued someone for libel for saying that he was boorish or brutish. Wow. He's an executioner. There's also a weird thing which is I don't know if this is the original moment where this idea came about

but there's a lot of question about at what point once the head is removed from the body does the person actually pass away and there were all these experiments of like trying to get people to blink post it, you know, talking to the dismembered head. There was a dairy, I think. Like, I remember reading when I was a kid,

even that they stay alive for like seven or eight seconds or something. Yeah, so there was this thing with Charles Henri, which is when he had executed a woman who was called Charlotte Corday. Someone, a carpenter jumped up and grabbed her head, and he picked it up, and he slapped her on the face. So a horrible thing to do post a post-upheading. I mean, I don't think, at that stage. Well, this is the thing.

Apparently she did. because apparently witnesses reported an expression of unequivocal indignation on her face after she was slapped and everyone thought, oh, maybe you actually last a bit longer. You last long enough to be annoyed by something.

But yeah, for a while, afterwards, there were a lot of studies into if that's the case because of Charlotte's... Yeah. Original guillotine invented in Halifax, West York. Yorkshire. Yeah. So, good? Well done. Yeah. Well, now, I'll be saying that that's good, because I would say, because it's in Yorkshire, it's bad. Debate. Debate. Oh. Off with his head. Oh, no. It was solely to drop off the heads of people in Lancashire, wasn't it?

It was called the Halifax Chibbet, but it was a mechanism for doing the same kind of thing. And Daniel Defoe wrote about it, and he said there was this rule, right, that if you could pull your head, so there was a pin that got pulled, and that dropped the chopper. But if the order was given to pull the pin

and you managed to pull your head out of the block in time, you were then free to run as far as you could. The executioner was entitled to chase you under the rules of this system. Wow. But if you got across the river, you were home, not home dry, home very wet, but you weren't free. You were not going to be executed anymore.

And so that apparently was a rule they had in place. It seems like a bad rule. You could spot people who've done it because they'd always have a bald patch on the top of their head, wouldn't they? It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in Sicily, the pistachios are guarded by the military police. Not a very stressful occupation, I would guess. Well, they're a very dangerous industry, turns out, sort of. They are very valuable pistachios in Sicily.

They're called green gold there. They're different to all pistachios in the rest of the world. They're farmed in a place called Bronte. And they're thought of as much better and richer and deeper flavor than any other pistachios. They only constitute about 1% of the world's supply, less, but they're the best. And so people keep stealing them. And loads of pistachio farmers were complaining,

saying literally people are rocking up with guns and, you know, holding us at gunpoint and stealing all our pistachios. There was one person who said they'd had a story of someone like repelling down from the air and scooping pistachios off trees. From like a helicopter. There would have to be, yeah, like a big blimp above or something.

I think from the helicopter, and I don't know if, like, you've had to pay for the helicopter. You're going to have to pick a lot of pistachios from your house sale to come and say. I find it incredible that there is a version of pistachios which apparently is even nicer than pistachios. One of the nicest things in the world. Yeah.

I can't imagine how good... Because I'm sure I've never had one of these Bronte pistachios. Yeah. I'm sure that I'm one of the 99% in the pistachio world. I think that's the 1% and that's why we rioted all those years ago. Yeah. The people who tasted those pistachios.

How good must they be? They must be incredible. I actually don't... I don't think pistachios are that great, so I'm not as excited as you, but I still wouldn't mind tasting one. Wow. But they're worth a lot, aren't they? Like, one single bag could be worth up to $33,000 American dollars,

and that is a... One bag? Not a supermarket bag. It's like 100 grams. Like a Santa sack kind of fake here. I don't normally buy them in Santa Sack. Okay. A big old bag, yeah.

That's a lot. How much did you say? A lot. 33,000 American dollars, I believe. That's incredible. Bronte, so this place, Admiral Nelson, Lord Nelson, was the Duke of Bronte. And he was granted the title by the King of Naples and Sicily

because he helped to put down a revolution against the king, Ferdinand the first. So he never visited, but he was the Duke of Bronte. He was very proud of that. He always signed his name once he was given that, Nelson and Bronte. Or just Bronte. And Bronte, did you say? Not and Bronte.

But there's a connection. Because 10 years after Nelson died, there was a clergyman called Patrick Bronte who thought, I want to posh up my name a bit, and he changed his name to Bronte. And then fathered the Bronte girls. Yeah. Did he get it from the pistachio place then?

Via Nelson, yeah. He wanted to make him the name posh and cool. That's amazing. Did not know that. If it weren't the pistachias, wouldn't have Wuthering Heights? Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Very good. And if we didn't have Manchester, we wouldn't have Jane Eyre because that's where Charlotte Bronte started writing Jane Eyre in Manchester. So thank you all here.

I thought I'd win more of you over with that one. That's cool. They're all from Yorkshire in this room. It's right. Actually, pistachio thefts is a problem all over the world where they make pistachios anyway. So in America they have a nut theft task force, which stops nut theft in the California area.

In Turkey, apparently, they have nut vigilantes who try to stop people from stealing their pistachios, and in Turkey, they don't repel from blimps or anything or from helicopters. You just ram a tree with your car and knock all of the pistachios out and then just gather them off and shove it in your club. That's really clever.

Yeah. And in Sicily it's the Carabinieri police force who guard them and they do helicopter patrols as well. Do they ever have to fire shells at the thieves? But I find the Carabinieri so weird that... If you go to Italy, there are two police forces and they just accept this. So there's like the normal police.

Oh, we've got about 40, haven't we? Okay, sure. Sorry, there are two types of police. So if you want to call, if you've got an emergency, you can either call the Politiya or you can call the Carabiniari. And I can't really work. And one's 112 and one's 113, I think. And this journalist was asking Italian, the Sicilians, and they didn't really know which was which.

They were like, you just pick one. It's just, and it's just a hangover. It's from pre-unification even, and the Carabini were like the Royal Guards, and now they're just a hangover. But they've got these really weird rules. they didn't used to be allowed to have facial hair for quite a long time, I think, and now you can have quite strict facial hair.

They had to ask permission to marry if you're in the military police force. And then once you ask permission to marry from your boss, then they do a full-on background check of your potential spouse to make sure they're appropriate. Thank you. I think that's the best one to ring, isn't it? If they're that strict. No?

Yeah, you don't have to ask. I want you to send a police officer, but can you tell me about your spouse a bit first? I don't think people are calling them the day before their wedding just to say, I think you're really good at and I've got some doubts actually. Wow, yeah, pistachio theft is a big, a huge deal. So this year, in June, I think this was in California, there was a guy, a trucker who was arrested

for allegedly stealing 42,000 pounds of pistachios. Wait, nice. Like one and a half bags? Yeah, and it's a problem because you, turn up, dressed as a truck driver, looking like a truck driver. Dressed as a truck driver.

Yeah. What have you haven't bought that Halloween costume yet? You sort of plausibly like a... We're wearing a t-shirt, for instance. Yeah.

And so now drivers have to have thumbprints, photo ID, the whole deal. And some people have hacked into trucking companies computer systems to place fake orders for pistachios

and then someone turns upon the day and says, I'm here for the pistachios that have been ordered. Right. And then they drive off with all the nuts.

And the idea is basically that there's no kind of bar codes on these things, right? There's just tons of nuts and people eat the pistachios and so that's kind of destroying all the evidence. Perfect crime. It's the perfect. Because you get to eat pistachio nuts throughout.

It's, yeah. Just back to Bronte for a second. Oh yeah. Not the sisters. The area with the pistachios. There's an amazing thing when you're looking at photos of it that you suddenly notice. this giant mountain that is sitting in the background of the pistachio area, and it's Mount Etna.

And Mount Etna is given a lot of credit for the reason that the pistachios are so good, because basically the trees are growing out of the kind of volcanic slabs that have been laid down over the passage of time. Which is genuinely really good for soil. Like lava has all these minerals in it, which over time make it much more fertile. So it's true. Yeah, but it's still an active volcano. up until very recently, I think it was

in, it was either this year or last year, it had these huge explosions, lava explosions. It grew in height by 100 feet. What? Yeah. Because of all of it it was literally like when you put a Mentos in a Diet Coke. It was shooting a column.

We know what a volcano is. Hang on, James. I need to hear a bit more about this Mentos Coke situation before I can visualize it. Do you mean it grew 100 feet just temporarily while it was shooting it out? No, no. That column, like a Mentos in a Diet Coke, shoots like meters upright. And this is what this did.

This was like hundreds of meters into the air, this column of stuff. So it grew and all the ash kind of sat on top of lava and dried up and it grew. But it does an amazing thing, Mount Etna, which I didn't realize volcanoes do. It blows smoke rings occasionally. Like a really skilled smoker doing those. You can see these beautiful plumes of... perfect rings coming out the top of Mount Adnan. That's great.

So, yeah, there's not just the pistachios that are cool about that area. I'm still not going until it can do that Gandalf ship. Then I'll visit Sicily. Okay, I've got an economics quiz for you all. Oh, great. Yay! Which is better value? Sheld or unshelled pistachios?

Well, I would say probably, it's more fun to open the shells and actually means you don't shove millions off. them in your face, so you kind of eat a bit less. But presumably the shells aren't worth as much, so it would be better to get unshelled. Okay. Good theory. I'm going to say shelled as well, purely because I think it's, yeah, it's the pure form, right? And also it's... The pure form, yeah.

I guess. Okay. I'm going to say it's impossible to answer that because you haven't told us what they cost, respectively. I can't tell you what's better value unless you tell me how much it is. I'm sorry, I just want to also allow myself to that. theory. Well, okay, let's say shell on pistachios with the shell half the price per ounce, right? But you only get half as many because half the space in the bag is shells in empty space.

So this is by a website called Wonk Blog, which is very good, by the way, on these sort of nut-related questions. The problem is, the price is roughly equivalent per weight, but it's labor. It's how much work you're doing to take the shells off the pistachios. And so it depends what you earn. So if you're on, you know, 10 pounds an hour at the cost of shell on pistachios is about four pounds in labour to remove the shells if you're doing it for a certain time. But if you earn, you know, 40 quid an hour, that's way more per bag of shell pistachios because you are having to do the work. Okay, so there's that thing about, is it Christiana Ronaldo? It's not, if he drops a tenor on the floor, it's not worth him picking it up because it would take him longer than he's earned that

amount of money. Exactly. Also, someone else might kick the ball away from you in the time that you went down to her. It's not good strategy on the pitch. I mean, what's he doing on the pitch anyway, Cristiano Ronaldo these days? Ronaldo would be the worst person in the world to buy shell on pistachios

because it's just not worth his time taking each other. It's assuming that shell removal is labour, and some people will call that a hobby. And there's a place in America called pistachio land. Sounds really cool. According to their website, they offer a motorized,

farm tour around the orchards, a candy kitchen where they produce their own pistachio treats, a geocash location and a Pocustop for playing Pokemon Go. That's four things. The website's really good. It tells you why pistachios are so good for you. Some maybe slightly dubious claims. They say that they're cholesterol-free, which I think they are, so that's good. They have antioxidants, so that's good for you.

You know, very fashionable. It also says that the colour green. is associated with health, hope, renewal, and alleviates anxiety. Which feels like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? It does, unless you're seeing it on the executioner's trousers heading towards you. It would cause stress. Did you know that pistachios are good for penises? In what?

Well, they've originally called the penistachio, weren't they? Yeah, yeah. In what way? In what way? Okay, so there was a study where they gave a bunch of men 100 grams of pistachio nuts as a diet, So you would eat them in one go for three weeks and they found that their penises got better.

Now, here's the interesting thing about this. Yes. I've not written down what that means. But presumably, the scientific paper didn't say the penises got better. So you've already... So I've written good for your penis and then I've kind of just not written anything else.

So it's going to remain a bit of a mystery. I have a lot of acronyms. Apparently your IIEF score is better and your PCDU parameters are better as well But there are side effects in patients with ED So watch out for that That's erectile dysfunction I suppose

The last one Oh yes So it's good for your penis, good for your nuts Hey No Yeah So you know Like it's a mystery what that means

But it's good news It's good news If you want a good penis I don't know if it means morally I don't know if it means in action I don't know if it's like at quizzes I don't know what it Well behave penises

Did you say good at quizzes? Good at quizzes I remember when we took you to the pub And you were playing the quiz machine Never again Extraordinary They had to clean the button so much After this

Anyway look we need to wrap up in a second Do we have anything else before we do? Well they're dangerous They're dangerous aren't they pistachos, they can explode. They can suffocate you. But not, not like as a sort of mercy killing.

That kind of thing. They don't grab a cushion. No, no, they don't do that. How can they do either of these things? Not under their own steam, either of these things, surely? Well, kind of, I suppose. So, yeah, they're basically, they're taking out oxygen from an area and releasing carbon dioxide.

So if you are in, like, a big truck full of pistachios and they have, you know, it's hermetically sealed and you're there long enough, then you'll suffocate. So that's kind of them by themselves, isn't it? Definitely, I think so. Yeah, and they have this kind of fat in there and they have this chemical reaction

and that chemical reaction gives out heat and if it gives out enough heat, if they're enough there, they can explode. Yeah? So they're dangerous. It would be an elaborate plot. It would be an amazing sort of... You need a lot of them.

If you have them in your pocket, they're not going to explode. Although you might end up with a bad penis if they do. That's true. Is it's not just like saying flower? Is it like every time your wife receives some flowers, you say, you know, they can suffocate you

if you're shut in a room with a million of them? To be honest, the problem is the florists never have enough space on the little car to write. You guys, I'll tell you one more thing. Yeah, go for it, yeah. So this is, pistachios used to be red in America, which I didn't know. They were dyed because they were brought from Iran.

And then there was the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. Big deal. There were trade embargoes, so no more imports from Iran, and America started its own pistachio industry. And this was all in the time of President Jimmy Carter, who set up this pistachio embargo. Very exciting. But he, of course, is a peanut farmer, if anyone remembers that. Jimmy Carter is a peanut farmer, and was and is. And there is a statue of Jimmy Carter in Georgia, which is of a four-meter-tall peanut, but it has the teeth of Jimmy Carter. It's the second tallest peanut statue in the world And second tallest

Second tallest Yep It's not the best But it's nearly there And this is my favourite detail about this It's just a tall peanut with Jimmy Carter's teeth It's really weird But it has a large hole in its rear end

And that allegedly was cut by the Secret Service To ensure that there were no explosives Or assassins inside it But why would you cut the hole? to work out if there were no explosives or assassins inside it. If there's no hole, there's probably no assassins inside. The peanuts bump. Also, if you were going to put a feature of Jimmy Carter on a peanut

to make sure people knew it was him, is the teeth? If you see it, you're like, oh, Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, well. Oh, wait, hang on, no, it's a big peanut. I don't know. I don't know which body part you'd put. I don't know any specific body part of Jimmy Carter very well. to know him as a whole.

I, the largest pistachio in the world is advertised as being at pistachio land in America. But I found that there is a pistachio-shaped museum in Turkey which has a larger pistachio. And so I wrote to pistachio land to tell them that their pistachio isn't the biggest pistachio in the world. No reply. Jesus Christ.

And I was so hoping to go on a trip there. They'll never have us now. Yeah, your face is just there with a cross over it. No, you out. No, it's just a big knot with James's teeth. Okay, listen, we need to wrap up. That is it. That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. In the course of this podcast, if we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schwabeland, Andy. At Andrew Humber. I'm James. At James Harkin. And Anna.

You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group. account, no such thing as a fish. No, or you can go to our group account at no such thing, or you can go to our group account what's happening.

4.5 times you've said this. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, which is the good penis.com. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. All of our future toy dates are up there. Do check it out. Thank you, Manchester, so much for this.

It's been so much fun. So I'll see you, that.