No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As I Love I Love Lucy

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Live from Newcastle, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the beach, geese, teeth and Queen Elizabeeth. 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

Hello everybody. It's Dan and Andy here from the podcast No Such Things a Fish, which you're already listening to. Yeah. Why are we here, Andy? We're here to let everyone know that they can see us in the flesh. I thought we were here as a social thing. I can't believe it. You've geared me into recording an advert. I know. The other two saw through it. That's why it's you and me alone. But basically, we are concluding the UK and European leg of our Thunder nerds tour. We only have four dates left. We're going to be playing. Cardiff, we're going to be playing London twice and Manchester, and then Caput. That is it. It is over. And we still have some tickets left for a few of those shows.

So if you want to come and see us, now is the time to get them. That's right. You can get tickets. There are still some available for Cardiff, and there are still some available for the second London Day. So Cardiff is on the 16th of October at the Wales Millennium Centre. London is the first one is sold out completely. The second one, there are still a few tickets left. That's on the 24th of October at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane.

So a couple of tickets are available for those two shows, and I'd say buy them now before the show. Yeah, we can't wait to see a bunch of you there. It's so fun. We have exciting guests. We have quizzes that we do on stage. We record an original new podcast each time, and we usually get a lot of weird stuff out of Andy

to do with a very specific sci-fi movie. So, yeah, a little teaser there. So, why don't you come along? Come and see us live. Go to No Such Thingasafish.com. All the links are there to get your tickets from. And, yeah, we'll hopefully see you there. All right, let's get on to the actual podcast itself.

Are we going to order a coffee at any point? No, I'm going home now. Okay. All right, on with the show. Bye. Oh, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you live from Newcastle. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, 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 Anna. My fact this week is that British children have been asked to stop digging holes on beaches after they dug one so big it had to be filled in with a forklift truck. Wow. They're hard to get rid of, and this is a waste of public resources, or this farmer's resources.

So this was the Coast Guard in Padstow, who had to deal with this one. It was eight feet deep. That's deep. And nine foot wide. Yeah. That's a source of more of a trap than a harmless heat activity, isn't it? It is. Well, I think, I was wondering why I was so wide,

because I'd always just make quite narrow holes. But if you're going that deep, you have to get people in it to dig it, don't you? So I suppose it does need to widen. But that does make it really hard to fill in. Takes ages. They had to call Charlie Watson Smythe from Padstow Farm. And he popped over and filled it in with his forklift truck. Have you guys heard?

of the St. Andrews' hole-digging society. No. Oh, is it to do with golf? It sounds like it. It's not. It's a beach thing. So it's only been going a few years, but I'm sure it'll last for many more.

So every fortnight, you just go onto the beach and you start digging a hole. Is it in St Andrews in Scotland? Yeah. Cool. And most people contribute to one main hole each time, but you can do your own thing. They're not prescriptive. And basically, it's the guy who founded it, said it's a really nice way for men to do something,

together where you don't have to make eye contact with each other. And that is what all men's activities basically are. Do they cover up the holes at the end of the night? I think they might fill it back in. I think they might be responsible diggers. So when the wife said, where have you been? They say, oh, we were digging holes, but we filled them all in. But that's honestly what we were doing.

I think that's really nice. That's nice. Yeah, that's great. I think that's just going against the public service announcement that I was trying to make with this fact. Now, you're telling everyone about the society. where you go and dig a hole. That's true.

I think they are very dangerous. The other week, I was on a beach and my son dug a hole, which couldn't have been more than, I think, 30 centimetres deep, right? And it was quite wide, but he put a little blanket over it. And he said...

And he said, Daddy, come over here. I've got something for you. And he said... Leave a little plastic lockness monster on the... Dad, I found it. He said, Dad, come, come. And I saw, I knew... Because I've watched him,

deep the hole, right? And I sat down, obviously, faking it, and... and fell into the hole, right. Phinella and my wife had to pick me out of it. My back was gone.

It was so embarrassing from just like that. You know, you've got to be careful. Genuinely, they're dangerous. They can even be lethal. Some more dangerous things on beaches. Umbrellas. Oh, yeah.

Due to wind, they send approximately 3,000 people to hospital every year in the US. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. They don't send them literally by holding on them to... It's Bernie Poppins. Just next to the H for the helipad, there's a little you.

Lightning, because as we all know, lightning doesn't strike at sea. Please don't write in again. Listen, I made a claim that lightning rarely strikes at sea. A lot of people just selectively didn't hear the word rarely have been inundating the inbox. Well, the truth is that it does rarely strike at sea, but if you're on the beach, you're often going to be the tallest person. or not the tallest person, but the tallest thing. On a beach, yeah.

On the beach, right? Because there's not buildings around, there's not trees around, so you might get hit. And of course, jellyfish. And what do you think? Should you wee on jellyfish stings? What do you think, people of Newcastle? No.

Okay, there was a very loud yes, but I think that was more recreational than medical. It's a no. It doesn't really help, doesn't it? No, there's been 10 papers that have tested it, and none of them were positive. About half of them has said it makes

matters worse and half said, it doesn't make any difference at all. Makes matters worse, because now you're embarrassed as well as a thing. What you need to do is apply baking soda slurry, which is 50% baking soda and 50% seawater and 50% seawater. Now. But that is for all jellyfish, apart from Caribdia marsupialis and Chrysiora His Sauce Cellar, in which case you absolutely must not apply baking soda surrey.

Oh, what happens? It makes it way, way worse. It's like when you put Mentos inside a Coke bottle, is it just... See, I think that's a good argument for just weeing on the wound. Probably won't make it too much worse. The odds of getting it wrong... I don't have time to do a DNA test on this jellyfish. That's just stung me.

Surely everyone knows a Chrysor or a Haiseo cellar when they see one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very funny. I found a professional sandcastle maker... Did you? Who... I read a profile of her. She's called Janelle Hawkins.

Okay. It just sounds a lot like James Harkin. Does it? That's why we're supposed to be surprised by that. It sounds a bit like James Harkin. Janelle Hawkins, yeah. Spooky. Very spooky.

Spooky. The thing is, Andy, I am not a sandcastle maker. No. Did you have anything else? And I noticed that I, by default, was defending you, but even I was not into that one either. Is that all on her? Can we move on?

Let's move on. Okay, great. Okay. So it is work. digging holes on some beaches. Yeah. Specifically, Fokston Beach. Oh.

So quite a long way for you guys to go in Newcastle, but if you are in Kent, there are still gold bars buried there. I've been to Fogston Beach as a child. There are gold bars under the surface. Yeah, well, you and did you? You could have come away a millionaire. Well, not a millionaire, technically,

but in 2014, so actually after you were a child, in 2014, an artist called Michael Salesdorfer buried 10,000 pounds worth of gold bars there as an art installation, quite a cool idea. He said, I'm making a constantly changing sculpture because everyone's going to be constantly digging up the beach. And I know it's making someone else do as well for him. But if you dug up one of these bars, of which there were, I think, a lot, about 30, they were either worth £250 or £500. And some people said they'd dug them up, but we reckon there's quite few left.

Cool. So it's worth it. Good to know. Yeah? A lot of people spend their life digging, right? Like, for various reasons, for work, we're on a beach. We're constantly just digging holes into the ground. And I always thought, I wonder like, you know, how close to the center do you get when you're digging down? So the deepest hole we've ever dug, which was in Russia, has gone down at 12,376 meters. That's the deepest one, and that is called the Kola Super Deep borehole. To put that in context, if you scaled the earth to the size of an apple, the depth that we've gone hasn't even broken through the top layer of skin of the apple. But the earth is almost the opposite of an apple.

With the apple, the best bit is the stuff inside and the crust bit is rubbish. Whereas on the earth, I think one of the reasons we haven't gone down is, it's not really nice down there, is it? It's not like, do you think if we just go 15,000 metres, we'll be like, oh my God, there's a whole other beach holiday. They couldn't go any... They didn't get 13,000 metres down and went,

it's not great down here. Dan, I love the idea of your son putting a little tartan blanket over the cola super deep ball. And leering you over to it. Have you seen this, the super deep bar hole? Yeah, it's... It's pretty small, isn't it? You couldn't fall down it, I don't think.

No, no. You could... It's nine inches across. Yeah, and it's all that it's on top of it is like a little manhole cover that it really looks like you could just undo. Yeah? If you dropped a pebble in it,

you bet you couldn't even hear it hit the bottom. I shouldn't think so. We're so much better than all other animals at digging holes, but I was... Do you mean with our hands? No, sorry, with it. because we've built those amazing machinery, so other animals don't go that far into the ground.

That feels a bit unfair then. That's like saying we fly better than any animal because we have... Yes, true as well. I was just surprised at the animal that has dug the second deepest aside from us and I think it's cool and terrifying. What is it?

A nile crocodile. Yes. What? It's not cool that they go... With those little arms? They actually do it terrifyingly with their jaws, apparently. And they've gone down 12. And they've gone down 12 meters, which is...

Oh, that's quite a lot less than us. Yeah. Yeah. It does sound terrifying. It's a distant second place, isn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it because they realised sooner that there wasn't nice Appley stuff down there than we did? Right.

Deepest toll in Newcastle? It's... I'm not going to answer that, in fact. But there is an official deepest toll in Newcastle. It is just outside St. James's Park, isn't it? In fact, it's just down there. It's just the other side of this. The science, science one? The one that's two.

2,000 metres. Yeah, yeah. Really? The Newcastle Science Central deep geothermal borehole. They wanted to dig a geothermal hole, you know, dig down, you've got free hot water forever.

And that's near St. James' Park. Handy. Another hole and James connection. I'm back on board, baby. The last one wasn't really a hole connection as much as a Sandcastle connection. I'm back out, baby. I just, I love...

a headline of the local newspaper. Was it The Chronicle? What has the borehole done for Newcastle? Conclusion was very little, sadly. Well, it made us know that Newcastle, many, many million years ago was a tropical environment. I don't know what you can do with that information. But maybe that's why people in Newcastle go

with their tops off all the time because they're hearkening to a better time. Long memory. Just, I have a hole digger, a favourite hole. Who is it? Who is it? Well, I realised as I said that, that it's actually someone who specifically didn't dig his own holes. He had holes dug for him.

But it's Bernard Claver who I... It's one of my favourite people because I'm quite into medieval Christian sects and he was the founder of the Knights Temps. She said sect. I mean, what sect? Yeah. Grow up, guys. That's a hell of a Tinder profile, is it? I'm really into medieval sex.

I own my own wimple. I will... I will bring my own root scrape. We're all having to readjust now to just be interested in what you're about to say as opposed to what we were hoping you're going to say. Picturing sort of monks with dildos from coming around.

Okay, Anna. Did you have a fact here? Oh, yeah, sorry. Bernard Claver. Yeah, co-founder of the Knights Templar. He was this abbot, very, very leading Christian thinker. And this just goes to show what good friends will do. so the fellow monks at the monastery absolutely adored him.

He was their spiritual leader. They knew that he was so devout that he went to excessive lengths. He went to excessive fasting, so he would starve himself basically to show his devoutness. And that caused gastric problems, but he was so busy praying in the chapel that he never wanted to leave until the last minute,

so he could never get to the Lewin time. So his monks kept on digging and re-digging him a poo-hole just outside the chapel so that he could dash out at the last minute, drop the cassock, you know, plop in there and dash back in. And if that's not friendship. That's friendship.

That's beautiful. I was going to quickly, there's lots of different types of holes. So I was going to do a very quick quiz to see if you could guess what these holes are. So here's the first one. Yule hole.

Christmas hole. It's the opposite of a Christmas tree. You just dig a nice yule hole. If you can't afford a tree, trees are expensive. You just throw the tinsle in the hole. Lovely. Yeah.

He's got it right. So, No, it's obviously not right. So a eulhole is, I saw this from Susie Dent on Twitter, it's a term for the loosest notch on your belt reserved for Christmas feasting so that when you put a bit of... Very nice. A bit extra on, you can use the yule hole in your belt.

That's great. Assholes. Come on. What are those? Donkey holes in the... Holes for donkeys. Yeah. It's donkey holes. This is an amazing...

It's not a donkey's ass. It's not an ass-ass-hull. It is out in the desert areas, donkeys make holes that create desert streams, and they provide water holes. They're not called assholes. This was in a scientific paper that I read. A scientific paper, but I'm not a...

Yeah, and it's a remarkable thing, because not only does it feed the donkeys, the horses, and their predators, up to 57 other species go and sip from these assholes. But then when they dry up, they become nurseries for germination. No, you're not sending your kid to the asshole nursery. And it's time for fact number two, that is Andy. My fact is that during the Hundred Years' War, every goose in England had to donate six feathers to the war effort.

So, 100 Years War, England, France. Very exciting. Lots of... Sorry, no, sorry. Not that exciting. I mean, as far as wars go, it was a long one, wasn't it? Long periods of inactivity. Yeah, 116 years long.

But during the hot bits of the war, England needed enormous numbers of goose feathers because they needed enormous numbers of arrows. So obviously, English Army, mostly archer-based at the time, like a Agincourt, 80% of the troops there were archers. And in 1421, the government had to buy half a million arrows. And all of them needed goose feathers to put at the blunt end to help the arrows fly through the air and hopefully like, ooh, a Frenchman. So that was the whole name of the game.

And where are the geese? You know, what a nightmare to organise. But fortunately, pretty much every village in England had a flock of geese just hanging around the village pond. And in 1417, King Henry V ordered that his sheriffs take six feathers from every goose of the land and deliver them to the Tower of London. So this was a way that...

So did they send all those sheriffs out to all the towns just plucking... I guess the sheriffs were... Yeah, they might have sent under-shariffs or whatever. But it was a huge endeavour. And, you know, like Battle of Cressy, 1436, oh, 1346, sorry, so way earlier than this. But the English archers, on the day, fired half a million arrows in one day, 80 per arch. It's a lot. It's so many feathers.

Yeah, they've got orders of like a million feathers from, like, one area of England that they need. I mean, because also, when you're building an arrow, it's not just the feathers. Obviously, you need the wood in order to make the stick bit between the plunt end and the sharp bit. You need, that's vital. Yeah. And by the way, there was someone who was designated the... official gatherer of all the sticks that sat in the arrow. What?

Yeah, yeah. He was given the ability to just walk into any forest in the UK and commandeer it. Because I'm commandeering your forest. Oh, I thought you meant he was given the right to look for good-looking sticks on the ground. That one's fantastic. I think his job meant he could go anywhere in the UK and point out a stick and it was that stick that was now his. Did they not just get bigger bits of word and whittle them down?

Yeah, yeah. They just have to look for exactly the right stick. No, no, no. He could chop down trees and he could do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, he could just point of things. That's very cool. Yeah, because they also needed the wood for the bows as well, didn't they? And it was illegal, actually, to make clogs out of ash for that time.

You weren't allowed to make wooden trees because they needed it for the bows. Oh, really? And that presumably at the time was one of the most fun things you could do was make some clogs out of ash. So that was a sacrifice. It's a different time. I think this is a good theory that basically geese were way more important to the war effort than, for example, horses. As in if you didn't have horses, you know, like, okay, walk. Let me ask you, who is collecting the sticks for the arrows?

Really, it's that guy's dog, isn't it? So, surely that's where dogs collecting sticks came from. It's the origin. It may be. You're right. It's a team effort. Well, they had to get the arrows to the battlefield as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they were often taken by horses. They would have huge wagons there because each archer could shoot for about five minutes or so with the arrows that they had, and then they had to get more arrows, because you can't just bring them all to the front, right? And so there was a wagon there, and they always had, like, a battalion of young boys

who would run to the wagon, grab the arrows, and run to the front to give the arrows to the arches. Cool job to have. Would you bring emergency geese with you on the battlefield? Oh, almost certainly every answer would have two or three geese just in his back pocket. You're saying that, like, you're joking.

Yeah. No, I don't think you would. But surely when you run out of arrows and you need to emergency make a new one. I think the process of making an arrow is so time-consuming. It's like saying, would you have a bullet maker on the battlefield in case you ran out?

Once you ran out of arrows, that's the end of the battle. You just go home. I guess you go collect them, right? If they've worked. If they've worked. It's not like darts where once they're in the board then you pop over and you pluck them out. Stop the more, everyone.

Should we just collect the arrows? We'll do it again. Do we know how pedantic they were about the goose feathers? because I read that traditionally, it had to be feathers from the male goose that were on the outside of the arrow, and then the two stabilising feathers had to be from the female. And I think there was a rumour that this made it fly better,

but I think it was irrelevant, that was just the tradition. And I'm not sure you could tell. So I wonder how pedantic Mr. Sheriff was. I imagine at the start of the war they were quite pedantic. By year 115, they were probably like any old feather will be. Because actually, I think it was, most people did use goose feathers, but if you were really fashionable, you might use a peacock feather in your hair. That is classy.

That's cool. You know you've been shot by an aristocrat. When you look there and you see a peacock feather sticking out of you. Oh, fancy. Was this the kind of the final last hurrah for the goose's war effort? Yeah, it probably was the last big effort. Major time where it was like the dominating thing. Because they were starting to bring in right at the end at about 1430.

There were battles going on where cannons were starting to be used. But it's quite funny reading the accounts because they were quite shit back then. So there was a battle where the Duke of Burgundy fired 412 cannonballs into a town and only succeed in killing one chicken. Quick, get all the feathers. I think goose feathers were used a bit later for fuses. Like, because the feather, the hard bit of the feather is hollow, you could kind of stick it in and put gunpowder in it

and set fire to it and then run away. That's nice. I'm pretty sure that was true. Oh, that's nice that they sort of stayed useful. That's lovely. Because geese are big players in the world of human history. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everything that was written between about 600 and 1800 AD. It was done by a goose. Yes. Very patient goose. Yeah. No, but the quills that we used to, right? Yeah. They were pretty much all goose.

You could use a peacock or a swan or whatever, but... Isn't it crazy as well that you can get left-hand and right-handed quills based on which wing you took the quill off? Is that true? Yeah, it's much nicer if you're left-handed to use a right wing of a goose and vice further because of the way that it curves. Okay. But I hadn't realized that the reason the demand was so huge

was that they didn't last very long at all. Because I guess you're sharpening them all the time. so you're lucky if your quill lasts a week. If you're having a big letter, right, if it's someone's birthday, then your quill's going to last a couple of days. Actually, I suppose you only write one birthday card, don't you? Yeah, it's Christmas.

If it's Christmas, thank you. It's Jesus's birthday. But where we get penknife from, the word penknife is a knife to make a pen from a feather, which I had just never made that connection before. Oh, yeah. I think the word pen might come from feather. Certainly does, penna.

One of my favourite etymologies, pen and pencils, come from completely different roots. Because, yeah, penna comes from feather, going back to Latin. Whereas pencil comes through old French, from, I think, a word that means, little penis. I think you're right.

Really? Okay. Yeah. That is good. Totally different etymologies. My favourite is that assholes comes from the... My favourite is, does anyone know why ducks are called ducks? It's because they duck? I only learned this the other day.

That sounds crazy. It's like, because they duck underwater, everyone was like, oh, duck, duck, duck, duck, and it's duck. So humans were ducking, sort of before ducks were ducking? The words, as in the words, yeah. I mean, ducks were ducking from... Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. What did we call them before? Just nothing.

We're just like, I can't even acknowledge that. There was a few different... One thing we used to call them ass feet, didn't we ducks? Did we? Yeah, yeah, because they're always flapping their feet underneath their ass. Oh, because when they're ducking, they've also got their bum sticking out of the water. Yeah, yeah, anyway. But we're not talking about ducks, we're talking about geese.

Let's talk about golf. Because goose feathers were used in golf balls. Oh, really? For a long time, actually. And that was kind of what kept posh people playing golf and non-poche people not playing golf because they were so expensive. And the balls were so expensive,

they were even more expensive than the clubs in those days. Okay. And the way you would do it is you would get a load of goose feathers and you would put it in some cow hide or something. and then you would soak it all and that made the leather get smaller but it would make the goose's feathers get bigger and that kind of made a really, really solid ball

and it was a perfect ball for playing golf. Did they bounce those ones? You don't really need your golf ball to bounce. Okay. Not so much. You're thinking of basketballs. Oh no. Yeah, I know.

But when you were making these golf balls, every golf ball had a top hatful of feathers in it. That was how you would measure how many feathers you needed. No. A top hat, fill it with feathers, and that was the right amount. So they're really shrinking down. Oh, yeah. Very whimsical.

Wow. I've got a riddle for you. Ooh, great. In the 1980s, the USA hoarded 1.5 million pounds of goose feathers in a strategic reserve. Why? Pillow fights? No. No.

Well, they had, say it again. They had it all in one, like, building. Well, I don't know about the exact, administrative distribution of the 1.5 million pounds of goose feathers. They might have needed a few sheds or whatever. Or a whole. Could have been in an asshole. No, we're not making asshole a thing. It's not happening. Why? Why?

Is this for when we go back to the olden days and we have to rely on bow and arrows because a nuclear blast has wiped out our guns? Nice guess. It's actually for if we need to go somewhere cold. It's just to make down... To make dovaves? to fill, it's basically sleeping bags and boots and Arctic weather kit. It's if suddenly we need to fight in the Arctic.

Then you just have a strategic reserve. So when James said pillows, he was right. No, no. James said pillow fights. Completely different thing. Frivolous in times of war. Wow, that's interesting. Anyway, just that was part of their...

And are they not there anymore? So is it worth attacking Alaska, is what I'm asking. Certainly is. Guys, I need to move us on. Do you want to sneak in anything before? Another use for a goose. Okay. I'm sure you guys know this, but Rabelais wrote in Gargantua.

I wiped my ass with a hen, with a cock, with a calf skin, with a... Come on. With a hair, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag. A attorney's bag? But of all the tortuels, ass whips, bum fodders, tail napkins, bunkhole cleansers, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose. How big a Vindaloo had this guy had? That it took all of that.

Poor goose. All right, we are going to move on to fact number three. It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that American comedian Lucille Ball's teeth could play the latest pop songs and bust Japanese spies. Wow. If you were around Lucille Ball at the right moment, if you stuck your ear to her mouth,

you could hear, you could hear the latest pop songs. And... It's so stupid. But it's true. Was she singing them? She wasn't singing them. Okay. No, it was legit the pop song.

So, in 1952, she was filming a movie. Dubari was a lady with Red Skelton. This was during World War II. And she had recently just had some temporary lead fillings put into her teeth. And as she drove home from the MGM studio, she said, one night I came into the valley, and I heard music. I reached down and turned the radio off,

and it wasn't on. The music kept getting louder and louder, and then I realized it was coming from my mouth. I even recognized the tune. My mouth was humming and thumping with drum beats, and I thought I was losing my mind. I thought, what the hell is this? Then it started to subside.

I got home, went to bed, not sure if I should tell anyone what happened because they would think I was crazy. Anyway, she told this to Buster Keaton, the comedian, who she was good friends with, and he said that she was picking up on radio broadcast through her fillings and that the same thing had happened to a friend of his

and a lot of people were reporting this at the time and then she suddenly heard coming through her teeth this sort of do-d-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-tut-d-d-d-tut-d-d-poh. And she reported it to someone and that person said that could be Japanese spies who were trying to send... What a reach.

Morse code to each other. It could have been just the start of Inspector Moss. Your lead fillings. Yeah, get radio? You need some metal in there which is going to receive the radio waves. And then you need something in there that's not quite solid that can vibrate. And the radio waves will make that vibrate and will make the sound come through.

Because it has happened in history. There's an example in the American Journal of Psychiatry where a 35-year-old war veteran thought he was hearing voices. But it turned out he was getting a local radio station. Wow. There was a 65-year-old man who had hip replacements. and the doctor was checking his feet and so put his stethoscope to his feet

and could hear, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever he was because he was vibrating through his hip replacements. That's brilliant. And has it ever been loud enough that if you're like, oh, I can't quite get the signal of a classic FM, you can say, oh, let's go around to Barry's house. Gather around Grandad's hip.

That's really funny. This is a field of study at the moment, so the US Army has just got the molar mic, Raphone, which is a radio that clips onto your tooth, basically. And it sends you, it translates your signals through your jawbone. So

the sound goes into your jaw and just goes straight to your auditory nerve. So you can hear a big advantage. You don't have to wear a microphone if you're up to your neck in a swamble or whatever. And they are testing us at the moment. That's actually weirdly, we talked about Beethoven on last week's episode, and I don't think we mentioned that

his friend designed for him something like that, didn't he? When Beethoven went deaf he designed a contraption that he put on his jaw against his jaw that conducted sound for him so that he could hear better what he was playing and it attached to his piano. Didn't he have to bite his piano to hear it? I think he did have to bite down on the piano, yeah. That was the prototype, him biting, yeah.

And then his friend was like, I'll make you a straw, mate. Yeah, and built like a metal rod. Wow. That kind of, yeah. Just so that in case anyone doesn't recognize the name Lucille Ball, I'm talking about I love Lucy, one of the greatest comedians of all time. I mean, quite often voted the greatest American TV comedian of all time. And I Love Lucy was a sitcom that she made, right?

Yeah, yeah. She was incredible. She's going to have her day very soon where she gets that second wind of championing. She died 30 years ago, so I don't know why Dan thinks she's going to get a second win. No, I mean, someone's going to say she's my favourite and we're all going to watch her movies again and so on. Dan's new podcast, I Love, I Love Lucy. Which is entirely in Morse code, only receivable by your teeth. I didn't realize how huge she was.

So there was a thing of, in one of the shows, her character gives birth. And I think it was the first time any American TV had shown a pregnant woman going to hospital as a character. 44 million people watched that. Yeah, it's insane.

Stunning, crazy numbers. 72% of American homes. Right. America used to shut down on a Monday night because that was the night it was broadcast. And weirdly, in that episode, she gave birth the same night that her character gave birth on TV. Yeah.

Not that weirdly, because she booked in a caesarian for that day. Yeah. Ooh. So I Love Lucy was possibly the first major TV comedy that was pre-recorded. Up until then, you were doing live TV. Everything went out live. And she and her husband, Desi, they innovated the multi-camera live audience pre-record. So when that show did go out, it was timed.

so that she would give birth on the same night. But what's amazing as well is, Andy, not only was at the first time they saw someone going to deliver a baby, but they couldn't even use the word pregnancy on the show. So the episode wasn't called Lucy is pregnant. It was called Lucy is Enciente, because that's a... Well, it's a different word for pregnant. I forgot to write which language down, but it's...

I assume it'll be Spanish because he's famous to her partner in it is Cuban. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think whenever they refer to pregnancy, they would say she was expecting, right? They would say she was pregnant. Isn't that? It's like it was a swear word. It's absolutely bizarre. Did no one know about pregnancy then? Actually, one of the facts that someone in the audience sent to us today said something like the... I think it was 1974 and it was the Formula One.

And they refused to show it on the BBC because one of the teams was sponsored by Durex condoms. Like all the other teams were sponsored by cigarette brands. Yeah. And they were like, no, no, condoms. Definitely can't have that on our TV. Yeah, and when they did the pregnancy announcement script as well, they had to, because you, in TV land, often you have to give it to people who are looking to see

if there's anything that can be offensive. So the BBC have, James, what's it called when they have to have a pass through it to make sure it's okay? Spoil spots. Yeah, that basically. Compliance. Compliance. The compliance was not only done by someone who was in-house,

part of the network, but it had to be handed to a priest, a rabbi. No. And they themselves are a joke as well. Look, we're all ignoring the big question about Lucy. Lucille. Was she a communist? She was accused of being a communist.

Was she? Yeah, and she was registered to vote as a communist. Oh, so that says she's a communist. Yeah, it does. And people claimed, people said they went to her house to have communist meetings, didn't they? But she did insist that she wasn't a communist. She said she was basically hauled over the coals in 1952

by the McCarthyite, you know, when the sort of commie hunting fever was at its absolute height. And, you know, she gave evidence. She said, yes, I was registered to vote as a communist in the 30s, but it was only to please my elderly grandfather. Very good. Joseph Stalin. I love Lenin. Yeah, there was a movie about Lucille Ball, wasn't there quite recently,

and there's a big scene in that where her husband comes out in front of the audience. and says she's not a communist. And he said, the only thing read about Lucy is her hair, and even that's not legitimate. It's very good. It was an amazing relationship. It must have been quite, I don't know. We all get excited by celebrity relationships.

Well, I don't because I'm above it, but many do. And they were one of the originals. Desi Arnaz was her husband. They've been together 10 years when they made I Love Lucy, and they played husband and wife in that. They sort of played versions of their own characters, didn't they? And it must have been quite groundbreaking then because he was a Cuban migrant

and she was this ginger person, the TV station said at the time. It's never been seen on TV before. A Cuban and a ginger. They had to call her strawberry blonde, didn't it? Yeah, yeah. Remember TV was black and white back then as well. It's more the fact she was white, isn't it?

No, they kept on quoting, no one's going to believe that a pale redhead is going to go out with the Cuban. Maybe it was like, if she'd had dark, You know, maybe it's slightly more plausible. Anyway, there was lots of us about it. But they were an amazing relationship, and they did divorce, but they stayed very good friends.

But he was interesting as well, Desi Annas. And he gave us the Conga. Did he? What do you mean he gave it to us? He basically introduced the conga line to the West. He started, and then another person got behind him. Before he knew it, the entire population of America. Yeah, yeah.

That's huge. That is a big one, is it? It's a big one. And that's obviously not how it started. So it was a big thing in Cuba. So Cubans in America tended to know about it. His father had been mayor of Santiago de Cuba in the 20s, and actually his father had repeatedly tried to ban the Conga

for being immoral and dangerous and sexy. Which it is. Which it is. But he then set up a club. It's the sexiest dance I know. I don't know about you guys. It depends where the conga comes. goes into, isn't it?

What? It doesn't go into anything. So you mean which room it goes into? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you keep it in the kitchen, it's not sexy. If it goes into the sex dungeon. I think a conga makes a sex dungeon unsexy rather than the other way around. Oh man, I'd be so terrified if I was halfway along a conga and I saw them going into the sex dungeon.

You can't change the course of the conga. You can't do it. I would just start walking quicker so we get three. through the sex dungeon faster and hopefully back out into the billiards room or something normal. Are you ever allowed to jump in front of the Conger to avert crisis? You're not allowed to speed... No, but you can exert subtle pressure from behind. Like, let's crack on...

Yeah, but pressure from behind is what they want. Yeah. Oh no! I started the sex dustin party. Oh no! Oh my god. Anyway. Yeah. What are we talking about?

Lucille. Paul. He started a good. club. I just have to make it clear, a club called the conga, where he introduced conga dancing. Wow. And that's how it came to us. So thank you. Thank you, Desi. Here's something we've got to thank largely Lucy, but also Desi for. It is thanks to her that we have Star Trek. Really? Star Trek exists because of Lucille Ball. So Gene Roddenberry had pitched the idea to quite a few productions. Gene Roddenberry being the founder, creator of Star Trek, and not many people

wanted it. Lucy said, this sounds fantastic. There's a rumor that she misunderstood what it was because she thought it was celebrities going on treks, basically. Star Trek. No. Yeah, because they were talking at a time where Bob Hope was going with USO members to the war zones and it was a big star power thing. That's a better, that's a great name for a show, Star Trek, right? It's a show arguably.

Yeah. But then she, okay, ouch, but she then found out what it was about and she said, this sounds very good. They made a pilot, that was rejected, and she said, let's give it another pilot. And it was the second pilot that allowed for Star Trek to be made. And she did that with Mission Impossible as well and a number of other shows. Mission Impossible, the old one, which I actually didn't know was a thing. Anna.

I'm so sorry. It's like you don't listen to me at all. Yeah, the TV series Mission Impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Well, not only was she a nerd. She was a jerk.

Yes, I heard that too. Yes. The soda jerk. Oh. I just heard she was an unpleasant person to work with. Yeah, yeah. Okay, in the 20s to the 50s, it was this year. huge phenomenon. I didn't know how big a deal

it was. So it was in drugstores, chemists, basically, but they had soda fountains there, and you'd have the soda jerk working the soda fountain, called that because they'd jerk the handle as they're giving it to you. But they weren't really, that wasn't their job. Their main job was to be an entertainer. And they were

all about punning, wordplay, making up crazy new terms for these drinks. You'd order, like, a cherry Coke, and they'd shout, stretch one, painted red. And that means they want a cherry Coke or... Aren't they also the one making the drink?

Who are they shouting this too? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's another soda jerk behind them who's doing a bit of the back and course. Okay, a bit of business. You'd order a Mary Garden. Mary Garden was a famous singer and you ordered a Mary Garden

because it made you sing and that was a drink where you wanted them to spike it with laxatives because you're blocked up and you needed to have some diarrhea. Oh my God. That, you know what? That sounds mad, but I do think that is missing from modern cocktail bars where...

And if you can just plop a couple of the old shitteroonies in there, that would be... It is time for a final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the smelliest car at the British Motor Museum belongs to Queen Elizabeth II. Are you allowed to make those sorts of accusations? It's not an accusation, it's a fact. That's what we do on this show, we do facts. Well, some of us.

I'm gonna guess that it smelled of corgi. Oh, okay. The car that just had constant corgis all the way through it. Okay, well, the people who smelled it, dealt it. No, the people he smelled it said, it's not a terribly nice smell, but it is very interesting. It has an almost cheesy, fatty smell to it. Ooh.

Is that Philip? No, so let me just explain how we just explain how we we know this. So there is a guy at York University called Dr. Will Tullet, and he's head of the British part of a European research program into smell. And they're trying to find lots of old smells and kind of save them before they disappear. And they ask people, what kind of smells are worried are going to disappear? And a lot of people are worried that the old smell of cars is going to disappear because now we're all going electric. There's not going to be any petrol cars. Cars are going to change. The smell's going to change. We're going to miss those old cheesy

smells of cars. And so they thought, well, we need to find the smell of an old car, so what should we do? We'll go to Gaden in Warwickshire, which is where the British Motor Museum is, and we'll say, what is your smelliest car, please? And they said, well, without doubt, the smelliest one is this rover from the 1970s

that belonged to the Queen. It's very interesting, because there's this thing about the Queen that supposedly she thought the world smelled a fresh paint, because everywhere she goes, it's just been painted fresh for her arrival. So she just smells this all the time. So it might have been a reaction to that. And also this had a thick carpet added to it. I presume for royal luxury.

That's absolutely right. It had a thick curly pile carpet. And it also had windows that were sealed. You know, in case there was a gas attack out there, they wouldn't go out. So it keeps the smell in. Basically, the smell stayed in there because they got into the carpet and they stayed in there and they couldn't escape because all the windows were sealed.

So it could be some occupant just let off a huge fart, shut the door straight away and it just hasn't been able to get out ever since until these people... I'm sure it was the coggies. But anyway, if you are interested, then in 2023 they produced some car fresheners with the Royal Car Smell. Really? So you can get a little tree in your car.

They'll give you the smell of the Smelly Queen's car. That's so good. While we're mentioning the modifications that were made to her car, we know that the presidential car, the beast, has things like it has blood in it of the president in case there's an assassination, they need to administer a bride.

Really? Yeah, there's all sorts of modifications to the car. And I thought, surely anytime the Queen had a car, they pimped the card. So there's that, the windows. There's also, in between the two front seats, there was a little tray that pulled out that allowed her to put her handbag onto the tray

just in the middle of her, yeah. I just remembered, I've seen the Queen's car. Oh, yeah? I walked past it once. Was she in it? No. Were you in the Gaden Multimuseum? No.

I wasn't. She was visiting the university I was at. And were you blown away by the car smell? Did you sort of have to cross the street? No, it wasn't a road it was one of the posh cars. It was a sort of, I don't know, Bentley or something. But it has the special, huge you know how some cars have the little sticky-upy Mercedes thing? The Queen's

car had a massive St George and the Dragon silver thing on the bonnet. Do you do it? Yeah, it was quite cool. I think that was unique. Yeah. And does the King get any of this shit? Or is it just like we stopped caring? I think King does. Why don't he use wine for petrol? Wine and cheese.

Wine and trees. Just general smells of cars. So the little pine tree thing that they put in cars, like the classic car freshener, was debuted in 1952, which is actually the year the queen became the queen, isn't it? Oh, yeah, she coronates it in 53, but she became, yeah. Anyway, she didn't invent it.

But that was not initially in the shape of a Christmas tree or a pine tree. Do you know what was originally in the shape of? Oh, gosh. Something smelly. A... A candle. No. It was, I'm afraid, a sexy pin-up model woman. Was it? Was it?

Yeah. Was it with a big bottom, though, that could be farting? Because it was the era of those postcards on the beach. It wasn't invented in Bognet. No, it was... You know those, like World War II planes and you'd paint a sexy woman on the side of your plane? You know that kind of fettie boom?

Like the pin-up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pin-up thing. That was the shape of the first, it was a chemist. It's called Julius Semen. And... Julius... Yeah, say that, sorry, name again.

Semed, sort of finish. He's got an accent, I don't know how to pronounce. He had bumped into a milkman recently. He said, my truck smells of spilt milk all the time, and it's horrible. It clings to the truck. Can you invent something? And he said, yeah, I'll go and invent the pine-scented thing.

That's quite cool. But he just shaped it, instead of shaping it like a pine tree, the obvious thing to shape it like, because it was the 50s, he shaped it like a sexy woman instead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. The worst scent, according to professional scent removers,

worse scent to remove, yes. Worse than like vomit? I think it's just more common than vomit, to be fair. There are a lot of smells that will tell you if there's something wrong with your car. So I went on to one of those websites of Garage who told you all the different things. So burning smell means you might have burnt out fuse

or the air conditioning is overheated. All the car's on fire? All the car's on fire. Rubber burning could be your brakes or your tyres have an issue. Or your car's on fire, I suppose. Rotten eggs means you have a problem with your catalytic converter or your fuel filter.

That's the excuse I'm going to use next time. This is an electric car. At the end is said, a dead animal smell. This could be an animal that has crawled into the engine and died. No, this is, okay, one of the most annoying memories of my childhood and it lasted so long was, sorry, personal anecdote, but my brother got a pet snake, a little garter. a snake and we picked it up from the pet shop, drove it home, got there, open the cage,

it wasn't in it. It escaped in the car. The cage? I think I'll see what you've gone wrong. Oh, yeah, he could, but he won't. Don't worry. Well, he did. There's a pet salesman who's run out of boxes. Look, it had actually wrenched open the glass container that it was being kept in. Okay. And it just escaped. And it for, I think we kept the car for about five years.

years after that and it smelled of dead snake every time you turned on the heating or the aircon and it was so funny it was such a joke and everyone who got in our car was like hey it's the dead snake car and it's there's unmistakable a dead animal in your car and they do like it because there's a lot of like warm nice nooks to climb into um it's i think there was a family in australia recently who the dad was driving along and he suddenly said oh got to pull over pulled and a meter-long snake had jumped out of the air-conditioning, the ventilation system and tried to bite him with its head and then were treated back in. Yeah. Well, that's it. So, Mazda in 2011 had to recall 52,000 cars because there's a spider which is called the Yellow Sack Spider who loved

the smell of gasoline. So they were attracted to the car and they would go into the vents and they would just live there. And then the webs that they would build up around it would mess up the pipes and overheat the car. So it was really dangerous. So they had to recall 52,000. So there is literally a specific spring inside this model of car to stop spiders from making homes inside of it. Wow. That's really funny.

I'm sorry, I've been so busy trying to think of of the name for a snake that would live in a car. Okay. Where'd you go? And a Honda? Yeah. That is great. But I mean, it was my car, so it works on that level.

Oh, shit. And a Honda. For God's sake, be. This is genius. I meant that. I meant that. That is it. That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. We will see you again. Newcastle. You were awesome. Thank you so much for having us. We can't wait to come back again. For the rest of you, we'll see you again next week for another episode.

Goodbye.