No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As 'Of Quails and Men'

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

James, Anna, Andy & Historian Greg Jenner discuss forks, eggs, ants, and why American audiences can be a little too Kean.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody. I hope you're all keeping safe and well and 99% indoors. I just wanted to let you know about a very exciting guest we've got on the show today. It is historian Greg Jenner. You'll probably recognise him from his previous appearances on this show or from his own podcast, You're Dead to Me, which is sort of a comedy history podcast. He gets fantastic guests on. It's really a great listen. And he also has a book out at the moment. He has a brand new book called Dead Famous. It's about the history of celebrity. I've already celebrated. reading it. It's a rollicking good read. It covers a whole bunch of historic celebrities from the 1700s onwards. And if you thought that throwing your underwear at celebrities was a modern phenomenon, then don't you worry it's got historic precedent. You can always use that as your defense. You'll find out that and lots more stuff in his book. So that's dead famous. Go order the book now dead famous by Greg Jenner. And spoiler alert, you're about to hear about one of those historic celebrities in the upcoming podcast. So without further ado, let's get on with the show.

Welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from our respective solitary pods. My name is Anna Tishinsky and I am sitting here in my home and in their homes we have James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and historian. Greg Jenner. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days in no particular order. Here we go. Starting with you, Greg. Thank you very much. Okay, my fact is in 1825, Britain's most famous actor was nearly murdered by his own furious audience. I mean, was he murdering a role at the time? No, no. So it's quite a complicated story. So his name was Edmund Keane. He was an absolute genius. He was the greatest actor of the 19th century, still to this day, greatly revered as a Shakespearean actor, but he was an absolute bell end. He was just the worst guy. I love him. He's my favourite. He's sort of the star of my new book because everything he does is just great and bad simultaneously.

Such mixed messages here. And he had been, this was in America at the time. This was his second American tour. It's 1825. He's in the city of Boston. And previously he'd been there in 1821 and he had basically angered the crowd. by refusing to go on because there weren't enough people in the audience. He was a bit of a diva. Okay. And he'd sort of, you know, he'd look around the curtain and gone, no, there's not enough people.

I'm Edmund Keen. I'm the great Edmund Keen. I'm refusing to go on. It basically left a sort of sour taste in the mouth. The Bostonians told him to never come back. And then in 1825, he comes back. And he's just come off the back of a huge sex scandal. And he thinks he'll run to America and get away from the scandal in Britain. But they all read the papers.

So he turns up, comes back. to New York, they chuck oranges at his head, which is, you know, not too bad, but he gets to Boston and 5,000 people storm the theatre and try and kill him. Wow, oh my goodness. Five thousand, that's quite a big gig. It's huge, yeah. That's what I'd get it out of that. I read that they turned up after the start of the show. They do, yeah. His audience was probably several hundred people and then an extra 5,000 sort of break down the door, smash their way in. It's kind of good news and bad news, isn't it? Because on the, you know, good news, 5,000 more people want to come and see you. But the bad news is they also want to kill you. Yeah, they probably weren't paying, I guess.

No. And what happened? Did he, presumably he survived, right? Yeah, he does. He throws down his wig, he runs out the back door, he sprints up the street and he hides in, I think it's one of the theatre employees' houses around the corner. And he runs in the door and hides in a linen basket. Oh, wow. It's so clever. It's so clever, because he's an actor, he's a master of disguise. But for him, just taking off a wig is a disguise. Do you know what I mean? True.

But the audience do track him down and they come to the door. But luckily, the theatre employee's wife is pregnant and it sort of calms them down. Because she comes to the door looking vulnerable and sort of like, please don't storm my house. And they kind of go, oh, yeah, all right, then I guess. I guess we won't murder the English guy. So he gets away with it and comes back to Britain. And then is this right, Greg, that then he carried on the top? because this is what I love about Edmund Keane

he doesn't really take his subtle cues very well so yeah he carried on with the tour well it can only get better from that quite low starting point presumably well I read that the rest of the tour he did Philadelphia but there were protests and then he did Baltimore but the night was cancelled when a mob refused to let the curtain go up

and then he did Charleston and the crowd loved it so it was such a we've all had those tours haven't we where you kind of do Norrie and it's good and then Bristol and it's good and then you do Dunstable and you get chased out by obeying mom. And then, Greg, I want to know if this is true, right? I read this in a book called Rogues and Vagabonds by Vivian Ellicott. And they said that he then did a Canadian tour

and he got really drunk after one of the gigs and then disappeared and went to live with some Native Americans. Wow. Is that true? It's true. He has made an honorary member of the Huron, Native Chinese tribe there. They give him a full ceremony. and he wears the stuff back in London.

He wears the sort of the headdress and the clothes. He's got a pet lion as well, which he walks around London with. Isn't it true that he did the gig and then he just disappeared and no one could find him anywhere and eventually turned up in a wig lamp. But this was Pig Edmund Keen.

This was him to a tea. He was famous for vanishing mid-dinner party, mid-gig. I mean, my favourite story before he becomes famous is that he was meant to be playing Charles I second in a play and he doesn't turn up for the gig. The theatre manager has to go on. in his stead doesn't really know the lines. The audience start booing because the play is going poorly.

You know, the manager's sort of looking down at his script trying to read the lines as he is on stage. And suddenly a voice calls out from the Royal Box. And it's this voice going, keep going, lad, you're doing really well. And it's Edmund Keene. And he has drunkenly, he's a raging alcoholic. So he stumbled off to the pub. He's got a skinful.

He suddenly goes, I'm meant to be in the theatre, but he can't remember how or why. So he stumbled into the theatre to watch his, own play. And then what's lovely is that he starts out with encouraging heckles and then gradually he starts to agree with the audience that play as crap and starts heckling his own castmate and is then carried out or forced out by security and fired from the gig. He was a child like a minor child star. He played flayoffs, didn't he? Was that his first role when he was six? That's right. So the thing you should know about Edmund Keene is that he's very small and he's very weird looking.

He kind of looks a bit like Stephen Schemi. He's kind of got these furious features. And as a kid, he was a brilliant gymnast. So his mum, who was a bit of an absent mum, but at one point she was in his life, she described him in the sort of plays as a sort of child genius, but he was actually a teenager. Basically, he was so small that he could pass for a child, but he was in his teens. So he was briefly famous in his teens. Then he had an absolute disaster and was a wandering actor who nearly starved to death on several occasions. At one point, he and his pregnant wife walk 180 miles from Birmingham to

Swansea for a gig. They don't have any money and they're sleeping in hedges. Wow. In the height of summer. She's seven months pregnant. Oh, gosh. Really, rarest to riches. No wonder he didn't know how to deal with the enormous wealth when it came. It really is. He literally overnight fame. Literally overnight. It's incredible. But that's a lot of planning to get to, if you know, we've got a gig in Swansea in a fortnight.

Yeah. But you can now. You can book all your hedges in advance, can't you. So we should say that Keene was, as well as being a bit of a rogue was, as you said, a brilliant actor, apparently, as far as we know, right? And I think William Hazlitt was very impressed with him and sort of... Friend of the show. Friend of the show. Big Willie H. Yep. Good old Willie H. He sort of kick-started his career, although he was asked to give a review. So I went to see him in, I think it was playing Shylock, his first big role. And he was asked to give a favourable review, which I didn't realize people do. You sent a review to the

theatre, but you'd say, yeah, but make it a really good review. So Haslitt had to be a bit like look I was asked to give a favourable review but I really do mean it this time it's great but he was particularly good at villains it seems I think wasn't he he seemed to play he played Richard the third very well he played Iago

played Shylock and he played this guy called Sir Giles Overreach and I'd never heard of this play but apparently it was one of the most popular plays in the 19th century it's called A New Way to Pay Old Debt and it was written by a contemporary almost contemporary of Shakespeare

just after him and it sounds great It's by a guy called Philip Massinger, and he wrote about 50 plays, apparently, and we've lost about half of them, and a whole bunch of them we've lost because they were collected by an antiquarian book collector,

and his cook, who was called Betsy Baker, fittingly, didn't realize how precious they were and used them all as pie baking dish liners. So they were just there to line dishes for pastry, and we've lost them. But he was this great, like he's not known at all anymore, is he? No, not really. No, no, a lot of playwrights for that period actually don't really have a modern reputation. It's kind of interesting. But I mean, it reminds me the

biotapestry was briefly used, I think, as a wagon covering. Was it? Yeah, I think I think so. But yeah, I mean, several sort of priceless things now. You kind of look back and go, there was a brief period where we're basically using that as blue tag. I read, just going back on to Keene, he became very rich, very quickly, like you said. And then he was living in London. So he's living in quite high society. Yeah, right? But he also had, he was a bit rough around the edges, as we've learned, right? So I read that he, people used to make fun of him because he would sprinkle Greek and Latin into the conversation, but he wouldn't really know what they mean, like Del Boy? Yeah, yeah. It's one of my favourite facts about him. One of the reasons I love him, and he's absolutely my favourite, because on the one hand, he's such an asshole. On the other hand, he's sort of man of the people. He didn't speak Greek or Latin, but he didn't let that stop him. And so he would go to dinner with his pot. friends, Lord Byron and William Haslett, he hung out with the king and the princes, and he would stand up and give a speech in dead languages that he couldn't speak to people

who spoke them. So he was like the opposite of Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson obviously speaks dead languages to people who can't speak them as a way of showing off how clever he is. Edmund Keane did the opposite. And everyone would like, that is not. But what I like is that he would leave, sort of midway through the speech, he'd be like, yeah, this isn't really working. And I don't really like these people anyway. My people are my drinking buddies, the wolves. And his drinking club were called the wolves, and they were all kind of this rowdy bunch of people he'd meet in the pub.

And so he'd leave these parties midway through a speech or whatever. Wouldn't say goodbye, he'd just go. And he'd be found a week later, comatose on the floor of a pub in Deptford, surrounded by his drinking buddies. But what's brilliant about Keene is that he was also incredibly vengeful. He was such a petty guy. And so he used the wolves as his own personal kind of fan group to go and boo every actor who'd ever sort of wronged him or any stage manager who hadn't hired him or anyone who'd ever

crossed him in his entire career, he would use the wolves to go and sit in the front row and just boo and heckle the entire play. Amazing. Here's a thing, Greg, that I read, and I want to know if this is true or not. So Keene was considered to be the best actor in England, which is true, I think. But what that was like was like being a heavyweight boxer. And whenever another upstart kind of actor came along, they would challenge you. to say I'm a better actor

and the way they would do this is have a contest of Othello where whoever was the best actor would be Othello and whoever the upstaters would be Iago and they would just kind of do this play to try and upstage each other like a heavyweight boxing championship. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely right. And you also had these two main theatres,

the jury lane theatre and the Covent Garden Theatre and you would quite often see people mounting the same play at the same time to see who was the better who's better Richard the third, who would be the better Hamlet. And so, yeah, it was a very much a way of keeping in check who the new kids on the block were. Did you have to, I mean, if you were trying to decide, did you have to run between the two theatres during the performance to compare and contrast? There wouldn't be on the same night.

It would be roughly a similar period. So, you know, within a few weeks of each other, you'd be able to sort of go compare. Okay, that makes it easier for audiences. Yeah, absolutely. Sort of flicking over from Channel 4 to Channel 3. But Keene was so jealous and so vengeful That he would set out to try and destroy all of his rivals And so he would do his absolute best to undermine them

He would often refuse to act alongside people He fired any actor who was taller than him And he was 5'4 So that was most active He fired any actor who was better than him Or any actor who is better looking So much so that famously people would go and watch Edmund Keen act

But they would leave before the end of the play Because all the other actors were crap And he also famously later on had a lot of power in deciding which plays would be put on at the Drul Lane Theatre. And he rejected 500 scripts because other actors had good parts and he was jealous of them. No wonder people thought he was the best actor of his time. No one else was allowed to do anything. All these other five foot three actors are insanely ugly. In fact, it was a great time to be a five foot three ugly actor.

Tom Cruise would have fit right in. That's mean. He's a very handsome man. Okay, it is time for a fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that it wasn't until 1913 that we finally figured out how to stop our food tasting like our cutlery. It was just all... Everything tasted like metal before that. It all just depended how tasty you thought for. So I was sort of reading about the history of Stade and a Steel, which is effective.

effectively when this revolution happened in being able to taste your food rather than your cutlery. And before stainless steel was invented and finally applied to cutlery in 1913, we'd had metal tools, obviously, since the iron age, the copper age, things were made of copper and the bronze age. But they all are quite reactive with the stuff you put on them. The only thing that doesn't react with the food that you're putting on it is gold. But that obviously was out of the reach of your use and your me's. So most people couldn't do that. Yeah.

You know when they moved from the copper age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age or whatever, did everything just start tasting different? Is that like, is that the main thing that happens to people who are living there? They're like, wow. It was a revelation. Even chicken, even chicken, which tastes like nothing, starts to taste completely different. In fact, actually, that thing of everything tasting like chicken would have been true back then. Yeah, everything tastes a thought.

It's like, have you ever had, have you ever eaten tarantula? Yeah, it tastes a bit like. fork. Yeah. But it's a really interesting thing, actually. I mean, I made a Radio 4 documentary about this, and I got to, I was on with a material scientist, and we got to taste foods with different types of spoon made of different materials. Who were you on with out of interest?

So it's a, it's a show called The Origin of Stuff, and the scientist is called Dr. Zoe Laughlin. Yes, I was reading about her. She's great. She's really cool. She makes stuff, like, she's got a BBC program at the moment, where she makes her own trainers. She's really cool. And I was also on with Katie Brand, who's the host, and a food writer called B. Wilson.

And we tried mango and strawberry. Can I just say, we always are asked, what's your favorite dinner party guests. I think the four people that you've just mentioned there is pretty much my favorite. It was pretty fun. Yeah. B Wilson, what a legend.

Katie Brand, love her. Yeah, it was amazing. Shame about the Greg Jenner aspect. I mean, it's a shame. I brought it down. I mean, I ruined it. But, so what was really cool, we tried mango and we tried strawberry yogurt and we tried them with copper spoons, silver spoons,

zinc spoons and gold spoons. And it's amazing. Like, genuinely, you don't realize how much you're tasting the spoon and the metal until you're not tasting it. I did read that eating mango sorbetray with a gold spoon is just about the best, you know, Epicurean treats you could possibly have. Is that true? It does sound really good, doesn't it? I mean, it doesn't, yeah. It doesn't sound like you're slumming it. They don't have it at many motorway service stations, do they? It sounds better than, you know, a muller fruit corner with a bus ticket.

There was a point in the radio show where I stopped talking and I was just eating the mango, just happily. Just like everyone else was talking about the science and I was just sitting there eating all the mango because it was amazing. But what was really interesting is that copper makes sweet things much sweeter and it makes other things much more bitter. So savory things much more bitter.

It's like vegetables. when you eat it with a copper spoon, it tastes really metallic and sharp and bitter. But when you did the strawberry yogurt, it tasted incredibly sweet, as if you'd poured loads of artificial sweetener into your yogurt. What about foods that are bitter sweet,

like chocolate that's 85% cocoa? That'll be really interesting, wouldn't it? I don't know, actually. Weirdly, I had some 85% cocoa last night. If only I'd waited 24 hours, I could have tested this right now, right here. Do you have a copper spoon? Yeah, I bring my copper spoon everywhere with me.

It's in my front pocket. Yeah, good point. Well, people used to, though. In the past, they used to have their own personal cutlery. You'd go everywhere with your own knife. And that was your knife, and you'd carry it everywhere, and you'd only eat with your own knife. And then gradually, people started to introduce forks, because forks come quite late. Didn't people carry it around in sort of cutlery shoulder bags?

Aren't there lots of those throughout history that, like, you'd take your cutlery satchel to a party? How much cutler are you taking, Anna? Are you taking your asparagus food as well? Yeah, your terrapin fork. Of course. If it's not a 13-course meal, I'm not going to the event in the first place. So if this is true about the coloury that you're having, does the phrase being born with a silver spoon in your mouth,

is that a bad thing? Does that, it doesn't, oh yeah, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Everything tasted like shit for him. Yeah. That's what I originally meant. Well, so silver is less reactive than most metals, but it's still apparently, and Greg would know, does leave a pretty pronounced taste.

Yeah, it does. And you taste it as soon as you then taste the gold, which tastes of nothing. And the gold was just amazingly interesting because it doesn't taste of metal, it doesn't taste of anything. You're just tasting the food. Whereas the copper was like really reactive because it's all about the electrons and, you know, how free they move around. So gold is inert, but copper conducts electricity really well. So it kind of, you just sort of get that activity in the mouth. So you're really feeling all the kind of taste buds going, what's happening?

whereas gold's much more sedate and gentle. I mean, your mate Zoe, Dr. Zoe, did say, I think, at the end of this event, which I'm so excited you attended, she said you haven't lived until you've eaten off gold. So that's a bit of a blow for most of us. Almost everybody, yeah. But should we get back to the actual original fact, Anna, the 1913, three? That's Harry Brearley, isn't it?

Yes. Yeah, we should talk about him. What a hero. Do you want to sell us about him, or do you want to do it? Oh, yes, I guess since I sort of brought him up initially fine. Well, we have a historian here. It's like, you know, why do we have to do all the work this week?

Exactly. I figured I could put my feet up for God's sake. Right, fine. 1913. There's a metallurgist called Harry Brearley. And he's actually working, as all the best inventions often came from sort of trying to work on weapons. Because really, all countries want to pump money into his war. So he was working on alloys for gun barrels to try and make the steel in gun barrels harder.

and he, so he was testing out lots of different alloys, steel alloys, and he added chromium to one. And when he was doing this to test sort of how strong it was, he had to etch into it with various chemical additives. And he noticed that the chromium was very resistant to these. And the thing is, this had been spotted before. So staining steel is basically you add a certain amount of chromium to steel. This had been spotted.

But the theory is that the reason Harry Brewery realized how useful it would be for cutlery is because he was working in chef. Sheffield. And Sheffield, for many hundreds of years, as I'm sure any listeners in Sheffield will know, has been famous as a cutlery manufacturer. So straight away, when he saw this material, shoved it in his mouth, went, oh, wow, that tasted nothing. I can use this. Because he was working on gun barrels, would it be fair to say that Harry Brearley literally brought a knife to a gun fight,

which is, in a way, what the First World War was? That's exactly what he did, and that's where the saying comes from. Wow. Yeah, very strong. The interesting thing about Brearley is that he was not the first person to be experimenting to this, and I think various other countries have claimed their own scientists got there first, but he turned it into cutlery, which is a huge deal. He was in Sheffield.

Yeah, exactly. And the other thing... You don't have Sheffield in France, do you? No. Sheffield, we have the coutautaut. And he was quite a socialist, really, wasn't he? And basically, they never painted the invention of stainless steel in Britain. So it meant that anyone could make it.

And also any money they did make, he wanted to share with everyone else in his company. And his bosses weren't particularly happy with that. But they did pay to it around the world. So it meant that if anyone made stainless steel in USA, Canada, Italy, France, or Japan, they had to get a license from Sheffield to do it. So that's how they made all their money. And then eventually he retired, and he started a charity called the Freshgate Trust Foundation, which he said he hoped would help lame dogs over styles.

It's good to have an ambition, isn't it? How is that? Yeah, I don't know exactly. I don't know if he was like giving legs to dogs or lowering styles. I'm not really sure, but one or the other. Are we 100% sure it wasn't a metaphor? Yeah, it feels like it's a metaphor or Harry Stiles. Does he mean getting sheepdogs to jump over Harry Stiles?

Because I would watch that. That's really nice. Yeah, it is nice, isn't it? I like to think it's not a metaphor and it's an exact explanation of what he was doing. I think it sounds, I actually, I believe that, because it sounds what you need when you've got to. a charitable campaign is a little big thing, they say, or a big little thing, you know, which is where it taps into a problem that we all know. So instead of saying, let's solve

plastic pollution, let's say, let's take this one particular example. So rather than saying, let's just replace all styles with gates, which is an impossible dream, you say, let's just help lame dogs for the styles, and it's achievable. Yeah, it's good. And yet, that invention doesn't seem to have lasted in the same way that staying in a steel house. I don't know about your guy's dogs, but my lame dogs still can't make it over those damn styles. I'm constantly, whenever I see a style, there's a queue of sad-looking dogs with little crutches next to it. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that ants have a special stomach, which is just to contain food to throw up into the mouths of other ants.

Mmm, isn't that lovely? And then do they go down the line? So do those recipient ants then throw up their food into the mouth of other ants? I mean, how many times does food get eaten? The recipe ants. I don't know. That's such a good point. You don't want to be at the end of that line, do you? Like the human centipede. It's the worst position, I think, is at the end of the ant-fomit line.

That's definitely true. It's not quite as bad as the human centipede. In fact, the human centipede, if it was the human ant, would be very different. It would just be two people celotaped by their mouths. I don't want to talk about this. I know I mentioned this because it's got a weird analogy to human life, but I've already reflected it. Go on. Talk us through it then. Okay, so this is a process called trophylaxis, and it's another way of ants talking to each other, basically. So they make noises, they touch each other, they have pheromones, and they also throw up into each other's mouths. It's all liquid mouth-to-mouth stuff.

It's actually, I say that, it's not all mouth-to-mouth, sometimes it's bottom-to-mouth. Anal secretions are imbibed, according to the scientific way of describing it. Yeah, that is a bit human centipede, isn't it? I know, yeah. But it's very useful because this is a, it has a purpose. They're not just doing it for fun. They have information in this stuff they're throwing up. So it might contain hormones. And maybe you can feed these hormones to a larva and it will change the way that the lava's life develops. So a lava which receives this kind of vom is twice as likely to become a larger workaround. So your whole life can be changed by someone else throwing up in your mouth as an ant.

I find that amazing. It's like Captain America Super Serum. You can supercharge you into a supercharged ant. It is. It is basically like that. Yeah. And the amazing thing about this research is how it was done. So the researchers, they had to collect this fluid from the mouths of ants, which were returning to the colony after a while away collecting fluid.

And they kidnapped them. They anesthetized them. and then they squeezed them very, very gently until they threw up this stuff and they collected 0.34 millionths of a litre per ant. Wow. And then had to analyse what was in that. What kind of dexterous, tiny fingered researcher

did they find to anesthetize and then extracts this? It's very hard you're getting the tiny chloroform rag over the ant's mouth, isn't it? If the Ant-Man movie had been anything like the science, then it would have been Michael Douglas taking a dump him in his mouth and then he's suddenly a superhero Is this fact going to be a string of superhero references that I don't understand?

Yes, it is. Yes. I'll just laugh for long. Do you reckon that this stuff that they vomit up could be milked for human consumption if you had enough ants? Yeah, I guess it could. I think it's very much a last resort.

I know you're getting to the end of your canned goods at this point, but I'm not sure we're there, yeah. Well, we do have a... Yeah. Okay. Maybe the bag cleans first. Ants are not the only animals who do this, are they? No.

Vom in each other's mouths for various different reasons. Vampire bats do it. So they vomit blood into each other's mouths, which I would argue is one step more disgusting than the ant version. Yep. Do you want to do a Batman thing here, Greg? Yeah, absolutely. In order to defeat fear, you must become fear,

which means you have to vomit blood into your mates. Yeah, it's not quite... They're really sweet, aren't they? No, they are. They do it to strangers, or to people who they've just met, basically. Yeah. Is it like a handshake? Because that has to be a viral nightmare.

Yes, exactly. We're not allowed to handshake anymore, but we're definitely not allowed to vomit blood into each other's faces. You can't do anything these days. But yeah, so when you first meet a vampire bat And you want to be friends with them You vomit blood in their mouths And they gradually raise the stakes at their way of making friends

So you start off with vomiting a small amount of blood It's doing a small favour for someone And then as you get to know and like each other And trust each other You will end up sharing lots of food With the other vampire bats It's really sweet Nice

That's cute I was really surprised that wolves do it We're not talking about Edmund Keen's friends The wolves drinking club I bet at some point actually Edmund Keen's wolves did throw up into each other's mouth But also grey wolves do this And which I find very sweet

But they leave the vomit in special piles And then it's for their cubs So their cubs come along and chew it up And when I was reading about this They do it with blueberries So you think of wolves As sort of tearing apart prey animals Which they do

But they love blueberries apparently And so they'll go and pick loads of blueberries from the bush throw them up and then their kids eat them. That reminds me of Pliny the Elder. You must know the story. I mean, you mustn't know the story of the Indian ants in Pliny's natural history. I mean, we all do, but why don't you just tell us anyway? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, Pliny the Elder is one of the sort of naturalists of the ancient world.

He's fascinating, he's really interested in science and all sorts of things. You know, it's this lovely section about ants and how collaborative they are and what they do. And it's really lovely and it's quite accurate. And you kind of read it and go, oh, that's good, that's right. And then he gets this weird paragraph when he's like, and in India, they have Indian ants, which are just and they are the size of foxes or wolves and they hunt and mine gold and they dig it up in the ground and they carry

it back to their layers and any passing Indian who happens to sort of pick up the gold is torn apart by these giant ants. It's pretty terrifying and modern scholars are like well that sounds not like an ant that's probably a marmot or some sort of other creature but they were convinced in the ancient world that there was a sort of race of

giant mega ants that hoarded gold like dragons. It doesn't sound much like a marmot if I'm honest. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. No. So it's probably a translation error, but it's got a nice bit

that comes after a long bit about ants being, you know, really interesting animals and then he gets a bit confused. Plenty, he did let his imagination run away with him sometimes,

didn't he? Yeah, it's alright. A few drinks. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's okay to riff. But this is the weird thing is that it is weirdly socialised

because the theory is that lots of insect colonies like ants or termites, they basically have one collective stomach. And so forager ants deliver food at a rate which depends on how full the individuals they encountered before are.

So if everyone you come across is really hungry, then forager ants kind of raise their game, and food flow rates kind of get matched to how hungry the overall colony is based on the information you're taking in. That's amazing. It's really neat. How do you spot hungry ant? Do they sort of limp and drag them?

Because I don't know if I could tell if an ant had lost weight for it. If it's so weak that it can't get over a style, then it's a very hungry ant. Forager ants actually self-isolate. Do they? Very thoughtful. Yes, they would have been absolutely nailing it around this time. Probably are. So they go out and pick up food from outside the colony. And so they're the most exposed to pathogens and stuff because they're in the outside world. And scientists find that when they deliberately expose them to a fungus that kills them after a few days, if they infect them with it, they'll avoid going back to the nest. And this is even before they get sick. They've got an instinct that seems to know they've been infected with a fungus. They don't go back to the nest, so they don't infect their friends. And even, their fellow forage ants will also not go back to the nest, you know, as if, like, they've come into contact with this ant who's infected, and they won't go back to the nest.

And then meanwhile, the nurse ants inside the nest will retreat deeper and deeper into the nest. Wow, but is it not true that the ones who are self-isolating do come out once a week to applaud the nurse animals? They do, yes. And they wear a little badge. It's very moving, actually. If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear it on Thursday. Another animal that does this vomiting thing is honey bees.

So if you're living in a honeybee house or a hive, as they call it, it might get too hot, right? It might get too hot. And so when it gets too hot, what happens is some water collector bees go out, they drink a load of water, and then they come back and then vomit it over everything and everyone. Wow. It's almost like a hose pipe kind of thing or a fountain. A fireman.

It's cool. Like a fireman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There is a thing about the nectar that bees drink, isn't it? Because they drink the nectar and then they come back to the hive and they regurgitate it into honeypots, basically, for, you know, the workers in a hive. But there's been a study done, I think within the last couple of months, saying that the sweet of the nectar is, the hard of the bees find it to regurgitate. So if it's not very sugary, it's very easy for them to regurgitate because it's not very viscous. It's quite thin. And it takes four or five seconds. So they just, you know, they lean over the honeypot.

They get another ant to hold their hair back a few seconds and it's fine. But if they've been drinking really, really sweet honey, or really sweet nectar, rather, it takes about 30 seconds for them to come up. And they basically have to lean over the honey pot and straight. They just sit there going, ugh. It takes ages to come out. Do you remember when we went to John Mitchinson's birthday party a few years ago, all the elves sat in the kitchen and drank mead?

Oh, yeah, yeah. that what you explain there is exactly how I felt the next one. We all perform the honeybee ritual later that night. So there's one regurgitating creature. It makes a seriously massive sacrifice. That's the desert spider. So she regurgitates food for her offspring as soon as they've hatched. But what she does, she eats enormous amount of food so that she can feed it to them.

And then it goes into her stomach. And then in order to, like she needs to. predigest it for her offspring and so her stomach properly digestes it and this involves her stomach creating massive amounts of digestive enzymes so that she can throw up enough to feed all of her offspring and her stomach creates so many enzymes and so much stomach acid that it starts to eat her from the inside out as well no way so she throws up all this food for her kids and then after about two weeks once they've finished the food her body's been eaten away enough that the kids can eat her as their last supper.

That's so weird. It's weird, but it's good parenting, actually, in a way. Yeah. It's short-term parenting, because once they've eaten you, you can't do much, you can't take them to the park after that. No, you're right. That's when the dad really has to step up. That's a bit like, have you ever heard of the Menified Man thing?

I think it was medieval Arabia, top of my head, people who at the very end of their life, this is a thing you could do is you just only eat honey. You just only eat honey. and very gradually your body becomes sweet and then when you died they would bury you and mummify you and then many years later on people would eat you

and you'd be sweet tasting and it was a sort of a religious thing I was going to ask what the incentive is for this I don't know I think if you earlier in life got to eat someone who was a sort of honey monster lying under the ground then I would be willing to enter that scheme

where after my death people could do that to me Imagine if they rebranded sugar puffs with a melified man on the front of the box. The rotting corpse of a person who once saves me honey. I'm not convinced that if you ate the, like presumably by this point, quite well-decomposed body of someone who ate honey for a while before they died, I don't even know if that would taste of honey by that point, would it? I mean, did it work? Oh, don't spoil it.

It's just going to taste a very slightly sweet. human carps, isn't it? I think so. It depends what fork you're eating it with, doesn't it? I've read... So this is just briefly back to ants. I just want to share with you the intro of an article in a new scientist about a particular kind of ant, okay?

There's a couple of sentences. I think it's worth telling you. The article begins. Suppose you could have sex with your brother or sister in the full and certain knowledge that any children will be safe from the harmful effects of inbreeding. Would you be more willing to commit his? incest. The longhorn crazy ant certainly is.

Wow, that does feel like the journalist has got lucky by finding that ants, doesn't he? After he's already written the first two sentences. I mean, I didn't know it was, I didn't really know it was about ants when I clicked on it. And I was very disappointed. Yeah, what a, what a start. On an opening. And would you, though? No. Yeah, I think that's probably the right answer, isn't it?

Probably. Well, Queen Cleopatra did, of course. She married two of her brothers. And she didn't even do that in the certain knowledge that she would be free from the damaging effect of incest. On regurgitators, do you remember last week? You won't remember this, Greg, because you weren't here. But Andy, you talked about human ostriches. Do you remember? Oh, yeah, yeah.

So they would swallow bits of metal and bits of glass and stuff like that. And the modern day, you know, version of that, they have the sword swallowers, but also you have regurgitators. So on Britain's Got Talent a few years ago, there was someone called Stevie Star who could swallow a Rubik's cube that was mixed up, and then when he regurgitated it, it was all solved.

No way he couldn't. No throat is big enough for a Rubik's cube. It was a small rubens cube. Oh, well. This makes tying a knot in a cherry stalk look like really child's play. Okay, which do you think would be harder? Learning how to solve a Rubik's cube

with the inside of your stomach, or learning how to swallow two Rubik's cubes, one pre-solved, before you do the show. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people think, I've read a lot of forums about it. A lot of people think that maybe he did your trick, which is having two rubies cubes inside him, and one of them comes out. But then a lot of people who do this kind of regurgitation, they think, well, you know what, maybe it is possible to do that. No way, man. And he definitely does other tricks with his regurgitation.

Apparently he learned his skill when he was a child and he swallowed his pocket money so no one would steal it. Wow. Nice. And then when he brought it back up, it was what? A different denomination? He's like a Bureau de Change. That's amazing, James.

I don't know. Did he not win? No, he didn't win. What? That's an amazing talent. There's no justice. Who won? Some singer.

Probably that dancing dog. But in fact, Do you remember that dancing dog in fairness? It could get over styles. Quite skillful. In terms of the guy who, the human ostriches, did you talk about Polyphagus? Nero's.

So Emperor Nero, according to Sartonius, the Roman writer, talked about Nero having a kind of a pet man who was probably a slave, but we're not quite sure. And he was known as Polyphagus, which is Greek for all eater, eats all things.

And he would eat anything, including humans alive, apparently. You could throw him a human and he would eat the human. How big was Polly Fagas? Well, apparently he was a very large man and he was sort of a glutton or a gourmand who would eat anything at all and he would devour. He sounds like a very large man with big claws who hybernates every winter to me. Well, so that's one of the actual interpretations as a story like, are you sure it's not a bear? But, yeah.

A pet man. I'm trying to work out which is a worst thing to be. A slave or a pet man. Both are very bad. It does sound like a very bad euphemism for any slave person, isn't it? He's not a slave, it's a pet man. It's awkward, you don't want the sound of that, Andy, because that is what your wife calls you when she refers to you. Unbelievable. Never mind.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that ancient Egyptians had artificial egg incubators, but they didn't have thermometers, so they measured the temperature of the eggs by holding them to their eyelids. It's really nice. Isn't that lovely? So, very quickly on this, Egypt has been famous for a long time for its egg ovens. And they have been going back from at least the late period of the New Kingdom, which is 500 BC onwards.

And we know that because Aristotle wrote about them. He said that the people in Egypt make eggs that are hatched spontaneously in the ground by being buried in dung heaps. And then 200 years later, there was. another historian called Diodorus Siculus. Sorry, Greg. I don't know how you pronounce that. And he also said that these egg hatching was really amazing, that the Egyptians did. And then throughout history, you get loads of people writing about what great egg hatches the Egyptians are. And I was reading an article about the modern day egg hatchers in Egypt, and they said that they still use all the old techniques, including this way of telling if it's too hot, which is they put them next to their eyelids, because that's where one of the most sensitive. parts of your body is.

And apparently it's still done today and they've been doing it for thousands of years. I had no idea that it was still happening today. That's very, very cool. Yeah. Yeah, isn't it amazing? Wow. And it's extraordinary the ability to, I guess,

they were mass-producing eggs because what's interesting is that chicken eggs were not eaten in Egypt for like all the phoronic period. You know, so when you're thinking of pharaohs and tombs and pyramids, they don't have chickens at all. And then they were introduced, as you say, about 500 BCE, And then they went mad for them.

They were like, yeah, we love eggs. It's brilliant. They're producing tens of thousands of them. So like I say, it wasn't ancient, ancient Egypt. It was just before the Romans arrived. Still pretty ancient. Yeah. I would argue that's ancient Egypt, depending on where you're looking from, which is now.

This is the problem with ancient Egypt is that ancient Egyptians were aware of themselves as an ancient culture. So there were ancient Egyptian pharaohs who did archaeology on ancient Egyptian pharaohs, which is amazing. They were kind of, and this Herodotus used to travel, he used to, you know, apparently he traveled to Egypt to go and look at the ancient stuff. So an ancient Greek philosopher and writer went to Egypt to go and look at the old stuff, which is quite cool. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, and everyone who went to Egypt or wrote about the Egyptians always seemed to mention these amazing egg buildings, which they used to make their eggs. So in the 18th century, there was a French scientist called René Antoine Féaud de Romer.

And he said that Egypt should be more. more proud of its hatcheries than of its pyramids. Fair enough. Rear Moore, actually, who, yeah, he was one of the people who went and reported on them. He, I love him because he's the guy who almost gave us paper, but then didn't. So he was a guy who was mainly an entomologist, and he studied paper wasps. And he suddenly looked at paper wasps and he said, oh my God, these guys are chewing up wood into pulp and then mashing it together to make paper. Guys, we should do this.

And he wrote that in a paper, which wasn't on paper, ironically. but people ignored it and then we didn't figure out how to make the paper that we know today for about another hundred years but I've always loved the idea that wasps were making paper for just thousands of years

before we figured it out what did they do with it though good point they're not writing ulysses are they they never call they never write but he's one of the brilliant men of this for the 18th century there are lots of fantastic French scientists of this period

sort of milling around being quite fancy and clever and he was an entomologist but he had all sorts of interest But what was really fun about him is that he was really fascinated by birds as well as insects. And he used to advise King Louis XIV as well, who was the King of France after Louis XIV. And Louis XIV, to get back to eggs, Louis XVIth was really into his soft-boiled eggs. He was really, really, like, he really enjoyed them, and he would have them every Sunday. And he had an ability to swipe the top of the egg off with a single blow of his fork, like a little sort of execution thing.

Which Louis was this? Louis the 15th. So pre-revolution. Pre-revolution, the 17th. There's a bit of irony there that he was able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. He could guillotine his egg with a single blow. And people would gather to watch the king eat his Sunday egg.

And the valet would announce it by hushing the room and saying, The king shall now eat his egg. And then everyone would go quiet. And then he would do a little swoosh thing, decapitate the egg. And some people in the audience started thinking, yeah, that's a good idea. Can I just say, like, I don't want to put myself as some kind of amazing French king, but I can chop the top off an egg in one swish as well. No, you can't.

I can. What I'm saying is it's not exactly swallowing a Rubik's cube as far as skills go, is it? It's not that great. No, you're right. 18th century France's got talent was a much less good show. But James, can you do it in front of an audience? Because that's where the pressure is. It's like going on a quiz show.

We can all answer stuff in our lounge. But when you've got people watching, that's when the pressure's on. You're absolutely right. You're so right. I would almost certainly freeze under the pressure. And also, you specified that he was doing it with a fork, for God's sake. This was in the early days of forks. People barely knew which way around to hold them, and he's decapitating eggs.

Okay, fine. He nailed it. Yeah. Did you see a few months ago archaeologists found some Roman eggs. 1,700 years old, there were chicken eggs that had not been opened

and they'd been deposited as part of her sort of an offering to the gods and they accidentally cracked them and the smell was intense. Wow, wow. Like 1,07-year-old rotten egg really, really intense,

sulfury smell pretty full on. Oh my God. I have had, I have eaten 100-year egg. I don't know if anyone else has had that. Wow. That's what it's called. Like in Chinese cuisine,

they'd call it the, 100 year egg, but actually I think it's just a very slightly gone off egg. Or something. They cook it in some way that it smells a bit sulfurous and it tastes a bit kind of bitter, but I don't think it's 100 years old. It's not dated back to geniuses at time. No, you've got a supply issue. But yeah, I can only imagine what the 1,000-year-old or 2,000-year-old.

1,700 years old, yeah, it's from the 4th century. And I think a couple of the eggs, they didn't crack. So they've got two preserved Roman eggs And then I think they broke a couple Those must be the oldest extant hen's eggs in the world There can't be any older than that I don't know I've not asked the round, but it's pretty good

Because one of the eggs One of the eggs in the world will be the oldest one Weren't it? That's just maths, it's true I don't even know if that's maths, you know That's philosophy Oh Philosophy

Well the Romans Super keen Because it's weird when you look at the popularity narrative eating chicken, that it really didn't become the meat of choice. It wasn't particularly popular meat until the last couple of hundred years. Maybe I think people ate such a wider variety of bird. But the Romans were quite into chicken, right? Yeah, they were. I mean, they also had sacred chickens, too. So there's that famous story of Claudius Pulcère, who was a Roman general, a naval general, and he was just before a battle, he was going to do the thing called

augury, or I think the word is ornithomancy, where you're trying to fortune tell using birds. And what he did is he put down some corn for the bird to eat, the chicken to eat. And the hope would be that the chicken would eat the corn, and that's a good omen for your battle. And the chicken didn't eat. And all the soldiers on the ships were freaking out.

They were like, oh my God, we're going to lose the battle. And so Claudius Polkaia, he freaked out. He picked up the chicken, and he threw it over the side and said, maybe it's thirsty. And it did not go well. They lost the battle. The soldiers panicked because he drowned the chicken, and there was a sort of inquiry afterwards about doing this terrible thing to a sacred chicken.

That's interesting, isn't it? because actually, obviously the chicken not eating has nothing to do with the battle, but in a way it does because he threw it overboard and everyone got worried about it. Yeah, and there's like a placebo. Yeah, yeah, it's a morale issue. Yeah, it is a placebo effect. It's kind of funny. So the Soviet Union tried to incubate some eggs in space,

and it worked eventually. They brought quails because they're kind of smaller than chickens. A lot easier to have a quail in a spaceship than it is to have a chival. chicken. So they had a problem and that was that when the chickens were born or when the quails were born, they couldn't eat or drink. And that is because if you get a quail when it's born, it can't lift its head up because it's not strong enough. But that's fine because all its food is on the ground. And if it wants to eat is on the ground. So it just kind of lies there with its head on the ground and eats and eats and eats and eventually it gets strong enough to lift its head up.

But in space, of course, you don't have the gravity to bring the head down to the ground. So its head a neck were just kind of floating around in the space. And it meant that they couldn't feed. So if you put some food down for the quails, they couldn't eat it. And so the cosmonaut doesn't the food float? Exactly. Can you not lift the food to the level of the floating quail? You can and that's what they did.

But they had to do it every two hours. And these cosmonauts had other things to be getting on with. They couldn't just be feeding the quails every two hours. No. And so eventually, unfortunately, the quails carped it. Did they actually? Yeah, they did.

But then they tried it again a bit later and they made tiny little hammocks for the quails, which would hold their heads in place. And then they could hold the food in place as well, and so the next lot were fine. I had pet quails when I was young. Did you? Yeah, because I'm allergic to cats and dogs and other animals.

And my dad was like, get you a bird, but we don't even want a bird in the house, so we'll get you some quails. So I had some quails in the garden. Did you try all the animals until you settled on quails? It feels like. Like you try cats allergic, tried dogs allergic, tried mammoths allergic. Yeah, I tried Indian ants.

They were feral and furious. They tried to steal my gold. And then I tried a pet man, but he tried to eat me. We ended up with quail. Yeah, sadly, actually my brother, who was very small at the time, he crushed the quail legs in his hand accidentally. Because, you know, he didn't understand his own strength. And so that was the end of our quail. Oh, my God.

Like Lenny from a bison man or whatever. Yeah, it was. It was a sort of sad. moment. Quails and men is a slightly more upmarket version of mice and men, isn't it? It's a bit middle class, isn't it? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in touch with any of us about anything that we've said on this show or about anything else in yours or our lives, then you can contact these guys on Twitter. James you're on at James Harkin.

Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Greg. At Greg underscore Jenna. And Greg. Your new book is called Dead Famous. Where can people get it in case they don't understand how to buy books? Well, these days, buying books is actually quite hard.

So, yeah, I mean, Waterstones is a good place. Independent book's lovely. Amazon have got it. The audiobook is me reading it, and people seem to quite like it. So that's a nice way to get it that's safe and relatively cheap. So, yeah, it's a history of celebrity. It's quite funny, and it will surprise you, I hope. So, yeah.

Amazing. Go and find out more about Edmund Keen and his crazy ways. If you want to listen to any of our old episodes, you can go to no such thing as a fish.com. We have just put up the whole first year and the whole second year for free, so that's 104. That was the maths there. Old episodes that you can go back and listen to now. Thank you so much for listening this week and we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.