No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Robinson Two-Soe

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Puerto Rican primates, epicurean pirates and painting princes.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Andy. My fact is that the first man to use the word avocado in English was a pirate. Avvacardo. Avacardo. That just sounds like you say it normally, don't.

Wow, okay. This is a guy called William Dampier, and he was an explorer. He lived from 1651 to 1715, and he was lots of things, actually. He was a hydrogopher. He was a scientist, a writerographer. writer, a naturalist, Royal Navy Captain, and we have a picture of him. It's in the National Gallery.

It's the only 100% genuine portrait of a British pirate. So he's quite... Does he have a parrot on his shoulder? Yeah, eye patch. He's biting a gold de bloon. Sort of making someone walk the plank. Yeah. No, I don't think he is.

He looks like a normal man. But he is, he was a pirate, and among lots of other things. And he wrote this account of the avocado pear tree. And that's in the... OED, when you're looking under avocado, his entry is the first one. He gave a little report about the avocado and said how nice it was. How many entries are there for avocado then after his one? Well, loads, because the OED sort of gives, they give a load of different citations.

When it's excited and stuff. Yeah, it's about five or six. But I think there's only one definition. I'm not sure you've got like the verb avocado. This isn't the definition. This is the citation. Yes. Yeah. He actually has over a thousand entries in the OED. Yeah. Of all the things that he has in the OED, um, I looked at the mole where he's the first citation. So the first example we have. He was the first person to use the word ThunderCloud. Cool.

Which is quite good. To fraype the verb. Facebook. Is it a frape? He used the word meaning to bind tightly. Soysaws sauce as well. Soy sauce, which is my favorite. Chopsticks.

Chopsticks, which are my favorite utensils. And a lot of this is because I guess he was traveling so much. Yeah. And, you know, he was writing reports on his travels, and so he was coming into contact around the world with a lot of words not previously known to English. So that's part of the reason why. Well, I think that maybe even more amazing thing about him,

is that he had a great recipe for avocado, which involves smashing it to pieces and adding sugar and lime juice, by making guacamole. He gave us guacamole. Although the tragic thing about him is he wrote so much about guacamole that he was never actually able to afford his own pirate ship

because he just spent so much money on the... On frays as well. It's always start renting those ships, doesn't he? You can put anything on the walls. So these words, he wrote quite a few books, but he had a very, very famous one, which was a new voyage around the world,

which was a book that was so influential that Darwin took a copy of it onto the Beagle with him. And, you know, is it this one book where we get a lot of these? Most of them are from that. I mean, that's pretty crazy. I think that was his main book. I think he wrote lots of other random stuff, but yeah, that was his big one, wasn't it?

And it was really popular, 1697. and it was when he'd gone round the world for the first time, was it? And then he went around another two times. And it was full of food recipes. He was a foodie. He was a big old hipster foodie. Barbecue, cum quat, tortilla. And he included recipes of what was the best thing to do with them.

So he really recommended Flamingo Tong, if you're ever in the market. He said it's very good. It's lean and black. And it's neither fishy nor unsavory. Yum me. He also at Armadillo, which he said, taste a bit like land turtle if you're not sure. Oh, like land turtle.

No, I can picture it. He ate prickly pears, right, which is a type of cactus. And he said that it turned his urine so red that it looked like blood. Yeah. Okay, but I actually have some prickly pear candy at home. So I tried some yesterday, and I'm yet to experience any red urine. But I thought I'd bring you all some. Oh, no.

Is your urine? It's just a small vial James is getting out. Some prickly pear candies that I thought you might want to munch on if you feel like it. Oh my God, they're delicious. And they're very red. They look a bit like Turkish delight, don't they? I'm a huge fan of the show and tell element of the podcast now. I really like James's Experience Corner.

That's good for the listeners. It's really enjoyable. They taste a bit like fruit pastels, doesn't they? Yes, exactly like that. I'm really excited because I got these at Christmas and they've just been sat there because I didn't really want to eat them because they're made of cactus. I finally got an excuse to. Oh, so good.

He also used to eat sea turtles, but he had a preference for the ones that were grass-fed. Grass-fed sea turtles. Was that unethical preference, or, you know, you don't want the ones that are grain-fed and Captain Cage is too. Yeah, exactly. No, he just said that they're the best of that sort, both in largeness and in sweetness. So quantity and taste. And it's just quite amazing to imagine that this guy who was a pirate, let's remember.

Yeah. He was going around. So can I get grass-fed turtle, please, for dinner? That's true. Yeah, yeah. He wasn't a very good pirate at first. His first act of piracy was an absolute disaster. So it was like the British government was given him permission to take over Spanish ships, wasn't it?

He was a bit more of a privateer, a sort of licensed pirate than a blackbeard ticket. The Spanish would call him a pirate for sure. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the Spanish were calling a lot of things, isn't they? Well, he and his fellow buccaneers, they attacked a Spanish fort. That was very exciting. They managed to take it over, but the townspeople had left with absolutely everything valuable. So it was a complete disaster.

And lots of his voyages were failures actually financially, but he was always making observations, writing down recipes, and it was basically long-distance book research that he was doing. It's not what you've sent him for, is it? I haven't got you any gold, but I've come back with a Delia Smith-esque tone. So, well, Delia Smith actually used to be a pirate. Well, mercenary. She was a soldier in the 80s.

But a lot of that was recipe collecting, yeah. Another thing that William Dampier did was he was the first British sailor to reach Australia. He got there way before the first fleets got over there. And weirdly, he has a few moments that we don't really give him this sort of acknowledgement for. There's this weird passage in his book where he's in the Galapagos and he's looking at the turtles there. And he's saying, oh, they look a different breed. And I wonder if that's helping towards their mating and so on. Just writes a few random lines just sort of suggesting that there's sort of evolutionary benefit to the way that they're shaped without naming that specifically.

Oh, so he says these suit their environment because they look like this. Exactly. Yeah. Which is just so Darwinian. And Darwin had the book. Nice. He became very famous, which is a night. Once his voyaging days were over,

he went to dinner with Samuel Pepys. He lectured at the Royal Society. And the last bit of Gulliver's Travels is based on his journeys in part. Did he meet like a tribe of giants and all that stuff? That's the second book of Gulliver's Travels, not the final. A bit more normal. It just contains talking horses. Well, he was in South America and he did see some horse.

there. He said, here they have several horses, but what is most worthy of note is a sort of sheep they have, which is inhabitants called Conera de Terra. The creature is four foot and half high, and they're frequently ridden by two of the lustiest men of the area, he said. And he's almost certainly talking about llamas, we think. So he's one of the first people to see lamas from the west. What a life. It's very difficult when you read about him because he was in many ways quite a bad guy. Okay. Oh, he has a Spanish person talking. I've been talking to some of my friends in Madrid,

and he did not go down well there. He, as anyone in that period, it was nuanced, to say the least, relationship with the natives that he met at various places and wrote some pretty awful things, for instance, about Australian aboriginals. As a leader as well, he was pretty widely disliked. We should say the thing maybe he's most famous for today is that he was also responsible for Robinson Crusoe, essentially,

because Alexander Selkirk, who we think Robinson Crusoe was based on, was on his ship and hated him so much or thought that he was very bad at maintaining the ship and said, I think this ship's going to sink, I'm not going to get on it until we fix it. And I think it was Dampier who said, no, the ship's fine. We can sail this ship. So was this halfway through a voyage, do you mean? Halfway to avoid. So basically they were going around Cape Horn and this guy, Selkirk, said, don't go around Cape Horn.

It's a terrible place to go around. There's always storms. It's high winds. It's like the middle of hurricane season or whatever. We can't do that. And then they went, well, we're going to do it anyway. And so by the time they got through, all of the ships were a little bit bashed. And he was like, these are going to sink on the way home.

Get me off here. Get me to wherever the nearest island is. I want to go to the nearest island. And so they sent him to the nearest island. And as he got there, the other ship started to go away. And he's like, I've changed my mind. I've changed my idea. And they were like pretending they couldn't hear him.

And so. What? Sorry. You love it. I read Robinson crew a year or two ago, and there's no mention at the beginning of it that he was a really annoying backseat driver of a void,

and it's very sympathetically presented into Fo's book. Well, to be fair, he had a bloody good point because the ship sank shortly afterwards and most of the crew died. Even more annoying when the backseat driver turns out to be right. That's really frustrating. But didn't Selkirk then get picked up

four years later on another ship that had dampier on it? Yeah, he did. So imagine that. He's like, finally someone's going to have to have to be. But then, When he got back on that ship, he realized and he was like, no, I want to be marooned again. And they eventually talked him around.

As in he genuinely was, yeah, because that sounds like a joke. But yeah, he genuinely did say. Set me off. As they picked up Selkirk, they managed to find a Spanish fleet, didn't they? And they managed to get a load of treasure from them, a load of booty, which meant Selkirk got a load of money. And he could retire when he got back to Britain. So he came home.

He was very rich, but he couldn't quite readjust to society because he'd been on this island for however long, being a Robinson Crusoe. guy and so he went to Scotland and spent 15 years living in a cave Oh my God Which feels to me like a missed sequel to Robinson Crusoe doesn't it?

Yeah Robinson Crusoe lives in a cave I think it's got all the promise of a disappointing second series I have to say I got like Robinson Tuso Yeah With what I would call it

Nice I like it Well you write books now Aren't you So Dan Pier The first person in the OED to mention the word avocado as we say it today. But before that, they had different ways of saying the word. So we kind of

get it from the Spanish word. People would say aquacarta or aquacardo and stuff like that. You can see online a big list of all the early times when people mention this fruit. They start in 1562, going to the 17th century. And in 1660, they talk about this poem that was written by Abraham Cowley, which mentions avocados. But they don't say what the poem is. None of the places say what the poem is. And that really intrigued me. I'm like, why are they glossing over this? So I found this poem.

A fragrant leaf the aquacarta bears. Her fruit in fashion of an egg appears. With such a white and spermy juice it swells. As represents moist life's first principles. I said there's a completely flawed description. Are we sure they don't want the avocado? I've never got white juice swelling out of my avocado. No, spermie juice in your avoccurmi juice in your avoccurms?

No, spermie juice and your avocado? No, am I not leaving it long enough to ripen? They had different types of avocado. So the one that we eat now is a HASS avocado most of the time. And this was an old kind of one that you would get. Some of them were white and egg-shaped. I think the main crime there is rhyming swells with principles.

Do you think? Which is not, that's what offends me the most, apart from the sperm-y juice. Do you know there's a Hass-avacado board with the official authorities on Hass avocados, which are the ones that almost everyone meats today. And they have huge amounts of data on their website about avocado consumption.

Yeah. US based mainly. So is that why that guy was following me when I went to my local organic shop to buy some avocados? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you say it's very spermy, sir? It's quite spermy, very spermy, too spermy.

They released a bit of research recently that they found that avocado shoppers divided into several distinct trenches. There are people who buy no avocados, first of all. They're not really interested in those people. No, no, quite. There are moderate shoppers. Then they have mega shoppers who buy a lot of avocados. But above them, there's top tier, ultra shoppers.

Wow. How many do you have to be going through to get to an ultra shopper level? I think it's achievable. I go through six a week. Stop it. We do about the same in our house, yeah. I think you guys might be a new category. No, so ultra shoppers in America spend $100 a year on avocados.

Oh, I spent way more than that. Well, there we go. The ultra shoppers go to the shop 183 times a year And one trip in seven They buy an avocado Okay, well I have Acado so I don't go to the shop

Oh my God Is Okado named after avocado? I don't think so Avocado All they know is avocado isn't it Why does everyone use this? It's all replacement products Isn't it?

We didn't have your pint of milk It's an avocado We didn't have a pint of milk What you've got is a bit spermy Okay It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's a Puerto Rican island where monkeys roam free,

but the humans have to eat their meals in cages. It's like Planet of the Apes. It's like a reverse zoo. Is it like Planet of the Apes? It's like Both the Things we just said. Yeah, it is like Planet of the Aids. The Apes keep the humans in cages in Planet of the Apes. God, I always confuse it with 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Sorry, I haven't seen Planet of the Apes. Sorry, we're getting sidetracked. Yeah, so this is, it is like a reverse zoo, sort of, in that it's an island called Caill Santiago off the coast of Puerto Rico, and it's a research centre. It was started in the 1930s. Basically, it's full of monkeys, and humans are not allowed to go there unless they are researchers.

And it's part of the discipline of it. You really can't disturb the monkeys. It has to be like they're living completely wildly. They're rhesus macaques. And so, if you're going to go and eat a meal, You can't just do it out in the open where you could get in their way if they want to cross your path

so they sit in a cage and eat their meal. It's pretty funny. And the reason for it as well is because this is such a deadly island to humans if you go there. The reason it's a deadly island is because the monkeys there have herpes a kind of herpes.

Sorry, it's a deadly island because monkeys are not happy. Darling, I'm about to tell you there's good news and bad news. Wait, what's the good news? The good news is I didn't catch it from a person. Does it count as cheating? Catch what from a person?

Well, that brings me on to the bad news. I have a question. Yeah. How am I going to catch herpes from a monkey? Do I have to use the same toilet seat as them or what? Well, no. Why is it dangerous? It's dangerous because they might use you as a toilet.

So that's the problem. They can transfer herpes via their urine. So if it makes contact with you, they can transfer it by their feces. And, you know, Risa's macaques, love. to throw feces at people. So, you know. So if you do happen to catch herpes and you need to go to your partner and say that you've got it, you can say, I caught it off a monkey throwing poo at me. Exactly. There's a legit reason. Someone right now, I bet, is dealing with this dilemma on the way home. You better hope you just been on holiday to India. Because like me and you, Andy, once both held a koala,

didn't we? And they're riddled with chlamydia. Yeah. So that would be a reasonable excuse for that as well. You could come home with all the STIs after a tour. Blame it on the local animals. And the gonorrhea is from a millipede that I met in Santiago. Really nice legs. Just to wrap up, the reason that the cages are in place is because, for that reason, if you're eating your food, the monkeys will desperately want to try and get it off of you. And so the cages are to protect you from getting herpes while you're eating your meal.

Okay. The story of how they got there is amazing. It's really cool. So they were brought over from India in 1938. And it was four scientific purposes, wasn't it? There was a scientist called Clarence Carpenter, which is a great name, who was responsible for bringing them, wanted to study their social groups and such like. But the second world war was about to break out. So this ship with 500 monkeys on it, this must have been, I want to see a movie about the journey.

Because they wanted to go through the Suez Canal, but they couldn't because tensions were high. high and the war was close to breaking out. So they had to go around the southern tip of Africa instead. And it turned into a much longer journey. The voyage lasted way longer than it was meant to. It lasted nearly 50 days. And he was on board with them all the time. He was, and have you seen the one photo of him on board?

No. He's wearing a bathing suit. It was quite odd. I don't know if he was going for swims in the Pacific on the way over. But yeah, Clarence Coventer. Begging for herpes. I'd love, if that was a movie, I'd love to see it as sort of like a William Dampier pirate sort of,

trying to take over this ship that just turns out to have 500. Oh, wow. So we've got the two stories kind of weaving in and out of each other, and it ends with a pirate attacking the monkeys and catching herpes. The most ambitious crossover in movie history. Gandhi was very much against them, wasn't he? What against them taking the monkeys? Life magazine did some articles when it was established,

and in one of them, they talked about Gandhi preaching against the exportation of India's sacred rhesus monkeys. Yeah. And eventually they banned it, but not for quite a few years after Gandhi had died. They used to have people living on there. So the first caretakers of the monkeys were this couple called the Tomolins. And they kept one of them as a pet called Pijita. And yet the rest of them, well, I don't know what's better being a pet of two humans

and stroked constantly and fussed over by them or just being led to live your life. I don't know. Left to live your life. But anyway, they... That's a really philosophical question, isn't it? Isn't it? One for the moral maze. Are you happy with servitude?

Or would you like freedom? Yeah. When you put it like that, it's actually when you're on. But the bars of the cage are made of gold. And, you know, there's a nice bed in the cage. Yeah. But then on the other side, freedom. Yeah.

Who of us can say what bars surround us? Well, you know. What compromises are we made? I can say what bar surrounds me most nights. So I think the monkeys all had this conference, this chat. And they nominated for Gis. But Michael Tomlin sounded quite fun. He would apparently regularly swim the one kilometer channel back to the mainland

would drink a fifth of vodka. I actually don't know what is a fifth of. Well, that's what Eminem says in that Stan is it? He goes, I just drank a fifth of vodka, dare me to drive. I think he says that. Who says that? Eminem. Does he?

I think so. So it's obviously enough that you're going to be drunk. I can't believe this guy Michael Tomlin is cooler than we are in that he gets Eminem slang. He lives on a monkey island. He'd be more than we are. What are you talking about? I think American listeners will be writing in droves very shortly to explain exactly how much for this. Just so we're clear, in the UK, we don't use that scheme.

And this was in the 1930s. Anyway, apparently it wasn't even vodka. People just said that because he was Russian. He actually preferred rum and coke. So, anyway, he'd swim over and then swim back, presumably hammered to the island where his wife was looking after the pet monkey. These days, there are 2,000 Rises Maccax on Caius Santiago. But also, I find this so creepy.

almost all of them have tattoos Sorry, that's not the creepy bit creepy It's a bit strange They haven't chosen to get a tattoo Have they? That's even creepier Arguably Is it? Oh no, what's creepyier What are they tattoos up?

Scientific stuff Oh, just high heart mum Yeah Scientific stuff Yeah like Equals MC squared Pite The vacuum is

Yeah That kind of stuff No sorry That's not the creepy bit The creepy bit is that the island is also home to a collection of 3,300 monkey skeletons. Oh, okay.

You mean the dead monkeys? The dead monkeys? Well, yeah, obviously they're the dead monkeys. What they didn't do is bring in the monkeys and say, what would they like around them? What kind of furnishings can we add? Like in a fish tank, you know, you're a skull, often a skull. You never have the dead fish in a fish tank,

but you never have a giant dead fish. It's creepy. Okay, so the question is, why did they not take away the skeletons, or bury them or whatever? And I guess, well, they still need them to study them as in such a long-running research centre now that you can study generations going back and you can obviously study the bones of the monkeys

that lived there before. But I think it would be creepy if they had a cool mausoleum full of all the monkey skeletons. But they don't have that. No, they don't think. I don't think mausoleum makers are allowed on the island. I don't think that research project's going to get funding.

But that's a good scene for the Dampeer monkey movie where that's where the treasure's buried. It's like the goonies, you know, the cave. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So anyway, some food for thought. Yeah.

I want to see these sick tattoos that the monkeys have. Einstein with his tongue out on his bicep. They do, I mean, it is a really important island because they do discover stuff. We haven't just done monkeys there and sort of forgotten about it. And I think it's sort of like a right of passage if you're a monkey researcher, I reckon if you said to your monkey researcher mates, hey, I'm doing a Cairo Santiago research project. You'd be the coolest kid in town. So some stuff they've discovered recently is that after any kind of trauma,

scientists now think that we probably age by apparently up to eight years. And this is based on... Oh, my God. It's a spurious link, but that's what scientists do. This is based on Hurricane Maria, that awful hurricane in 2017. It killed a lot of people in Puerto Rico, didn't kill any of the monkeys, but totally destroyed the island. So all the trees are blown down. There's no shade.

The average temperature on the island. and rose by eight degrees. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Which is rough. Because they take blood from the monkeys all the time, for scientific reasons, they had the samples before, that they could compare to the samples afterwards, and they looked at like lots of markers in the blood and the immune system and the proteins,

and they found they showed signs of aging by about two years just from that hurricane. Wow. Because it was stressed about it. What in humans live much longer. And human years, apparently. Okay. Yeah. There's another monkey island, which is in Liberia, which is a bit.

sad because it was a monkey island that didn't have any natural resources. So the monkeys there had to be fed daily by the researchers. So they would bring bananas over every single day. But then in the 1990s, there was the war. And as a result, the research unit fled. And these monkeys were just left on their own. And so they had no one to feed them except one guy called Joseph Thomas, who for the last 40 years has been going twice a day to this island with bananas and feeding these beautiful monkeys who come into the water to him and he knows them by names like Mabel and so on. Mabel and so on. Mabel's the head like that. Mabel. Edith, Prudence, Aggie, you know, normally.

Did you hear how Joseph Thomas was recruited for the job? I think so. So this was in the 70s and this was another research island. It was set up by a woman called Betsy Brotman and she was trying to find a vaccine forehead bee. and she actually did come away with the vaccine for Hep B, although she since said it's actually a bad idea to test on animals. But at the time, she set this research lined up in the 70s. And I think it was her who recruited Joseph Thomas because she went to him and said, I really want to learn to play tennis.

You're good at tennis. I also need someone to help me on my monkey research. And they made a deal where if he taught her tennis, he would work on her monkey research. Now, I know that sounds like he's not a very one side of exchange. I'll tell you what, we'll do it. deal. If you do all this work, I'll also let you do all this work. It was basically that.

You know, you know there is an island where you've got lots of potential tennis partners you can go to. Monkey tennis, anyone? I've been to a monkey temple in, um, what was it? In Nepal and that's another place where there's just monkeys everywhere. They're just kind of running around and stuff. And when I was there, you kind of, you have to keep hold of your stuff. the time because they saw a monkey stealing someone's mobile phone and their bag and then

running to the top of a huge building and then the local the guys who were kind of in charge had to come with a big stick and prod him and then someone climbed up to get the mobile phone and stuff so do you know this is something Ethan our fellow researcher told me yesterday that they know that mobile phones are more valuable than let's say something less valuable I don't know if they know an iPhone's more valuable than a Nokia but they they did a study at another monkey You're saying you'd be completely safe if you went there, Anna, because your phone was made in 1983. I've got nothing desirable for the monkeys. They actually wouldn't recognise your phone as a phone.

They did this amazing study over, so they film monkeys for 270 days in Bali at this one temple. And they realise that when monkeys take something off you, they negotiate with you for food and exchange for it. So they take your phone and then if you give them two bananas, they give it back, whatever. And by watching them, they realize that, you know, the higher the value, of the item, if they've still on a phone rather than a camera case, then they'll barter for more bananas. Wow.

That's really clever. It's really good, isn't it? That's incredible. Terrifying. Have you guys heard of Snake Island? Oh, where is that? Off the coast of Brazil. Oh, no.

It's called Ilha da Quimada Grande, and it's completely dominated by a special kind of snake, a particular kind of snake. They're golden lance-head pit vipers. Oh, gosh, they sound scary. Dangerous, maybe. are dangerous. They're venomous. Their venom melts the flesh that they bite into.

And they evolve venom to incapacitate and kill the seabirds that land on the island. They are not nice snakes. They can climb trees, which helps them to eat the birds that they love to feed on. And on this island, there is about one snake per square meter. Wow. What? Yeah. Oh my God.

A lot of them will be in the same square meter, though, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Even so. It's not one every square meter, but nonetheless. They're not perfectly arranged like on a chest They're playing a huge island Wide game of snakes and ladders

Yeah, yeah, it's very hard to win It just sounds completely terrifying Why would you stay there if you were a bird? Mike, Mike, great I don't think they're reading TripAdvisor I'm thinking, oh, I'll risk it Like, they're just flying and they end up there Yeah, but get back, tell the others

I've been to a rabbit island Have you? Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Near Hiroshima, it's like just an island full of rabbits. Wow. It's not a research island. There's just loads of rabbits there. In Sydney, where I live,

we used to have a rabbit problem down in the northern beach of Palm Beach and used to drive down at night and you'd put the headlights on at the car at high beam and you would just see what we're in the daytime, empty fields just packed like they're at Glastonbury watching. It's really, honestly, it's quite scary because you walk down the street in these, in this Japanese island and the rabbits just follow you because they used to be fed by tourists. And so you sort of turn around and there's 20. rabbits behind you and you kind of walk a bit faster and you turn around that there's 30 rabbits behind you. That's really scary. That is a good horror film. What STI did you get off there?

Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 14th century Italy, if you wanted to insult a nearby city, you would send all your prostitutes to take part in a running race around their walls. What if I didn't have any prostitutes? Well, you've just been in a war, probably, with that city. You probably picked up a few on the way, is the truth. I didn't know I was into that. So I saw this in a book called Running Through the Ages by Edward Sears.

And we're talking, so Middle Ages Italy, you've got loads of different areas owned by different people. So you've got the Papal States, you've got Sicily, but then you've got places like Florence, Pisa, Siena, Luca, and Melchard. land, Genoa, all those kind of city states, you would say. And from around the 13th century for about 400 years, we seem to have this really odd tradition of whenever you're battling with another city, or you've beaten them and you want to celebrate that, or you just want to, you know, stick it to them, you would have a running race around their town. And it's so weird.

And there were lots of different versions of this, but one of the biggest insults was you would get a load of like mules or donkeys and then you would get all your sex workers. either from your city or ones that you picked up through the war, and you would just get them to race around. Yeah. And it did sound a bit like, because armies, as you say, they would gather the sex workers and they would bring them along for the battles even. You know, if the armies were facing off,

they would have them do races sort of in the front. And they said, that's why they're here, darling. That's why we brought them. So you think this is all fake news? I do. This isn't happening at all. The wives turned up to surprise their husbands one day. We came for the races.

The point of it, as far as I can tell it, is that it was a big collective screw you to the other city that you're... That's it. Yeah, yeah. And so they would do loads of different things. So one of the things they did, they would gather outside the city. So you gathered outside the opposing city state. Then you would find the oldest tree in the area and you cut it down.

Yeah. Which is a symbolic castration, apparently. I know. And then they put the tree on a wagon and wheel it up to the city. Like, just really up close. Like, look, that was your tree. And we just... penis. Exactly, yeah. And then they would go to the stump of the tree and they would start

minting coins on the stump. Okay. So I know, I know. The base of your castrated penis. We're going to make coins. And then basically what they were saying was, we're going to change the currency that you operate in. We're minting coins. And some of the coins would I think depict a picture of someone minting a coin on your tree. Yeah, but it was this whole. I think they'd show them being vanquished, wouldn't they? Or they'd show humiliating scenes for the enemy, these coins. But it. The tree thing does imply that there's a lot of explaining to do when you show them the tree in the city.

There you have to say, this is your oldest tree, guys. Oh, is it? Okay. We couldn't tell which was your oldest tree. We've counted the rings. We think it's pretty old. It's only, it was your tallest tree, but that might have been a different breed. Actually, that was, shut up, show!

And then one of them says, okay, so. And then you have to say, no, but metaphorically, it represents us castracing you. I don't know how upset you're going to be. This is starving to. Are you yelling to the top of the guys at the wall? It's a hell of a complicated conversation. You're sending messages on paper airplanes over the wall. Look, forget the penis thing.

We're talking about the coins now. It doesn't matter about the penis thing, all right? We've moved on. All right, race the prostitutes. Release the prostitutes. Well, the thing with the prostitutes is it was slightly more literal in that they would often race around land in the city even. And so that you're basically saying, we can do what we want around here. You know what?

You think that you own this place, we can run our prostitutes. I read an account of the prostitute races not being just for when you're sieging and at battle. You would do it generally around town. So there would be kings who would use them to do it as a display just to show a sort of minority of society, doing something a bit derogatory. Yeah, just to sort of push the point of like, I'm the king and I'm running this place. And what's interesting about it is, so there was one that was done where the race would end up at St. Peter. Square.

Rome. Yeah. And so it was done there. This is in the 1500s. You don't get that these days. I don't know if you've been to say Peter Square, but. The Pope is not going to like that. So this is 1503 and it wasn't just prostitutes who were part of the race.

It was, you know, elderly people were in it. Children were in it as well. They would all be naked, but the prostitutes would be wearing underwear. It's very odd. Underware very. Very. Very. Racy in those days, wasn't it?

Underware, I think. More raciesies than having your genitals hanging out. I believe. Because a lot of people didn't really wear underwear. I'm going off memory here, but a lot of people didn't wear underwear. But prostitutes would wear them because it's, you know, a nice bit of, ooh, look, what might be in the air. Scantily clad is saucier than nude. Yeah.

You know. It depends on context. It does. But, you know, Adam and Eve, just innocent, pure, first people alive. Adam and Eve wearing a kind of thongs made of leaves. Suddenly sexy. Yeah. And that was the problem.

Yeah. Using the snake as a gasser. Yeah. That's a sexy thing now. Well, it depends if it's one of those. Pipnipers. Everybody Fetch is melting.

So they weren't even half, they were just naked. Not even half naked. Because people do seem to be described as half naked a lot doing it. And it's all too, it's all just about

insulting and humiliating, isn't it? And I read quite an interesting description of why this was so common in Italy, this taunting. And it's because, obviously, Italy wasn't Italy the country until extremely recently. it was just loads of city states

and so warfare was quite different to a lot of other places because it was just city states against each other so it wouldn't be there's like lots of action on these big battlefields and seizing lots of territory

it was pretty much just sitting there besieging a city so you just sat doing nothing for months on end so you had to think of other things to do to make them feel bad like a sports day is a sports day

Megan's spoon race bring out the prostitutes they should do a sack race because you're trying to sack the city that's where it comes from That feels like a trick you play as a besieged city persuade them all to climb into sacks Was that the original Trojan horse?

That's the Trojan sacks Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 5,000 sacks Been left out the front With heads The other really interesting thing In the source that you sent around, James, was about the ribalds.

So I didn't know If you get like the word ribald that we use today So ribald is in, you know, like rude and raunchy A bit of a ribald joke Ribalds back then were people in like low people in the army, seems like, and they would do these races with the prostitutes, or I think they were sort of pimps as well sometimes, so they were, I guess, tasked with sourcing the prostitute sometimes.

And they seemed to do kind of all the low stuff that other people, like the knights wouldn't want to do. So they would have to drop their pants in front of the enemy and shout swear words. Well, it's very hard to drop a suit of armor. It's like dongueries. You have to do it all on the shoulders. It's so annoying going to loo. So they'd shout swear words at the enemy end.

They'd scale up the walls. Their response was scaling up the walls because they didn't really get given many good weapons. And the pillaging, a lot of the pillaging, which is a bit ungentlemanly. The ribalds would do that. They were kind of like your first, they were like cannon fodder slash first line of attack, right?

Yes. Yeah. But yeah, really interesting. And I did find it really interesting that they would be the pillaging because the knights couldn't really pillage because you were a knight, so you couldn't really do any of that stuff.

They could go in and they'd grab a load of stuff and then just gamble it away, wouldn't they? Yeah. Which I'm surprised because I think what it's smoothed over because I know that knights returned from warfare with a lot of stuff that they'd stolen.

I reckon they had a sharp word with the ribalds after they'd done the pillaging and said, alright, hand some of that over. Right? Sure you're right. Surely you're right. The ribbons were nicknamed the Knights of shit. They were just, yeah,

they're just absolute base grunts in the army. The Knights of Shireling, I've got a job. I'm a knight of shit. You definitely put the end of that in your business card. The word night would be very big. The Ipan Palace is in China and there would be people, soldiers in armour who would kind of be sieging the palace. And the people inside the palace would taunt them. Why do you think they might do that to come towards the gates?

Is it because they're taunting them to get to the point where they pour the, the boiling oil on their heads. It's close to that, actually. Okay. It's quite close. So the people inside are taunting the besieging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is getting them close, right?

Okay, so it's either going to be like spikes come up through the ground. Yeah. Or they're going to then say, ha-ha, the tree's actually that way. You've got miles to run. That's good. They're wearing iron armor. Oh, it's a magnet. It's a magnet.

What? The gate. I kind of thought that was a joke. The gate. is a magnet. No, not strong enough to what, suck the middle of our toes. This is what the stories of the time say

that their gates were made of lodestone, which attracted iron, and so whenever the soldiers came near it, they would kind of be all over the place, they couldn't move properly and stuff like that, and so the people in the palace would go, ah, fuck you, you can't even come close, can you? God, so could you wake up in the morning one day,

go outside your castle, yeah, and a nighttime commando army who tried to take over and just plastered around the whole. Every morning you just scrape the nights off the door. It's not sticking them directly to it, which was actually your comedic version of that. Actually, it just makes it more difficult for them to run around.

Oh, wow. Would it feel a bit soupy? That's a suggestion. I mean, but no, this actually happened. You know when you put two pencil rubbers and you face and it's like a weird force in between. But there's no way this Chinese propagandist who was making this up a thousand years ago or whatever. There's no way they actually had.

magnet strong enough that the entire army starts crumbling. I got to say, I didn't think Lodestone was a real thing. Well, you can get magnetic, magnetite for instance. What Chinese people would call Lodstone in these accounts we think probably was magnetite. Oh, okay. But it's interesting then if that

came out as a rumor of being truth, because then if you were approaching the castle and you had your armor on, you might take it off thinking, I don't want to get sucked up to the wall. You'd start just feeling a bit awkward about whatever you were doing. You know when you can't move anything right, You know, you're just because you're feeling embarrassed.

So you start thinking, oh, well, this is probably the magnetite making me move awkwardly. Like, you move more awkwardly. Yeah. Like a placebo. Like a placebo. Like a nocebo. Yeah. Although I do like Dan's version better, which is you're worried about it.

You take your armor off and then you just get attacked. That's clever. Oh, you must have read that story. But if anyone didn't read that story a few weeks ago, at Hadrian's Wall, it was one of my favorite news stories in years. please look it up because you need to see the visuals but basically archaeologists were digging around at Hadrian's Wall recently and they found this volunteer actually

volunteer retired biochemist called Dylan Herbert found a 40 centimetre wide sort of block of stone with an engraving on it which is a flawless cock and balls like it looks stunning the best a 12 year old boy could master and underneath it has the word secondinus cacour which is like slang second

Dinas the shitter, just perfectly written there, 1700 years old. And that's there. Second Dinas, that's how he's remembered. And the BBC article reported that the experts who uncovered this believe the phallic image alongside the quote adds to the force of the written insult. Undoubtedly. Imagine that. Second Dinas, like, we don't know anything about this person, right?

We know one thing. That is the most successful bit of insulting in history. That's the dream. dream when you insult someone. That's great. Poor guy. Actually, the guy who found it. Sorry, it sounds so fun finding it as well.

This old guy said, only when I removed the mud did I realize the full extent of what I'd uncovered. And I was absolutely delighted. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that a member of the Romanov royal family, Prince Rostislav Romanov, lives in Hastings as a painter. his friend and wife referred to him as the artist formerly known as prince brilliant that's very funny it's a wonderful little gag doesn't work does it because he's never been a prince well he Romanovs were gone a long time before he was born

yeah but they they were absolutely but he and they still are trying to sort of suggest that maybe one day they can return so they're keeping the titles and they keep it alive as a sort of exile family does he call himself does he style himself as a prince yeah he does I think he does interviews as a prince. He talks about the royal family in exile. They have as part of the Romanov surviving family ahead who would be the heir apparent to any return that would be made of the family. So yeah, I would say he is a prince. So he was born overseas from Russia. All of the Romanov family had to leave. And as a result, none of them have ever lived within Russia. Apart from the ones who were brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks of course. Yes. Yeah, they're still there.

It's still leaving, isn't it? Nowadays, he finds himself living in Hastings, where he is an artist. You can go on his Instagram account. I quite like his art, actually. It's pretty fun. Oh, yeah. And, yeah, and he does interviews occasionally to talk about his relationship with the family and what's going to happen one day and how they might return and so on.

Is he plotting a comeback? It's worth a try. I would say it's actually not worth a try. I have to say, I would not be wanting to invade Russia right now, I don't think, as an artist living in Hastings. I wouldn't back my chances. Well, here's the thing. There are attempts occasionally to bring them back into power.

So we were just talking about monkey islands. Someone actually tried to set up a Romanov island. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And this was the Pacific island of Kiribati. And the idea was that they wanted to take over this island, turn it into a sort of a resort. But they said, could we revitalize the royal family and have them rule over here?

So they tried to have monkey island. It was a Russian MP. Yeah. He was called Anton Bakov. And he was quite critical of the Putin government. And Putin said, back off. Yeah, and he wanted three islands. They were uninhabited, so they would have been a great place to kickstart the whole Romanov dynasty again.

And the islands were called Molden, Starbucks and Millennium. Starbuck. I know. I don't know why. Moby Dick thing or the restaurant chain. You would think Moby Dick thing. And also, can we just pick up on Anna calling Starbucks a restaurant chain? Says a lot about your standards.

Oh, Anna's taking me to a restaurant tonight. Oh, great. I wonder which one. Just seven coffees for dinner. Yeah. No, he wanted to make kind of micronation. But I think the Kiribati government refused. They said our sovereignty is not for sale. Well, he was also talking to the Gambia,

and apparently had support of Yahya Jame, who was in charge of Gambia at the time. And that was to construct some artificial islands off the coast of the Gambia. Wow. Do we know what his plan is after? I see that that bit is easy enough. You go to a tiny island when no one lives, and you declare yourself.

the Tsar, how are you going to then go from there to ruling Russia? It's a stepping stone. You've got to have a base. I would argue that perhaps his long term might not even be to take over Russia is just to have the Romanoff Empire back. Oh, it's a bit sad. Imagine if you called back the Romanovs and showed them some crappy little rock in the Pacific and said, this is what your empire is. Well, he also bought some land the side of the Vatican in Montenegro.

So he's trying it in loads of different countries. Nice. I like that. It's like risk, you know? You just plot yourself and it looks. like nothing's going on and then suddenly a couple of moves and you've taken over the world. I don't believe you ever won a game of risk. Dan is playing risk and trying to negotiate for three uninhabited islands in Kiribati

in Kiribati. Yeah. Prince Philip, linked to the Romanovs. In fact, so linked to the Romanovs because when his parents got married, Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia was at the wedding. and his great aunt Ella became a nun, Prince Philip's great aunt Ella, became a nun and after her death became a saint. And they were always all the proud that they had a saint in the family, which I think it's fair

enough. Yeah. That's quite. Do you know what were her miracles? Saintly moves. I don't know what her miracles were. No, no, no. That's all I know.

But Philip was used recently, wasn't he, just before his death, for a blood sample to confirm the identity of what was it? Yes, it was, bones of the Romanovs were contested and the scientists were trying to work out whether they really were the... I think that... So they were in Yatterinburg and they were attacked by the Bolsheviks and they killed all of this family

but there was two of them who were supposedly breathing when they took the bodies away and there's a suggestion that those two had escaped. Now when they found the bodies they found all of them apart from these two bodies and they tested them and they realized they were the Romanov so that kind of

gave fire to the conspiracy theory but then they found another two bodies nearby and that's the recent test that they did and they found that they were related to the romance. Because one of the supposed princesses lived for many decades, didn't she? And always insisted that she was the surviving daughter. Anastasia.

Yeah, you don't want the kids' film. I actually didn't know about that film. But Anastasia was one of these two people. And there was a hugs of someone called Anna Randerson who claimed to be her. Yeah, that's who I'm thinking. And she got really famous, I think. Yeah, yeah.

But it turned out she wasn't. No. Right. strange being descended from defunct royalty, isn't it? It's a very, very strange life. There was an Oscar Newsweek saying that London is actually the hot destination for most... It's heaving, isn't it? Throw a brick. Well, I guess it's because we happen to have retained a royal family. Most of the other countries sort of haven't in Europe. And it's also one of the really flashy royal... I think British people

don't appreciate how high investment the British royal family is compared with the other European royal family Oh my god. They're so humble. Yeah. They've got a little cottage. But there are only about half a dozen monkeys left in Europe, I think. And the British one is the sort of biggest ticket one. It's a biggie.

Yeah, it's a biggie. And people have been coming here since people started deposing royal families. It obviously became very trendy from like pre-second World War and then under communism, of course. In Eastern Europe, they didn't love having the kings and queens there. I think King Zog of Albania was stationed at the Ritz for a long time after he was forced into exile. Speaking of Zog, there is a crown prince of being. the Albanians today. That is Lika Anwar,

Zog, Reza, Badawin, Mizizueh, Zogu. And this is the person that should the Albanian royal family ever come back, he will take over. It's quite a good name, isn't it?

I'd love to see him turning up at customs, basically, and opening his passport and then opening the next wing of his post. Do you think he has a concertina thing? He has to wind a handle. Tiny little trumpet. But it's really interesting because Anwar part of his name is named after Anwar Sadat.

Egypt. Yeah. And Reza is named after Muhammad Reza Palavi, who was the last shire of Iran. Iran. And so he's basically taken all of these names from all the different deposed people and then put them into his name. Oh, he has his parents. He basically lives in Tarana anyway, capital of Albania. And he has a little royal residence.

It's quite a nice house, but it's not a mansion. It's not a palace And when he opens his gate He has a little yard there And inside the yard It's all the unwanted statues From the last you know 100 years that they got rid of

When communism fell So there's like a statue of Hodger And a statue of Lenin and Stalin And stuff like that It's funny that he's got them as the Well they're like Who's gonna want these And they look at his name

He'll want them And it's kind of sad isn't it Because in a way he's the final statue You know He's sort of purposeless One day he'll be just walk through the garden and freeze, won't you? Oh my God. That's a nice fairy tale. That's really good. Yeah. I really like, do you know of Princess

Camitari of Burundi? So she moved to France in the 1970s and she did this because her father was assassinated and then the King of Burundi was assassinated in 1972. So she fled, she went to France where she became the first ever black supermodel in France. And there might have been others, but she was really the first one who was going on the front of magazines. Yeah, and so on. And she says that, obviously, it was her connection to the royal family that got her the gig,

because the magazines at the time were basically only putting on blonde hair, blue-eye models. But she was brought on as a princess. So she said, you know, I could have been black or blue or a crocodile. They would have put me on because I was a princess. And then people thought she was so beautiful that she became an actual model. So she did that for years and years and years. But then she moved back to Burundi because she thought, you know what, I'm going to run for president. So she set up a big campaign where.

she was going to try and become president of the country. And I love that one of her priorities as the presidential candidate was to bring back the monarchy. That was like an opening bit. Well, that's good if you're open about it, I think. Yeah, as if you're obviously campaigning for it. I was just wondering what the weirdest fate of a descendant was. And I was reading about the daughter of Romanian King Michael I,

who had to abdicate in 1947. She called Irene Walker. and in 2014 she was done for staging cockfights. Really? That's her life now. Oh my God. So when you say staging, you've just been putting them on, you don't mean like fixing them? No, but I think they're very often fixed.

Yeah, that's another level of illegality. Not only were you doing a cockfight. It wasn't even fair. She's very successful at it. It sounded like she used to charge spectators $20 each. She lives in Oregon. She lives in Irrigan in Oregon. Brilliant.

Stop that. Good stuff. And what's her name? Irina. Irina. Irina. Irina in Irrigan in Oregon. And yeah, she charges people to watch Roosters fight with knives attached to their legs.

Oh, my goodness. The winners would get up to 18 grand. The Greek royal family, they were abolished in 1974. Okay. So they were exiled overseas. And one of the princes, Prince Nicolaus of Greece, was discovered in 1995, working under a pseudonym as a production assistant for Fox News. Really?

The channel. Wow. Yeah, so he'd been working there as this production assistant. And the only reason he was outed is because they were doing a story about his brother, Prince Nicolaus's brother, getting married. And they saw their standing as one of the groomsmen, their production assistant. That's amazing. What are you doing here?

Oh, my God, that's incredible. Yeah. I was reading about Crown Prince Otto of the Austro-Hungarian. He would have been the Crown Prince of it. Okay. Is he current? is he alive. He died in 2011.

At the age of, I think, about 99, it was really old when he died. So the Austro-Hungarian Emperor was dissolved when he was, I think, about seven years old. But he was officially the King of Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Prince of Transylvania. That's a good one. It is a pretty good one.

His name was Franz Joseph, Otto, Robert, Maria, Anton, Carl, Max, Heinrich, Sixthus, Xavier, Felix, Renatus, Ludwig, Guyin, Pius, Ignatius. Was his dad, Jacob, he smug? Can I just say Maria in there as a weird one, isn't it? This is. I noticed that I didn't read the full thing. He just can't be pasted it and then when you read it out.

It gives me surprise to me. Although maybe that was their excuse as well. I didn't fully read this when we... But also he had Carl Max in his name. Carl Max. Really? Yeah, yeah. But he, so he was, you know, seven years old, the empire is dissolved, which he's the

crown prince of technically. So, and he had to kind of rebuild his life and he, you know, he learned seven languages. He became an MEP, which I find interesting. Really? God, that's a thought from. grace, isn't it? You're going to be Prince. That's a big ballot as well, isn't it? Yeah. When you've got all of his name, aren't? He actually got the votes of about 17 different candidates because they thought they were very many different people. I'm going to vote for

Maria. And I love this bit of his history in his life. So he had really interesting life. He helped to organise the pan-European picnic of 1989, which is a little known bit of the end of the Cold War. And it was on the border between Austria and Hungary. So you've got, you know, free market west on one side and communism. this zone in the east and thousands of people came and sort of gathered there to have a kind of cross-border picnic as it were and then actually 600 East Germans just moved into Austria they just sort of fled across the boundary. Like during the picnic kind of thing. Yeah yeah yeah. Like can I bore your ketchup? Oh, I'm here now. Oh sorry I was just running away from a wasp.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that was said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shrebeland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M, James, at James Harkin. And Anna, you can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of the previous episodes are sitting up there waiting to be listened to. We've also got links to the final leg of our nerd immunity tour up there. Go see if we're coming to a city near you. And if we are, Come along. It's an awesome night and we'd love to see it.

Otherwise, come back next week. We'll be back another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.