No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Salty Yeti Bones

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Live from Paris, Dan, James, Andrew and Anna discuss odour-analysing t-shirts, New York under meteor attack, and self-pricking porcupines. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

thing is a fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Paris. James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that North American porcupines sometimes fall out of trees and impale themselves on their own spice. So it gets pushed into them? So they're ready in them.

That's what impaled means. Do they die? We all die, Andy. I took the again, we're in Paris, I should have realised the philosophy would come earlier anymore. They can... Well, actually, not usually. And the reason that we know about this,

for a few reasons, but it's kind of a report that came out by a guy called Oldest Rose and his colleagues. And they noticed that quilts have antibiotics on them. And they worked out that the reason that they have antibiotics, on them is because they do impale themselves quite often and it means that it won't kind of get infected and it won't kill them It is weird that they spend so much time like trees and this is North American occupies, isn't it? They absolutely love climbing trees Yeah, actually if a female porcupine is only interested in sex once a year and she signals that by climbing the tree urinating and screaming

We've all tried it But the males have urination as well in their mating so the males they can some sometimes make the females receptive to mating, and the way they do that is urinating on them, and they have special high-velocity urine, which can go six feet. Wow. So even if a female is on a completely different branch, the male can spray her, then she will sort of become fertile.

That's incredible. Is it true, I might have this wrong, but is it true that, so there's a fight that happens between two males who are courting the one, so the urination thing, as well as being an exciting thing, for the mating ritual is also in the same way that a dog might pee on a fire hydrant to mark it as its territory.

It's a territory marking thing I think as well. That feels slightly. Possible. Yeah, they're not really sure. They think, yeah, it could be pheromones to attract them. But they do have this massive fight. And lots of males can get involved because they're very solitary porcupines and they have this very narrow window of fertility, the females. And so they're on their own,

middle of nowhere. They're something like, oh, fucking fertile. So they have to do this whole screaming, weeing thing. to spend urine into the air and hope the males smell it. So then a bunch of males flock to them, and then they do have this huge fight, and so it's very normal. If you see a male porcupine mating,

he'll usually be doing it with a bunch of someone else's, some other porcupine's quills sticking out of him. Wow. Covered in other men's quills. Wow. Yeah, not comfortable.

No. So female porcupines are pregnant or lactating for 11 months of the year, and they can be pregnant for all of their lives. and they lived for 20 to 30 years. So they basically spend their entire life pregnant or breastfeeding. Why do they're screaming so much?

Why are they not more porcupines then? They're just good at hiding from you. I think there are quite a lot. If you're in America, I think you hear it quite a lot. So, they have lots of quills. Actually, they have spines all over their penis as well, the males. It's covered in what they call horny material. It's very clever.

But they've, you know, the normal, you know, problem for humans is that they can stab us with their quills. And there was a paper from 1955, which is all about being quilled by porcupines. And this is our friends at Improbable research. So the guys who do the Ig Nobel Awards, which we mentioned before, there was a paper in 1995 written by Albert R. Schabel. And in it, he wrote, many hundreds of quills have penetrated various parts of the author's own body in numbers of one or two to as many as 40 at one time. On one occasion, 40 were driven into the forehead and the bridge of the nose by one stroke of a porcupine's tail.

It added, the penetration of porcupine quills into the human body is never a pleasant sensation. This last sign speak. Just in case you were thinking of trying it out. They don't you? They have really interesting sex organs, don't they? Porcupines. The males have interesting sex organs.

So they keep their testes inside them. They don't let their testes into their scrot or something. for most of the year. They're just sitting in their stomach somewhere, not their stomach, they're abdomen. And then they just plop them down into the scroital sack once they're going to mate, and they suck them back up again when they're not mating. But then they've got, as you say, their penis is spined, but also it's usually pointing backwards. So it's in sort of a sheath that points backwards towards them. So when they mate with the female, it flips out like penknife. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah.

No wonder they keep their testes inside. They'd probably be stabbing themselves otherwise the whole they're around. That's probably just, yeah, protection. There was a politician from foreigner called Bobby Bean, and he wanted to become a senator, and he ran with the promise that he would make sex with porcupines legal. And how did he... He's now president. Did he win?

No, he didn't win. Actually, it wasn't quite as stupid as you might think. His idea was to... He wanted to erase kind of useless... laws that exist. So it currently is illegal explicitly to have sex with porcupines in Florida. And he's like, you know, they have a penknife, spiky penis. We probably not going to do that. And we're spiky on the outside, we probably don't leave this law. And there was like other things, like there was a rule against men wearing strapless gowns that he wanted to get rid of as well.

Trapless gowns? Yeah, yeah. Well, how are he going to seduce the porcupine? They eat people's toilets sometimes. What? Poplarines. They do. They genuinely do. What do you mean?

Well, okay, let's have some qualification here. So, what they do, they love sodium, so it's salt, basically, and they need one of it. They crave salt all the time. And some people in their territory still have outdoor wooden toilets. And a lot of the wood, you know, if your aim is poor, has urine soaked into it. Okay? So urine contains salt. and, you know, people, there are toilets

which have been eaten away at by porcupines. So they don't eat the porcelain, but they do eat the surrounding wood. So they eat the hut. Yeah, they eat the hut. Yeah. So Boy Scouts, I think on Boy Scout camps, they often say you'll go to the loo and you're surrounded by porcupines chewing through the hut to death and try and access your urine.

Oh, my. Sounds like a really frightening experience. But the salt love gets them into all sorts of trouble. So they chew through cars a lot, so cars are quite soft. They genuinely do. No, they don't. Coming from old toilet volume over here.

You'll draw the line at cars. Very weird. They actually treat your cars mostly in winter. Can you guess why? Salt on the roads. Selt on the roads. Did you read that as well? Oh, great stuff.

And it must be on the tyres when you're driving along. Gets on the tyres, flicks up onto the engine, and then they'll eat your engine out from the inside. Wow. Another thing that eat that, Dan, you might. be interested in is um uh yeti bones what which means this guys am i in some kind of weird fever dream so they eat toilets they eat cars and they eat yetis yeah we're just thinking how far we could push it there's a theory that's prevalent among people who believe in the saskatch which is the same as a

yeti right in the fictional oh god absolutely not it's like calling a hedgehog in a pub you find the same thing I'm sorry to the Sasquatch and theetti communities. So people who believe in the Sasquatch, people often say to them, why aren't there any bones? Why do we never find any bones? And they say, well, it's obviously because they're very salty, and poplopines are beaten them. Yes. Yes, there's something you believe that.

Yeah, that's a true fact that they believe in. It's true. And also, they say that in Canada, they don't actually put salt on the roads anymore, speaking as salt, because Bigfoot keeps eating it all. So they think we've got to stop, we're losing too much salt. Really? Yeah, we should probably move on. Anything before we do?

Should we just talk about other tree climbers? Shall I just do one more thing on the porcupropex? Just really quickly, because it's about French person. There was a 19th century French explorer called Jules Gerard who reported on a group of people called the Hachia they were from Algeria, and all they ever did was smoke hashish and kill porcupines. I came here to smoke hashish and kill porcupines,

and I've just finished my hashish. Yeah. But now I'm quite sleepy. We do need to move on to our next fact. Just really quickly, because you know that fish can climb trees. What? Yeah. Fish climb trees and loads of different types of fish.

So one of them is the mangrove killy fish in mangrove forest. And that exists in, like, lots of America, Florida and Brazil. It lives in puddles. And then the puddles dry up, at which point they actually climb up the nearest tree. So it looks like a normal fish, climbs its way up a tree, and then it climbs into a hole in the tree that insects are made or a natural hole in a tree, and it just waits it out in the hole until it rains again,

and it can wait in a tree for months. So sometimes you'll just be walking across the tree and there's a fish halfway up. Weird, hanging out with a urinating porcupine. It's very weird in the upper canopy. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that scientists are developing t-shirt which tells you when you smell.

This is really cool. So, there is a British microchip maker and the firm is called arm and they are working on putting AI devices in clothes basically. So, the idea is that you will have a microchip in your armpit, effectively, in your shirt, and it will inform you on a scale of one to five how bad your body odor is and whether maybe it's time to have a shower or change your clothes. Okay. Oh, but if you change your clothes and you've lost the shirt that tells you.

I guess you have to change for another microchip cheetah. Yeah, it's going to be quite an expensive endeavour. Will the washing the clothes not make the microchip? Obviously. This is the key problem that they are trying to overcome. It's making a microchip, which will withstand repeated washing machine. So you have no choice but to wear that one show over and be permanently on number five. Yes, I'll try.

I'm not saying it's free of problems, alright? I do think it's a good idea. There is a way, actually, to make clothes clean themselves. You can put certain nanoparticles in clothes, and then they'll kind of clean themselves. And scientists are using this to make robotic trousers for old people. Okay, so old people have trouble walking, and they think if they can make these robotic trousers,

it will kind of help them to walk. Okay? That's a nice thing. Yeah. Hi dear. Sounds dangerous to me. I've seen the wrong trousers, but go on. Well, the thing is they put these nanopaticals in, which means they don't have to be washed, so that's good for the electronics. But the problem is, all the old people they'd given them to said they would just wash them anyway.

That's a hard thing to get around, isn't it? There will be, just while we're on the smart closed thing, there will perhaps one day soon be underpants that you can use to control your home. so this is really cool so this is not too far away but you mean like turning light stuff and stuff because I I was once lying in bed

and I rolled up one of my socks and threw it at a light switch and turned the lights on so my wife is not nearly as impressed as you guys James has been trying to get the story into the podcast for five years

it's probably managed it is very impressive a roll-up sock and you were on the other side of the room. It wasn't like it was here. No. Your socks must be rock hard. If only you have microchips in your socks, please wash me.

So you will be able to get underpants that control your home, okay? I'm determined to tell you about this. So it's basically just more putting sensors in clothes. So you will have sensors which measure your heart rate, your temperature, your body temperature, or the temperature of your body inside your pants. The pressure, the hydration. What do you need that for?

Well, okay, well, here we go. So you could connect your thermostat in your house, you could link it up with your body temperature. And when you're at home, it could notice, oh, Dan's feeling, Dan's the pants are a bit hot. I'll turn the heating down a little bit. And then you could think it's fair

that we all have to live in a politely cold house because Dan's got a hot crush. You buy a machine that folds your clothes your clothes for you. Well, it was a Kickstarter, I think. It's called The Foldy Mate. And I was watching a video, so it's a massive machine. It's about as big as a person. It's like the size of a fridge.

And so I don't know where you're going to put it. Next to your fridge. You don't want to confuse them, though. No, true. Oh, no, it's Folding the Pastor. And I've eased my pants. And that's how Fuzili was invented. No, so you, I was watching video of them doing it, and then trying to advertise it like it's this unbelievably convenient thing.

But you have to put your clothes in one by one, and you have to attach them to these clips, and you have to lay them down quite flat, like perfectly flat, and then exactly the right arrangement for it to suck it in, and then spend about 10 seconds folding it up and spit it out, and then do the next one. So it probably quadruples the time it takes to put your clothes away. I read about, this is actually quite an old invention, I think it's from 2006, And I don't think it's taken off, but it's a cool idea. It's a shirt that was designed by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

The idea is that the shirt has fiber sensors inside it. That means that it goes to a wireless transmitter when they're activated. And what it's designed for is people who love to play air guitar. So as soon as an air guitar player goes in strums, there can be a brung noise. Surely that will happen every time they make this movement. Yes. And I'm not saying there's any particular times when you might make that one. But there might be some where you don't want to hear a big...

...dance been in his room a long time playing the guitar. Why's it so cold in that? So that exists. That's good. Well, this is slightly different, but Ford, I don't think we've mentioned this before. Ford, the car firm has a robot bottom called the robot. and it's to test seats in cars

and it mimics the action of a person getting into a car and they've just had a recent innovation in which is now the robot sweats because car seats you have to you know they have to last years and years and years so it can get in

and out of a car the robot 25,000 times in a few weeks and it bounces around and it sweats and this is really good because it simulates a decade's of the car, presumably by a naked sweating person. So it's really to test it to the structure. That's the thing. That's a very specific niche of driver that they're appealing to.

My underpants and trousers are designed to stop any sweat from leaving them to get to a seat. They're the barriers, right? Well, not all of us have such high-tech clue. Some of my trousers have holes in the buttocks. It's stress sweat that comes out of your buttocks, isn't it? Is it? No, no. Well, yeah, there were like two different types of sweat.

One of them's, oh no, it's not stress sweat. Sorry, anaprein sweat is stress sweat and that comes up with your armpits. Yeah, the bottom sweat is fine. Well, I'm glad we cleared that one around. So this is on sweat and body oa, this fact. And we do have these two different kinds of sweat. So Ekrine, or Ekrine, is the one you get on, basically the one that's not your armpits and your crotch. and that actually comes from your blood.

So when your hands start sweating, for instance, they're actually bleeding in a way. It comes from blood plasma. And that's why it tastes quite salty, it's because it's the electrolytes or the minerals and stuff in your blood. That's why poppy pies are coming over and licking me the whole time.

We need to move on to our next fact very soon. Yeah, I know. Oh. She's got flu by. Cats and dogs have sweat on their paws so they can get that attraction on the floor. Is that why? Because you think you would make you slipier, wouldn't you?

It increases the friction. If it's just in a sticky level, you don't want kind of gushing, I don't think. Sticky. There's something really wrong with my cat. Spraying water out of all four pores. I also find it so weird that the smelling sweat, right, the bits that you excrete it from

are your armpits and your groin, which kind of we know. And then the other two bits are your eyelids and your ear canal. So if you've got really stinking eyelids, then apply some dove. It'll be fine. Just on smells, I read that

since fact was about the smell. There was an anthropologist who was called Louis Leakey, he was a very famous anthropologist. He was responsible for bringing people like Jane Goodall into research and making her name Diane Fosse as well. He has a theory

or had a theory which claimed that We survived as humans largely because of our body odor, we were too smelly to eat. Yeah. He thinks that people or other animals would want to kill us at the time, you know, Neanderthals, but they'd be like, oh, geez, mate, and then just not go near us. That's why we're here. Whereas Neanderthals, it smells. They had that amazing, those amazing clothes, didn't they, those Neanderthals that would tell you when you were sweating. That's why I think it. If we managed to get rid of the smell thing, then surely we're losing one of our weapons against being killed.

Yes. Suddenly the whole animal kingdom will be around on this. The only slight flaw is that quite a lot of deadly animals live in Asia, and a lot of people in Asia don't smell at all. So most Koreans, for instance, don't have the gene that makes a sweat smell at all, do they? So how have they avoided all the lions over the ages? It's time to move on, Dan. Okay, we need to move on to our next fact.

for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the best astrophysicists in the world just failed to save New York from a fake asteroid. It's pretty scary stuff. This is a genuine simulation that a whole bunch of astrophysicists from all over the world do. And it happened a few weeks ago. It happens at a conference.

So it's a conference called the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference. And every year they have this gathering, where they're set a task when an asteroid is coming for the Earth, and they have to work out how to deflect it. And they bugged it up, and New York was destroyed. It's so exciting, though, so it lasts for five days, but in the simulation, that's years and years. So this year, a few weeks ago, they got this alert.

There was a fake press release was sent out, saying that a 100 to 300 meter wide asteroid had been detected, had a 1% chance of striking the planet in 2027. And then, you know, as the days went by, they keep on getting updates, it's now 100% chance, we're all going to die, sort it out. And what they eventually managed to do was nudge it off course. So I think it was going to hit Denver, and they nudged it off course, and it struck New York.

Do you know one way that this is better than nuking an asteroid? This is one theory that if there's an asteroid on its way, we could do. Sorry, what's better than that? Well, this idea that I'm about to send you. Oh, great. It's a weird with... I said... Come on stuff again.

Basically, if an asteroid's on its way, one plan is to nudge it out of the way, one plan is to blow it up, but the best plan maybe is to just paint it on one side. Okay. So that would change the thermal properties of the asteroid, and it would mean that it moves in a different trajectory. And how do you suggest that we paint this asteroid? Well, the UN's Space Advisory Council ran a competition at Move an Asteroid competition, and it awarded the first prize to an idea to make a giant paintball gun. you can fire it at the asteroid

that's amazing you know the movie Armageddon so there's been some research recently done by some scientists where they did a simulation to see how well that would have worked if Bruce Willis had actually nuked it like he does in the movie and it splits apart

and what they discovered in the simulation was that it would break apart like it does in the movie unfortunately the gravity is so great that it would just be pulled back together and there's one solid asteroid and just wipe us out. That's how the movie should have ended. And this is a new discovery, isn't it?

Because last year when they ran the simulation, and this really is the top people that NASA and all those other organizations have, last year when they ran it, they did save Tokyo from the asteroid by doing a nuclear explosion, which blew it apart. But since then, yeah, they've just go, well, they'll just suck themselves back together and keep coming at us.

So there are all sorts of other weird ways of diverting asteroids. So I really like the mass driver way, which basically is the idea that you would, it's quite slow working, you need to know that the asteroid was going to hit you in about 100 years time. Right. You've got to pass the knowledge on to your grandchildren.

But the idea basically is that you get onto the surface of the asteroid. You get some landing objects onto it. And they pick up rocks from the asteroid, and they just throw them at the earth. And the motion of that pushes the asteroid away from the earth. So it's kind of like imagine if you're sitting on a swing, I guess, and you've got a tennis ball. And then if you throw the tennis ball away,

you'll kind of go backwards on the swing, right? It's the opposite reaction force. So if enough bits of rock are thrown at the Earth and the asteroid, it'll sort of slow it down. But then if too many are thrown at us, then we die anyway from the things you've thrown at us. Yeah, you have to make sure they're not too big, though, with bits of rock. Yeah. Wow. And you need 100 years. You need 100 years, yes.

I think previously, Dan said that the warning we would have is about one second. Look, you don't have said that as well. It's not true. Well, we know about loads. This is a really cool thing. So NASA currently knows about 795,000 asteroids. So can I just say, like, for instance, the Chelebyensk meteor, we didn't know about that at all until it landed.

So it might be that we have no seconds. So I was wrong by one second. But this is the amazing thing. And the problem is it's really hard to keep track of them once you spotted them. So scientists have lost more than 900 near-ear-earth asteroids. As in they were spotted once, we thought, oh, that's a bit worrying. And then we don't know where they've gone. Wow, really?

Yeah. So we saw them once, because sometimes it takes 20 hours to confirm that what you're seeing is right. Sometimes the weather is bad, so you can't see it again from a ground-based observatory. So you just sort of say, oh, well, there. See you. Fingers crossed. Don't come back. We're going to have to move on to our final fact, or something's killed by asteroids might have been the dinosaurs. Again, I didn't really say that sentence very well, but I think all the points for that.

But there is one guy who doesn't think that. There's a guy called Professor Brian J. Ford, and he thinks that the dinosaurs actually died out because of a lack of sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes. Sex lakes. Dan, how's your crotch feeling?

Getting any hotter? What is a sex lake? It's exactly what it sounds like. Cool. So his theory is that because dinosaurs were so big, they wouldn't be able to have sex because they would just crush each other. And so the only way they could do it

is by using the lakes to be buoyant. Do you know what I mean? They can only have sexed lakes. And he says that as the continents drifted, there were loads of shallow, there used to be loads of shallow lakes and there weren't shallow lakes anymore, which is true. And so he thinks because of those lack of shallow lakes, all the dinosaurs died out. I'm surely this would mean that all the fossils we find

would be crushed dinosaurs underneath their crushing mate. Yeah, you're right. They might not be true. It's just a theory. It's a great theory. I love it. Can I just, one thing about Asteroid names. names. Oh yeah. So asteroids, it used to be the near-Earth objects, and most of which are

asteroids had to be named after mythical creatures, but there have been loads and loads found since that was decided, I think, about 50 years ago. So it also used to be, they had to be named after things from mythology, but they couldn't have creation or underworld themes, because they're reserved for other bits of space. So you have to really do your research into your technological creature. Anyway, so these rules were kind of loosened because there are like tens of thousands of them that have names now. So if you, obviously, obviously, you obviously, I was looking at the name of the massive list of asteroid names, and you have these really grand ones like Palace and Juno and Achilles.

And then you have Bill Smith and Sarah Jenkins, Donna Anderson, Randy Peterson. And I was looking for our names in them. So there are a lot of Annas. So there's an Anna, just Anna on her own. And then like, you know, Anna, what's it? That's the one that's going to get us, isn't it? Fingers.

Fingers cross. I'm rooting for her. There's also a James on his own and a Daniel on his own, that there is no Andrew or Andy. Right, thanks a lot. So, I think the next asteroid name you should claim it. Or we can name a sex lake after you. Yes.

That's how I'd like to be remembered. For our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that until the 1840s, there was no maximum size for a rugby team, so matches were sometimes played with up to 300. players on the bench at the same time. So was that an 150 against 150 or 299 against 1?

Yeah, he's very good. There was, we do have an example of it, so the game of rugby was said to have been invented in a school called rugby, hence where I get the same from, in 1823. There was a match played in 1839 where Rugby School House had 75 players, so that was their team and they played

a team that was called The Rest and there was 225 people wow yeah that's amazing do we know who won

I don't actually know who won I couldn't find out I'm sure it's out there somewhere but yeah and it was obviously it was a very chaotic game as you can imagine they hadn't really

got any rules to begin with rules slowly kind of thing yeah it just used to be like basically a load of guys in the field just trying to get the ball from one end to the other

but with no rules right it's just basically one big scrunk strangling and throttling were outlawed in 1862 that's when I went right off the game that's just health and safety gone mad in the end isn't it?

But this is... Yeah, because these go back hundreds of years, don't they? It all comes from games which were called folk football so there's one that's still played in England in Derbyshire in Ashburn where you keep playing until you score a goal or until 10pm. Whichever comes sooner,

just knock off. Because people would die quite often. There are lots of records of people dying playing rugby, partly because people used to carry knives in sheaths on their belts. And so you might just run into someone else's knife by mistake. That happened. That's a foul. But this is the other thing.

The game of rugby is problematic because it lets people take revenge on each other because there are no rules. So if you've got a village of people basically having a big fight, you could just say, oh, yeah, he ran onto my knife. Right. Where is this? that this happens? This is in the sort of 14th-15th centuries.

So this is before proper rugby. Yeah, yeah. Because there is one call, I wonder if this is what you're talking about. Calcio's Dorico? Well, that's a very similar game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like what Andy's saying,

it's a rugby game, but the idea is to play rugby, but also just kick each other's ass really badly. Like, you're allowed to punch, kick, headbutt, elbow, choking is permitted. There's no gloves allowed, you know, to soften the punch. and the amazing thing there would be deaths

and they would just carry on and so on but the main thing was if the game was going a bit too slow and they wanted the fans to sort of have a bit more of a fast experience and get the game done they'd just let some balls come in suddenly just random balls

running around attacking humans I mean it sounds incredible yeah that's Italy isn't it Calcio yeah this presumably wasn't recently this happens now you're about to do everything except kick people in the head

and who's telling the bulls not to do that. Well even in rugby, kicking used to be shin kicking specifically used to be massively part of the game. So this is one of the biggest controversies rugby ever saw was when they were drawing out the rules. It was like in the 1870s. And hacking was really part of rugby, which was basically really, really vigorously kicking someone else's shins.

And some people wanted to outlaw it. And some people said, that's going to ruin the game. It's part of it. But it was the case that, like, after a scrum had broken up, everyone else had left the board at the other end of the pitch. You'd still have, apparently, you'd have two players left over kicking each other in the shin really

hard at the other end of the pitch. So then people used to wear sharpened boots with spikes on them to really get that shin kick as good as it can be. And then they would wear white trousers to show off the blood. This was a mark of... This is the English school system and its

best, basically. And then rugby moved to France to other countries and in the late 19th century in France once we did have rules rugby was seen not so much as a team game but more than an individual game there was still a team but you were trying to see how well you could do yourself and so it was like one athlete against the group and you were trying to get around them so basically players were reluctant to get dirty

reluctant to find themselves on the ground and they thought it was less glamorous to get involved in scrums and this only was challenged when France played England in 1906 and found out that the English were not playing by those rules are off. Actually, one of the objections to getting rid of the shing kicking was, I read, and I don't know what this means, and just don't shoot the messenger, but so this was hacking when it was going to be banned, and the Secretary of Blackheath FC said,

we can't ban the practice of kicking each other in the shins, because it will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game and bring over a lot of Frenchmen. you really know your audience so well so when it took off they eventually

I think it was the 1870s give or take whole football club said you okay fine we'll stop each other kicking in the shins with sharpened boots

but you're still allowed to trip up the man who's running that was just a nice little innovation they thought they'd throw in nice yeah oh you know

the rugby balls could kill you as well could they yeah but not the way you would think oh I didn't have thought in my head. Let's think. Okay, so

like they hit you in the head so hard that you die. Brilliant. That's not the way that you would think. Good. Okay, it's not that way. So rugby balls, the first person to make a uniform, oval rugby ball was a guy called Richard Lyndon. And his wife actually was involved in the manufacturing too.

So what it was was you would have a pig's bladder and you had to blow that up and then surround it in leather. That's just how you made the ball. But Lyndon's wife, Rebecca, was the one who did the actual blowing up and she contracted a lung disease and she died from it because there was unexpectedly you know there was an infected bladder and she had had 17 children for him as well by him you know this is a very sad story and so that determined him to make a rubber bladder it basically

prompted the innovation of um and he also invented the modern pump he saw an ear syringe and he thought well i could take that from an ear and put it into a football and then that could get up that way that's yeah but who was looking after all those kids while he was inventing these silly rugby ball-based things. My question. The book I read about rugby does not relate. Just a tiny little nugget of how how influential this little rugby school in England has been on global sporting. Outside of inventing rugby itself, there was a student there who was from Australia called Thomas Wills. He went back to Australia and he invented Aussie rules, which back in Australia is a huge sport. It's not gone global.

In fact, Australia have an all-star Aussie rules team that they announce every year. But because no one is good enough to play them, they've never played a match. So we've got this like supergroup who would just get announced and they meet up, but that's it. They should play the rest. That's such a good point. So Robbie's known for having really hardcore players playing it, I guess. And I think, so my favourite story is Wayne Shelford, who is quite famous to win particularly hardcore. he was captured the All Blacks in the 80s

and he in one of his got a fan in, or maybe that's him, I don't know sounded like him based on what I'm about to tell you. This isn't going to end well. So he was captured the All Blacks, very hard, but in one of his very first games he was super young, a French,

he was playing France and a French boot ripped open his scrotum and left a testicle hanging free. And hanging free, he also had four teeth knocked out in the same incident that he didn't want to leave the pitch. Anyone else has just been sucked up

like a porcup house. Also, that's a hell of a kick that gets your testicles and your teeth. Unless they're kick-top with such force if they come into your mouth. They're killing his tentacles with that long. But yeah, he just said to the video,

quick, sew it up, sewing up, and so it up right there and then, and he kept on playing the game. What? What? Until in fact he was not unconscious later on. We're going to have to wrap up shortly. We're going to have to stitch that. The testicle with podcast back into the strode of the microphone box.

I thought that metaphor was never going to end. Anything else before we wrap up? I just have my favorite rugby story, aside from the testicle, and maybe is the story of the Dorchester Gladiators. I don't know if you know this one. So Dorchester Gladiators were a team in the year 2000 and they were an amateur over 40s, very unfit rugby team who just played sort of amateur games for fun.

And then they thought they were mates, so they thought they'd go to Romania for kind of a big booze up and play some rugby over there. And they were giving some toys to an orphanage, actually, to be fair. Anyway, they were in Romania. And the Romanians got a win that there was a rugby team there, and they were invited to play a game. And so they were like, you were playing a game

with the local Romanians in the local park. And there's been some sort of mistranslation. And so Romania thought that they were basically a national level team. And so when they turned up, they realized it was in their national stadium. It was being broadcast on television. Spectators there, and they were playing against the Romanian national team. We did say, we did get a bit suspicious

when they offered us a training session the night before, and we refused to do that as we do our pre-match warm up in the bar. I think before the match apparently the Romanians were all training and the Brits were there looking at them and smoking on the sidelines The Romanians took pity and only beat them 60-17 out of sympathy in the end Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much Thank you. We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes to upcoming tour days to fit some merchandise Thank you so much Paris that has been absolutely