No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Buckingham Palace All-Day Breakfast

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

Live from Oxford, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the longest baseball match, the highest wedding ceremonies, the largest carpets, and the holiest trees. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Oxford. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the longest professional baseball match on record only lasted so long because the umpire's rule book was missing the bit that explained when a match should be stopped.

That's amazing. I kind of think that an umpire should already know the rules by the time he's starting to umpire the game. Yeah, you would think. Halfway through, he shouldn't be going on, I'm just going to check that. Well, this was unprecedented. times in the baseball world. So this was a match that was in April 18th, 1981.

It was the Poor Tucket Red Sox, and they were playing the Rochester Red Wings. And so these are smaller teams in a different league. Professional baseball players, though. And Poor Tucket, it was played there, which is in Rhode Island. Big deal for poor Tucket, because the newspaper the next day said,

not since the time that they had to shoot the drunken camel at the city zoo, Has there been this much excitement in poor Tuckett? Yeah. But it was 1983. So it sounds like a weird match from ages ago, but quite recently, really. At the start of the match, there were 1,700 fans watching. By the time the game eventually ended, which was 407 in the morning,

there were 20 people left. Still watching the match, 20, which I feel is quite a lot. I read that some of them were asleep. Oh, okay. Well, they all got given a season ticket, so it paid off for them. Some of them got lifetime passes. Yeah, they did, that's true. So it was, this is the longest baseball match on the world,

which is eight hours and 25 minutes. It really isn't that long. I think what makes it long. It's quite long. Come on, we're from a nation of cricket. That's bullshit. Exactly. Eight hours.

Exactly. Because all the writing up, like there was a player called Wade Boggs, who was 22 years old when the match started, and by the time it ended, he was 23. Wade Box is quite famous. He became quite a famous player later. Did he?

But this didn't have. happened to like land on the, you know, when it went past midnight, he turned 23. The thing about this match was it was eventually stopped and they then resumed the match a few months later. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, that's, I thought it was just a midnight thing the birthday. No, no, no. Oh, okay.

But when they've carried on afterwards, it took like about 18 minutes or something for them to just didn't they just have a score once basically? And they did. And then that's over. And there sort of thousands of people flocked because by then it was almost as big news as the drunken camel thing. So the entirety of the nation, practically. was there for 18 minutes.

But Dan, what's the deal with the missing page? Who's ripped out the crucial page? Yeah, we don't know if it was missing. We don't know if they couldn't find it. And just no one knew what to do. And so there was actually someone that they were trying to call on a landline who was higher up, who just wasn't near their phone.

Also, it was, you know, 12 a.m. heading into 4 a.m. eventually. Yeah. So they eventually got through to him. And they were like, what do we do? And he was like, stop the fucking match. What are you doing? Why did they...

Why was it lasting so long? Do we know? in baseball is you have an innings and an innings, you keep going with innings is until someone scores more in that innings than the other team. You get, you know, you do a certain number that you're supposed to do. And then if it's a tie, you just keep going until one team gets like sudden death.

And they just kept going, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil. And then there was a one. Right. And then the other team got a one. And that was, um, he kind of got a home run to tie that game. And he said, I didn't know if the guys, on my team wanted to hug me or slug me.

That's a great thing. But Wade Box, by the way, I just want to say, because he is famous, but the most thing I know about him is he once consumed 107 beers in one day. Whoa. For, like, charity or... He was just thirsty. Sometimes people don't need an incentive, Dan, to drink

a hundred beers. He was famous as big drinker, but then this is the record that his friend said, and he's confirmed. Wow. But so, um, The match itself, again, I wish we hadn't told you it was just eight hours, because when you hear the details of the match, it does sound like it just went on for like a week. So the accounts of the baseball players, a very cold night,

the baseball players getting so cold that they were ripping up furniture from the dugout and burning it, snapping used baseball bats in half, and putting it in this bin of fire to stay warm to keep them going. If you can snap a baseball bat in half, I don't think you'd need a fire. I think you're fine. What a jump brawn. These people are pathetic. It was cold. It was really cold.

And that was one of the problems. It was a really windy day as well. And so the problem was it kept being nil, nil, because no one could get any home runs. And the reason was they kept whacking it for miles and miles and the wind would just blow it back into the stadium. But they're playing with a boomerang, it turned out. Yeah, extraordinary games.

It is quite pathetic. If you look at sports matches of yore, where they basically, before all these rules were codified for all the sports and sort of mid to late 19th century, they just went on for days and days and days, didn't they? You'd get football matches and rugby matches with hundreds of participants. You'd have one village playing another village, and they'd play from dawn until dusk for like four days straight.

It was great. I think the first recorded football match ever in Sheffield in 1794, that was three days long. And the match report said three days long, a very good match, and it felt necessary to note that although they were, were quite a lot of injuries, no one was killed. But that's amazing because that team before that game, they were called Sheffield Monday, weren't they?

Very strong. But on the flip side, you do get short baseball games as well, and there is a record for shortest baseball game ever, which was in 1916, and the match lasted for 31 minutes. And that's really quick for baseball. And the reason is both teams beforehand spoke to each other and realized they both had them trained to catch,

which was going quite early. No way. But the problem was, for the fans who came to the match, is that the game started 30 minutes early. So the game ended before it was meant to start. So fans rocked up and they're like, this is going to be great. And then they saw the final batter or whatever, and then they all went off.

That's bullshit. I'm outraged for these people 105 years ago. Do you know the first ever baseball rule that was written down was that all players, must be punctual. Really? Oh. This is the oldest set of rules we have.

They're called the Knickerbocker rules. They were written in New York. But the thing was, the teams were from New York, but there wasn't much room to play in New York. So they always played in New Jersey. And so if you have to schlep all the way over the river to New Jersey, obviously you don't want people turning up half an hour later or an hour later or whatever.

So that's why that was the first rule. It was good, isn't it? Interestingly, a New Jersey is what these poor cold guys in the match we previously were doing. I do need it. And also, in those set of rules, hitting the ball out of the stadium was a foul. So, you know, in baseball now,

really what you're trying to do is whack it all the way out. In those days, if you did that, you would be out. And that's because the stadium was right next to the Hudson River. And they couldn't afford to lose all the balls. So did the phrase, you knocked it out of the park, have a negative connotation. Idiot, you knocked it out of the park. Now we've got to go and get it in the boat.

There was one controversial rule that, incident, which I read about. And this was a guy called Earl Weaver, who was manager of the Baltimore Orioles. And he had a real issue with umpires. So I think he was manager in like 70s. He hated umpires. He thought none of them knew the rules.

They didn't know what they were doing. He got told off loads of times for once he pulled up third base and just walked off the pitch with it. He once... The description was he was told off for pecking at an umpire's chin with the beak of his baseball cap. So they had a tense relationship.

Anyway, in 1979, he got in such a big fight with one of the umpires who basically hadn't called out what this guy thought was an legal move of the oppositions, that he went to the dugout, he got the rulebook, he marched back onto the field, and he opened the rule book and started reading from it, saying, look, you obviously don't know the rules, you idiot, and the umpire got annoyed, understandably, and so then he started tearing the rulebook to shreds and throwing it all over the field in front of them. One of the other things, early baseball, they never, so baseball players all have that cool glove that we get as kids

when we're playing. Yeah, that's what it's called. You don't mean the giant gladiator phone thing. No, I don't mean in the audience, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so those gloves. But in the early days of baseball, that was seen as a very wimpy thing to have any kind of handwear.

So you would just have to use your hands. But that was really damaging all the players because those balls, as we know, very hard and they're being walloped. So that was a real risk when you were a baseball player. And so it was a player, as far as one historian was looking in final, player called Charles C. Waite, who was the first person who wore a glove, but because he was so scared

of being made fun for it, he wore his skin tone color as the glove. So he thought at that distance, they might just think in the crowd, he's got slightly big hands. But just one big hand. Yeah, yeah. Just on the gloves and the catching and throwing. Yeah. So the world record for throwing and catching eggs was set by a couple of baseball players from New Zealand. Oh, is it? I guess they're very practiced at it. Called Nick Hornstein and Ricky Pyeway in 2018.

So is that like I throw an egg to you and you have to catch it and you have to be as far away from me as possible? Exactly. Does it matter how the egg is cooked? It does. Come on. That would be very true. Frisbee a fried egg? Come on, that's a challenge.

It's 93.6 meters. Sounds boiled. It was a raw egg. And it was very impressive. And this is at the World Egg Throwing Federation, which is based in Swatten. In England? We know where it's based. Sorry.

Anyway, it sounds like an incredible party, the World Egg Throwing Championship. So I was reading an account of it. And I'm just going to read you what happened on the day. Former champ Norm Fowler of Peterborough won the Russian egg roulette. No explanation in this article of what that is. Then the target accuracy contest, throwing at male model Joel Hicks, was won by Tina from Cambridge with two shots to the groin. Listen, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that when acorn woodpeckers fight each other, the rumor spreads through the community, and other acorn woodpeckers turn up to watch. This is so cool. So they're really social. They're the most social woodpeckers, because a lot of woodpeckers are solitary, I'm sure you know.

And they love this spectator sport, and they have these amazing battles over their territory, their trees. they're granary trees, which are where they stockpile all their acorns. And basically, the trees are guarded by a group of males who are all brothers, and then a group of females who are all sisters. And they're all shagging each other as well as guarding the tree. But they're not brothers and sisters with each other, so there's no incest going on. Anyway, when one gender dies out, when one sex dies out, then there's a vacancy.

And so, you know, a bunch of female acorn woodpeckers will want to swoop in to claim that tree. And these massive fights break out between the different claimants to the tree. And, yeah, people come from miles around. Not when I say people, I mean woodpeckers. I think you've identified too closely with your research area this week, Anna. That's amazing. And they'll spend, they'll travel for a couple of miles, and they'll spend, like, an hour a day just watching this big fight.

And they'll go back home. And I think it's useful, they think, because you can pick up social information, and spy out potential mates. But they leave their bit of tree that they're protecting in order to see this fight. And it feels like that's the next little trick of evolution that you need a fake a fight

and then send in your troops around the back. Or there's like one acorn woodpecker who kind of goes around when everyone else is at the fight just stealing their acons. Exactly. Or claiming the trees, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah. You've broken the system.

The fights, they last for a long time. They last for about a day sometimes. I know the woodpecker, the audience has come for an hour. Yeah, but cricket matches lasts for five days. That's true. Pathetic. Yeah, this family strategy they have is pretty interesting, the sort of incest avoidance thing they have

because you get a breeding pair and then you get a load of babysitter, let's say a load of babysitter males, okay, who are the offspring of the breeding pair. Got it. Then the breeding female will die, okay? But that means that there has to be a new female. However, the previous, the helper males,

the babysitter males, previously couldn't breed because the breeding female was their mother. Okay? But now they're on equal terms with their dad because there's going to be a new breeding female. Yeah. So now there is just a parity, so they're all going to breed with the new,

female. So finally, and this is good for, obviously, for the babysitter males who now can breed, but it's also very interesting because it means these birds have an awareness of the relations of other birds to each other. It's called triadic awareness. And it's... It's not in Woody Woodpecker, though, is it? Does it make, do we know if it makes it an awkward father-son dynamic? It's like if your parents divorce and then your dad marries a step-mom, then you also shag the step-mom. Is it? And that often creates tension. I think it does.

It's just why I wonder if it's the same. Yeah? But it's so, yeah, like that family dynamic is so weird. It's also the case that a few mums will also live in the same nest, right? And when that happens and they're having eggs, they try and synchronize eggs so that they don't have one child arriving before the other. And what they'll do is if one of the mothers has an egg, they'll knock the egg out, just to make sure that that's no longer... I think they might eat it.

Yeah, yeah, and they'll get the youngens. So if there are two breeding females and they haven't synchronised when they're having their eggs, the other one will push out or eat the egg of the first one until they get it right. Or, sadistically, feed it to the mother often. You know, you've laid an egg and then your rival female pushes it out

and then comes and feeds it back to you. But it's all because of this bizarre setup where they have up to seven males and up to three females in every crew. isn't it? So you've got these three rival females at all times, constantly laying and killing each other's kids and laying and killing each other's kids. And it can be weeks. It'll go cannibalism for weeks, and then you time it right, and then happy families again.

Yeah. It's like when your periods are synchronising when women live together, it takes a few months to get in sync. Yes. And you kill each other's periods until they all arrive at the same time. Apart from, of course, that's a myth. It's a myth. It's a myth. Women's periods don't synchronize. Is it? Oh, yeah. You keep claiming it's a myth, but I... What am I? Let's move on.

No, Dan. Come on. Please, Dan. Let's see. Well, my research has shown in the houses that I live in that there's something to it. Hundreds of thousands of houses, I'm sure. I had to move a lot of times to different houses, particularly when they found out of my period experiment I was conducting. The fights are pretty violent, though, because I read one place that said the birds basically

have spears for mouths, and you'll see after the fights that the birds will have eyes gouged out, blood all over them. They'll fall to the floor, holding each other's legs. so they can't fly and they'll kind of crash to the ground. So they're pretty violent. Wow. You can see why people go to watch. Yes.

And by people again. They make a sound that goes like waka waka. Oh, like Fuzzy Bear. Fuzzy bear or Shakira were the only two I could think of. When will they duet? What did Woody Woodpecker? His was like, hoo-ha-ha. Yeah, exactly.

Is that in any way? That was quite good actually. Not bad. So the voice of Woody Wookpecker was a woman called Grace Lance. She's also known by her stage name Grace Stafford. And what happened was they had another person who did the voice. I think it might be Mel Blanc, but it was someone famous. He was the original, I think. Yeah, yeah. And then he decided he didn't want to do it anymore.

And she said, well, I'll do it. I do a really good impression. Not as good as Dan Schreiber, but it's quite good. And her husband, who was producing it, said, nah, I don't think so. I think we're going to tender for it. And so she then did an anonymous audition tape and sent it in with all the other audition tapes

and he still chose her Woody Woodpucker. Wow. And for the first something like 10 years or so, eight years in fact that she did it, she didn't have her name on the credits. And that was because she thought people would be disillusioned if they knew Woody was voiced by a woman. Right.

Wow. As opposed to a woodpecker. because I would be devastated as a child their trees are incredible aren't they you've got to look up the granary trees of acorn woodpeckers which they mostly keep in the California, Oregon area basically look like a tree that surface is covered in crumpets.

They look incredible, they look like, you know people who are scared of like little holes is it called tripophobia or something like that? They would hate these because it's just loads of loads of little holes and each one is shoved an acorn into it. And they test them, they'll shove an acorn in, and then they'll practice trying to get it out. And if it's too easy to extract the acorn

from the little hole they've made, they abandon the hole. So that's going to be too easy to steal. But it keeps changing, because the holes always change size. Because trees change size. Trees are always growing and shifting a bit. And acorns dry out, so they will change size when they do. So it's a nightmare.

So they spend all of their bloody time moving. It's not funny. There are up to 50,000 holes in a tree, guys. Guys, please take it seriously. 50,000 acorns in a tree. It's just you and your brothers and your three weird wives. And you have to... It takes 20 minutes to make one hole.

There are 50,000 holes in the tree and you're constantly moving the acorns to a better fitting hole. It's awful. I would want to die in a fight. Okay, look, we need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the world's largest car. The carpet museum is shaped like a giant roll of carpet. For people at home, we've just put a picture of it on the screen. And I think that undeniably looks like a giant roll of carpet. It's awesome. It's really amazing. Where is it?

This is in Baku, in Azerbaijan. And this is something that I noticed when I was reading about a carpet war between Azerbaijan and Armenia on top of the actual war they're having. They're not the most lethal weapons, are they? But you can carpet bomb somewhere, I suppose. Yeah, I think you've got confused. So these are carpets that come from an area called Nagano Karabakh, which is a disputed territory between the two places.

Armenian weavers are claiming that the Azerbaijan government is appropriating their culture. Because basically most people, most historians, not all of them, but most historians think that these are Armenian-based carpets. But Azerbaijan has built a massive museum. and most of it says, no, they're ours. Oh. I didn't know that this was so political museum. It's quite political.

Yeah. Apparently, there's some Azerbaijani officials who say there is no such thing as Armenian carpets. No such thing. That's pretty, that's pretty balsy to say Armenia doesn't even make carpets. I know. Well, they claim that the Armenians stole the Azeri,

like tactics and, you know, stuff like that. And the UNESCO has said that Azerbaijani carpets are a masterpiece of intangible heritage. But a lot of people pointed to the large donation that the government made to UNESCO just before they made that. So this is very controversial. And I know from me saying that, it sounds like I'm on the Armenian side. You can make your own decision.

But don't decide wrong. James, you've just absolutely torched our Azerbaijan tour next year. So thanks a lot for that. Wow. And this museum, yeah, it's quite new. If you look in Baku, I think a few of you will know this because they've had football tournaments and stuff there, but they've built a whole load of new stuff in Baku quite recently.

But one thing about, I notice when looking in the interior of this, is that all the floors are paved with marble. It doesn't seem to be a single carpet that's not behind the prospects. So funny. You don't have ruined them. That's a sign that you're treasuring your carpets. Yeah, I guess. Because they're really, I mean, there's much wall hangings as for floors until pretty recently,

aren't they? Yeah. I've always thought we should bring back the wall carpet. Yes. I like it, yeah. It's gone out of fashion a long time ago. Like, probably turn in the 20th century. Maybe before.

I've got a carpet on a wall. So, went out of fashion maybe 200 years ago, actually. Have you really, only? Yeah. Why? It's actually sound-proofing. Yeah. Maybe that's what they were doing,

recording all their podcasts back in the day. Maybe. I was reading, there's Turkish carpets, rather than having a new Turkish carpet that feels like a... it's just really bold in its colors and really bright. Getting a more antique feel to one is something that people chase more. And the way to make that happen that they do in Turkey

is that they actually take the carpets out for months at a time and just lay them out in fields. So if you go on Google Earth and you zoom in on Turkey, there is whole fields, yeah, of thousands of carpets that are just laid out in the open because it's very dry. And they just sit there. And it's these carpet layers who understand fading so well that someone can say, I want it faded to like this kind of degree

and they're like, leave it to me. And they go and get the carpet when they know the time is right when it's faded. Yeah, and it looks really antique. And they dust it off and that's when you get your carpet. Wow. That's really cool. Is it fake?

No, I do believe you. It's just that when you say weird shit like that, it's often not true. I know. And the way you looked at me, it was like, is that true, James? Is it true? Prove me wrong. So did you hear that in 2012,

scientists at the University of Manchester made a magic carpet, which is very exciting. Yeah. Not a classic magi-carp. They made one which, basically, it can tell you when you're going to fall over, which is very useful. Oh.

So it doesn't fly either. It's not flying. It doesn't fly. No, no, no. They're working on that. They're working on that. They're not working on that. Obviously, they're not fucking working on that.

It's the next obvious step, isn't it? How does it do that? Does it just have those horrible roles in it? that trip you up and then a sign on the other side that goes, ha ha, I told you you'd fall over. Quite the reverse. It's stuffed with clever fiber optic cable and that kind of thing. And basically it builds up a profile of your movement as you're walking around. So it's not like...

Can you get amazing internet if you're sitting on that carpet? It basically monitors you and if your movement deteriorates even slightly. It's for people who are elderly. Yeah, it can tell your gate. And if you're gay... So it can't tell you you're about to fall over now, but it can say you're about to fall over soon. So look out for that.

You can imagine an alarm that went off when you're about to fall over would actually make you more likely to fall over. 100%. Do you know that there's people at the Harvard University that are working on a magic carpet? Same question. A flying one? This is an actual flying one.

And they have made it, but it's the size of a bank note and it's only 0.1 millimeters thick. Okay. So who's flying on it? Is it a ant? Like a cool... Yeah, that'd be so exciting. That would be awesome, right?

They think that they could possibly make it bigger in the future, but you'd need so much energy and you'd need to make it ripple. So what it is, it's like a really tiny bit of, almost like paper, it ripples and ripples and ripples, and then the force that these ripples cause can make it kind of just go up off the ground, but they can also make it go forward. So it kind of is quite cool, but I suppose we're a few years away from it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair enough. It's a long way to go. That's very cool. Can we go back to the countries that lead the world? in carpet making, because I don't think we've covered them all. There are a lot. Okay. So, Menistan is a big one, has the Guinness World Record for the biggest carpet in the world,

which, by the way, it's really beatable. If anyone wants to, it's 14 metres wide and 21.5 meters long. Which feels shit. And it wasn't even made by that many people. Daily Sabah, which is a Turkish news site, said it was made by a total of 40 people, including one man. It is, like, historically it's like a women's role to make these carpets, isn't it? Yeah.

everywhere. That seems to be the unifying thing across all of these carpet countries. He's always the women who do it. He smashed through the carpet floor. That's great. Well done. But Turkmenistan's national flag has carpet on it. Does it? Which I don't think any of the others do, so I think that's winning.

But yeah, in 1992, when I think they became independent from the Soviets, they started designing their national flag. And if you look at it, it's a really nice flag. It's green with a red stripe, and it has five carpet, like, motifs. on it. They're called gulls, and they're just little carpet patterns. Oh, it's patent. The flag's not made of carpet material. Does it have tassels? Because if not, I'm not

interested. It doesn't have tassels, and if it was made of carpet, it would need a fucking strong wind to fly in. Yeah, yeah, good point. Can we talk about Wetherspoons, carpets, please, briefly, please. Okay, sure. Okay, every Wetherspoons, about, what, 900 in the UK has its own special carpet. And this wasn't known about until about 2015. Known about in public. Must have been known about. Tim Martin, the boss, he probably knew. He probably was laughing up his sleeve at all of us.

Everyone's always so pissed when they leave. They never remember the carpets. That's the trick. There was a guy called Kit Kales, who started a blog about the floor coverings of every single Weatherspoon in the country. And he assumed they'd be identical when he started. So I'm not sure why he was blogging about it. But all right, he found out, and then he started the blog. It doesn't matter.

Each one has their owner. They're often themed to the local It's really exciting. So there's a Britannia pub in Plymouth, which is slightly cruise ship-based, you know. He wrote, Kit Kales, he wrote an entire book about Wetherpoon's pub carpets. And the sun covered it with the headline, The Rug Pratt. Is this Britain's saddest hobby? Is that a pun on the Rugrats? It's a pun on the Rugrats, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know. Well, he was, the person, the original people that made those carpets were the people that had... Axminster. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I've gone a bit deep on this one, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So they're the ones who have the royal decree. Warrant. Warrant in order to make carpets for the royal family. So, yeah, weather spoons and them. And then they stopped making it because people started coughing. But Buckingham Palace, if you've ever been inside, it's all weather spoons. Yeah, that's true.

It's taking up all the space. The ground floor is just a really big weather spoons. I'll tell you what, the Buckingham Palace all day breakfast is off. Do you know, one very famous red carpet that we all are aware of is the Holyfield red carpet that we see at the Oscars every single year. And I didn't realize that there's so much mystery around the red carpet at Hollywood. So when they make it, they make it in a mill in Dalton in America, and they don't tell you which mill it's being made in.

That's all we know. We don't know it's got its own special color, Academy Red. They bring it there in a truck. It's very mysterious. They lay it down. They have people in tuxedos with little portable vacuums, just a vacuum. at every spot and make sure that the carpet's doing fine.

And then when the ceremony's done, they pick it up and they burn it. And it's only ever used once. It's just a big mystery. And they make a whole new carpet the next time. Because they don't want the material. So a few people have stolen bits of material from it. And they've gone on eBay and they're really worried that it's kind of like the Coca-Cola recipe.

They're going to discover the recipe for the Hollywood red card. It's a red carpet. No. It's not a red. It's a magic carpet. It's kind of slightly off red. It's more like, It's actually burgundy.

Yeah, it's burgundy. They let people film the ceremony. You can see what color it is. You can see the color, but you can't see what it's made of. It's made of carpet. It doesn't matter. I think, although I like the conspiracy theory reasoning, I think it's more likely that you can't reuse it

because the next Hollywood year it's going to look like crap. And it's 152 meters long. So there's very little other use you can put it to. There's hardly anyone who's got used for 152-long carpet. I think it might be. Maybe it's just made of something really awesome, like Bill Murray's back hair or something. Yeah, exactly, yes.

You know, people used to cover their carpets with other carpets to protect them. Called druggets. Oh, yeah, I've got one on my wall, yeah. Your wall is seven carpets thick. Yeah, until the 19th century, drugets, which are just cheaper carpet, so you put on top of your carpet for everyday use. And then if a guest came, you whipped the carpet off, and then you had the proper one underneath.

That's a sad thing. Andy has a drugget dealer, don't you? Hey! Okay. it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the world's first ever hot air balloon wedding

was meant to happen in 1865, but the officiating priest refused to go up, so the couple had the first ever hot air balloon honeymoon instead. Very nice. It's just a nice story about a couple called Mary West Jenkins and John F. Boynton.

They wanted to marry in a balloon. They thought it'd be fun, and the Reverend said, no. He said it was too unholy. not appropriate enough so they just went up after the wedding instead. But it was a very exciting ceremony this wedding. There was 6,000 people there.

They were mostly there for the balloon. They were there for the balloon, yeah. They were in Central Park. So they did get married in the end, but they got married on the ground. And how much do you suspect that the Reverend was just too much of a person to go up in the balloon? It's possible, isn't it? There was the Baltimore Daily Commercial of the 10th of November 1865.

This was a couple of days later. They said that the official store, was that the priest had to get the last train to Philadelphia. Okay, but then they did say the actual reason probably was that the Reverend gentlemen, accustomed to operate solely in mundane matrimony had backed out at the 11th hour. Right. I wonder how much a history, like speaking of the shortest baseball match before,

has been influenced by people needing to get trains. Quite a lot. What time is it now? And the Reverend, by the way, was a guy called Thomas DeWitt Talmadge. And one reason why I'm not sure whether he was scared of going up is he was a massive publicity stunt guy. And they said that he was the most famous clergyman in the world, including Pope Leo the 13th. He was really, really famous. He thought that no one should be able to read novels.

Sorry? When was this? This was in the 1860s. People frowned on novels back then, didn't they? You were supposed to be reading Greek. He said that anyone who read novels shouldn't be allowed to work in an office, a store, a home, a shop, or a factory. And he also thought... Where are you going to work?

In a field? In a field. Yeah, do you get one of Dan's magic jobs drying carpets out for a living? It's not. It's real. Yes, yes. But this guy, the two people who got married, it was, like you say, Mary West Jenkins and Dr. John F. Boynton,

and his doctorate was in geology, and he decided that, as well as doing his wedding up in the hot air balloon, he also was going to make several electrical experiments while he was up there. Cool. So he was like... like mixing business with pleasure. Yeah, she must have been slightly annoyed as he set up the cathode. The balloon was an interesting one.

Well, the owner of the balloon was an interesting man. He was called Thaddeus Lowe. And he had been a spy in the Civil War, but a balloon spy. Right. Yeah. It's so hard to spy on a balloon. You'd think it's quite conspicuous. It's very hard.

Yeah. But, yeah, you're right. He had proposed balloons for use in the Civil War, which they actually were in the American Civil War. And he... What would he do as a spy, though, with the... You would... You know, look around.

Oh, he'd be up there. He'd be up there. So you'd come back and be like, they've got carpets everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He demonstrated it for George Washington, who had died about 40 years earlier.

Sorry, for the White House. He'd gone up in Washington with a telegraph key which linked him to the White House. So he was able to radio down to the White House. You mentioned George Washington by mistake. For no reason. For no reason. Oh, thank you for picking me up on that.

The first actual marriage that did happen eventually. in a balloon was in 1874. It was Mary Elizabeth Walsh and Charles M. Colton, and it was on top of the P.T. Barnum Manhattan Hypnodrome that they had. There was always a balloon on the top of there, and it used to go up all the time. And so they got married on there,

and one of the people who was on there, who was basically Barnum's balloon guy, was called Washington Harrison Donaldson. And he was named Washington after George Washington, hence the connection. And he was a daredevil, and he was amazing. So he used to do high wire acts and so on,

and then when balloons became a thing, he did a thing whereby he would go up in a balloon, but he got rid of the basket, and he would have a bar, just a bar, where he would put his legs over and go up, and he would start doing basically trapeze-style axe, where he was flipping around and so on. And when he got very high,

he would let the gas go down of the fire, and he would come back down. And as he was coming back down, he would drop a human dummy from it, which everyone would see suddenly a plummeting human and it would land on the ground

and inside were business cards and flyers for his act. That's amazing. And so, yeah, and so he used to go around doing this act and eventually Pity Barnum saw him and employed him and what he used to do in the middle of Manhattan

would go up in this balloon before shows and when he was up there he would just throw Barnum business cards and so on. So New York constantly littered with advertising. The balloon was called P.T. Barnum as well, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. Yeah. I thought these guys are pretty brave, actually, because their wedding was postponed by one day

because the balloon burst the day before. It's a good way to get your wedding paid for. It was the idea of the couple, the first wedding, and it was basically a way to get P.T. Barnum to fund their whole wedding and pay their dowry, because it was such good publicity. And also, because these became really popular, if you look through new searches of the late 19th century, balloon weddings were the thing. and it was such a good way to get guest to your wedding if you didn't have mates because thousands of people would come

and sure they're there for the balloon but the photos just say I'm a seriously popular dude and there was one actually I read about one in 1884 this was in Pennsylvania where the couple failed to arrive they freaked out and realized they were too scared to do it and all the promoters were going to have to refund the crowd

because you'd be a paying customer as well as a guest and they decided they weren't going to do this So instead, the balloon's owner and his assistant staged a marriage. They posed as the couple. They got married to each other in this balloon, went up in the air, under-assumed names,

but they only found out four years later. It was actually legally binding. Did they stay, did they fall in love? I really don't want to tell you the answer to that, Andy, because I think it'll ruin your night. Okay, don't tell me. Don't say anything. Okay, we'll leave it there. There was one in 1888.

This was a wedding between Margaret Buckley and Edward T. Davis. 40,000 people came to that wedding to see them go up on the hot air balloon. Unfortunately, the balloon then landed in a swamp, but it kept kind of moving along the swamp, so they were dragged for two miles clinging to the ropes of the balloon, and they finished the rest of the trip by train.

So good. I have a favorite hot air balloon love story. This is an account from someone online. My husband proposed to me on a private, a hot air balloon ride. That's not the story. The pilot told us that one time he had five couples on a larger ride and one of the guys decided to propose to his girlfriend

by having a big sign on the ground where the landing saying, will you marry me? But he didn't put a name on the sign. All five couples were dating and all five of the women thought this is the best proposal I've ever received in my life

and four of them were disappointed. I mean, I think you'd roll with it, wouldn't you? If it's a third date, it's too, you know. You can't roll with it. It's got to be someone. You can't say, oh, yeah, that's mine. And have the other bloke next to you go, no, it's not. It's mine.

Anyway, I love it. There is actually, there was a service that offers, it's called D&D ballooning. I think sadly the company shut down now, but it exists last year. Dun to the Dragons ballooning? You look too excited about that, but no. I think D&D is just the people who run the company. It's in California, and it offers mile-high balloon trips. And basically, what it promises is comfort

and discretion for a couple, it says you've got in your basket the privacy of an enclosed dome tent with your own private view as our discrete pilot ascends to one mile. We provide a CD player, you provide the music blankets,

pillows and imagination, and it lasts an hour. An hour? Five minutes in. Take it back now. Come on. Sir, we haven't actually taken off yet. Come on.

Oh my God. We're going to have to wrap up very shortly. Can I tell you about one balloon hero? Yeah, yeah. Willie Coppins, heard of him? Willie or won't he? Go on. He will.

Will he will, and he did. He was a fighter pilot in the First World War. Belgian man, very brilliant at shooting down observation balloons, right? Which were a major feature of the first World. Reasonable. Look, they were very well defended, right? He was so good at it. They were called Balloon Busters, the pilots who did it.

He shot down nearly 40 balloons during the first of war. which is really big potatoes, okay? The German army was so angry about Willie Coppins. They specifically tried to kill him with a booby-trapped balloon. They put up a balloon with explosives. But get this, once he was being shot at from a German balloon in his plane, and he coolly just flew up and around and parked on top of the balloon until it landed and then just gently slid his plane off and flew away.

Listen, if you're going to give me shit about carpets being laid out entire thing. No way, Buster. I'm a bit skeptical, I have to say. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Dan here. That's an abrupt break. That's an emergency break for a plane to land on a balloon. No, it's a very soft landing, surely.

No, really? The softest landing you could possibly have. If you think about, you'd need a vertical take-off and landing plane, right? Like most planes kind of come into a runway. It might have been a very long balloon that he was like, they had those long balloons that he was landing on. That's the runway. A zeppelin.

A zeppelin. It was a zeppelin. Yeah. Any further questions? Please know. Look, I'd hate to cut this off, but we've got a train to catch. So that's it. That is 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 we've said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep.

Or you can go to our groupieberland. account, which is at No Such Thing, or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. We've also got a link to all the rest of the tour dates of this nerd immunity tour. Oxford, thank you so much. That was so much fun. Thank you for coming out, being with us here tonight.

Really appreciate it. And we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.