No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Worrying About What Might Happen

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

An all-new bumper compilation of silliness with Dan, Anna, James, Andy, Jenny Ryan, Tom Scott, Rhys Derby, Alan Davies and Sandi Toksvig Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to the end of 2020. Oh my days. We made it. It's the end of the year and the start of what hopefully will be an amazing 2021 for all of you guys. What have we got for you? Well, we have our annual clip show. It's massive. It's one and a half hours of all the bits that didn't quite fit in the edits of this year's no such things are fish. I really hope you like it. These are always my favorite episode because they go from one thing to another to another. You never know what you're going to get, but you do know that there'll always be something interesting or something a bit silly. Okay, well, what else is it to say? I suppose our book, funny you should ask, is still available in all shops if you got book tokens. Do people still get book tokens? Well, anyway, it's in the shops. Funny you should ask by the QI elves. And also, next year we hope will be a big year of touring for us as soon as the venues open, we will be back out there to do our thing, meet all you guys, so keep an eye on no such things of fish.com for any details about that.

And I believe there is one show that is currently on sale that will be in London in the spring. So get tickets for that, get our book, enjoy this show, and we'll see you on the other side. Happy New Year! On with a podcast! Hey guys, we've got a quick question. if the date is Wednesday the 31st of December, are you in the last week of the year? Yes.

Yes. Yes. That is incorrect. You're in the first week of the year. I'm afraid you're all have to leave. What, could you not be in both? No, of course you can't be in both. What do you mean?

It's Wednesday the 31st of December. You're in the last week. No, but the week's different, isn't it? Because it's more heavy set on the other side of the week in days. If it's on a scale, it would weigh over to the new year week. wouldn't it? Dan's describing better what the international organization for standardization describes in terms of how to refer to weeks. So, you know, across the world, we have to have the same definition of week one, week two, week three of a year. And the week... I've got to say,

I'm with Andy on this one. Look, the week's up to start on a Monday and we've got to have the same week so that trading and business internationally globally works. So there's an international body that decides what week one is. And the definition of week one of the is the week with the year's first Thursday in it. So if the 1st of January is a Thursday, then week one actually starts on the 29th of December, which is that Monday, right? So week 1 is that.

So if the 31st of December is on a Wednesday, then you're actually in week one of the next year. No, that's insane. You can't have week one beginning two days before the year ends. I'm sorry. It's absolutely matter. No one does things in weeks anyway. You do things in quarters.

When it happens like that, Anna always has her new year's party on Sunday the 28th. of December, don't you? I do. It's an absolutely banging event with me and my cat in attendance. I'm sorry you guys, I've never been able to make it. Just very quickly,

what number Archbishop of Paris do you reckon André Vantois is... Is he the current? 23rd? 22nd. As far as I can tell, he's the 30th. So that's his actual name,

Andre Vantre. And he... Yeah, he was born with the surname, And the best guess is that it was because an sort of ancestor of his was found and adopted, and they were found on the 23rd of a month. And so they were given that surname. Yeah. So, but as far as I can tell, he's the 30th.

There's a lot of breaks in their archbishops over the years. So there might be a few that are not in there. Hey, what's Archbishop Van Tuas' favorite band? I don't know, Andy. What is Archbishop Van Tuas' favorite band? I feel 65. And it's because they have a French name and then a number. Oh, really?

Well, I feel, I feel. No, no, I do understand that. And he's French, and he has a number in his name. Do you know what their favourite punk band is? No, I don't know. It's Blink 182. And that's because French people blink like the rest of us, and there's a number following that. I really think we should move this on.

I've got to get out of here. What is? Bantois' favorite album by Adele. There's a few options there. 21, because he's called 23 and it's just another number. Yeah. Yes. But interesting, you propose it to the original 19.

It's closer, isn't it? Closer to him. Yeah. Are Oliver Adele's albums numbered? Yeah. Oh, mate. Yes. Yeah.

1921. the age she was when... It's actually not the ages anymore. They've become untethered from her age. Got it. I thought, I was thinking, she can't have released 23 albums or 21 albums in her career.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense. There's an Indian lusia called Shiva Keshavan, and he has been a true victim of the Indian government's low prioritising of various Olympic sports. You can understand why the Indian government isn't prioritizing. prior to the luge. Think about the Himalayas. Think about the pre-mo territory you've got for lushing.

I was just thinking that Sean Connery would be a good luge manager like coach, because he'd be like, you're a lusia, you're a lusier. And all the S.Hs, Sean Connery's both got Shiva Keshavan. So he had to train on wheels, not in a proper luge thing.

Because that's normally on ice, isn't it? The luge. He had to make a, a sled basically with wheels on and just train on busy roads. Oh, wow. Just going downhill in the Himalayas. And there's footage of him dodging a herd of goats, which is in the middle of the road. And he has to sort of frantically looge around.

You know Old MacDonald had a farm. Very well. Did you know familiar? Yeah. E.EI.O. Well, the earliest version we have was actually Old McDougal had a farm. E.I.E.I.O. And there's an even earlier version, which is not about a farm.

but it's old Missouri had a mule. He hi, he, hi, hi, ho. And every country around the world has its own version of old McDonald. And they're all on Wikipedia, of course. So in Turkish, it's Alibaba has a farm, I, E.I.O. In Swedish, it's Per Olsen has a farm, E.I.I.O. And in Serbian, it's Svako Yutro, Yer No, Ja, Ye. Organismus na guaday, which means one egg a day gives the strength to human organism.

Wow. They've just gone completely random. I don't understand that at all. Every other country in the world is about someone having a farm, and they're just like, nope, eat your eggs. When planes are actually just coming into land as a normal procedure, the way it works is that they have to get ready miles before. They even see where the airport is.

They've got to get to a certain height. And then there's a couple of things that they have to either see. They've got to either have eyes on the runway or the lights that they can see coming from it to know that they're at the right height. And it's actually the computer on board the airline that makes them make a snap decision about whether or not they were able to land or if they're at the wrong bit. So as they're getting ready to that moment, the computer will just yell out in the cockpit, decide.

That's all they get. She goes, decide. And then they go, yes, we're doing it. Or they have to pull out. Sounds like a TV quiz show. And now it's time to decide. Oh, you wouldn't have wanted to speak boat, but you've died at a blink. That's amazing.

Do they get warning? Is there a sort of, I'm going to have to hurry you here, your time's clear. I hope you've made up your mind because in a minute you're going to have to decide. And then if they go for it, it goes, ooh, interesting. We'll come back after the break to see if you made the right call. There is a problem with being in the centre of America. Someone found out. There was this massive problem that was generated for someone who lives quite near the centre of the US, in fact.

And this is to do with a company called Max Mind. Have you read about this story? About IP addresses. Okay, so it's so weird. Basically, Max Mind is this company who about just over 10 years ago started calculating the location of loads of IP addresses. So you know with your computer, you've got an IP address. MaxMine figured out whereabouts they all were geographically,

and then it could sell that information to companies like Google and Facebook and lots of other people. But often, when you're trying to work out where an IP address is, you can't get it exact. And sometimes it'll just say, this is somewhere in America or somewhere in the US. And so for all of those, MaxMine just default assumed that they were in the middle. So they got the coordinates of roughly the middle of America and said, okay, all the IP addresses that we can't quite place, they just are here.

And it turns out here is a rural farmhouse belonging to someone called Joyce Taylor, who now has 600 million IP addresses registered to her farmhouse. And it's a complete disaster because basically if there's a troll online or if there's someone who's hacked your company or if there's someone doing criminal activity online and the police are tracking them down, they chase up their IP address and they constantly find it's at Joyce Taylor's Farmhouse. And she's just inundated with kind of abuse and people writing her threatening letters

and had no idea why, for about eight years. She was just like, why am I being, what's happening to me? Are we definitely discounting the fact that Joyce is like a massive cybercriminal? She's a criminal mastermind, an 82-year-old criminal mastermind. It's possible. That's funny. Oh, poor Joyce. What choice?

Apparently, that Vern Scholars refer to the novel as around the world in 80 days and the play as around the world in 80 days, but with 80 the digits. So that's how you can tell the difference.

I'll be honest, I didn't get that from when you were reading it out. I saw the fatal flaw in transferring this visual thing in front of me to the audio medium. We're really hoping you were going to say

around the world in 80 plays was what they called the play. He wasn't that. modern guy, you know? People claim you was. You know, no mitten crabs is, if you catch one, is there always a string attached to another mitten crab on the other end? The CIA, they collected a load of jokes in the Soviet Union in the 80s. That was one of the things they did and that got declassified quite recently. We're not quite sure why they did it, but it might have been a way to kind of gauge what people were thinking in the Soviet Union or maybe a way of undermining the

government or stuff. So they found stuff like, there are two men waiting in a line to buy vodka. The first man says, I've had enough. Save my place. I'm going to shoot Gorbachev. Two hours later, he returns to claim his place in the line. His friend said, did you get him? And the man replies, no, the line there was even longer than the line here. That's a good joke. It's not bad. A man goes into a shop. A man goes into a shop and says, you don't have any meat, do you? No, replies to sales lady. We don't have any fish. It's a store across the street that doesn't. doesn't have any meat. Again. That's good. It works, doesn't it? I think that's really good. Yeah. Were they planning on distributing the big book of CIA jokes about your country?

It feels like it, doesn't it? My favourite person to have sort of an Olympic career and then a follow-up is a guy called Ross Rebagliati. He was the first person ever to win gold at the Winter Olympics in snowboarding, which was in 1998. And it was really sad for him because he won gold and then he was drugs tested and they found cannabis in his system. And so he was immediately had his gold rescinded. He was put in jail for maybe importing it into Japan, I think, which is where the Olympics were. And then within about 72 hours,

they then gave the gold medal back because they went, actually, cannabis is not on our list of banned substances, as it wasn't back then. But he insisted that it was from secondhand smoke. You know, he hadn't smoked weed for almost a year and it was nothing to do with him. He was furious. But he has now gone on to found,

a company called Legacy Brands, a CBD and Cannabis Consumables Company, and has a series of different strains of weed named after him. So that's his job now. And Cissy wasn't stoned then, but is stoned all the time now. I guess you can never guess what's going to happen, can you? Because the 1984 Olympics promotion by McDonald's about you could get a free item off the menu every time the US team got on the podium. I don't know what you've got, Big Mac for gold or something, fries for something.

they didn't expect the Soviet Union to drop out of the Olympics. Bloody American National Anthem was playing all the time. And I think there was even a shortage of hamburger buns because people got so many. So you've got to be careful what you offer up, I think. Yeah, at any Olympics, saying that about Team USA is not right, cool. No, you're right. You want to make it Team Togo.

Just be super cautious. Yeah, I think the Danish basketball team. I think you're going to make it quite niche in specific. Jamaica Winter Olympics. I had one year where it looked a bit dodgy. I might have lost a few burgers, but otherwise, you say. One more thing. Just that you can bite.

So I think you were talking at the start about how audio stuff can also maybe trigger weird hallucinations or change your brain makeup. And actually, they have now invented headphones, which I think are either on the market now or they're coming onto the market soon, which send electrical impulses into your brain. and they cause it to release more, like, dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin, like happiness hormones, essentially. And they're called, I think they're called Nirvana headphones.

So they stimulate the vagus nerve in your brain, apparently, which then releases all those neurotransmitters, and they'll do it in time to the beat of the music you're listening to. So you could even be listening to The Verve or something, but you'd be over the moon. Oh, unnecessary burn on the Verve. Hey, I love the VIRV, but they're not upbeat. Yeah, but I've heard that they've tried that, but the drugs don't work, so it's...

Hey! Wasn't there a big clash in East Berlin about updating the traffic light men? Really? Yeah, the East had particular traffic light men, and they were called Ample Mention, I think, which literally means exactly that, the traffic light men. And one of the things that was proposed is replacing all of them, And people in East Berlin particularly said, no, we really like these particular traffic sides

that's sort of something very recognizable, very iconic about this half of the city. And so those, I think, were rolled out. And in fact, this is not useful for anyone at home, but we have one in a jar just here. Oh, that's what this is a buildup for. Right. Okay, let's see it.

Can we see it? Okay, yeah, it's here. So this is a little tin of tea. This is the ampulman. Yeah. And you'll recognize the stop and the go. You know what? The Go Man looks a bit like an old monopoly man kind of thing,

because that does a bit. Yeah. We've all seen lots of these, right? These are in Berlin. Well, it's a big souvenir thing in Berlin now. Yeah, yeah. But also on the traffic lights is the noticeable thing. Exactly.

Where you see a traffic light go and you're like, I mean, there are the souvenirs, but they're also the tap. Well, they were kept. That's sort of the point. Yeah. Yeah, they're really cool. They're much more jaunty. Mm.

I just not sure that show and tell is ever going to work as a podcast. It works when you had your own tight, so maybe... The American Dairy Association has a page on its website called Famous Cows of the World. And it's a good read. There are a whole bunch of cows on there, but my favourite was Elm Farm Ollie. Do you guys know about Elm Farm Ollie?

Well, neither did I, but it was the first cow to fly, and also the first... When I say fly, I should be clear, the first clown to ride in an aeroplane. A clown? Clown? So it was a clown as well as a cow. It's a clown cow? Must have had massive shoes.

Had a red nose and huge shoes. I've lost it. It was the first cow to take a flight and it was the first cow to be milked mid-flight. This was in Missouri in 1930. And you know how all these things have some kind of superior scientific justification? And so the justification for this,

when they paid huge amounts of money to take it up, was they wanted to observe the mid-air and high-altitude effect on animals in flight of their milking and of their milk. And it turns out it didn't make a difference to the milk. But, oh, there was a farmer called Bunce, Elswath Bunce, who milked her, who then also became the first person to milk a cow mid-flight. So a huge sequence of first for Elm Farm Ollie. Yeah.

It's good to be the one who's milking Elm-Farm Olly, because if she asks you to smell her flour, it's always going to be milk that squirts out of it. your mouth. Okay. Dan, do you want to try a better punchline to that protection? Yeah, I'd like to see you try, Dan.

The master is spoken. Possibly tell that. Has wonky shut down now? It has, yeah. Yeah, has it? What? No, it had new management a few years ago. I've definitely had it in the last year.

I can guarantee they don't do that kind of rude service anymore. They don't do the rude service. All their trip advisor reviews went downhill, after they stopped being rude to the customers, because that was part of the experience. Like, three stars. The guy was really nice to me who gave me my meal. It was amazing. I went there once, and we sat down on the table.

It was me and three other people. And then halfway through the meal, literally halfway through the meal, and we need this table now. You need to go upstairs. And they took all of us and made us sit on a much smaller table upstairs while they put other people on our table. Wow. I had a meal there with Tom Davis,

who is people who will know him on TV as King Gary and a few other TV shows. And we went there and they put us on a big round table where there was an entire family sitting and we had an old grandmother sitting in between us. We weren't even next to each other on the table. Oh, it was wonderful. Great days, wonkies. Anyway, our podcast.

Yeah, back to the podcast. Do you guys know about the Devinish Fibs family? No. No. Well, they're an extremely prominent family in a sense in that their names are all over, park benches across the UK. And so this started to be spotted about 10 years ago, maybe a bit more.

And there are sort of park benches with, you know, there's plaques on in memory of. And they're always in memory of someone, Devonish Fibbs. So, for instance, in Dartmouth Park, near where I used to live, there's one that was in memory of winter Devonish Fibs. And it said, like to have everything just so. And then the plaque was at a lopsided angle. And there was another one somewhere, which was in memory of Barbara, Devonish Fibbs. Fibbs, whose wish was to have a bench plaque inscribed with her last words.

Unfortunately, her last words were, and then it's a series of expletives, the asterisked out. That's really funny. Currently, scientists are trying to find out who killed the dodo with a CT scanner. Whoa. There was more than one dodo, though. That's true. Yes. No, that's true.

What do you mean, though? So do you mean like a specific one, or is it? I do mean a specific one. There's a dodo in Oxford's Museum of Natural History, and it's a celebrity dodo, actually, although these days all dodoes are celebrities. But this is the one that Lewis Carroll may have seen when he was writing Alice in Wonderland, and it might have inspired the dodo in that. But scientists thought that it had been killed some way or that it died of natural causes, actually, because they thought it had been brought to the UK. I thought they threw it on a bonfire or something. I thought they destroyed it.

Yeah. Well, they've still got the skull, all right? That's the main thing. And so they put the skull in a CD scanner, and they found it didn't die of natural causes. It was shot in the head with a shotgun. So that is the opposite of natural causes. And what they're trying to do now, they've got a little bit of the lead that kind of impacted with the back of the skull. And they're trying to find out what country the lead from those shotgun pellets was mined in.

And then they're going to try and find out where the shot was made from that lead. And basically they're on the longest cold case ever, where they're trying to find out 400 years they're who pulled the trigger. What are they going to do? If prison is great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren? Yeah, exactly. They're going to get a knock on their door. Where were you on the 4th of March, 1596?

I was just looking into the quirks of Iceland, the country. I didn't know this. Beer was banned there until 1989. Really? It was banned in 1915. They had a referendum and they decided to ban beer. and then in 1921 they had to change it a bit. They legalised wine because Spain threatened to stop buying Iceland's fish

if Iceland kept on refusing to import Spanish wine. So they had, okay, I can't find one has some wine. And then they allowed very, very weak beer, but they didn't allow normal strength beer. And this backfired badly because people just started putting vodka into their incredibly weak beer and making a kind of horrible beer and vodka cocktail. Some of the spirits that you get in Iceland are unbelievable. I went to, there's a restaurant that specialises in slightly sort of quirky food,

and I ordered the fermented chuck. And it comes in a jar, sealed kilner jar with a rubber thing and a very, very strong glass of, we call it shnaps, I don't know what you call it, it's a very strong, pure alcohol thing. And I said to the guy, I didn't order the shnaps, he said, you're going to need it. And because for the sake of the other diners, you have to open the jar really, really quickly. and grab a little spoonful of this stuff,

and stick in your mouth and close it, because it smells so terrible. And the taste was the most disgusting thing I've ever had. It burned the back of my throat. And I did take the shnaps as a shot. I drank it so quickly, anything to make the taste of the fermented shark go away. I really thought you were going to turn it around and say,

the amazing thing is it smells awful, but the taste is devised. No, it smells awful and also tastes awful. Horrendous. Hey, one bit of royal etiquette, which I think is upheld in the royal family, as opposed to being upheld by the tabloid press, is eating etiquette, which is that, and it makes sense, so the queen is served first.

You would serve the queen first at a dinner. And then when she stops eating, really you're supposed to stop eating as well. And this has existed for a few hundred years, and it was really difficult with Queen Victoria, because this was the practice then as well. But Queen Victoria, the thing about her was, she was incredibly greedy.

used to eat extremely fast. Like her advisors used to say stop eating so fast. She got terrible indigestion. She could eat seven courses in half an hour, apparently. And she was always served first. And so the people who were served last, by the time they got their plates, they were sort of immediately whipped away from them again because Queen Victoria had inhaled her first course.

I've got to say, Anna, we've been for dinner quite a lot of times. And you will not let a plate go if there's any food left on it. No matter whose plate it was. Yeah. Is this why you've never met? the queen. I did it once and I've been banned from dining with the queen since, desperately trying to lick everyone's plates as they were taken away.

I had a quick look at some things that you could get sent to prison for in Finland. Oh, yeah. In 2015, the police asked the members of the public that if they saw a pizza that was on sale for under six euros to inform the police, but the way that they saw it is it's impossible to run a business where you sell pizzas for less than six euros. It's just the ingredients are too much. It's completely impossible.

So if people are doing that, it means that they can't be paying the tax on the pizza, which means that they must be tax avoiders. And so they literally asked people to say, if you see any pizza on sale for underneath that price, send us the menu and we'll arrest the guys. That's so funny. That is a bargain price for a whole pizza. Yeah, it is.

Unless you're in a shop. In a shop, it's a kind of normal price for a shop pizza. That's a very, very posh shop pizza, really, isn't it? But, I mean, there are pizzas around the corner that you can take away delicious for a fiver. And I'm now wondering if it's my responsibility to be informing on them. Just tell the police in Finland, because obviously the taxes in Finland are a bit higher than they are in the UK. So probably it's more of a seven-pound thing in the UK. Oh, you feel bad.

If you've got the whole staff and structure of the co-op sent to Finnish prison, what are you in for? I'm also in for selling the... pizza. There's the pizza wing, isn't there? The hardened criminals. I went on eBay to look at what the most expensive items currently on eBay are that you can buy that are related to Lincoln. Did you find the horse hair?

Yes, so good. So there's a lock of hair. There's a lock of hair from the horse you rode in the 1860 election called Old Bob. And old Bob attended his funeral. and for just $1,250, you can buy a hair of this horse. One hair? Actually, yeah, it's not a long. It's one hair.

A single hair. Yeah. Like, if you open the envelope, that could just fall onto the carpet and you've lost it. If you're a mafioso and you don't have the resources to put a whole horse's head on someone's pillow. I'm just thinking that, you know, as a middle-aged man who's losing his hair, I shouldn't be letting it go down the drain. I should be saving this in case I become president. or like the president's ass or something in the future. I don't know.

Surely this is our next tour match, Hark and Sam. I've got just one last thing about sort of ingenious ways of catching poachers, people who are trying to illegally catch all of these fish. During the early 80s to about 1998, there was a guy who worked for the California U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and his name was Terry Gross. And he was sort of sick of the fact that there were poachers that would go in the early morning.

to catch all this salmon when that was highly illegal. So you usually had to stop half an hour after sunset, and they would drive out at two or three in the morning. And they would get away with it because the tracks that were leading to all of these lakes were monitored by other poachers. So if they saw a truck come down that they knew was one of the wardens, they would say, quickly, get the boat in, get out of there. So they had plenty of warning.

So he had no idea what to do. But then he came up with this idea of putting on a wetsuit, getting into the water before the day ended, and waiting patiently. And what he would do is while they were fishing salmon, he would loosen the glove of his wetsuit. And as they were fishing, it would hook onto his glove. And he would slowly splash around.

And they would start going, oh, my God, I've caught a massive salmon. And he would go harder and harder. And they're like, this is the biggest salmon we've ever got. They've got this on recording these words. And they would slowly come in and they would get to him. And as they got right up to him, he would say, good morning, gentlemen, state fish and game warden, you're under arrest. And he would pull out.

He would pull out of his wetsuit, a citation book. and he would give them their finds, and then he would go back in and try and catch more people. And Ira Glass, NPR, this American life, looked into it, and they found that there were plenty of these people that used to do this, sit there for hours and get caught by the fishermen. Yeah. Wait, but did they, so did they have their heads under water while they were wagging their glove above the water?

No, because it was so dark, so they would sort of, yeah, sit above and, yeah. But just in a nice little... thought, it's brilliant. This guy's an amazing guy. That's real commitment to the job. I don't know if I'd sit in freezing cold water for a full day in a pond to catch a poacher. I had a neighbour once, an elderly

neighbour, who would sleep in his car to try and catch car thieves. Really? And he caught them. And he actually waggling keys out of the window as soon as someone grabs them.

I was just thinking that this guy who's pretending to be a fish, basically, he's lucky that they're not catching them with dynamite, isn't he? Yeah. Or a car back thing. Yeah, exactly.

Well, actually, in the... In the example, in this interview, they heard somebody going, get the net, get the net. And then another voice goes, get the net. Heck, get the gun. So one more thing about Olympians who have other jobs. You know, the Brian brothers, the tennis guys.

The tennis, Brian's, yeah. We absolutely love the Brian Brothers. So it's sort of best doubles partnership ever of all time. They've won a billion Olympic medals. And they have a second, I don't know if I can call it a job, because I don't know how much profit they make from it, but they also are a band. They have the Brian Brothers band.

And so Bob plays the keyboard, and Mike is on guitar or drums, but he's not on the drums when the drummer of the counting crows joins them, which he does sometimes. So like legit band. and I mention it because everyone has to look up the 2009 song Autograph, which I'd forgotten about, but it features cameos from Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. And I'm telling you, I wish to God it was this Andy Murray here

because that would have been less awkward than what they make Andy Murray, the tennis player do. It's about what a horrible choreo is signing autographs after matches. And Andy Murray's little rap section in the middle includes the lyrics during Wimmy, It gets really crazy. My hand cramps up and my mind gets hazy. And look, I'm going to leave people to imagine the rest. Andy Murray's rap section is never, the words that should never, ever be put together.

Another fun thing about ghost crabs is that they're very house proud, but only when they are sexually mature, which maybe is the same for humans. So when males are not sexually mature and if you get female house crabs, they borrow into the sand and they leave these tiny little holes. in the sand. They're smaller than a tiny coin, but they can go four or five feet down, which I was think is kind of cool. Anyway, they borrow holes into the sand, and they just throw the sand anywhere. The sound that they've used to borrow, they just chuck it all over the beach. But as soon as they hit sexual maturity, they suddenly sculpt the sand into a perfect pyramid. And this is to sort of advertise themselves to ladies, we think. So a woman can look across a beach and she'll spot the sexually mature men by the perfect pyramids that are next to their

entrances and you'll see the little entrance and then it's a little crabby footsteps, footprints going to the pyramid. Do you think that if a ghost crab goes to Egypt, they look over and they go fucking hell, there is a very attractive enormous ghost crab over there. Yeah, very intimidating trip, very intimidating stagdo for those males. So you can find out a lot of things from CT scans of mummies. They try to they CT scanned an Egyptian priest called Nas Yamun, and they scanned his throat and his vocal cards, and they could find out what his voice was like.

So they did the CT scan of his vocal cords. They created a 3D printed vocal tract, and then they kind of fired air down it, and they could work out exactly what he sounded like. And it's basically people on the internet think he sounded a bit like Britney Spears. Cool. Oh, I thought I thought I'd heard this one. I thought he just went,

he goes like, mea, like that. And you know how she goes, mea, mea, mea, mea. James, that's your cat you're thinking of. Oh, yeah, sorry. That's not, that's not Britney Spears. But yeah, there was basically, the sound did the rounds on social media, and a lot of Britney Spears fans were very excited about it. Wow.

I'm some released material from 2,000 years ago. Well, the interesting thing is, like, Nessiamun would have, he was a priest, So he would have done a lot of singing and chanting in the temples. So basically, if you went back to ancient Egypt and you walked past a temple, it would sound like someone's singing baby one more time. Wow. He wouldn't have been dressed as a school girl, though. It seems implausible.

Might have been. There's probably a lot less chess players online than we actually think there are because they create fake accounts and they build them up and up to be sort of well-played chess players with high rankings. and then they play themselves and defeat that person. So it's sort of creating bogus accounts in order to defeat them and then raise your ranking. Imagine if it's just one guy, the whole of chapter.

Have you heard of sandbagging? That's another cheating thing. So weird. This is where you play deliberately badly to qualify for a tournament that is actually a bit beneath you and then you win. You take the brakes off and you thump everybody. That happens in golf as well.

claim. Like you play badly for ages until your handicap gets way worse and then eventually you go right, today's the day that I'm going to try and win the tournament. It's extremely lucked down upon. Yeah. No shit. They've got measures in place, don't they? I think they have actual measures in place now on the chess side to stop that. So I think it's if you ever achieved certain high scores, they look at it and go, well, there's no way that you can now suck that much because you got to this level. And if you won a certain amount of cash prize, like a high cash prize, well, how did you get to that? You must be good. You must be sandbagging us in order to do that. Very embarrassing if you're not sandbagging and you are just having a really bad cup of the

lines. Or you just got lucky one time. Yeah. It happened. I think they had to change the rules or tighten them a few years ago because there was a middle school. It's so sad when you're sort of forcing 12-year-olds to do this. But in Texas, it's quite a lot of. called Henderson Middle School, and they entered a competition where you had to have a ranking under 900, and then they absolutely smashed it. They were investigated, and it turned out they'd lost all of their previous 28 matches, and they're really good, and someone worked out the chances of having lost them all being as good as they were, and it was one in sextillion chance that they could have lost all 28, which is like if there'd been them playing chess since the start of

the universe and everywhere in the universe, it still wouldn't have happened. happen probably. So they were disqualified. But 12 year olds, come on. Okay, I think it's not impossible that some people get to a really good position on chess.com because they're only playing people who are deliberately losing in order to Sandbag. So they think they're incredible. They win a big cash prize and then the next time they play it, their deficiencies are revealed. And then they get banned from playing because chess.com thinks they were the ones doing it. It's absolutely minefield. It's a vicious cycle. Other people who go down

sort of scavenging and hunting around the lost rivers are the Tibern, it's Tibern, is that the pronunciation? Is it the Tibern Angling Society? Yes, the Tibern Angling Society. It's just wonderful. They made up once a year to report on the fish they found.

It's always zero. So it's not the greatest angling society. But they are obsessed with the idea of daylighting, which is the idea of bringing these hidden rivers back to the surface, through destruction of the stuff on top, of bringing the Tyburn back

to being what it once gloriously was. And it's an extraordinary thing that they put together in around 2000, where they put a full report to show how they would do it, where it would go. It would demolish about one billion pounds worth of real estate, unfortunately.

Darling, it's only Buckingham Palace that needs to go, really. It's Buckingham Palace. That's part of their plan. They want to get rid of it. I've one more thing about Houdini's habits at home. When Houdini and his wife had an argument, he would leave, he'd walk around the block,

and then he'd come back, and he would open the door of the room where his wife was and throw his hat into the room, right? If it was thrown out again, she was still angry, and I guess he would do it again. And if the hat remained in the room, she'd calmed down and then they'd go in and resolve it. What if the argument was about him leaving his clothes

hanging around the house on? time like a lot of the arguments in my house are about. So I read a paper called Man and Mungooses in Indian Culture by Derek O'Lodrick. I'm not sure that's how you pronounce his name, but I'll look it up afterwards. And I found the oldest known story about mongooses, and it's from 3,000 years ago. There's a king who's having a feast, and then a mongoose walks in, and half of his body is made out of gold. and he comes in and he rolls in all the food of the feast and the king's like, what the hell are you doing?

And he said, oh, well, I once rolled in the food of a Brahman, like a really holy Hindu guy. And the Brahmin was so holy that he turned, when he rolled in his food, he turned half into gold. And this mongoose is going around looking for another holy person so he can turn his whole body into gold. Right. I don't know if you want your whole body turned into gold.

I'm pretty sure King Midas taught us that, didn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they hadn't come across each other. King Midas didn't turn into gold, did he? Yeah? No, no, no. He turned everything.

He touched into gold. He didn't get a gold finger and then touch his leg and he had a gold leg. I know he regresseded it because he couldn't eat it. But wait a minute. What happened? No, no, he regretted it because you couldn't, well, partly because if you touched another person who he loved, they turned into gold. And that's based on the fact that people don't want to be turned into gold.

Yeah. What happened if with King Midas touched himself? Do we know? Is it in the story or? They didn't do that. in those days, James. It was a cleaner time. There was something about Finland that was actually the original article I read, and it's an amazing fact that I didn't know.

And I can't remember how the journalist Lewis segued into it. But I'm just going to segue into it by saying she also mentioned that Finland's only monarch, the only monarch has ever had, is this German guy who never visited Finland. That's all right, yeah. And this is in 1917. They got independence from Russia. and they started off thinking we want a king, everyone else has got, or a queen, everyone else has got one, where should we find one?

We obviously don't have a royal family here in Finland because we're brand new. And so they picked this guy, Frederick Charles of Hess, and he was a German prince. They designed a crown for him, which I think you can still see on display somewhere in Finland. And then before he even had a chance to enter the country, they changed their mind after a few months. And he abdicated. Oh. That's it. Did he advocate from overseas?

As in he, yeah. Yeah, he was still outside. God, that's so funny. It must have been good in those days when there were all those new countries being formed. And if you were a minor noble in anywhere in Europe, whenever there was a new country, you must have been there with your fingers crossed. Thinking, oh, maybe I'm going to be king of there. You're sitting in the waiting room with all the other potential monarchs going in for their interviews.

I hope that bastard from Schleswig Holstein doesn't get it. He's coming out looking all. cocky, really ace the practical, the waving section of the interview. Here's one quick thing on forgeries. There is a forger, or there was a forger, called Elmere de Horri. He was a Hungarian in the United States, and he did forgeries of loads of people, Picasso, Matisse, and he did loads of forgeries of Medigliani. Okay, and he did so many Medigliani that these days it's impossible to compile a catalogue

of Meddliani's work because we don't know what is real and what is a forgery by this guy DeHori. And the reason I bring it up is because he has a collection of all of his forgeries, and it's run by a guy called Mark Forgey. No. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Who's got extremely fast internet as well, hasn't he? I like to have you guys come across Freddie and Truce Oversteegan? No. Who were... Not today. He's not at the hotel here. They were part of the Dutch resistance, in fact,

and they were 14 and 16 years old, respectively, and they were killers, cold-blooded killers, and they called their kills liquidations, which is quite terrifying. And apparently the 14-year-old actually looked about 12, so it was quite easy for them to get away with killing because no one expected to be killed by a 12-year-old girl. And the way they did it was they had various methods,

but they cycled around quite a lot. I guess cycling was a thing for these resistance ladies. And they would ambush collaborators. So they'd be on two bikes and they'd have pistols in their bike baskets. And they'd ambush them. Or sometimes they'd do a drive-by. So Freddie would be riding the bike and Truss would be on the back. And, you know, cycle past them collaborators

and just shoot them up as you ride by. Oh, God. Wow. Off into the sunset. And what was the liquidation bit? Or was that just a fancy? They would just shoot them as opposed. There was no melting them down. No, no, they didn't have like a vat of acid in their cellar where they dragged Nazi bodies.

Cool. Just get back. What? You didn't melt them down? No, we just did a drive-by and shot them. Well, you got to melt them down, mate. Maybe they did. I guess I didn't look into it enough.

There are a few sort of modern loopholes for companies in Britain that don't have a liquor license. And I was reading about one place, which was there was a new craft distillery in Yorkshire that was being set up in a disused train station. So they'd done it up, and it was going to be for gin, I believe. And it's called Tapling and Meagin Distilleries. And by the time they were about to launch, all the paperwork hadn't been done yet for their license. But they had this big party that they wanted to promote their drinks. So what they had to do was they looked and found a loophole, which is, if you're on a moving train, you don't need a liquor license.

So all trains that you buy alcohol on, they don't need a license. A moving train is exempt from it. And the fact that they were in a train station and they had a parked train there, they got all the guests onto the train, and they took it on a two and a half hour ride just to one... they just went one way, turned around,

well, not even turned around, just drove back again. And did a two and a half hour gin master class once it was in motion. And that allowed them the loophole of having the party still. If you had a bar which had a miniature train on the counter, so it sort of came chew-chewing along with your drink, Does that count? Then you wouldn't need a liquor license.

Maybe you have to be on the train. So if you went to like, what's that sushi place, which has got the conveyor belt. If you got to your own sushi and you sit on the conveyor belt, technically you don't need a license. Don't sit on one of the coloured plates. You will be selected. I was looking at other ways that museums need to preserve their artefacts. And one is from fires, serious problem. And it's a really difficult choice for museums because the main way to get rid of fires is

with sprinkler systems, but obviously if you sprinkle a whole art gallery, then you sort of ruin the paintings that way. So a lot of museums kind of don't do it, and that was a serious problem in Brazil. You might remember a couple of years ago when the main museum in Brazil destroyed 90% of its collection because of a fire, and they just didn't have the adequate protection. But there is one place, the Getty Museum in L.A., which has such cool fireproof systems.

So they have, like they had the big wildfires last year, and they were pretty much licking at the sides of the museum. And the curators were completely chilled out about it because it's so well protected. So it's full of like Rembrandts and manets, but they, first of all, they have a system where the oxygen can get sucked out of the rooms. So as soon as a fire got in there,

it wouldn't be able to breathe. And so it would just immediately go out. So it's like an anti-ventilation system. Cool. And then they also have around the museum, a million gallon water tank. And so as soon as a fire starts coming close, they just start releasing water into the ground

all around the museum, like a moat. It's great. And so firefighters who are fighting the wildfires use the museum as like a rest area and a vantage point to look around at the rest of L.A. and go, well, I guess the art's okay. Wow. Really clever.

That's amazing. Really clever. Well, just speaking of water, there was a museum in Spain, which is the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, which is called Arqua, and they've had a real problem with leaks this year. Now, hang on. Honestly, they get all of their stuff is stuff that's been found underwater, like statues,

which are sunk or with shipwrecks or anything that's come from the bottom of the ocean, and they have hundreds of thousands of things in there, but they also have leaks in the basement and a lot of damp causing problems with the wall, and they're really worried about it, and they reckon that it's going to wreck all of the things, which have been on the was for thousands, hundreds of years. Oh, no. Have you guys heard of at Nuclear Trains, a Twitter account?

No. This is a really cool one. So it's a Twitter bot, and it's made by two scientists who are called Matt Allenson and Keir Little. And what it does is it tracks trains which are carrying nuclear waste across the UK. So these trains go. I didn't know they existed, actually. Sorry.

I didn't know that were trains that had nuclear waste. Right. They're yet to tweet. No, no, no. Well, yeah, I mean, it's not common knowledge, but you have to transport radioactive containers and trains are not a bad way of doing it. They're very tightly sealed.

And these guys, they're not pro or anti-nuclear. They genuinely are just in it for the trains, as they say. And they have clarified that the radiation you would get, Because sometimes these pass along platforms, you know, they go through Brixton or whatever, quite near passengers. But they've said that the radiation you would get, if you're on the platform, and one of these trains went by will be like you'd just eat in one banana. Isn't that amazing that everyone on the platform has just eaten the equivalent of one banana? But would you feel it? Would you feel full? You don't.

Everyone slips over on the platform. Yeah. No, they don't emit bananas. They just get that much radiation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. But that's quite dangerous because if you're such a banana lover

that you're constantly operating on the banana eating cusp of getting radiation poisoning. And you manage it very careful. You know, you're eating 350 bananas a day and you know you're only 351 would tip you over the edge. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. What happens then, Andy, if a train full of bananas passes by,

what is the radiation level in that at that speed? That kills you immediately. They have to transport bananas one by one, don't they? That's why they're so expensive once they get to the ship. job. Do you know that this is one of my favorite totally random facts, but you know, Penny Mordant, who was very briefly actually defense secretary last year. And before that was International Development Secretary. You know, she's named after a Royal Navy frigate. Wow. She's named after HMS Penelope. That's so funny. Isn't that weird? That's a really good. A giant frigate. It's because she's from an

Army family and actually it was known as HMS Pepper Pot because it was shelled so many, so many times in World War II. So she could easily be Pepper Pot modern. Oh. Didn't she do that diving shows? Is that Ireland's. Pepper Potts is Iron Man's girlfriend. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe that's why they didn't go with Pepper Pot. They didn't want her to be confused. Why is she called Pepper Potts? It's a weird name.

It's because she comes from a comic book like all these characters that they often have. They often have quite plenty names. And illiterate names, don't they? Yeah, good point. I read about one plane crash or, you know, emergency landing in 2013, this guy called John Pedersen. And he realized that his plane had had a little bit of damage and he wasn't going to make it all the way to the nearest airports.

This was in around Chicago. And so he saw a long road and he thought, well, you know, that's probably the best way to go. I'm going to try and stop on this road. But obviously there's traffic on this. this road so he doesn't want to hit any. And what he managed to do was exactly time it so that when the lights went red and everyone stopped, that's when he landed in the middle of this intersection.

Isn't that amazing? Wow. That's his story. He's sticking to it. I was reading this article about it in the Chicago newspaper and they said that he landed and didn't hit anyone and he was in the middle of this intersection. And then the lights changed and two cars just went and didn't notice him and crashed into him. what?

And then just, apparently, it says, and then mysteriously sped off. So they kind of drove, hit this plane, and then thought, oh shit, I've just hit a plane, and they just did a hit a run on this. Left the scene of the accident. So weird.

Oh, I can't be bothered to fill the form in on this one. No one's going to believe that, are they? No, I'm never going to get this sort of claim. This plane just pulled out in front of me. People always think that pneumatic technology is going to be the next big thing. I think there was a lot of excitement in the US about 40 years ago that it was going to be how we all disposed of our rubbish. And so Disneyland, I think, was a pioneer of this, right?

So their entire garbage disposal system is fully pneumatic. So if you're in Disneyland, you put something in a bin, and then it drops down into a tunnel system, and every 20 minutes, it just gets sucked about 60 miles an hour to a collection point. There are a lot of theme park nerds who are about to get angry at you because it's the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida, not Disneyland. I guarantee you're going to... Thank you for that correction.

I got to do a behind-the-scenes tour there once, so I actually got to see some of the tunnels that those go through. And you're just kind of walking through the backstage tunnels, and there's just this tube next to you where every 20 minutes or so, you just hear this... Hang on, so do you have to sort of dive out the way every 20 minutes? No. No, it's just a tube on a wall.

It's not like a transatlose. How big is the tube? Can you fit a human in it? It's 20 inches diameter, I think. Can you fit a mouse in it? 20 inches. Okay. That's pretty big. Yeah, I've been to Disneyland and Disney World as well, and the rides, I don't really like them as much.

I prefer their universal ones, the rides. But if there was a garbage shoot thing, then I would be definitely going for that. You could sell T-shirts saying, why don't you get sucked off at Disneyland? Hey! Like the rubbish. through our pneumatic tube system. I will argue with you for like half an hour that Universal's rides are terrible compared to Disney's,

but we do not have the time for that. Have you heard of Jebediah Buxton? No, I don't think so. My favourite plaque-e in the UK, lived in Derbyshire. The label is Mental Calculator. So Jebediah Buxton lived in the early 18th century. We think he was an autistic savant,

people who could do unbelievable calculations in their head. So, Jebediah Buxton was once asked after a church sermon, what did you think of the sermon? And he said, oh, I just counted how many words there were in Ed. He just gave the word count. That's so good. I know. He was completely self-taught, not formally trained at all,

and didn't know much about anything except numbers, but knew everything about numbers. So he walked around the local area, which is called Elmton, which is about 1,000 acres, and he could give its size not only in acres, but also in square inches. Wow. He was amazing.

Sorry, I have no idea what you just said because I was trying to count the number of words you were saying. Not as easy as it sounds, is it? It really isn't. It really is not. If you get a seal and you blindfold it and you give it a pair of earmuffs, then it can't find fish.

I'm not surprised. Yeah. I'm not surprised at all. Actually, sorry, I've misread this. They can find fish if you blindfold them and give them me a muffs. Okay, that's gone from being an incredibly underwhelming fact to being quite interesting. And it's because they use their whiskers, right? And the whiskers can tell the movements in the water.

And this is amazing. So when fish swim, we talked before that they have lots of eddies and vortices and stuff like that, which they leave in the water, the seals whiskers can detect these tiny little vortices in a fish that swam past 30 seconds ago. So it swam past 30 seconds ago and it can still feel where it was and then it can still follow the track of the fish to get that even if it's wearing earmuffs.

Wow. That is amazing. Can it tell sort of the time that's passed rather than up to 30... Can they be like, oh, 15 seconds ahead because they can tell the strength of the... Wait, they can't tell the future. Not the future.

What I'm saying is they could count up to 30, but when they feel it, let's say it's a wake that comes past them at 15 seconds after it's been there. Can they know it's 15 seconds? I don't know if they can count up to 30. I don't know if they know it's exactly 30, but I think they will have a basic idea of time and will know that the vortices will be stronger

if it has gone more recently past. I mean, it's like smelling something. You know, you feel it getting stronger as you get closer, don't you? Yeah, you don't, when you're trying to find something in your house where the smell's coming from, you're not counting the... You know, your nose isn't saying that's exactly five meters away, but you can tell them it's closer or further. You guys don't do that?

I think if you want to sue anyone, you should sue the makers of Sherlock Holmes Baffled. Have you guys seen that movie? No. Oh, yes. It's from 1900. It's the first ever movie with Sherlock Holmes in it, and it's an American silent film.

And basically, it's very much against the canon of Sherlock Holmes, because what happens is people keep kind of stealing things from under his nose and then using trick photography they just disappear and then you just get a picture of Sherlock Holmes going, oh, what happened there? Why did they disappear? And then they reappear in another part of the room and then they steal something else and then disappear again and it goes on like that for a couple of minutes.

And I just don't think that that's really... I mean, first of all, he doesn't solve anything. He just stands out looking confused. Yeah, he's baffled. Yeah. Well, that was made in 1900, I believe, right? Is that right, James? So there's another one, which I'd love to see, 1916,

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. And this was a movie where Sherlock Holmes was sort of lampued by Douglas Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who was one of Hollywood's leading actors at the time. He was a swashbuckling adventurer, and along with Charlie Chaplin, they set up UA, United Artists, and he was a huge influence in Hollywood back in the day.

and he played basically the druggie version of Sherlock Holmes, really bringing up that side of his character. So the way that in the movie he was presented, he wasn't called Sherlock Holmes. He was called Coke Any Day, E-N-N-Y-D-A-Y as his surname. And he had a bandolier of syringes that he wore across his chest. So he was constantly injecting himself as the movie went along with cocaine. Yeah.

He had a clock with the clock face. says eats, drinks, sleeps, and dope instead of the numbers, so he would know when to inject himself. And the idea is that Coke Any Days was trying to find all of these drug barons, and once he caught them, he would sample all the drugs that they had as he was busting them. And Fairbanks hated the movie after it came out. It was only a two-reelor, and he just said, this is horrific.

But that's one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes movies as well. As a parody. 1960, yeah. But Dan, that was the first year as the first full-length Sherlock Holmes film. But this was a bit more serious because it wasn't a mad cocaine rob. He was played by William Gillette, who was a distant cousin of the Gillette Razor family. Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

And William Gillette was a really interesting guy. So he only played Sherlock Holmes in one movie, but that was after he'd played him on stage. about 1,300 times. He'd come up with a stage version of it. And he and Arthur Conan Doyle were actually friends. They, I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle was probably pleased because he managed to work out a way of doing the character well on stage and it was respectful and all of this, but also entertaining.

And when they met, I really like this. William Gillette, they were meeting, I think, on the same train. And Gillette got off the train, dressed as Holmes. And then he found Arthur Conan Doyle. And he examined. having him through a magnifying glass. And that was, from that point onwards, they were firm friends. Conan Doyle loved it.

Yeah. That's, it's a risky move, isn't it? Yeah. It really is, yeah. Yeah, he might think you were taking the piss a little bit. But we also, we had temperance bars in Britain, which were super popular around the end of the 19th century, again, with this big push to stop people drinking. And apparently, for every little mill town, there would be at least three.

temperance bars, which is essentially like a, I mean, like a milk bar. It's a cafe. I think they used to be not that long ago. There was definitely one in Lancashire, I know that much. Well, there's one left now, and it's Fitzpatrick's in Lancashire. You're absolutely right. And the owner of Fitzpatrick's in 2012, he'd just been on hairy bikers actually

in talking about the great stuff about non-alcoholic drinks like Dandelion Burdock and how great abstinence is and how popular the bar still was. and then he was done for drink driving. Oh. Have you guys heard of the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the Greggs? What? No, but I can understand that. Okay.

Gregs are. Well, no, I've tricked you with my words. This is the story of the only nuclear bomb that has ever been dropped on American soil by an American plane. Okay. And it fell on a family who were called the Greggs. They lived in South Carolina, parents, three kids. their cousin. Everyone was playing, the kids were playing in the yard next door to the garden, right?

Perfectly normal afternoon. High above them in the sky, there's a plane, which is doing a training exercise with a real nuclear bomb where they have to transport it across the country. So training exercise, there had been some kind of mess up with getting it sort of locked into its its sort of hangar thing, you know, it's hanging there above the Bombay doors. So the captain sends a crew member to adjust the locking mechanism. The crew member can't quite get a handle. These are huge bombs. It looks like a, you know,

it looks like a whale, weighs about three tons. The crew member climbs slightly up the side of the bomb and reaches up to grab something to get a handhold. Unfortunately, what he grabs is the emergency bomb release mechanism. Right. And then does he fly down on it like in Dr. Strangelove? So, well, the bomb falls onto the bomb bay doors, right? which crumple like paper.

The crew member makes an X shape with his body and just about stays inside the plane. Okay? The bomb is now falling towards the completely unaware Greg family house. It lands in their garden. It makes a crater 15 metres across and 10 meters deep. No one is killed. The family are all injured, but they, you know,

they became superheroes. No. They become superheroes. The family's chickens, unfortunately, were vaporized. But thank God the bomb did not go fully nuclear. It kind of had the safety catch on. But then, amazingly, the crew were so apologetic. They were so mortified.

They'd done this. And they wrote to the family apologising, and they stayed in touch for years with the crew, this family, the great. Even to the extent that one of them visited the family for a week's holiday many years later. Wow. That's so nice. That's incredible. That must have been an embarrassing moment because I used to get embarrassed enough. you know when you had to knock on your neighbor's door

and say, I'm really sorry, I've kicked my football into your garden. I am so sorry, I have dropped my nuclear bomb in your backyard. In the Vietnam War, I don't think we've ever mentioned Operation Wandering Seoul, have we? Which was one of the tactics that the US used against Vietnamese soldiers, which was to play ghost noises incredibly loudly out of helicopters and from US soldiers sort of hidden in Vietnam, they'd have these big boomboxes and play ghost noises.

That doesn't seem like it would work because helicopters are extremely loud. And it's not like they're not like they can sneak up on you and then play this noise. You're going to be the first thing is you hear the helicopter. And you're going to go, why are ghost driving helicopters now? That doesn't make any sense. You're so right. The idea was that in Vietnam, the belief is that if you don't get a proper burial, then your soul wanders the earth.

And so they actually recorded South Vietnamese people. They recruited South Vietnamese people to record themselves shrieking and screaming and saying, my friends, I've come back to let you know that I am dead. I'm dead. Don't tend up like me. Go home quickly. Wow. Really?

Crazy. And the Vietnamese soldiers mainly didn't believe them. And all it did was give them a target to return fire to. Oh, no. That would still scare me. I have to say, if the four of us were out, you know, in a jungle and we were scared and a boombox had a voice of saying Alex Bell saying, oh, don't come over here.

I'm dead. I get scared by that. What situation? Why are we in the jungle, Dan? I mean, how badly wrong is our tour gone? That we're on foot in Vietnamese jungle. And why does it take a boombox and a helicopter and the jungle for you to pay any attention to Alex Bell?

Alex, if you're listening, here's how you get us. to actually upload the podcast correctly. When you say there are all these museums around license, some of them do sound, I would say, of limited interest. So there's a museum, there's an island called Jaime, and there's a collector on there, who's a collection, museum, whatever you like. It's a lifetime of paper napkins,

which are organised by theme into binders. And there's a photo of her online. Her sofa is covered in binders, full of paper napkins. Does anybody else feel in an overwhelming sense of sadness? Well, there's Natins there to wipe your tears away, Sandy. Yeah, that's so true. It's a place to have a cry.

They have a museum of sea monsters, but the way that they've done that is they have the stories of sea monsters, like any museum might do. But the founders, they phoned every single care home in Iceland, and they asked for all of the elderly residents, do you know any stories about sea monsters that have happened in your history or have you heard any stories and they collected all of those and they're all the stories that are in the museum,

which I think is a really good way of finding social history, isn't it? Yeah. So wonderful. But that's the origin of Grimm's fairy tales in the first place, isn't it? The Grim brothers didn't write them. They went around and collected them. They really? Mostly from women, yeah.

I was a woman. I think she was called Daughter Wilder who gave her. lots of the stories, but they went around and particularly older women asked them for the stories that they remembered. I mean, really, we ought to be doing more of that. I think that kind of gathering of stories is a wonderful thing. So good for them. That's great. Yeah, it sounds wonderful. It sounds like an incredible filing system, but done as an entire country, where they're all dedicated to filing one aspect of social history. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, yeah, it's incredible. With the Grim Brothers, I read a story, which I really hope is true.

I always keep meaning to look it up, which is when they were gathering the stories, one of the brothers was trying to get a great story off a sailor or some guy who knew a bunch. And he said, what can I give you to give me your story? And the sailor needed new trousers. So the Grim brother gave his trousers on the spot to this guy to wear and then gave him his story. And he took it down sort of trouserless as he was taking it. I love that kind of, I need your story. What do you need?

My trousers is fine. Go for it. Wait. Did the guy who was talking to not have any trousers on? No, he probably just... Was he approaching a trouserless man and saying, tell me your story. I think a trouserless sailor, there's another story there.

Wait, was it the story of Winnie the Pooh? Actually, in Berlin, there was a traffic jam this year that was in the news, which was... This is in February. and this was created by one German artist, called himself an artist called Simon Wechert, who created a traffic jam by just pulling a hand cart. So he was on foot and pulling a hand cart behind him, carrying 99 phones.

So how Google Maps works is when it's giving you traffic updates, it assesses all the number of phones in a certain area and then assumes that those are lots of people in cars and then assumes that that means there's a huge traffic jam. So Google assumed massive traffic jam on this one bridge, and it redirected traffic around it. And this guy was just him on his own, walking to the center of Berlin. He actually walked past Google's offices just to do a sort of middle finger up to them, I guess.

That must be so freaky for the guys at Google. They must be, oh my God, the traffic jam. It's coming this way. It's an invisible one. They're the worst. That's hilarious. They claim to be supportive. A Google spokesperson said, whether via car or cart or camel, we love seeing creative uses of

Google Maps, is it helps us make our work better. Oh, yeah. Doesn't sound like they really liked it. And now that guy has been killed. He's been disappeared. I won't find him on Google Maps anymore. One thing that's quite similar, which is about modern technology and slightly hacking it, is the old Tesla's, which would drive, you could set them to drive just underneath the speed limit,

wherever you were. They would read the traffic signs. And so researchers at McAfee realized that if you got a 35 mile per hour traffic sign and you've got some black sticky tape and turned the three into an eight, then your Tesla would drive at 85 miles an hour in that area. Wow. These are the old Tesla's and the new ones don't do that anymore. I think possibly thanks to this little bit of work by McAfee.

But I just, I mean, especially as the 35 mile and hour traffic signs are usually in places that need people to slow down. It's... Yeah. Yeah. And that's why we're still in the trialing stage, really, of the driverless cars, isn't it? Like one smear on a speed sign and everyone dies.

Have we ever talked about... Just that reminds me of the tree of Tenoray, which is in... or was in, I think, Liberia, but somewhere up there. And it was the most isolated tree in the world. And there was no tree anywhere for, like, I don't know, 100 miles in any direction. And then it got knocked over by a Libyan truck.

driver. It was just like, literally there's nothing else to run. And he just decided I'm just going to drive straight into that by accident. That must have been like the scene in Austin Powers where the guy's being about to be run over by the steamroller. And he's shouting, no, from about 20 meters away very, very slowly. Do you think the guy, the truck driver was similarly, I can't see anything else? I think that's a really unfair analogy.

Because in Austin Powers, the idiot is the person who's about to be run over. So that implies you're blaming the tree. and the tree's gone to extreme lengths to escape traffic collisions. It's so socially distanced that tree. It really is. I think what it is is there's something about people when they're driving. If there's a massive area with nothing there at all, but there's one thing, then for some reason you just kind of get drawn towards it,

like your brain just can't avoid it. There is a thing called target fixation, isn't there, where someone is so focused on avoiding a thing that they keep looking at the thing and aiming towards it. accidentally. The conversational equivalent is that thing which is in the meaning of Lyft, where there's something you're trying to avoid talking about, and so you can never avoid talking about it. And I think the example that's given in that book is if you're talking to someone with one leg and you find your conversation is liberally peppered with references to Long John Silver or the last leg of the

UEFA competition. It reminds me of Michael Windsor, who is now Basil Brush's PA. Chenie, you're always name-dropping. Because you're friends with Basil Brush, aren't you? That's why you brought him up. So the way he got the job was he rang up Basil Bush's creator's son as Basil Brush and auditioned for him during the... You just was in character the whole time, did the voice perfectly, got his mannerisms and he got the job from that phone call, which is an absolutely bold move because you've got the potential to really upset somebody who literally this guy sees Basil Bush as his brother. That's how Peter Sellers as well got his first job. Peter Sellers of Inspector Cluoso fame and the Goon Show and so on. He was getting nowhere and he was an impressionist

and he called up the BBC and he did an impression of the head of the BBC at the time saying to the person who's the producer picking up going, have you got this Peter Sellers? Not in an American accent. Where's Peter Sellers? Where's this Peter Sellers guy? This kid's harder here. You got to get him.

You got to get him now. So, yeah, so he imitated it, and the guy went, oh, I'm so sorry, well, yeah, we'll book him. And Peter Sellers later admitted that was actually me, but the guy was so impressed. That's hilarious. That's actually how Rory Bremna still keeps getting jobs. You can do a very good impression of the Director General of the BBC. That's not fair. Rory Brammerna's great.

I don't know why I said that. Do you know Vanilla Ice's real name? Oh, I feel like it should. Oh, gosh, I can't remember. It's called Rob Van Winkle. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Anyway, apparently... Why on earth would you change that? I mean, that's a fantastic name. And also, wait a minute, it scans perfectly, doesn't it? Rip Van Winkle. He wouldn't have to do Ice Ice Baby. You're absolutely right. He was called Vanilla because he was the only one in his friendship group who was white.

And he got called that. And then he had a dance move called The Ice. Yeah. Right. I didn't know he was white. I didn't know anything about him. You're kidding. He almost played London, I think, in 2019 or 20, possibly, yeah, 2018 or 2019 on ice.

It's going to be his first vanilla ice on ice concert. Yeah. And he sings a song where the lyrics are Ice Ice Baby. This guy has an obsession. He's got a problem. It's an issue. Actually, like Crowley has something in common with Rex Lambert, founding editor of BBC's List of the magazine. Is it that they were both insane?

I suppose so. Actually, you'll get sued for that, and this is about being sued as well. So Alistair Crowley tried to sue a writer called Nina Hamnet for libel, because she called him a black magician, which said he was into black magic, and he said that this wasn't true. And he tried to sue her, and he lost, and he was declared bankrupt. And then towards the end, basically, he became a big drug addict, because he'd taken a lot of drugs before, and then he became a real drug addict, and he died quite young. But I was reading about Nina Hamnet, and according to Wikipedia, she was a Welsh artist and writer who was an expert on Sailor Shanties

and became known as the Queen of Bohemia. She sounds incredible, isn't she? She was basically one of the main people in Soho around the 1930s who kind of knew absolutely everyone. She had an incredible bohemian life, but actually when she sued Crowley, it became such big news that it really kind of wrecked her life and she became a bit of an alcoholic

just walking around taverns in Fitzrovia trading anecdotes for drinks. Sad. If you take on black magic, it always wins. I was amazed about other people's connections to the occult around this time and people who I thought were just legit humans.

So the way Crowley first got into this whole world was I think he joined an order which is called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And another leading figure in that was Yates, which, as in W.B. Yeats. And he was actually, him and his partner, Maud gone famously, his sort of muse.

And also E.E. Nesbit, who wrote the Samhiyadh, if anyone's read that. E.Nesbitt, like five children and it? Yeah, exactly. Wow. It sort of makes sense when you think about it. You can imagine someone who was into weirdo magic writing that. Yeah.

But Yates was a chapter leader for this order, and Crowley didn't like him. And there was this big rivalry going on about who should be ruling this chapel, Crowley or Yates. And eventually Crowley invaded his chapel mid-Sermon. He launched what he called an astral siege on the chapel, which involved kicking the doors down. And he was wearing a kilt for some reason and an Osiris mask, as inspired by Egyptian mythology. And he started casting spells and waving daggers around, and the police had to come and break it up. Wow.

And they fell out. The big story of that, it's called the Battle of Blythe Road. and the story is that he came through and he started propelling black magic at Yates and the others as he was coming up the stairs. Yates was using white magic and the white magic toppled him over down the stairs. Now that's what they say,

but when you read into it, what it actually was is he was coming up the stairs and Yates and his buddy, who was a boxer, was kicking him back down the stairs. Is that what white magic is? White magic is some big guy kicking you down the stairs. Yeah, exactly. He's one of the gladiators.

This is white magic. But this order, the idea was they wanted to discover a unified theory that explained the magical world so that they could bring endless possibilities to magicians. That was why they were set up. And that's why Yates joined. He wanted to use it for good. And so he joined Crowley and he had a mentor there. And the name of his mentor, Alan Bennett. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, it's not actual Alan Bennett, obviously. I was summoning a demon yesterday. This year has had an exciting new naval battle, which is great, because not as many classic naval encounters as that. Yeah, definitely. So I don't want to get old Jeremy Carlin on your ass, but... I promise this is a good one,

because this is the first naval battle in the Caribbean for 75 years. And it's between Venezuela, a Venezuelan naval patrol vessel, which was doing the rounds, defending the motherland and so on. And it had guns, anti-aircraft guns, that machine guns mounted on the deck, lots of stuff. On the other side was a Portuguese cruise ship, which included an 80-seat theater, a sauna, and a jacuzzi.

The Venezuelan patrol vessels said, you're being very territorially aggressive or something. Basically, they were chancing around a bit. They approached. They ordered it to come into port in Venezuela and surrender and all of this. They then opened fire, and then they rammed the ship. They rammed the cruise ship. But unfortunately, they didn't realize that the cruise ship in question,

the resolute, was built for polar cruise. and I had a one metre thick hull. The Venezuelan naval patrol vessel crumpled, basically, like a tin can. 44 sailors had to be rescued. Unbelievably embarrassing. Wow. Yeah. That must have really livened up that cruise ship, crew for the people on board.

And if you look out on your left, you'll see the Venezuelan Navy. And Venezuela is now owned by Thomas Cook, is that right? That's right, yeah. Amazing. You know that there's a lot of art that just sits out at sea on private yachts that often are worth sort of two to three times the value of the yacht itself. They're such valuable pieces of art. So, for example, Joe Lewis has a 200 million pound super yacht. He is the majority stakeholder of Tottenham Hotspurs, the football club.

He is a very, he's a billionaire in the UK. And he has a yacht. And that moored, and when it moored, people could see through the window and they saw hanging inside one of the rooms a Francis Bacon painting that sold anonymously at Christie's for 26 million pounds. And so there's courses you can take now to train people for the practical care of onboard art collection because everyone on board doesn't know how to look after these, you know, priceless pieces of art. And they keep getting damaged when they're out at sea and, you know, someone will pour, someone will pop a champagne bottle and a cork might. hit a priceless beast of art. Or in some cases, there was one guy, Jean-Michel Basque, who's an artist,

who has little bits of corn flakes that are hanging off the paintings, and they were very worried that they were going to be ripped off, thinking that maybe the kids on board had spilled their corn flakes onto the painting itself. You can't spill cornflakes onto a painting that's hanging vertically on a wall. I don't know. Dad, you've got kids.

How far does the food fly when it gets spilt? Exactly. Exactly, you very much cared at it. You absolutely can. Well, the ceiling fresco, the vatican, is just a fall of cocoa pops, isn't it? Yeah. I think if you're putting cereal on your paintings, then you shouldn't have an automatic right that it's taken seriously. Yeah.

Well, apparently in this case, it was a mistake. He was eating cornflakes looking at his painting as it was laying on the floor, and it fell on it, and it became part of the art, is what they say in this article. But then one of the more famous ones is that some million... or billionaire owners came back onto their yacht, and they'd been told by that the captain had unwrapped a piece of art that had arrived for them onto the yacht and had hung the painting on the wall.

And this was a horrific moment to hear it because the piece of art that they'd unwrapped was a bit of art done by Christo and Jean-Claude, and their way of doing art is they wrap things up. So they just wrapped stuff up. And so effectively, the captain had taken the actual art off, put it into the room with all the hot pipes, and then hung up this painting on the wall.

And you might know some of their work. They did the Reichstag in Berlin. They wrapped the entire. That's what they do. They just go around wrapping things. So, yeah, so there's courses now for teaching you how to look after art on the high seas. Very good.

So funny. A bit after that, there was a famous dog. He was called Dom the Talking Dog. And he was called the K-9 phenomenon of the century. He debuted in 1912, and he had a vocabulary that reached eight words. What words were they? Please don't say rough and rude.

I think it was a bit like that. They were all in German, first of all. He could say, he could say haben, he could say kuchen, which means cake, and the first one means have. He could say, he could kind of say yeah and nine, and he could say ruha. Oh, come on, I need a recording of this, or I will not believe. Well, he was really, he was absolutely massive. He was like, he was when he came over to America, so he was big in Germany, obviously, like, you're going to be big in Germany if you speak German. But when he came over to America, there was a lot of kind of German expats there, and they were really excited.

And so they met him on the coming off the ship, a load of reporters and asked him for a quote, which his owner said he was too seasick to give a quote when he arrived. But he was very impressed by New York. But whenever he went on stage, he would kind of answer a series of questions. Presumably, the answers were always Harbin or Hohen or something like that. But the point was that he would make noises that sound a bit like it. But according to the journal Science, someone did an actual paper on it. They said that really he's only just making noises. And it's the people in the audience that are interpreting it as words.

They sound a bit like words, but obviously he doesn't really know what he's doing. And it helps that the German language sounds quite. a lot more like a dog barking than sort of the Spanish language. I mean, you wouldn't get away with a big romantic language and a dog trying to impersonate that. You're absolutely right. When I don't understand a question or I can't quite determine what the person said, I give an answer that is indetermined as well.

So it could be sort of a mixture of yes and no or I'm not sure. So, you know, because I don't know what the person said, but I still want to respond because they're staring at me. So I'll often say something like, I'm, hey, no. And they go, are you sure? And I'll go, huh? And so that's just a little hint there for some people.

You might want to, it's a little skill you can have. That's great. Do a sort of a halfway noise. In Russian, you can say yes, no. Yes, no, which means no. Daniet means no. Right. Well, in New Zealand, we have a term called, oh, yeah, nah.

Oh, yeah. You probably heard of this one. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So when people say, you're going to the beach, oh, yeah, nah. And you, what does that mean? Does that mean yes or no?

Well, it means you might, but you just see how you go. Oh, okay. And they might say to you, oh, are you into it? Have you seen this thing? Are you into it? Oh, yeah, nah. You know, you could be, but you don't want to give it away. So it's a wonderful response because, and then you can't actually respond again to that by law in New Zealand.

So if you've received an oh, yeah, nah, you can't go, look, which is it? Because then you're just, you shunned. I suppose you could just say maybe, I guess, is a similar word. No, because then you're really giving it away that you're not sure. Oh, okay, yeah. All right. It's not an, oh, yeah, nah, is the full spectrum. Okay.

Very non-committal country, an entire country that's terrified of commitment. That's actually, that's actually an option. That's actually an option on the upcoming election ballot, isn't it? No, yeah, no. It is. Yeah. Yes, no or oh yeah, nah. Now, even though it ends on nah,

the year part is got to be strong, oh, yeah, no. Oh, really? The way you say it. Well, yeah, there's different ways of saying it. So I would have assumed it meant no in the end. The one you end on seems to be the dominant one. Ask me, ask me whether it does. Oh, does it just mean no?

No. Should we get back to talking dogs? The breath actually can be a problem in some places. The Edvard Monk Museum in Norway, they say that the scream is fading. The screen, which is his most famous work, is fading because of people's breath. And that's because he used very cheap, low-quality paint. He used cadmium sulfide paints monk when he did his painting. And it means that when you breathe on it, it kind of gets worse and worse and worse.

And they're trying to stop people from breathing. And that music is they should replace it with the screen. Yeah. Yeah. The screen in front of the screen. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice.

Thanks. Sorry, it was too good that I didn't laugh. One of those ones. I was afraid to breathe in front of it in case the joke faded too far. Should we? We can stop there, actually. Should we can?

Yeah, let's do that. That was a great one. No, no, it's fine. I was only going to talk about taser tampons. Let's talk about taser tampons quickly. And then we can move. on after that. I refuse to press stop.

So some modern self-defense gadgets. Obviously it's still a bit of a growth area, even though a lot of these things get released and they're not legal to carry. There is a killer engagement ring with a particularly sharp-cut diamond, an unbreakable umbrella, which wax just as strong as a steel pipe

but weighs only £1 and 11 ounces. I think my favourite is the pink steel. which is a stun gun made to look like a tampon. It can deliver a 50,000 volt shock and can be used handheld or shot out to distances up to 14 feet. No. That's a heck of a tampon. I think I've seen that done in Thailand, actually.

Do it me, Andy. So, no, but you don't wear it as a tampon before you fire it at your... No, no, no. It's to be hidden within your... handbag and nobody would know. Not presumably among your other tampons. You don't want to accidentally get the wrong one, do you?

Yeah. Although if you've got enemies and they ask for a tampon in the bathroom, that's a hell of a prank. Prank. 50,000 volt prank. Prank goes wrong. Man doesn't understand what a prank is. Oh. Lovely. Wow, that's extraordinary. Those are all on the market. We can Yeah, they're available somewhere and I cannot guarantee that they are legal in the territory

in which you're currently listening, so please don't waste your money. I got one last thing, which is I like the idea of the name's center for North Dakota, so I just quickly looked into other names of North Dakota to see if there's any fun names. And I found there's a place called Flasher, which is great in North Dakota, a place called Zapp. And Zapp, kind of, the only major thing I could find that happened there was in. In 1969, there was a movement called Zip to Zapp, where the mayor of Zaps suddenly found two to three thousand partiers tearing up the streets and setting bonfires in the middle of them

to have this big party, and they had to get the National Garden to push them out. Why was that called Zip to Zap? I thought you were going to say the mayor zip wired into Zapp which sounded really fun. No, I think it was just a group of people that lets zip over to Zapp and have a massive party, I believe.

And then lastly, a place called Buts. which is a cool name. B-U-T-T-Z-V-I-L-L. Oh, that is weird. There's a lot of butts in that part of the world, isn't there? Because butts like means it's like a raised bit of land or something. So there's that B-U-T-E? Yeah, so in Montana and Wyoming and Dakotas, there's loads of butts.

You're not going to believe this. In South Dakota, there is a place which was the original center of North America, which was done by drawing two lines, and it is called Snake butt. Really? Yeah, and they put an obelisk on it and they named it the approximate centre of North America

and then in 1930 they changed their minds and decided it was in rugby, North Dakota. But it was Snake Butt. A confusing name is. It's actually really hard to work out where are snakes but. It really is. Do you know what?

I was having a look because I was going to look into some old books and maybe this is just me having sort of lockdown brain but I suddenly had a look at Winnie the Pooh and I hadn't realised quite how philosophical it is so there's a wonderful bit where Piglet and Pooh are sitting underneath the big tree

and Piglet says, what if this big tree falls down and Pooh says, what if it doesn't? And I just thought, what's a great attitude to life, isn't it? Instead of catastrophizing and thinking, what if this terrible thing happens? I like that attitude. Or am I being ridiculous and we can touch into it? I have to say, it sounds like Pooh is praying for an end of the pain there.

It sounds like he's taken Peglet there on the assumption the tree will fall on them both. I really like that. Why are we always worrying about the bad thing that's going to happen? What if it doesn't? We just sit here happily and not worry about bad things happening to us.