The Blindboy Podcast - Foolscap, Dunce Cap and Dogs

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Rambling hot take. I explore the connections between paper and public shaming  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crows the pole halls, you fools cap me halls. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you are a brand new listener, please consider going back and listening to some earlier episodes to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And I know I do have some new listeners this week because this podcast was picked as podcast of the week on NPR over in America on a radio show called Code Switch.

And that's a huge honour for me because NPR, National Public Radio, kind of set the tone for what a modern podcast should be. Like a lot of my storytelling and structuring is influenced by This American Life, which is one of the original great podcasts. But I never got to hear myself being recommended because the podcast was recommended on the radio part of Code Switch, but not the podcast part. So when I went back and listened to the Code Switch podcast I couldn't hear the bit where the host Gene Denby mentioned me I believe it was from around July 27th that's when the episode

went out but if anyone works in NPR or if you're an American and you happen to record it off the radio if you could contact me and give me the audio that'd be great because I'd love to show my mother but thank you to Gene Denby and the Code Switch podcast and NPR for giving me a shout out and recommending me as podcast of the week.

And if anyone at NPR wants to have me as a guest or something, give me a shout, I'd love to do that. But I opened this podcast by mentioning the word foolscap. The word foolscap is one of those words that I've never properly interrogated. I used to study accounting in junior certain school, which was an effrontery to my cognitive disposition. It felt like a combination of maths and snakes and ladders,

except without any of the enjoyable fun bits that can occur during a game of snakes and ladders. Why did I study accounting? I didn't have a choice. It's just what you had to do. I would have begun it in first year so I was about 12 and what I disliked about accounting, it wasn't so much the accounting itself, it was the way the teachers used your acumen for accounting as a way to define a person's personality. So if you were good at accounting in first year,

at the age of 12, the teachers would label you as being very mature. You know, you'd be listening in. You'd be listening in to two teachers' conversations when they're talking about students. And the lads who do well at accounting, you'd hear the teachers going, oh yeah, they're very mature.

He's very mature, he is. He's going places. He's got a good head on his shoulders. and then if you weren't good at accounting you were called scattered or immature which i think are very unfair parameters to measure a person's emotional maturity by like when you're 12 in accounting class the exercises you're given are here are the imaginary profit and loss accounts of a fruit seller. Balance that. What you're actually measuring is which one of these 12 year olds is willing to do a task that's incredibly tedious, boring and pointless just because I told them to. So what you're doing there is training people for the workforce, Training people for jobs that they don't like doing.

And I'm not shitting on the young lads who loved maths. They hated accounting too. They wanted algebra and trigonometry and calculus. That's where they were having crack. But no one, no one liked doing profit and loss accounts. But if you could tolerate that boredom and finish it to completion, you were labelled as an emotionally mature 12 year old with a head on your shoulders now i could never do accounting mainly because of the word

fool's cap the teacher would ask us to take out our fool's cap ledgers we would have fool's cap ledgers to do the accounts in apologies there was a very loud seagull outside my window there he bled slightly onto the microphone there this tells me a storm is coming because the seagull outside my window there. He bled slightly onto the microphone there. This tells me a storm is coming. Because the seagulls are never this in inland and this vocal unless a storm is coming. But anyway, I'd never heard the word fool's cap before. It sounded like a deeply interesting word. I'd consistently asked the teacher, why the fuck is this paper called fool's cap? The cap of a fool? What does this mean? The teacher wouldn't know the answer. I'd keep asking. I'd get in trouble for asking it so much. There was no Wikipedia. So the time that I should have spent

learning how to balance accounts, I spent thinking about what a fool's cap was. And each time I'd ask. And each time the teacher. The teacher wouldn't know the answer. And the teacher would never admit to not knowing the answer. So instead they said the worst thing possible. It doesn't matter. Do the profit and loss account. It doesn't matter that it's called a fool's cap ledger.

And then I'd start arguing with the teacher. Saying. Well if it doesn't matter. Why did they bother calling it a fool's cap ledger and then I'd start arguing with the teacher saying well if it doesn't matter why did they bother calling it a fool's cap ledger why when I'm in business class or in English class I take out my A4 notepad or when I'm up in the art room I can use an A3 sheet of paper or an A2 sheet of paper if I'm feeling adventurous why are all these different types of paper if I'm feeling adventurous? Why are all these different types of paper called A1, A2, A3, A4? And then when I'm in accounting class, the paper is named after a hat. Surely it's important. And then some other young fella would go, yeah, why is that? And then I'd get kicked out of the class. Now it's worth noting about the teacher who used to teach me accounting. And I won't mention his name,

but he was a highly, highly eccentric elderly man. Very, very eccentric man. He was an older teacher who really should have quit a long time ago. He was never physically abusive. He would never hit students because you couldn't. But he thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of public shaming. And he would shame students publicly in quite erratic and bizarre ways.

I'll give you one example. He did this to me. I didn't find it particularly shameful. I thought it was funny. But it was an attempt to shame me. So I used to hate doing accounting. So what I would do is you'd have to draw margins on the side of the foolscap paper. So I would draw extra big margins.

I'd get like two rollers and do margins that were two inches big. Now this was very foolish out of me. My logic was by making my margins huge. Then I'm decreasing the amount of space on the fool's cap page that I have to do work in so if I do a little bit of work it looks like a lot of work because my margins are massive I was 12 and didn't want to do accounting but one day my accounting teacher he looked at my margins and how big they were and And he said nothing. And he got my fool's cap journal. And he put it on the ground at the top of the classroom.

And he made everyone walk across my fool's cap page. One by one, each student walking over my fool's cap page. And then we all wondered, what the fuck is he doing? Why is he getting everyone to walk over my copybook? And then he said, young blind boy thinks he's building footpaths in his fool's cap. Everyone walk over the footpath that he thinks he's building in his copybook. He wants to work for the council. So that was an example of a very elaborate shaming exercise that he performed on me. Rather than simply saying, your margins are too big, he accused me of making a footpath in my copybook.

Which I'll be honest, I don't hold that against him. That's a level of insanity that I kind of admire. Another thing he used to do, he'd be handing out punishment exercises. And one of the punishment exercises that you'd get is you'd have to do lines. It was known as a time wasting exercise Bart Simpson on the fucking chalkboard at the start of the Simpsons so if you were talking in class you'd have to do out a hundred lines I will not talk in class but this particular teacher his catchphrase was I don't give lines I give So he'd say, I want a hundred tigers tomorrow.

But he'd never explain what a tiger was. So he'd come in the next day with a hundred lions. And then he'd go, what's this? I asked for tigers, not lions. So there was no way to win. But again, a very poignant metaphor. A Kafkaesque exercise on the pointless, circular, futile bureaucracy that many of his students would go on to face in the working world. So I'd keep pressing him.

What the fuck is fool's cap, sir? What's fool's cap? Can you just tell me what the fool's cap is, please? And each time, it doesn't matter it doesn't matter until one day he finally gave in and said okay i'll give you a fool's cap so he cut out a fool's cap page from my copy book rolled it into like a cone stapled it with a stapler and then said put that in your head and stand up by the wall so I had to stand up by the wall in the classroom with this cone on my head for the last 10 minutes of class or whatever now I know that sounds terrible

but I didn't really experience it as terrible this teacher was so ridiculous that he was kind of publicly humiliating himself, if you get me. Nobody really took him seriously. So even though he made me stand up by the wall wearing a cone on my head, I didn't experience shame. No one looked at me like the other students didn't look at me with shame. I didn't experience shame. The teacher just looked like a

lunatic and it was kind of funny. So I don't recall this as a painful memory from school. It was a funny memory from school by a very eccentric teacher. Even though if the principal walked into the class, she'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? This shit's illegal. You can't do that. But the thing thing is this week I finally decided to start looking into why is fool's cap paper called fool's cap why is it called this it just came into my head this week so I went digging and researching because I have the internet now so fool's cap paper is slightly more slender than a4 and a bit longer. So the story of how fool's cap paper came to be, it's bizarrely similar to how ecstasy tablets are made. Let me explain. So in Europe,

paper only really started to be used around the 1100s onwards. Before that in Europe, there was no paper really. Like, illuminated manuscripts were printed on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. Now the rest of the world had been using paper for a long time. The Islamic world had been using paper, the Chinese had been using paper, they had papyrus down in Egypt. But in Europe, in the Dark Ages, paper became a thing in the 1100s. I think the Spanish got the methodology from the Chinese. So as paper started to become popular around Europe, it was being handmade by small artisans.

And there was no real standard size of paper. Paper is ground up wood pulp that's bleached. So paper starts off as a mush. And then this mush of wood pulp is put into a mould and it's left to set. And then this makes a sheet of paper. Papermakers in Europe would have little indentations on their moulds. Little drawings could be the drawing of a crown,

the drawing of a horse. Lots of these different designs would then get imprinted on the piece of paper that's made and this became known as a watermark because you'd see it easier when the paper was wet. And the reason this is similar to ecstasy is there's lots of different types of ecstasy tablets with lots of different types of designs on them smiley faces blue ghosts mitsubishi all of these different designs because of how ecstasy is pressed and the mold that it comes from The design on an ecstasy tablet operates,

it's the same functionality as the watermark on medieval paper. If you buy ecstasy and it's Mitsubishi you know, ah these are Mitsubishis, I have an idea what's in it, I know where it came from. I'm not advocating ecstasy, I'm just giving an example. It kind of, it was branding. It was branding. So with the paper, these different watermarks and these different designs didn't necessarily denote quality, but it did denote the size. And by the 1400s, the most popular mould for paper in Europe had a little design on it. And this design was the design of a court jester. A court jester was like an early type of clown or a comedian. Wealthy noblemen or kings or fucking royalty or popes or whatever throughout the middle ages. The way for them to show off their wealth is they would throw dinner parties in their manors or in their castles or whatever.

their wealth is they would throw dinner parties in their manors or in their castles or whatever they'd throw a dinner party the guests are there they have them all fed now it's time for entertainment and one of the most popular types of entertainment was to bring out the court jester and the jester used to wear a hat now the jester's hat has got like two little things sticking out of it with bells at the end. They're supposed to represent the ears of an ass, a donkey. Because donkeys traditionally are just hilarious animals going all the way back to Greek mythology. Poor old donkeys.

It's just because donkeys have a... they bray or whatever you call it in a very funny way. And when you contrast that with the nobility of a horse's neigh, poor old donkeys look like fucking idiots. So donkeys have been portrayed as comedic animals in western culture for years so the jester's hat looks like a donkey's ears but a jester's hat is also known as a fool's cap because the jester was called a fool. But throughout Europe, from the 1500s onwards, people who were dealing with paper, whether that be printers,

or people who were printing books, or people who were writing into books, slowly but surely across Europe, they started to kind of agree upon that paper that has the jester on it, man. That paper with the fool's cap on it, that's the one I want. It's the perfect size. It is the right size. Give with the fool's cap on it, that's the one I want. It's the perfect size. It is the right size. Give me the fool's cap paper. I don't want blue ghosts. I don't want

smiley faces. I don't want strawberries. I want fool's cap. So around the 18th century, the industrial revolution, then Europe starts to standardise its paper sizes. It starts to decide we need one fucking size of paper for this job, right? Let's use the one that's been most popular for the past 500 years, the fool's cap. Let's just stick with that one. Like if ecstasy was legalised tomorrow, we'd probably all agree upon Mitsubishis. It's the one that everyone knows. Fool's cap is the Mitsubishi yoke of the paper world. That's why fool's cap paper is called fool's cap, which is the answer I really wanted to

hear when I was fucking 12. If my teacher had told me that and used history and storytelling, I might have been less intimidated by accounting because I'd have respect for the page now. That's a cool story. And there's another theory about why foolscap became the standard size. Now this theory is, they don't know whether it's true or not or a rumour, but it's interesting nonetheless. overthrew the monarchy in England for a brief period of time. He wasn't a fan of monarchy kings and queens. He was a parliamentarian. And when Cromwell was overseeing a parliament called the Rumpf Parliament, apparently Cromwell ordered that all the royal insignia of like the crown be taken off any official paper and instead you put in fool's cap, the jester's cap, as a joke,

as a way to spit on the monarchy. Like we don't get a lot of information about Cromwell in our education system other than the horrible genocide that he committed in Ireland but by the end of his life the monarchy really hated Cromwell. Like they dug him up just to behead him and stick his head in a pike for years but another interesting thing about foolscap paper and it takes me back to that moment in school when my teacher made it into a cone

got the foolscap paper and made it into a cone shape and put it on my head and made me stand up now I didn't know at the time but that's called a dunce cap and made it into a cone shape and put it on my head and maybe stand up. Now I didn't know at the time but that's called a dunce cap. It's a very insidious way that teachers would shame students that might have had intellectual difficulties,

might have had learning difficulties, were misbehaving. It gained popularity in Victorian times but a dunce cap was a conical hat it was a cone made out of paper placed on a student's head and the letter D was written on it

a very shitty and shameful antiquated practice even today it kind of lives on if you play the video game Grand Theft Auto 5 online, if you misbehave in this video game, if you make things difficult for other players, then your character will have a dunce cap on their head for 48 hours in the game.

But interestingly, fools cap paper and the dunce cap instrument of shame do have a correlation. So dunce caps were traditionally made by a teacher in class from a piece of fool's cap paper just like that teacher did with me. Because fool's cap paper is that little bit longer when rolled into a cone it was the perfect size to fit on the head of a child and be long and pointy enough to elicit shame and embarrassment and ridicule in that child because that's what it was for so fool's cap and dunce cap are related so let's go back further like so dunce caps as used as a tool of shame in school starts in the Victorian era up until about the 1960s but how and why does a cone hat come to symbolize stupidity

or unruliness and what about the word dunce you know that's still used as an insult today if you're calling someone stupid people call them a dunce the history of that is quite interesting because the conical hat that cone on the head we associate that with like wizards like a wizard's pointy hat when it goes back to a theologian in scotland in the 1200s by the name of john dunce scotus his name was John. He was born in the village of Duns in Scotland and he was Scottish. So John the Scot from Duns. John Duns Scotus. And John Duns Scotus is a very important person in Western Christianity and Western thinking. He made a metaphysical argument for God in the 1200s. John Dunst argued that God is not a person like a man with a big beard up in the sky. That God is like above reality.

God is everything. God is an energy which is quite radical thinking for the 1200s. But the thing with John Dunst, he wore a big pointy hat. Now, when you think of wizards, even the cartoon version of wizards, you often think of a wizard as having a big pointy hat and with like the sun and moon and stars on the wizard's hat. This goes back thousands of years. One of the most beautiful artifacts that you'll ever see is called the Berlin Gold Hat. It's this beautifully preserved gold hat that's about one and a half feet tall, that was used in Germany in 1000 BC. So that's a thousand years before the birth of Christ. That's 3,000 years ago.

So 3,000 years ago in Germany, they were wearing these giant gold cones on their heads. But if you look closely at the Berlin gold hat, it contains the lunar and solar cycles. So 3,000 years ago, in where Germany is now, very important people were wearing tall golden cones on their heads that contained information about the solar system. And this tradition stayed in Europe through pagan cultures, pre-Christian cultures.

This idea that if you wear a cone on your head, that wearing this cone somehow allows you to communicate with the universe or to receive information from the universe. 3,000 years ago, people in Europe were making telephone masts out of themselves. But John Dunce, in Scotland, in in the 1200s who was a theologian thinking about the nature of God he also wore a pointy hat and he wore a pointy hat because he was copying wizards he wore a pointy hat because he was of the belief that to wear a pointy hat meant that you were divining knowledge from the universe, that you were picking it up like an antenna

and it was going straight into your brain. And the followers of John Dunce and his metaphysical theology also wore pointy hats and these became known as Dunce hats. So pointy hats and their direct correlation with intelligence and information

goes back 3,000 fucking years and now you have John Dunce bringing it back in the 1200s. So the wearing of a pointy Dunce cap was seen as a symbol of intelligence and education up until about the 1600s. Around the 1600s the church and popular thought turned against the ideas of dunce. The idea that God was this all-encompassing energy that moves beyond reality started to become unpopular and humanism became the dominant way of thinking,

especially during the Renaissance. The most beautiful visual example of Renaissance humanism is the painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo called the creation of Adam you definitely know it it's one of the most famous paintings in the world it shows a naked man Adam on the left and on the right God is floating in the air and he has a gray beard and he's a man and he's touching Adam's finger. And if you look at God and the angels around him, it's in the shape of a human brain. But that painting's from 1508 and what it shows clearly is God is a human being. God is a man. He's got a grey beard. Look at him. God isn't an idea.

It's not a thing, not an energy. God is a man and we were made to look like God. That's an example of renaissance humanism in art. But that completely turned against the metaphysical ideas of John Dunce. So what happens? If you believe in those older ideas of a metaphysical God, you're a fucking idiot. You're a stupid cunt. You're a dunce. And now all of a sudden,

the pointy hat that the followers of dunce were wearing become a symbol of stupidity and feeble-mindedness. And you start to see it most evidently around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition began in the late 1400s. Spain had been under control of Islam for 800 years, so the Spanish Inquisition began to root out anyone who wasn't Christian, and a huge symbol of public shame. In Spain, during the 1400s and the 1500s, if you were seen to be not Christian enough, you had to wear one of these pointy hats and parade yourself around the streets, whipping yourself until you bleed for penance. But this is why today, if you go to Spain around Easter time, like I've done many times around fucking in Andalusia, and everyone's dressed up like the fucking Ku Klux Klan, well those Catholics who are dressing like that and wearing the pointy hats, they're carrying on a tradition

of public shame. To wear the pointy hat is shameful. They flog themselves, they hurt themselves, they hurt their bodies carrying giant fucking statues of Holy Mary. It's about shame. You're an idiot, you're an outcast, your views are outdated. Get in line, whip yourself, wear the pointy hat. So that there is the European tradition of pointy hats becoming associated with idiocy stupidity, having the wrong opinions that culminates in the dunce cap in the Victorian era. But another

thing that's worth pointing out why did the Ku Klux Klan wear pointy hats? Well this is a separate podcast in itself, which I will do, but the deeply racist hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, is very much ideologically rooted in Scottish ideas and Scotland, particularly lowland Scots.

The word clan is associated with Scotland. So there's one theory that the Ku Klux Klan were deliberately looking into the work of this John Duns Scotus to try and bring the pointy hat back as a symbol of them being deeply intelligent and having this divine knowledge about their supremacy of their race and their culture and their heritage. I suppose the point of this podcast is I'm trying to provide an answer for 12 year old me who was in accounting class asking why is this paper called fool's cap and when my teacher turned the fool's cap into a dunce cap rather than answer me I wondered that he know what he was doing.

Did he know this information or something similar I just didn't want to say it now like I said I wasn't particularly hurt by this incident this teacher was so mad it was funny it wasn't a very nice thing to do to me but it didn't leave I don't feel bad over it what I feel bad about is the wasted opportunity

I had quite a curious mind in school because I was also autistic my curiosity didn't have boundaries. So I literally did pester this teacher about the meaning of foolscap every day when he mentioned it, as opposed to doing my accounting. And I know that teachers listen to this podcast. And I suppose I'm making an appeal. Like what a wasted opportunity my teacher had there

I just use storytelling to go back 3000 years to interrogate the word foolscap to make foolscap into an interesting story with a narrative I can't speak for every neurodivergent person but I understand the world and understand ideas

through storytelling I don't even think it's a neurodivergent thing incorporate storytelling into your pedagogy pedagogy is the philosophy of teaching the philosophy of imparting knowledge in an educational setting we all remember philosophy of teaching, the philosophy of imparting knowledge in an educational setting. We all remembered. When I think back to school and I go, who were the good teachers? The ones that I remember were the ones who made subjects interesting through storytelling. And that

negative shit did have an impact on me. Like, I started off this by saying that when you were 12 in secondary school the kids who were good at accounting specifically were seen as you're emotionally mature you're going places and the ones who couldn't do accounting who couldn't balance books of an imaginary company were seen as scattered it made me feel so excluded that today as an adult I have anxiety around accounts. I have anxiety around numbers. Like I have accountants now. I have to do yearly accounts to pay my taxes and my accountants do this for me. But when they have a yearly meeting with me I do genuinely find it difficult to present as an adult in that room. Like I'm not great with numbers but when someone has shown me accounts I feel like a little baby. It's an emotional thing

creeps in. I do feel like a dunce. I do feel stupid which is no crack when you're self-implied but a fool's cap had been explained to me at 12 through storytelling and wizard's hats and medieval court jesters and ecstasy tablets. Then I'd have felt a little bit more welcome in that space. It's time now for an ocarina pause. After the ocarina pause, I think I'm going to stop talking about hats, but I'd like to continue the theme of public shame. I'm in the office now, it's night time and the seagulls are all asleep so I'm gonna play my Puerto Rican guayro with a little tube of eye gel and you're gonna hear an advertisement for something, a digitally inserted advert. Let's go.

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Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com that was the puerto rican guayral pause support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I pay for this office. It's a lot of work to make monologue essay podcasts each week, but I adore doing this work. I love it. And if you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you some distraction, some solace, some entertainment, some escapism, whatever it is that has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. All I'm looking for is the price

of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint? Would you say, fuck it, I like Blind Boys podcast, I you buy me a pint would you say fuck it i like blind boys podcast i'd buy him a pint well you can however if you can't afford that if you don't have the money at the moment whatever reason don't worry you can listen for free because the person who is a patron is paying for you to listen for free so So everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model that's based on kindness and soundness and it works fantastically.

Also, it keeps this podcast independent. ACAST hosts this podcast so I do have to have a certain amount of advertising on it but all advertising is on my terms. What destroys creativity is the input of advertisers. Advertisers coming in to a podcast or radio or TV and saying, we're sponsoring you, so we need bigger numbers. We're going to fuck with your content. Don't do a podcast about the

history of foolscap paper. Who wants to hear that? We need a podcast on the latest TikTok trends. Well, they can go fuck themselves. My responsibility is to ye, my patrons only. And what I do each week is I speak about something I'm genuinely passionate about. Because only when I do that, can I provide the podcast hug. So thank you to everyone who is a patron and support independent podcasts whatever independent podcast you listen to can be monetary support or just liking sharing the podcast on social media leaving a review subscribing all that stuff matters dog bless so one thing that got me thinking about that got me thinking about dunce caps and that old teacher that I had

that accounting teacher and how he used to enjoy using shame public shame as a type of punishment got me thinking about this fella in Limerick

there's a fella I've seen walking around Limerick and he's been doing this now for a few years and I've walked behind him a few times on the way into town so this man doesn't hold his dog's leash instead what he does is he ties his dog's leash to his belt

the problem is when he walks the dog leads him so the dog is effectively walking him but because I've walked behind him when the dog walks him the dog's lead because it's attached to his belt pulls the man's pants down slightly so you can see his bare arse and then he pulls it up but it's consistent and continual so if I'm walking into town close to this man I see his bare arse like eight times in 40 minutes now this is regular it's consistent it's been like this for years like if I was walking into town and my dog kept pulling my pants down so that people could see my bare arse, I'd stop doing it.

The man seems completely unfazed by it. His facial expression doesn't change. It's just, oh, my pants have fallen down again, better pull them up, keep going, as the dog tugs him along. Now, I don't really mind. I'm not offended by a man's bare arse. I don't care. But at this point, I think like this is his thing. This is what he wants. He kind of likes his bare arse popping out and people seeing it. And then if anyone says anything to him he can blame the dog

because he's not touching his belt he's not touching the dog the dog is attached to his pants pulling him along so if anyone was to say put your arse away man he's just gonna go it's the dog

the dog is attached to my belt so he can blame the dog his thing might be public nudity but he can never be pulled up on it excuse the pun because he can just it's the dog's fault but i've never seen anyone confront him about it in all those years i've never seen anyone say anything to him and i think the other reason why is his dog is this mongrel breed that has a bit of a boxer and a bulldog in him so the dog's face is full of shame and embarrassment the dog who's walking this man looks permanently mortified all the time and I think that's also working for him the man doesn't care

he just pulls his pants back up pants come down, pulls him back up keeps walking, the dog is pulling him he doesn't give a shit but the dog looks mortified the man has made himself immune to all types of public shaming

for having his arse out all the time because his shame can live vicariously in the expression of his dog's face and then the dog ironically is existing as this incredibly specific service animal for this one man and his public arse fetish and fair play to the dog he's brilliant at it but it got me wondering if that dog then had puppies could the puppies grow up to perform the same service will they inherit the capacity to communicate shame and embarrassment on behalf of their owner but it got me thinking about dogs now I've always maintained and I will maintain dogs aren't real I love dogs but there's no such thing as a dog in nature there's wolves but dogs

are made by humans humans invented dogs All dogs are descended from friendly wolves that started hanging around with humans thousands of years ago. And we started to breed the wolves that were the friendliest, that were the cutest, that were good guards, that hunted with us. And from that came dogs.

This invented animal that services humankind. And there's lots of plants and animals that aren't real chickens aren't real chickens today are nothing like the wild fowl that they evolved from actually i shouldn't say evolved because they didn't evolve they were bred by humans which is completely different to evolution. Especially farmed chickens. Like farmed chickens are effectively little teenage chickens with these gigantic breasts that are so big. Some chickens that are raised in a battery environment fall over. Their legs can't support them. So

chickens that people eat, they don't exist in the wild. They're crazy things that humans invented for our own needs. And corn, big yellow husks of corn, real wild corn is tiny, it looks like wheat. But even grains like wheat, they're not real. Wild wheat looks much more like grass. Cows aren't real. They're a human made animal. Cows don't exist in the wild. There's wild ox which cows are descended from but cows are created by humans. But I'd like to speak about some of my favorite dog breeds based on what they were bred for and why. One of the most fascinating breeds of dogs is the Saluki. The Saluki comes from ancient Egypt and it's considered to be one of the oldest purebred dogs in the world.

They're amazing looking dogs. They have these slender faces and they even look a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs. And they have Cleopatralike eyes and these long ears. They exist today with ancient Egyptian aesthetics. Archaeologists have found Saluki skeletons that are like 8,000 years old. The Saluki is present in the Bible and in the Quran. The Salukis were the only dog that weren't forbidden under Islam. They were bred to hunt with falcons.

One of the reasons people believe that the Saluki's genetics still survive today is because so many of them were bred in ancient Egypt. There was a Saluki breeding industry, mainly to have the dogs made into mummies. People would be buried with mummified Salukis. Another mad dog is called the Basenji. It's an ancient dog, thousands of years old from Africa. And the bizarre thing about the Basenji, it's like a dog with the personality of a cat. They don't bark, they yodel and they're known for having the personal hygiene that cats have, which is the ultimate dog. It has the personality of a dog and the hygiene of a cat. Then you have the Tarnspit dog. The Tarnspit dog

is now extinct. The industrial revolution made the Tarnspit dog extinct. The only images we have left of the Tarnspit dog are drawings from like the 1840s. It looks a bit like a bit like a terrier but the Tarnspit dog was bred for chefs. It was a chef's dog which is unthinkable today. Why does a chef need a dog? Well the Tarnspit dog was bred to cook meat so in like taverns in England in the 1700s and 1600s where a chef might be cooking a large joint of ham or a joint of lamb over a fire they'd have like this big giant hamster wheel up on the wall that was attached to the turning lamb and this turn spit dog was bred to go up into the wheel and turn it like a little hamster effectively turning the meat on the fire but they were bred to work in teams together but also what this dog was bred for was loyalty so you had to have a pair of dogs

that would remind each other of their shifts for tarning meat but for both of them to never ever eat the meat no matter how hungry they were. So this was a dog bred exclusively for human service and the worst thing they never even got a day off. So you'd have these two tarn spit dogs spending all week working on a wheel spinning meat over a fire. And then on Sundays when no one was allowed work anyway. And people would go to church. They used to rent out the turn spit dogs to people. To use them as foot warmers in church. And then the industrial revolution came along.

And all of a sudden no one needed these dogs anymore. And now they're extinct. And we're not even sure what they look like. And they reckon that there's a possibility that the modern Corgi is descended from the Tarnspit dog. Another very interesting dog is the Kerry Blue Terrier, which is an Irish breed. Now the dog itself isn't that impressive.

They look like very pissed off poodles, but they're Irish dogs. Michael Collins had one, named it convict 32 but what I love is the origin story of the Kerry Blue Terrier. Apparently during the Spanish Armada in Ireland in 1588 Spain sent like a fuckload of boats to invade England from Ireland but it didn't go as planned all of the ships off the west coast of Ireland shipwrecked from the fucking top of Ireland all the way down as far as Kerry but the story goes

on one of these Spanish ships in 1588 that shipwrecked off the coast of Kerry there was a beautiful Spanish dog, a male dog, on this boat and it was bright blue in colour. And all the sailors on the boat died but this beautiful bright blue dog managed to swim all the way to the shores of Kerry.

And when this dog arrived in Kerry, every fucking female terrier in the land of Kerry couldn't resist them. It's like this is the hottest dog I've ever, look at him, he's Spanish and he's bright blue. So this bright blue Spanish dog had sex with every terrier in Kerry and this went on to become the Kerry Blue Terrier, which Michael Collins owned. And I love that because most of the other fucking breeds of dog you can see a clear lineage

and quite a rational story as to why they exist and a reason and then in Ireland we have to have a fucking blue Spanish dog who was irresistible to the terriers

of course we gotta give an honourable mention to the Saint Barnard travellers used to or pilgrims used to travel through the Swiss Alps to try and get to Rome and they'd have to try and navigate the freezing cold temperatures of the mountains of the Alps and a monk called Bernard of Menton

he established a hospice in 1050 so that's like a thousand years ago he established a hospice to try and help people cross the alps but while he was there he started breeding dogs to go out and rescue people who'd be caught in the snow or stuck under avalanches they bred the saint barnard this fucking gigantic dog who could survive days in the snow with his big warm coat and then sniff out

people who were trapped in snow even in a blizzard and then find the person have the strength to pull them out and also have the size and warmth to cuddle up with the person and keep them warm if possible

and also they used to carry a barrel around their neck that contained brandy. So this giant dog bred perfectly for finding people in the snow. So that's all I have time for this week. That was a sprawling podcast. A bit of escapism for ye. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, mind yourselves,

rub a dog, and enjoy the oncoming splendor of autumn. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. T tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and

punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com this is an advertisement for the ah here now stage at electric picnic in the mindfield area Picnic is a great place for live podcasts. I've been doing live podcasts at Electric Picnic since about 2018 and I've been speaking in the Mindfield arena and the Ah Here stage since about 2016. The Ah Here stage is now sponsored by now so now it's called ah here now now is a streaming service it's the home of the biggest blockbuster movies the latest and best shows and unmissable live sport all without a contract and there's going to be lots of class podcasts at this stage myself, I'm doing a podcast I'm Grand Mam Podcast Hold My Drink with

Charlene and Ellie Around The World In 80 Gays with Brian Kennedy and Catherine Lynch Stall It with Darren and Joe so it's going to be a fun weekend because I love the minefield section of Electric Picnic

and the Ah Here Now stage because it's nice to get a break from the general cacophony of the festival. Festivals are very loud and very bright and thronging with people, which for me personally, I find that a bit overwhelming. But what you get with the minefield area and the I hear now stage is it's a little pocket of peace you can go in there you can sit down in a tent and you can listen to people speak you could use it as an opportunity to hear a podcaster or a speaker who you wouldn't

normally listen to you can put yourself outside of your comfort zone and you can get the lovely communal experience of being part of a discussion that's what I enjoy about the minefield area at electric picnic is it's you're not just sitting in a tent watching people speak the nature of it is quite participatory you feel as if you're part of a discussion the i hear now stage is the one i'm definitely looking forward to the most because i've got a class guest who's not going to tell you because it's a surprise but But it's going to be there alongside the Leviathan Tent, the Manifesto Stage, the Theatre Stage, the Ward Stage, the Publ Gaelge. This whole area at Electric Picnic dedicated to ideas and speech and debate. And for me, rest.

Now before you go calling me an old fogey who can't handle festivals I'm artistic so being in a gigantic field with thousands of people with multiple competing sources of sound is something that I've always had difficulty with. I've been gigging at festivals for over a decade so I can tolerate the extreme stimulation that a festival can provide my senses but I do need breaks from it and the Mindfeel Arena has always been where I get my break it doesn't demand much of me and there's a good chance you'll get a seat I'm on on the Saturday um I'm just looking at the poster and oh I I'm headlining. I'm headlining the Here Now podcast stage. Right, I didn't know that.

So I'm on on the Saturday doing the Blind By podcast. Look, you know the crack. You're listening to my podcast. Come down to my podcast at the Here Now stage on Saturday at Electric Picnic for a wonderful time. And the main thing I will be concerned with is wasps so I love doing this gig at Electric Picnic I love doing my live podcast Electric Picnic but because it's September I find that wasps are particularly belligerent now most other people don't have to worry about wasps but I do

you see because I wear a plastic bag on my head I very easily attract wasps depending on what I'm eating or drinking. So if I take a sip of any drink that's in any way sugary and the residue of that drink makes it onto the lip of my plastic bag then I'll be tormented by wasps and the fear is is that it only happened once the wasp flies into my plastic bag and becomes trapped between my human skin and my plastic bag and then I have to hit myself into the face to try and eliminate the wasp to try and neutralize the wasp so when I do the podcast atnic, I have to make sure I'm not wearing any strong fragrances, that I only drink regular water all day, that I don't eat any sweets, chocolates, nothing sweet, and then I won't be accosted on stage mid-podcast by a wasp. No one else has to worry about this. Darren and Joe don't have to worry about this. Kelvin from Talking Bollocks podcast doesn't have to worry about this. The Charlene and Ellie podcast doesn't have to worry about this. Darren and Joe don't have to worry about this. Calvin from Talking Bollocks podcast doesn't have to worry about

this. The Charlene and Ellie podcast doesn't have to worry about this. Brezzy doesn't have to worry about this. But me, because I have a plastic bag in my head, I have to be extra concerned about wasps. But look, we've done it before. I'll do it again. Maybe I deserve to be stung by a wasp. Maybe that's what I need.

Look, if you're going to Electric Picnic, check out the Ah Here Now podcast stage stage which is in the minefield arena you will not regret it it's a wonderful place to rest and recharge