Three Bean Salad - Submarines

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Submarines is this week's topic, and inevitably the beans end up talking about flightless birds. And flightful birds. And flaming pedalos shaped like birds. And macadamia nuts.

I've got a new way of starting the show. Quite bold isn't it? You've caught me off guard, I'm eating an almond. Almond or almond? I say almond, which apparently is wrong. I used to say almond and I got a lot of hate for it. I had a voiceover on behalf of all almonds, like the British Almond Council. I think it was California almonds. The first hour of the session was spent discussing how to say the word almonds or almonds.

Almond. Now, you know what? I tell you what almonds is the word, it's a word that I trip up on. And it means the way I deal with it is I slow down a lot when I say it. So I'll be like, yeah, so anyway, so yeah, it was great. I'll be like, that was a great almond. Nice to see you, mate. Yeah, that was great. I really enjoyed that almond. There'll be something like, you know, it was a great nut mix.

You know, there was there was peanuts, there was Brazil nuts, there was almonds, there was cashews. I'll really slow down on that word. What about cashews? Oh, no, cashew, cashew. Cashews, surely. Walnut. Well, well not. Macadamia.

Macadamia, that was the sexy rebranding of macadamia they tried to do a few years ago. Didn't know because no one's eating macadamias, guys, it's just not one of the main nuts. People talk about Brazil. Macadamia. Macadamia. That song was part of trying to relaunch it. No one will take macadamia seriously. No one, guys, people's macadamia

awareness is so low. What does macadamia really fundamentally look like? No fucking idea. What a whole nation in the Balkans declared independence and called themselves macadamia, didn't they? An entire country called itself macadamia, it still hasn't worked. They've tried so much. They've tried just to bring up macadamia awareness. I couldn't tell you what shape or size it is. I couldn't tell you what flavour it is. I couldn't.

The message hasn't got through, has it? The message just hasn't got through. What is the macadamia? Do write in if you know. Can you hand on heart say you know what it is? Yeah, but no bullshitters, please. Yeah, because we're sick of that. We're sick and bloody tired of the macadamia bullshit. Yeah, because we're weak in the week out. We've all heard it, okay. We don't use this as a soapbox to

just gas on about all that macadamia bullshit that we're all sick of hearing, okay? All I can tell you about macadamia, they're roughly a kind of magnolia kind of colour, I think. It's somewhere, but it's a kind of beige, it's halfway between beige. Yeah, that's what they want you to think. I can't even tell you what colour it is, frankly. It's like an off, it's basically it's like, if you painted a war white, and

then came back like 30 years later. And then bounce a bit of life off of a dried old cranberry. The faintest tinge. Yeah, exactly. That's what you think the colour of the macadamia might be, but it might not be. Exactly, it might not even be that. Also, I think they're round, but I'm not, I'm not entirely sure. I think they're generally they've been cut in half down the middle, haven't they, when you

buy them? So they're round, but with one flat side. No, you're thinking of watermelons. No, no, I'm thinking birthday cakes. Hang on. No, I think a macadamia, it's about the size of if you got a golf ball, yeah, shrunk it. The size of a macadamia, no, how you think about that? What are you doing? Are you leaving it out? Are you boiling it? What are

you doing? Now you're taking it in the tumbler. You're taking the accidentally you've put your trousers in the tumbler, and you've left a golf ball in it again. Yeah, and it's shrunk down to exactly half of its previous volume. Okay, okay, but it's got the same circumference. All the other dimensions are the same.

It's shriveled inwards on itself, volumized. I like you, Henry, I could not with a gun to my head, I couldn't draw a macadamia if you know, how would you how would you manage in a lineup? What if it was a bit slightly more passive knowledge, if you're presented with a series? Yeah, because by a series of, what's the word, you know, I could process a cross-off elimination. Yeah, so I could go that's a pecan, or a pecan, as Americans say. Yeah. That's a

walnut. That's a peanut. Yeah, all the others. And then you'd be like, oh, by the way, sorry, I think you've dropped something there. There's something there that's you've dropped on. You've dropped it in amongst the nuts. You've dropped some sort of half looking legume. There's a pulse here. I don't know what it in egg. I don't know what it's an egg off, but it looks endangered,

which should be very careful. You've dropped some sort of chalky chalk like you've taken a plaster cast of a lizard egg and then and then made it in chalk. You've dropped that there. It seems to me, Henry, that you do have quite a detailed picture of what my academia looks like. I'm sure it's wrong, but I tell you one thing I couldn't tell you though is, or at least, okay, no, thing is, I can sort of picture one, but they're

very hard to define. They didn't quite look like anything. And also their texture is very hard to define. It's slightly shiny. Is shiny a texture? Slightly chalky. Yeah, it's sort of smooth rough. It's like a solidified paste. But you can crack it in half weirdly. So it exists in a sort of impossible state. The way the molecules have been arranged will be crucial to why it's like that. It's one of the things where like it's kind of soft, but if you

hit it from the right angle, it'll split in half. Like with a perfect edge. If we have a perfectly understand the macadamia nut, we might be able to understand how to travel to Mars, say, you know, wouldn't be surprised in a macadamia nut technology ends up being the cockpit of the first manned flight to Uranus. That's what I'm saying. Well, get on it, boffins.

So this this week's episode is about, I believe, submarines. Yes, sure is. And this is three bean salad, by the way. Welcome. Also, have we not said that yet? I think so. We haven't done the pompadou section yet. No, we don't have to have a pompadou section, mate. It's optional. You know, she's not forcing the We've changed it quite a lot.

I'm just I'm not losing faith in it. In fact, right now, this is this is a pompadou section. So I've turned it around. Right, here we go. This week, the show is about submarines. Submarines. Submarines. I think it's quite a fertile ground for for for myths and stuff. Because people like us might not necessarily understand how it all works, really. Like I have heard that there's you must make sure that you're not in the bog when you're surfacing.

What does that mean? Because the because the pressure the pressure release surfacing means that the doors expand and you can't open them and then you're trapped in the bog until you go back down again. So you missed the all of shore leave. Now, I thought it was going to be something where all of the liquid inside the toilet would sort of spur back up. Yes, and then I thought the pressure was going to suck you out through the toilet. Oh, it'll suck you out. But the door will also be

locked and your turd will expand at the same time and get the bends. Filling you in a cube and a room shaped cube of shit. Exactly. Sorry. But equally, you would assume that when they first build it that they probably size the doors so that they can build it that they probably size the doors so that it's kind of the right size for, you know, sea level anyway. How do you think Submariners relate to men of the sea semen,

you know, but people on boats up on the surface? Because I think of when I think of, you know, semen or people of the sea, I think of a towel, you know, tassel haired bearded, ruddy faced men, fishing, you know, fishing their pockets, salt salt on their faces. Kelp on their shoulders. Do you know what I mean? Like battered, battered by the seven winds. Yeah. Yeah, a little rolled up cigarette. Sick calloused hands. Sick calloused hands. Speaking of barely comprehensible dialect.

Shouting, shouting songs, awful songs into the wind. And, you know, believing in a lot of folklore about about mermaids and stuff, and just being tossed around on the surface of the waves, but loving the scene, but those people under the submarine and Submariners, are they are they in on that as well? Because I feel like they're not weird. I just think of them as loads of men stuck in a tube. I don't see them as men of the sea. No, I know what you mean. They're sort of like they'll just

unhappy little boats. They're just unhappy men, just trapped in a sort of massive brimble. But they might be, but they might be very happy. I don't know, because it must surely requires a certain character to be up for that for a gig in the first place, right? You know, they're in a they're in a they're in a job, but they literally can't even see them.

They might not love the sea, they might just love tubes. The tube lovers. Ah, yeah, they're failed train drivers. They'd be they they might be the kid who, you know, if they're in the playground, and was running around and playing in the little tunnel, they'd be the kid that wouldn't come out of it at the end of the day. You know, They're the tube lovers.

Might be that kid. Yeah. I mean, they, they could, they could really hate the sea. It's basically the only place on earth you can guarantee you can't see the sea. Yeah, it's inside the submarine. Even that's right under your nose and above your nose and all around it.

That you're around your nose, but you can't see it or smell it because of the guffs or you can smell as human guffs. There's literally none of the fresh air none of the fresh you literally, the opposite of the fresh air you get from the sea and the, you know, all the, all the positives from that. That's gone. Guffs, men, hatches, torpedoes, occasionally that kind of that there's a muffled sort of beep sounds you get on you in

some rooms. Yeah, I think they got a special, they have a special guy for that to do the muffled pings. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of kind of a man bat, especially train. He emanates those. Yeah. Do you think you'd be a good Submariner? I don't think so.

I think I would have a low tolerance to the sheer amount of guffs, as Henry has already mentioned, the human guffs, the percentage of full-throated fart gas that is part of the atmosphere in those things that contained fog must be incredible. And people must get caught out by that on the first day when they don't think about it. And then they turn up and nightmare, that's your life now. Well, you would hope that if you, if you're going to go into

this life, they'd be, they'd be, you don't just sort of sign on the, the dotted line, that, you know, there's some sort of a little, are you yourself tolerant of flatulence? Are you a flatulent person? And they would say, yeah, in that case, they say, well, good, best of luck, Philly boots. Philly boots, you're in the right place. This is your time.

Get in the tube. Welcome to the gufftube. Um, so what you're saying is that actually, rather than people who aren't flatulence, uh, because, you know, there's one, there'd be one school of thought that says the less flatulence, you are the better, because you, you're reducing the sheer intensity of the gufft, but you're actually saying they should lean into it.

I think, I think the Navy is probably more pragmatic than that, and realizes that people, people who appear at the recruitment office claiming to be guff free are unlikely to be trustworthy. Yeah, they're going to be delusional. And then they're not the sort that we want, you know, defending Her Majesty's waves. So are you saying that when you join the Navy, you're, you're

led into a little room with a little doctor and you're invited to guff and then they sample it. And depending on how accurate and, um, and voluminous the guff is, it depends, you then get shuffled to a different part of the Navy. So really, really gross, um, sort of catches in the back of your mouth, heavy swamp, gassy guff. Yeah, you're straight into a nuclear submarine, small, small

and tight, then they go to the fleet air arm and they become a pilot, because you, you don't want to be going up to, you know, two miles above sea level with a, with a tummy full of, full of popsicles, dude, that's just, that's going to be very achy when it expands. And noisy, but odorless. Where would you go then? No, yeah, then you'd be naval intelligence.

Those guys very refined, aren't they? Noisy, really confident, noisy posh guffs. No, no, no smell or flavor whatsoever, because they're so well bred, but just, but just that two is almost like a sort of a clarion call. The hunt is up. That two is in that posh two, that clean, cut, cut glass. Yeah.

Um, follow, talk to me about follow through in this context. That's probably your Royal Marines, I'd say, because you've got to have a bit of grit. You're in the mud anyway. Yeah, exactly. You're on your, you're crawling on your, the truest grit for a career as a commando, I'd imagine. Is it, is it possible that guff affects the buoyancy of a

submarine? Oh golly, yeah, there's probably, there'd probably be a specific, I mean, just as you, have you got your Batman and you've got your, you've got your submarine driver, and you've got someone in charge of the fridges, you're going to have someone who's probably, probably that's their job, right? Well, I'm wondering if actually all of them are lined up. They've bought different tones and volumes of guff.

They were lined up like a huge sort of guff harpsichord or guff xylophone, sorry. And the general sort of orders them to guff, different groups, them to guff at different times, and that will actually control that the buoyancy and therefore the height and the direction. And they get different sort of, yeah, different sort of guff racks at different heights. Guff racks, they're strapped into guff racks.

And this is, they don't tell you this, this isn't in the ads. Join the Navy, join the Navy, discover it. Get in a guff rack. Yeah. You get, get clamped into a guff rack. And it's like a xylophone, the general goes up and down with a big, you know, pom pom on a stick sort of thing and literally hits your ass.

And, and that could also, could also account for all the bubbles that come out, come out of the back of some marine and film. Dance through the exhaust pipe. So you're saying the general, as you call it, the general, the submarine general, they're recruiting him from where then? Are they, are they going to some sort of the finest music conservatoires in the land?

He'll be, he'll be a disgraced conductor. Yeah. Yeah, or failed tympanists. So Simon Rattle, he went to Germany, did he, for a couple of years, for the Berlin Philharmonic? Did he? No such thing. Yeah.

He was under the sea. Thousand feet under the surface of the sea. Playing the deadliest tune known to man in a lethal game of arse bugle roulette. Against the Russians. I tell you what, the, when, when, when the submarines was first announced as the theme, the first emotion I felt was very rapidly, I felt shame that I still haven't seen Das Boot.

Oh, I've never seen Das Boot either. I have seen Das Boot. I've seen The Hunt for Red October. Oh, I've seen that. Fucking absolute tripe. It's great. It's great. I don't think you can make a good submarine film.

I just think it's too, the direct, the characters can only walk in two directions. There just isn't enough room for drama. It's the same reason why you don't get crabs being leading men. You need, you know, your clonies, your bra pits, they can walk forwards, backwards and sideways. Exactly. And the same goes for worms.

Cause worms can only go backwards and forwards as well. And it's the same, you can't, you go, where's Derek? Well, he's down the other end. That means you have to walk past literally all the other characters to get to him. It's just so hard to organize the drama when you're constantly saying, excuse me, Steve, can you get out of the way? Yeah.

Well, that's, I think the problem is because people are making submarine films about submarine stuff. You see, what you need in a movie, you need a nice fish out of water story, right? So you need your submarine, but you need your submarine doing something a submarine shouldn't be doing. On land. Oh yeah.

That's what I'm saying. Oh, that's good. Just a submarine. That's a scruble. Submarines. Yeah, submarines got to organize a, you know, a, children's birthday party or something in a shopping mall. And it's got to get up the M4.

It's got to get on the, I'm not gonna cross an ice rink. So hang on, in this film, is the submarine itself the main character or is it? Yeah, it's like Herbie. It's like Herbie. How would you anthropomorphize the submarine? Can you just give me a quick sketch? I think visually, where's the face?

The face, you probably, you might have to have a little bit of artistic licensee and I probably would give him a couple of portholes at the front and some paint on some eyelashes. So you've got his face down the end, not you haven't not on the little turret, his face is down the end, like a, like a You'd prefer on the turret, would you? With the periscope? Thomas the Tank Engine.

Well, that'll be quite good. The periscope could be a sort of quite a quizzical little sort of single-eyed creature popping up and down, having a look and see what's going on. Like a sidekick to the main. Yeah, or like, oh, that's good. Oh, he's got his own sidekick. Yeah, which is the periscope.

So he's got the face on the front, like Thomas the Tank Engine. And then periscopes, like a little wisecracking, probably voiced by kind of Kevin Hart or something like that. Maybe Steve Buskemi, would he do that? I think he'd be very good. I think it'd be a very, very good choice. So the submarine is, is a character. So in that universe are all military vehicles and characters?

Not necessarily. If we go down the Herbie route, I think Herbie was the only sentient car, but there is the potential for the submarine to, you know, have a friend who's an old grumpy fishing trawler. For example, a sleek and alluring Boston whaler for some sort of love interest, you know, a couple of cheeky canoes. Yeah. And they buy a zoo.

They buy a zoo, which has always been their dream. They're in a lot of trouble here. They're very quickly out of their depth. You could call the film out of their depth. Out of their depth. Yeah. And there, there's a evil corporate tycoon who wants to buy the zoo and turn it into a bad car park.

Oh, and they've all got, they've all got a rally together. Um, you know, a combination of the sewerage system and fountains. I imagine it's hard just to see the admin side of getting a zoo going from that situation, because you're looking at gov, you need to apply montage to the government. Montage. Well, a giant metal penis, isn't it? You know, even, even charitably, you have to say that's what it is.

A giant metal penis that fires explosive metal penises. It's the most phallocentric piece of weaponry ever conceived. If you basically drew your own dick on some graph paper, you've drawn a diagram of a submarine that would pretty much work. Did submarines start in World War One? I think they did. Yeah. Those would have been absolute dog shit.

Those ones, those first ones. Oh, can you imagine how bad they were, those first submarines? Well, presumably they just, they would have required a sort of, a sort of secondary sort of dinghy on the water with a man with a sort of pump. Trying to follow them along and get some air in. He'd be dressed as a seagull. He would be camouflaged. Just in the hope on a clod of, on a huge clod of kelp.

Just pumping away. I would like to go on a submarine. Having said all this, I would like, I would like to. In a leisure way. Well, I did the top there. I guess the, the, yeah, I guess, I guess the main type I'm talking about is the nice one with the windows and a Caribbean island going to look at clownfish, but I would be, I would be interested in the, I would be

interested in the metal tube. I don't know. I don't feel I'd be able to handle it very well, but I'd be interested, you know, even if it was for, for an afternoon. How would you feel about going in one of those ones they do in the David Attenborough documentaries where they go really deep, which is like a yellow. Be quite nervous about it, probably. Yellow sort of hull.

I'd like a big bubble, huge bubble. Yeah. But one of the, would you like to go down in one of them? I would like to think that I'd be the sort of person that would be capable of going down that, but I, in the reality, I think I wouldn't be able to concentrate on all the deep sea fish. I'd just be waiting for the, the windscreen to crack just a tiny bit. I'd be waiting for that first little crunch of glass.

All I'd think about. And then that lovely sort of 90 millisecond grace period before the entire thing is crushed into a tiny sort of can like. And that's thousands of tons of pressure. Yeah. Wait, and all you have time to do is say, tell my wife I love her to your colleague who goes, you understand I'm also going to go, and you get, oh yeah. And then at that point, then the water's in your face.

You've got giant crowds of tearing your eyeballs out. You've got just tentacles going into all your orifices just ripping apart from the inside. This is sounding better and better. You've got a giant clam around your balls. I was just literally just biting it off. Yeah, that's what I'd be worried about. And you could see the treasure.

That would be the irony as you, as you're having your, your crown jewels ripped off, you can, you can see that the actual treasure is there. Old, old red bids treasure. Old red bids treasure. You were right, you were right all along. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. Well, that's the trouble with the red bids curse, isn't it?

It's been the bane of my life that curse. Oh, so annoying. Absolutely bane of my life. Just one day when I could not have that hangover with me. You, you betray one 18th century pirate. Yeah. And yeah, it just follows you around. Wasn't it?

One spectral buck in the air. Just one spectral buck in the air. You, you, you make what you think is a square deal. Yep. You buy one secondhand Renault McGahn off a pirate. Which he's assured you is seaworthy. That was Submarines. An excellent topic.

It sure was. Thank you to everyone who has sent in their suggestions for topics, for future episodes. We've had some nice ones, keep sending them in. We've had some other correspondents. Please, we like all your emails. We've had a lot of correspondents. It's, it's the topic that won't go away, guys.

It's about the rear or indeed just kind of flightless birds in general. Right. I think I over, I think personally I over corrected last week a bit. So two weeks ago, I said the rear isn't a dangerous bird. It's a sweet bird. And actually it's the category that is the dangerous bird. I think the reality now that I've had a week to look into it and I've had various emails and tweets,

the rear is still absolutely a dangerous bird. And so what I've done then, in this past week, there have been people who've been very lax around their rears, I would imagine. But they are still dangerous, not as dangerous as a cassowary, but still very much in the of concern category. So I just want to make that entirely clear. But more your sort of fraudster rather than your kind of armed bank robber kind of threat. Are you saying in a metaphorical sense?

Yes. But in a more real sense, they will absolutely tear you out at the hole in your abdomen with a claw. So it's like, put it this way, when you're being attacked by a shark, you're not thinking, oh, thank God, this isn't a tank. So tanks are much, much more dangerous than sharks. But it doesn't mean you should relax around sharks at all just because they're not tanks. I think we've fallen foul of the need to leak table things,

which is a modern, you know, it's a modern disease. We've had to leak table cassowaries and lears in, you know, in terms of which is the most scary. Lears, so rears. And we're now part of the problem. We have become part of the problem, which is every week now we're picking out a different message, which bird should I be afraid of? Lear, cassowary, people are running around in circles a bit like.

What's a lear? A bit like, I mean, rear. I think a lear is is one of those when someone gets a rear to mate with a leopard, isn't it? And that's very dangerous. You get a lear, that's the origin story of King Lear. If you've ever seen the play. So guys, the latest really on the rear, cassowary world is that someone called Jennifer Ackerman got in touch.

I'm about to send you just to this is a bit of a pompadou. We're doing this over Zoom, so I'm able to put a link in the Zoom, which I'm going to share with you both now. OK, so this is a link to Jennifer's tweet. And I just want you both to at the same time, open this and. Take in what is. Going to be a new entry into the league table of most fearsome flightless birds. OK, but it's booting up.

What? What is this? Oh, my God, look at those legs. Oh, bloody hell. Hello, Benora. Right. Jennifer writes, sure, rears are undeniably enticing, but secretary birds are the real dark enchantress of the bird's world.

Secretary legs for days, lashes to die for and can kill a small antelope. What? And look at it. I mean, obviously, this is an audio medium, but to describe it, it's the sexiest thing I've ever seen. She's even got her arms behind her back, arms, wings. The poise, legs cross. It's a very catwalk stance. It's the end of the catwalk before we flip 180 and go back down again.

It's also very kind of 80s film, new girl in the office. Hello. What the? It's an 80s film where a previously slightly plain girl who wore specs. Yes, has had some sort of makeover. And it's like, what the? In fact, what do you think of me now? Yeah, this is Olivia Newton, John at the end of Greece, but in bird form.

Yeah. And it's like, hey, haven't seen plain, haven't seen plain Susan around the office for a while. Yeah, we're not going to see her again. Hey, do you want to shem? What? What about you, lady? Champagne? Who's the new hot hot chick? Who? Champagne.

Hey, we used to have a girl called Plain Susan used to work around this department. But maybe you'd like some pink champagne. All right. Why is this guy got the voice of like a sort of southern sort of Baptist preacher? Oh, I used to see Plain Susan around the photocopier. Why? Well, she was playing around here with her plain face. She was plainer than a ream or the AFOP that she used to load

into the photocopier in a joyless way. But you, why don't you step into my limousine helicopter, lady? It's got a jacuzzi inside. So don't open the door when we're over the drive flying over a main road. I got a pink champagne jacuzzi. You feel the bubble to the pink champagne going up in your crack. But wait a second. Old Plain Susan, she just had a neck pendant just like it

with a St. Christopher from her old mama. It was just the same. And Plain Susan used to have a name badge saying Plain Susan on it. It was a surprise that she went along with the name. We gave her a name badge, but she'd what the hell do you want to move? What? Who? How? And that's Plain Susan. And look at her.

She's had such a makeover. Plain Susan used to have a beak, but she used to have a curved beak, but it wasn't set off so well by those black, pendulous, fleshy protuberances around your head. They're swinging around. Anyway, if you're listening, do look up the secretary bird. It looks like a sort of... It's like a Disney movie where they've had to try and make a bird

like a love interest, and that's what they come up with. Oh, my God. If you have access to Twitter, go and have a look at our account at Bean Salad Pod, and we will put up the photo of this fine, fine bird for you to be able to visualize this yourself. So some more facts about the secretary bird. It hunts and catches prey on the ground, often stomping on victims to kill them.

Of course. That's how it kills you. With a sort of high-heeled talon, presumably. Yes. Stiletto heel. Yes. And it's also the emblem of Sudan. Is it really?

Good bird. Thanks for that, Jennifer Ackerman. Well done, Jennifer Ackerman. Brilliant. So if you've got a more terrifying and sexy flightless bird, but I can't imagine there's another one out there, that would blow my mind for the fourth one. And we can erode. You know what, right?

This podcast is, you know, a lot of it's quite silly, but I'd actually be genuinely interested if there isn't an ornithologist out there. I thought you were going to ask if there's a secretary bird who's single and might be listening. That's amazing for a cappuccino one day. But if there is an ornithologist out there, what is the link between flightless and sexy legs,

genuinely? Because most of the most sexy humans are also flightless. Exactly. Strong point. That's a really good point, actually. Sorry, so what are you going to say, Henry? If an ornithologist is listening. I'd just be quite interested to know about

why is it that the flightless birds have these very, very long, elegant legs, whereas flighted birds have short, stubby legs? I can tell you that, and I'm not an ornithologist, I'm just a man of sort of medium intelligence. OK, go on. What is it? Because they travel by running rather than flying, so by having longer legs, they can go further.

Whereas if you fly, you don't need long legs, because you're just using the departure or something. So you're saying that the law of evolution states that if one cannot fly, one must be able to run fast? Well, pretty much, yeah. All land-based animals... Is giving you a decent answer, I think. And perhaps the sexiness of the legs

is because they're running all the time, they end up quite sleek and willowy, and they're nicely shaped, do you know what I mean? They're not just sitting, watching box sets, these birds, to my knowledge, which is nothing. There are land animals that have small legs, like a dashand, but that's because we've been meddling with the genetics of that animal,

and it's a monster that we've created. To make them... But no, but it's adorable. We've made them adorable. Whereas if you imagine a dashand in its natural state, we'd have those long, secretary bird legs. We'd have four-foot-long, sleek, tallened legs. Tapering to a fine point, yeah. That would be horrible.

But I might be wrong, so if you are an orthologist, I think that's very rudimentary understanding that I have of why they have sexy legs, but I do think you need to worry about that. I don't think anyone's leaning into us too hard for their ornithology A level, every time seen. Yeah. It's the way the podcast is going, though,

and I'm very welcome to. It's heavily lurching towards the flightless bird world, which I'm enjoying, frankly. I'll be the first to admit it. Will Beezer emails and says, you asked at the end of the first podcast whether anyone had been attacked by a rea. I can't say that I have, but I was attacked by a swan.

It's my earliest memory. I was at Slimbridge Wetlands when I was about three or four with my nan feeding the swans some bread. And after I ran out of bread, I started throwing little stones at them with the same sort of bread scattering technique, thinking that the swans ate anything breadcrumbsized.

The swans became violent, naturally. And I recall my nan staving off a group of about five or eight swans by wielding her handbag and swinging it wildly around her head like a flail. So she went full berserker, good old nan. Man, I don't know, let's hope that she made it, right? I'm assuming that they all made it out of that. Yeah, he doesn't say whether she made it.

She may have been that thing where she goes, you just save yourself, leave me here, just go, just go. I'll slow them down. But never forget this moment. I know you're only three, just go. Just make sure this is your first memory. Try and make sure this, and also try and remember the name of the wetlands centre.

It's very important. It really adds texture to your anecdote. I know you're only three, and you haven't got a concept of a wetlands centre but for you, the world is just a bunch of, you know, pictures and things that just, you know, these don't, the world is just a series of sizes, basically. You just throw all you throw at a different size thing.

The only thing you're really aware of is size difference. But try, if you can, to remember the name of the wetlands centre. Go, go. Go now! Oh, God, they're on me. As she finally pulls the pin from the grenade, she's been keeping in her handbag all along. Eat this.

Eat this, you Queens bitch. There's a great one-second after she says that, isn't it? Eat this, yeah. Was it your queen? Your Queens bitch pulls it, and there's one second where everyone looks at each other. The swans look at each other. She looks at the swans.

Nothing they can do. The swans look at her. We own of the wetlands centre. He shuts up. He puts the blinds down on the ice cream. He's got time to do that, otherwise. He jumps into the swan shape, to make his escape.

He knows he hasn't got time. He wants to create a viking burial for himself on the petal. As a flaming swan shoots like a flaming arrow across the sky and lands in the prow, sets him alight. Well, I'm sorry. He still got in contact. What's happened? He sent us a nice story.

You've slightly slagged off his anecdote technique by slagging off the fact that he included the name of the wetlands centre, which I thought was just a nice detail. That was rock solid. That was rock solid. And then you've hypothesised that maybe his nan died in a flaming ball of swans.

Which if that was true, a little tip for him is he's left out probably the most part of the anecdote. Which is not so much that the swans attacked him, but the sort of massive flaming ball of nan. Of nan. I mean, it's perfectly possible that if this happened, as he said, he doesn't actually know what happened to his nan.

All he knows is she said, go without me. And he's never thought to broach that in his head because he doesn't want to go there. He doesn't want to imagine what happened. But you've now filled in that gap and coloured it in, in allure detail. And he might go back to the... He might now, for the first time,

feel ready to go back to that wetlands centre. Oh. And then discover that actually, that she didn't blow them up or herself, but actually she went to live among them. And she's been there ever since. Yeah. Nan.

Nan. Well. It's a great first memory, though. My first memory, weirdly, is also at Slimbridge Wetlands Centre. Really? Really? Was it of an old lady blowing up five swans?

You might be quite a lot of people's first memory. And last. No, mine's very boring. It's just that there's like a... There was a bit inside where there was a fake kind of swan house. You could go inside and you could then sit on the swan eggs. They'd made big. There was a big swan eggs that you could sit on.

I very vividly remember this. They were quite smelly. There was that sort of hay in there. It was all quite shit and old. And that's my first memory. You sat on an actual swan egg? No, it was like a big fiberglass swan egg. Oh, it's a fake swan egg.

Did you have to dress up as a swan? Were you trying to experiment what it would be like to sit on a... Yeah, I didn't have to dress up. I think they were just trying to give you the general feel of it. Just imagine a three-year-old me sort of grappling on a big egg. I think it's a very weird thing to offer children to do, to sit on a swan egg and imagine you're a swan who's had given birth to some eggs and is keeping them warm.

I don't know, but the stuff they go for, man, do you know what I mean? I think it's like magic roundabout. I'm sure people, when they first pitched that, would have been like, this is absolute nonsense. What are you talking about? But the stuff, the small ones in particular, that they genuinely go for,

I could imagine that could be the sort of thing that makes no sense to an adult at all. But they're like, yay! I want to slip off the massive egg again. My elbow, please. I'll tell you what, I'd be so pissed off. If I worked in that slimbridge... Wetland Centre.

Swans entry. Wetland Centre. If I was working on the staff there in the ideas meeting, and I would have pitched, I think, something much more... In the hot pitching room, yeah. In the hot pitching room. I reckon, you know, I've taken interest in film, you know. I'd have come up with some good ideas.

Some bloke had pitched that idea of sitting on the swan egg. With a reeking hangover. You know that guy would have been absolutely, yeah. Still half cut. Dressed in yesterday's clothes. Bacon dangling off his face. And I'd have been so confident that idea was bad that I would have actually have openly slagged it off

in front of the other executives. Little did you know, they'd already commissioned the fibreglass eggs. And I would have been so annoyed to see the kids lining up and really enjoying it. While my Blade Runner meets swan experience, right? Which has decimated the budget. For the next decade. Meaning the swans are on quarter rations.

Imagine it. It's a dystopian world. Which are the real swans and which are the cyber swans? So hard to tell because the level of robot technology has got so good in the future. And you go into a small suite where there's a robo swan who's doing a monologue about some of the really amazing ponds he's seen that humans can't even imagine. Exactly.

And there's a sexy hologram ad for a swan escort. Yeah. Being sort of projected. And everyone's eating noodles. Is there a bit in Blade Runner where someone makes an origami swan? Oh yeah, good point. And that would come up in the meeting, that's where you got the idea from, Henry.

And as soon as someone says that, I'll be like, yeah, well, see, it all adds up. And at that point, everyone in the room would be so excited. They'd be like, fuck it, okay. It doesn't matter about the canteen. We're putting all the budget into this. People can bring their own lunch. We're putting all the budget into the Blade Runner swan experience.

Meanwhile, Dave, your egg thing. If you can find some stuff to make it fine, there's no money in it. You can use that space over there with a stinky bit with a hay. Yeah. Fast forward, 18 months. Both things are now open. The queue's around the block for the swan eggs. We've got, we've got...

No, what is, Henry turns up at work and they're queuing out beside the wetland centre. He's like, oh my God, words got round. And then he goes through and he sees... I've been thinking, thank God we got through those teething problems with the hover... And all the deaths. The three workers who died.

Thank God it's not in vain. Yeah, thank God we found the extra investment from Saudi Arabia for the £3,000 a day electricity bill that it takes. Never mind that it's now owned by a corrupt oil shake. It's a good workout, OK. It'll be worth it because the people are turning up. The children... Getting people excited about swan

and that's what it was all about. In the meeting with the oil shake, you had to eat a swan. That was the... To prove that I was serious. And you know they were secretly filming it at the time. They've got you by the balls. And then you finally step into the wetland centre. And what do you see?

Little Ben Partridge, three years old. Slippin' and sliding. Slippin' and sliding and the turned styles for the Blade Runner experience are already beginning to rust. Yeah, they've wrought on the same day. We're only an hour in. They're rather the old crows and ravens are perching on bits of it, on bits of the set.

You get to the office and on your desk is a letter with a signature on the stairs from Ridley Scott. It's the one thing you forgot to do. You even wrote the letter and put a stamp on the envelope. You just forgot to post that bloody letters to Ridley Scott. Because he didn't know what his postcode was. And the final insult is you go downstairs again. I've got off the little egg, I'm going home, I'm happy.

You look in the little swan house and Ridley Scott's on the egg. And he's just slipping off the egg going, Henry, where's my money? Where's my money, Henry? Because as soon as you pay it up, I'm investing everything into the film sitting on the swan egg experience. Which is going to star Russell Crowe

playing three different characters. The swan, the child and the mother. And the egg. And the egg. And the egg. I forgot to mention the egg. Using CG technology. CG egg.

He's not going to use a real big egg. It's not going to be in camera. He's going to use a CG egg. Yeah. It's never been done before, Henry. Oh yeah. And then he'll go, but Henry, just give me a bit of hope.

He'll go, but Henry, you know what? We might use the set actually from your swan blade runner experience. And I'll be like, oh yeah. And he'll be like, yeah. For firewood. Firewood to create energy for the catering truck. Oh, there we are.

Well, thank you to everyone for sending us emails. If you want to get in contact, 3beansaladpod at gmail.com. Or you can follow us on Twitter. At bean salad pod. At bean salad pod. That's right. But until next time, sweet friends.

Goodbye. Cheerio. Bean out. Thank you.