567: No Such Thing As A Honey Badger On Toast

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's show, which was recorded live in the wonderful city of Christchurch, the furthest away that we have ever been from home.

Unfortunately, Andrew Hunter Murray was not here for this show.

He was unexpectedly called back to the UK for personal reasons.

But in his place, we had the unbelievably brilliant Josh Thompson.

Now, those of you who like New Zealand comedy like I do do will know all about Josh.

He has been on New Zealand Taskmaster.

He's been on the Guy Montgomery Guy Mont Spelling B, which by the way, if you've never seen that, you have to go into YouTube and look for episodes of that because it's a brilliant show.

He's also been in the New Zealand version of The Office.

But in this show, he came on and was absolutely brilliant, told us a whole load of facts that we didn't know about New Zealand.

I'm really sure you're going to love this show.

It's the last one of our talk.

Can you believe it?

We'll be back to normal programming in a couple of weeks' time.

But anyway, I really hope you enjoy this show with Josh.

And what else is there to say apart from on with the podcast?

No such thing Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Christchurch.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin and Josh Thompson.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Josh.

Well, my fact is that the first people to achieve powered flight were not actually the American Wright brothers.

They know it well here.

We're not the Wright brothers, but actually a lone eccentric New Zealand farmer called Cranky Dick Pierce.

Somebody tells me that the people of Christchurch might have come across this guy before.

Yeah, well,

there's an airport about two hours from here in a town called Timuru where I was born.

Yes.

and that is named Richard Pierce Airport after so

he flew about two hours drive away from here wow amazing so the Wright brothers the Wright brothers flew in in Kitty Hawk in America in December 1903 but Richard Pierce actually flew in March 1903

now how um are you like because there's a lot of conflicting accounts are you sure I'm so totally sure the ocean yeah yeah here's the here's the only problem right is that and I see where Anna's coming from, the Wright brothers, when they did it,

they have a photo and they have lots of people who saw it.

The issue with old

Cranky Dick is that

we have nothing.

We have bits of the plane and full bits of the plane, but the original one, no one took a photo and no one saw it happen.

And

loads of people saw it happen, but by the time they were properly interviewed about it, most of them were dead.

I heard that there were some photos, but they got destroyed in a flood.

Yeah, there were a lot of convenient destruction of photos.

But the real, I mean, I think the main thing Richard Pierce had working against him was that he was a New Zealander, and in New Zealand, we don't like to show off.

So, yeah.

So, while the Wright brothers had your movies and your photos of the event, Richard Pierce had a handful of farmers watching.

And he had a bit of trouble getting the plane started, actually, which happens to the best of us.

And after a while,

right, guys?

If there's a lot of farmers watching but that

you know they're all pointy and giving instructions after a while after a while a lot of the farmers left it was only a really small handful of people he got the plane going but then he didn't want to gloat about it so he knew the farmers would be like oh okay i saw your little bicycle plane fly mate calm down

but yeah he he just didn't keep any journals so it's a so was it like a bicycle no it was uh it was like uh it was pretty amazing really he built the entire thing himself so the right brothers had a lot of money they sort of connected to the vanderbilt family and they you know they were commissioning commissioning engine parts and stuff like that.

Richard Pierce built the entire thing himself.

I've seen the engine,

like the pistons are made from irrigation pipes, the cylinders are made from tobacco cans, and when you look at it, it looks like it's made from tins and cans.

Wow, that's amazing.

This is a bunch of baked bean cans stuck together for a you know a high school production.

And the frame was made out of bamboo, right?

Yes, that's right.

And so he was also known as Bamboo Dick.

Yes, yes, yeah, which grew famously fast.

It's the fastest growing plants on Earth.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Just be careful googling that.

I had a bit of a...

Not proud of it.

They did a replica of it to see if it would fly.

And this was in the 1970s.

And they made a documentary about it.

And while they were doing the filming, they attached it to a horse.

A loud noise happened and the horse bolted.

And as it ran, the speed that it went at, which it pulled the plane into the air.

Oh, wow.

And all the crew saw it fly.

And they went, oh my God, it's flying.

It actually worked.

And then it crash-landed and they went, did you get that?

And no one was filming.

Yeah.

How convenient.

Why did they tie it to a horse?

Oh my dick.

That's such a Timuru thing to do.

Everything, if you ever go down there, everything's tied to a horse, mate.

Well, Timuru, so not only have you got Richard Pierce Airport down there, and it is where you are from, where you were born, also another notable character from there is Farlap.

Of course.

Yeah, I can't believe it.

Farlap was sired there and the father of Farlap was called, what was he called?

Night Raid.

And Night Raid had a bunch of award-winning horses.

Farlap, which was the biggest, but there was one called Lady Graceful, Pillow Fight, and one called Peter Jackson.

Wow.

Really?

What?

Yeah, coincidence.

It is weird.

Do you know how big a deal they make of him in Australia?

It's mad.

And he's from New Zealand.

I was astonished.

It's so odd that they've spread Farlap over three different locations.

Like, would you do that to someone you love?

They worship this horse for non-Australian New Zealand listeners.

Farlap is the biggest celebrity in Australian history.

This

incredible race horse from the first half of the 20th century.

It was a very sweet story because a trainer persuaded a businessman to buy him from New Zealand, and then he turned up and his face was all covered in wart.

And so the businessman went, that's disgusting, that's a horrible horse.

No, I'm not going to pay to train it.

So this guy trained it for free.

And yeah, it won all the the races there were for ages.

And then there was an assassination attempt and everything.

But then when he died, they couldn't decide where to keep bits of him.

So his hide is in Melbourne Museum.

Skeleton in the actually his skeleton is in New Zealand, I think.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's actually the best bit.

And I think it's heart.

You want the bones, mate.

And his heart is in the National Museum of Australia.

So yeah, you've got the skeleton.

That's good.

Fallout.

Is that a New Zealand thing?

Is that what's going to happen with you, Josh?

Yeah, well, I hope so.

It's going to take a while to get the hide off, to be honest.

We'll keep the bones at home.

Yeah.

Yeah, actually,

yes, there was assassination on Tim, but Fallout was

hit by the mob, right?

Yes, and survived by shooting, which didn't get him, and he went on to win a race that day.

The mob, did you say?

Yeah.

Did they leave a human head in his bed?

I think we should really emphasize, just quickly, going back to this first powered flight, Richard Pierce, how humble he genuinely was.

When he was interviewed, he refused to take credit almost.

He misremembered it.

So, most of the evidence, and most people who've researched it, agree now that he was the first powered flight.

It was

nine to eighteen months before the Wright brothers.

But when he was asked to remember it, he said, I don't think I did anything practical with it until 1904.

Incorrect.

He was doing it in 1903 or 1902, because they interviewed all these sort of 80, 90-year-olds in the 70s and 80s, I think, who all remembered sort of when in their lives it had happened, they could place it historically so they could put the event in context.

But he just said, you know, no, the Wright brothers, they're fair cop, they should get the credit.

I'm just, you know, no invention is really invented by a single person.

It's just all inevitable that someone will come up with it.

It was just bizarre.

The other thing is that the Wright brothers, they sent it up with a catapult or something.

It was kind of like a rail slide.

Yeah, like a sort of water slide, but without water.

And his one, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

To describe it for you, you might not know.

I got it.

And his one was much more like modern planes, right?

Yeah.

I reckon.

Yeah, that's right.

What's really amazing about it is that he left zero research.

And because of that, he had zero impact on the aircraft industry because no one knew he existed.

No one knew what he did.

Yet, the Wright brothers had a biplane, they had an engine mounted behind them, they had skids instead of wheels, and yet planes evolved to be more like Richard Pierce's plane, which had wheels, a variable pitch propeller, single plane, engine mounted in front, propeller on a center crankshaft.

So really Bamboo Dick was right.

Yeah

and all on his own.

He built the engine on his own.

He just went to someone, the only other person in New Zealand who knew what an engine was basically at that time.

It was so fresh.

That's not a knock.

Like 10 years before his flight was the first time that there was a recorded hot air balloon flight in New Zealand.

Yeah, in 1903.

So we're talking about like there's a lot lot of tech that wasn't yet here.

So this guy taught him how to make a machine.

He then gets on his bicycle to go and collect all the bamboo that he needs for the plane itself.

So he's just riding in and out of town, building this eccentric thing that no one's ever seen before because it doesn't exist.

And yeah, and then he does it.

The guy he worked with, who was the engineer, just to build on his, you know, everyone works together on this, was a huge deal in his own right.

The engineer who was the guy called Cecil Walkdon Wood.

I don't know how well known he is here, but he sounded very cool.

So he made New Zealand's first motorbike and probably first motor car, I think,

around 1900, 1901.

And he powered it with gunpowder.

Yeah.

And he got...

It goes very fast in a very short time.

But he bought his gunpowder from a local chemist who was called William Gunn.

Brilliant.

That's great.

So Richard Pierce's engine that he made himself, a Model T Ford engine, has 20 horsepower and weighed about 136 136 kg Richard Pierce's homemade engine out of baked bean cans had 25 horsepower and weighed about 57 kg

so

more power and about less than half the weight and the Wright brothers engine had 12 horsepower and 82 kg I mean how embarrassing

although he did keep crashing it I'm just remembering the final thing I thought

there were like three separate accounts of it crash into a bush that it crashed into a bush again yeah another bush yeah he had a lot of bush

He was a very bad farmer.

Like, apparently, his animals were starving.

And he was terrible.

He didn't care.

He didn't care.

There's only a few instances in which the media had any kind of interest in him whatsoever during his lifetime.

One happened in 1909.

At this point, he's a really kind of disheveled reclusive in his house.

And they come to him because they want to interview him about the fact that...

Between June and August of 1909, lots and lots of New Zealanders thought that aliens were invading because they kept seeing stuff in the sky.

People were going, we think either aliens or Germans are invading.

We're not sure.

And they were reporting it to the police.

There were multiple accounts of kids in school grounds seeing an object land and fly off again.

And it's gone down in the sort of annals of like UFO canon of sort of like legit encounters.

But they went to him at that point and said, didn't you try and build one of those things that was going up?

And that's one of the only interviews that we have with him during his lifetime.

Yeah.

And what was their point?

It was like, are you an alien?

Well, they were, yeah.

What did they think?

No, they were like, could we go up and get them?

Could we use them?

Yeah.

Or is it possible that we are being visited by, you know, Americans who are flying planes here and they just haven't told us?

And like, they're going from city to city and so on.

He also invented a bike that you don't pedal cyclically.

you pump up and down with your feet.

And it's like a piston bike and it rides.

And also it had tires that inflated as you rode.

Which must have been so hard to make.

I would suggest making better tires in the first place.

Yeah.

But he was like, these body tires keep getting flat.

But I've seen the picture of that bike, and the tires are flat.

Really?

So maybe he was right.

Because you do, what if you're not cycling?

You don't want to waste air, you know?

I think that's fair enough.

Very eco-eco-friendly.

I thought I'd look at a few more local achievements as soon as we're in Christchurch.

So I went on the Guinness World Records and I found out that the largest ever game of leapfrog was in Christchurch.

It involved 1,348 participants,

which I think by coincidence is the exact number of people in this building right now.

If you include all the staff and us four, I think it's exactly so.

We could do that?

Okay.

Slightly messes with the format of the show, but

the most tea bags thrown into mugs in 30 seconds

for a team of two

That was broken in Christchurch in 2021.

Wow.

It was 11.

Finally, the next thing.

The most tea bags thrown into mugs in 30 seconds by a team of one is 13.

Yeah.

And one final thing in Christchurch, the greatest distance ever run on a treadmill in 48 hours by a female.

Can you guess how far she ran?

Well, you don't get anywhere, do you?

Yeah, zero miles.

But she thought she'd run 340 kilometers.

Okay.

Well, the days of Invis of the Plane are quite a long way back, aren't they?

Yeah, I tried to see if there were sort of any notable stories that came out of Timuru, you know, just like any great news stories.

The only thing I could find was that the Timuru District Council were trying to investigate a missing $5,000 toilet unit.

They basically just nicked this giant outdoor toilet.

And

yeah, and just, I mean, it doesn't get any more interesting except.

Well, I mean, look, I've dealt with these allegations in the past

like to be honest.

I'm sick of them.

It's time to move on.

Maybe someone tied a horse to it and they just

Yeah, it's true.

Shout out to the journalist by the way who ends the piece by saying police are investigating but still have nothing to go on.

Oh my God.

Come on.

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It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in the 1940s, a law was passed that meant wherever the Dutch princess stood didn't count as a country.

What?

So cool and weird.

I can't find out another time this has happened, but this is amazing.

And I read this in a book, which is so fun, and I would recommend.

I found it on my bookshelves recently.

It's called Atlas of Extinct Countries by Gideon Defoe.

And it's about all sorts of weird nationality quirks.

And this story, so this is in 1940, Germany invades the Netherlands.

The Dutch royal family flees, mostly goes to Britain, but the princess, Crown Princess Juliana, went to Ottawa, and she went with her two daughters to Ottawa Germany was occupying the Netherlands.

And while there, she got herself knocked up.

And there was a problem with that because the law in the Netherlands was that no one could be in the line of succession if they were born on the soil of a foreign country.

And she only had two daughters at the time, so if she'd had a son, that would have meant he would be heir presumptive, but he couldn't be because he'd be born in Canada.

So they had to do something about this.

So the government got together with a bunch of lawyers and they concocted a new law which basically said, wherever this pregnant lady is, isn't Canada.

Because in case she gives birth, it can't be on Canadian soil.

Did the Canadians agree with this?

I think that, you know, it's only a small bit of their soil.

It's not like you're stealing an acre of land.

Well, it depends where she walks, though.

If she gave birth, sort of, I don't know, in the Prime Minister's chair or something, and then she boomed, like.

He was probably very careful not to lend him her chair at that time.

But was it the case that it was technically Netherlands, or was it just no, it didn't belong to any?

It was weirdly nothing.

I think maybe making it the Netherlands would have been even harder.

And the law was that as long as it's not another country, you're okay.

So it was just an extra-territorial zone, basically.

Right, the thing is, if she'd have been born in Canada under normal rules, then she would have been British because anyone who was born in Canada in those days was British because it was a former British colony.

Although, because she was a Protestant descendant of Sophia of Hanover, by British law, she's British anyway.

Right.

It's one of the weirdest ways to get citizenship of any country, I think.

You know, you have to do the test when you go to different places.

To be British, all you really have to do is to be a Protestant descendant of Sophia of Hanover, and you're straight in.

Really?

You know, if you're Dutch and you were in Canada at the time, you know when you see in movies, sometimes someone's running towards an embassy so that they don't get caught.

Yeah.

If they'd hopped on her shoulders for like a shoulder ride, would they?

Yeah?

Yeah, but you then have to stay on her shoulders the whole time.

And as soon as the baby's out, it's Canada again.

Yeah, but you make her walk to an embassy.

I see, I see.

It's probably easier to leg it to the embassy.

I don't know if you've tried climbing on the shoulders of a nine-month pregnant woman.

They hate it.

My wife and I have some really weird kinks.

So was this Princess Juliana?

Yes.

Yeah.

Now, I was unaware of the pregnant thing.

But I do know that after the war, she gave Canada 100,000 tulip bulbs to say thank you.

Did she?

Yeah, and I just think 100,000 is too much.

Like, you know, when it's just too much, Admin.

Like, you know, when you go to something, someone gives you like a bag of tomatoes during tomato season, you go, oh, okay, well, now I've got to deal with all these tomatoes as fruit flies everywhere.

You know, like, they've got to plant a hundred thousand tulip bulbs somewhere.

They've got to feed them.

I've got to keep them alive.

And you know, when she comes to visit, she's going to be like, where's my 100,000 tulip bulbs?

I know.

It's not even just that.

It didn't stop at 100,000.

She then went on to give them 20,000 more as an extra thanks to the maternity ward in the hospital that she gave birth in so they could be planted in the grounds.

And then it became an annual thing.

She would send them tens of thousands of bulbs every year for her entire reign.

To me, it sounds like she's got a lot of tulips hanging around.

She's just trying to get rid of them.

It sounds like big tulip to me.

Just a case of the bulb industry reaching its claw over the world again.

All of Canada's mates always getting tulips as presents, constantly re-gifted.

So they don't know her.

This kind of thing did happen in a few other places around that time.

So in 1945, the British government ceded suite 212 at Claridge's to Yugoslavia.

So the room, 212, they said this is now part of Yugoslavia so that the heir to the Yugoslav throne could be born on Slavic soil.

So does that mean like the house, like the maids, did they have to go through customs to like clean the room?

I guess so.

According to the story, they got a spade full of soil from Yugoslavia and put it underneath the bed.

So that not just was it technically Slavic soil, it was literally Slavic soil.

I'm not sure if that's true.

Because, yeah, there's rumors of that kind of stuff with George Washington.

There was a statue in London.

They said that the soil that the statue was placed on was American soil that was imported, so that Washington wasn't technically on British soil.

But I think that was the tourist guides would tell you that.

I think that might have been false.

It's pretty easy to fake soil.

I run a pretty tight record down the South Island

Yeah, but on the other hand having come into New Zealand and Australia It's not that easy to bring soil in is it

That's right James keeps handing his golf shoes over every time we come into this is a great tip by the way So if you are if you play golf and you bring golf shoes in you have to declare them because they might have soil on them.

But when you declare them, they clean them for you.

Love me.

It's amazing.

I've never had such clean golf shoes.

It's a very expensive way to get your golf shoes cleaned.

Buy a ticket to Australia or New Zealand every time you need it done.

I was actually reading a few of the other fun, weird nationality examples in this book, The Atlas of Extinct Countries.

One of my favourites is somewhere called the Republic of Goost, which is a village.

It's in the mountains of southwestern France.

It's a little hamlet, but this weird thing happened in the 19th century where this rumor spread that it was its own independent republic.

It's quite hard to work out where it came from.

I think an MP referred to it as a republic in 1827.

And, you know, you go back through newspaper archives and there'll be stories in the American newspaper saying, well, of course, there's this tiny village of Gooste, which is its own independent republic in France.

It had no legal basis, but two of the things I like about it.

One is that, according to an 1896 article from an American tourist who went there, the women there remained beautiful well into middle life in striking contrast to the lowland women of France.

So

that's interesting.

And the other thing is, lowland women, because Goost was on the top of a hill, the other cool thing about it is that it was at least an hour's hike to get down to the bottom of the hill to get anywhere else.

And when someone dies in Goost, that's a faff.

So they created a chute out of timber and they just got their corpses whenever anyone died.

Like a water slide, but with no water.

That's absolutely right.

Wow.

That's very cool.

And the body just, what a wonderful way to end your life, or to begin death.

They said a little prayer at the top, tipped them over the edge, slid them down to the town at the bottom, which presumably was like, stop sliding your dead bodies down here.

That's so funny.

I got a riddle for you.

Okay.

Okay, so in 2009, a girl was born in China.

Her father was a Canadian citizen born in Libya, and her mother was a Chinese citizen.

What was her nationality?

You're gonna have to go to the corner.

So, she was born in China.

I'd say Chinese.

She was born in China.

Her father was Canadian, but he was born in Libya.

Her mother was Chinese.

Now, you think Chinese, but because the two parents were not married, according to Chinese law, it goes on what the father's nationality was, so she couldn't be Chinese.

Okay,

the daughter was the horse.

Okay,

so

let's pretend he never said that.

Or Libyan.

So he didn't have his Libyan citizenship anymore because he'd renounced that because he'd moved to Canada.

But according to Canadian law, you could only be Canadian if you were born in Canada or if one of your parents was born in Canada and he wasn't born in Canada.

Oh my god, she didn't she did she had nothing.

Well the answer is she was Irish.

So I'm quite quite surprised you didn't get that Josh Actually, no, I was going to say Scottish, which is different.

It's different, but it's Indian-ish.

So I was pretty close.

Mentally, mentally, I was pretty close.

It turned out that the father's father was born in Ireland, and you can get Irish citizenship if your grandparents are from there.

So since she couldn't get any of the others, they gave her Irish citizenship.

Good all that.

Eventually, it got in the news and stuff, and the Canadians went, oh, yeah, we should probably give her Canadian citizenship.

So she did get that in the end, but yeah.

Wow.

Ireland is always sort of scooping up the rejects from the rest of the world.

It's so nice.

In a very nice way, I remember when

Britain left the EU and sort of everyone found a very, very distant bit of Irish ancestry.

And I just went, yeah, we'll have you.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Coming in.

Well, I went, I mean, I'm loving all this stuff, but I really, really dug deep on the tulip buzz.

And I went down quite a rabbit hole of terrible gifts from royal families.

Oh, yeah.

And in 1851, Queen Victoria sent American President of the United States

sent the President,

Millard Fillmore, a £1,000 block of cheddar cheese.

Wow.

It's 450 kgs, it's nearly half a ton of cheddar.

Wow, so like a week's supply almost.

Well, apparently it's quite hard to transport and became quite smelly.

So

I think it was meant to cement American-British relations, but it just stank.

And in the 1860s, Napoleon III of France sent Emperor Maximilian of Mexico a stuffed alligator wearing a crown.

Again, to celebrate the French-backed emperor's rule over Mexico, but everyone thought it was just a bit weird.

Yeah.

Tacky.

It's tacky.

It goes in the guest room.

And there's a more recent one, you guys might know about this.

I don't know if this is controversial, but Prince Charles, who was Prince at the time,

guys, I've got a lot of facts.

He visited Haiti as they were recovering from an earthquake, and he gifted them a jar of sand from the Dead Sea.

And it was seen as not particularly helpful.

If anything, the last thing you want after an earthquake is more dirt.

We've got to move on in a sec, guys.

This is sort of about diplomatic quirks, and I kind of love all the weird diplomatic quirks and immunities there are.

I think actually my favorite example of like a diplomatic rule that's made, it was in 1917.

I don't think we've talked about Lenin's train trip back to the Russian Revolution, which was the thing that triggered the Russian Revolution.

So in 1917, Lenin was taken in a secret sealed train, which was kind of officially given Russian embassy status.

He was taken from Zurich to Petersburg, sort of so that he could start the revolution.

It was arranged by Germany because Germany wanted to weaken the Russian war effort at the time, and it thought the best way to do this is to get this crazy revolutionary to go and start a revolution there.

So the Germans sort of sent Lenin back.

So it's quite awkward because Germany and Russia are at war, but they're sharing a train together and helping each other out.

So they drew a chalk line down the middle of the train carriage and all the German sort of soldiers and guards stood on one side and Lenin and his mates stood on the other.

And it's such a convoluted journey.

They had to swap carriages about four times.

So they always had to get off, get on, redraw the line, say,

you're not allowed to cross over.

But the thing I actually love most about this, because it's such a nice insight into Lenin's mind, is he also organized a bathroom rotor.

So on this train, there was one bathroom between 34 people, half Russians, half Germans.

Lenin had forbidden anyone to smoke on the train except in the bathroom.

This caused a problem because everyone kept hogging the bathroom.

So he started issuing passes.

He's on his way to start the greatest revolution of the 20th century.

He was issuing bathroom passes, and you got a second-class pass if you needed to have a cigarette, and you got a first-class pass if you needed, you know, to

have a number two or a number one.

You know, he didn't distinguish between those in the pass system.

So that you could, there's Lenin, like, you want to we?

Yes, there's a first-class pass, and that gave you priority, and you got to bang on the door and say, oy, smoker, get out.

Amazing.

And that's

just, that's, I find that really entertaining.

What

Good old Lennon.

Good old Lennon.

Good old Lenin.

You know, not enough people talk about that side of him.

That's yeah.

The bathroom monitor side.

It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the marine snail, Litterina saxitillis, is otherwise known as the most misidentified creature in the world.

It has been wrongly identified as a new species over 113 times and was first described in 1792.

This is astonishing.

Is it because it just looks like a little snail?

Yeah,

it's a little rough periwinkle is the kind of snail.

And yeah,

it's a snail that it just comes in different shapes, different sizes, different colors.

Yeah, and so as a result, people keep finding it and going, wow, this is new and giving it a new name.

And then people eventually just go, sorry, that is the periwinkle.

We need to bring that back to the old name.

As far as I could tell, because it's a bit hard to get the full list, but I have seen a list.

Sometimes it's been named six times as a new species by the same people.

Which is wild.

That's so funny.

It's like every new human you met thinking they're a different species because they're wearing different clothes, basically, isn't it?

Yes.

Because they do have this real variety.

I don't know how people do it who are naming these things.

The problem with them is that they adapt incredibly quickly.

They're amazing.

So, if they find themselves in a different situation suddenly, some are a bit cold, some are a bit scary, somewhere a bit rocky and exposed, they'll exploit the genes within them because they've got huge genetic variation.

They'll exploit the genes within them that make them, you know, turn bright red, or make them go really small, or make them get a really thicker shell.

So, that's why every single one is completely different.

Yeah, and this isn't just with this particular species.

So, there's a big group called the World Register of Marine Species or worms, and they have been going through exhaustively the giant list that we have of all the names of all the species out there.

And they discovered that they've had to reassess 190,400 of them because they're duplicates and they need to be taken away.

So, yeah, we have 228,450 accepted species as it stands.

That number is growing all the time.

It's almost half.

They went back and looked at the list and were like, half of these are fit.

They're just that guy in a hat.

I just don't know how you could misidentify.

Like, I'm not a gastropod mollusk guy like I'm more on a bivalve buzz but

but if I

like if I got a child to draw a picture of something they found at the beach it would be this yeah it's the most common thing I've ever seen I got to say I'm not actually sure if that's the stale we're talking about

And I've just got to say that people listening at home don't know what we're pointing at.

So as far as they're concerned, this is exactly what it is.

That's right.

It could go the other way, of course.

There's a lot of things that look identical and turn out to be completely different.

So, for instance, there were some researchers who looked at the DNA of 643 bird species in North America, and they found 15 new species that looked identical to other things.

But when they checked the DNA, it turned out they were completely different because they just looked like little brown birds.

It's so weird.

I always wonder with taxonomy, there must come a point where you think, why are we doing this?

Why does it

is it that this bird doesn't care that it's a slightly different type of bird to this bird?

Why do I?

I guess we would know if things go extinct if we put them in big databases.

Yeah, I know.

But that's the thing.

If it's very similar to this thing, then I know it's a very controversial thing to say, though, in the age of climate change.

I'm going to back out.

But I think one thing that epitomizes it is the giraffe problem, right?

So I think

we thought for many hundreds of years that there's one species of giraffe, and then very recently.

recently it's been thought that actually giraffes are split into four different species and that means that giraffes suddenly go from being a bit of a worry to very endangered, because now that there are four species, each species has far fewer members.

Oh, yeah.

And it seems like there's such a weird categorization that we put on stuff to say to this giraffe, hey mate, do you know yesterday you were fine, but today you're in serious trouble.

What?

Oh, that is interesting.

It's as well,

the worms, that unit, they've made estimates about what there is out there still to find.

And they think there are still 10,000 new marine species waiting to be found that are sitting exclusively in the back rooms of museums that have been collected.

And actually, that is a big thing in the world of curation with museums.

A lot of new species are discovered in the boxes that they have there as opposed to in the field.

We went behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum in London.

There are still boxes that Darwin collected from the Beagle that have not been properly studied yet.

It's incredible.

There was one person at University College London who left the job.

I think they retired.

And they left a bottle of homemade plum brandy in the drawer and then when they actually looked at it they found out that it wasn't a macerated plum in the brandy, it was actually a testicle, brackets species unknown.

And they've added it to the collection.

Hopefully one day we'll find out what kind of testicle that was.

It's a good job they didn't drink it.

Yeah.

You know, that reminds me of a great New Zealand invention.

We talked about that earlier in the show, is that New Zealand innovated the glory hole that doctors use.

No, this is those pervert doctors.

This is specifically for doctors and for people who are too embarrassed to have their testicles checked.

So what you do is you go in a booth.

It's kind of like going to confession in church, right?

Right.

Actually, very similar to my childhood.

And so what you do is you go in and you pull your trousers down and a little door opens with the hole and a hand comes through and it just plays with your testicles and then goes, ten hail Marys.

And then just gives you a thumbs up and gets out of there.

Yeah.

Is that the thing where you look to your left and cough?

I'm pretty sure he was a doctor.

Isn't that a thing though?

That is the thing where they get you to cough.

It feels like they're weighing.

I think one of them jumps up a bit.

This really sounds made up, does it?

Yeah, one of them, like, guys, go home tonight and give a little cup and look to the left and cough.

And I think one of them jumps up.

And I think that's it.

Wash your hands.

I don't think any of you has been seeing a real doctor.

Wow.

That's very funny.

This rough periwinkle, by the way, since we're on sexy facts,

they famous for basically attempting to mate with any shell that they encounter.

So they'll find a mucus track and they'll follow it,

hoping that there'll be a female at the end of it.

But whenever they get to anything, whether it's a male, a female, just a shell, doesn't matter what it is, they'll try and have sex with it.

And the females, on the other hand, are really quite passive.

They don't really, they don't try and fight him off or anything like that.

They just let him get on with it.

It's the best way to do it.

Well,

she doesn't seem to encourage the male, she just like barely even knows.

Sometimes she'll just carry on walking down the road with him on the back humping away.

And yet, they are officially, the females,

the most promiscuous animal on earth, I think, aren't they?

Because they're so passive and the lads are so randy.

And it's quite extraordinary.

They don't have an egg-based system.

They have an in, you know, they get inseminated internally and then they've got a uterus equivalent, which which is very unusual in something like a little snail.

And so the males will mate with them.

And I think this little snail penis comes in through her side, but she can have hundreds of embryos in her uterus that are at various different stages of maturation from loads of different male snails.

And they did a study of four

female versions of these snails, and they found that over 2.5 months, each one had about 70 offspring, and on average, they'd have 19 fathers between them.

Wow.

So you're storing 19 fathers' worth of offspring.

And when you go into labor, it's fine.

If you're feeling sorry for them because they're giving birth constantly, sometimes multiple times a day, it doesn't take any effort from them because if they pushed, then all the snails would come out.

like even the not ready ones.

So the snails themselves crawl out and their little baby snails are known as crawl aways because they literally they're just like, I'm ready to go now.

Got my shell.

Crawl out and just disappear into the world.

Oh, they come out with a shell on.

They come out with a shell on.

Wow.

A bunch of barnacles crawling out.

I think I might have been on the same website because I

don't think so.

I was looking into conch sex and

conches are massive sea snails and are in trouble in Florida because when the water gets too warm, they become sort of sexually lethargic.

I mean, it happens to the best of us.

And so there's a team of scientists in Florida because the water's getting hotter who have to go and pick up the conscious from the warm areas and take them out into the cooler areas to mate and to encourage them to mate and have sex.

And I don't know how that got uncomfortable searching at that point, but I think it's a lot of sexy talk and a lot of Marvin Gaye music and just sort of...

That's so embarrassing though.

They need a human helper, a human fluffer to help them.

Hey, just while we're talking about sea slugs, one thing that I read about is

SpongeBob SquarePants, the creator, was a marine biologist, and I had no idea about that.

Yeah, he was called Stephen Hillenberg.

He sadly passed away in 2018, but he's the one who came up with the concept for it.

He was a marine biologist.

He was working for the Orange County Marine Institute.

And while he was there, he created a comic book to explain intertidal zones.

So, like all the pools that you get where you go and see what's going on in there.

So, he just laid out a bunch of facts in there.

One of the facts is that one species of sea slug can lay one million eggs in one sitting, right?

And that was in there, and he gave it a round.

And someone saw that and went, this would be a really good cartoon for kids.

And so, SpongeBob Squares Pants is based on a fact book that he did for students at a marine biology place.

But I don't remember SpongeBob giving birth to a million offspring in one sitting.

That was the pilot, they said, it's great.

We have a few tweaks, just a couple of tweaks.

The barnacle vagina exit is a bit strong.

And let's let's get his pants back on.

All right.

I found a lot of animals that are out there that are just called completely the wrong thing.

You may be aware of the mantis shrimp.

They've got a very powerful claw strike.

It's very explosive.

It can kill, it just basically punches the prey to death.

But the mantis shrimp is neither a mantis or a shrimp.

The bunterong, commonly known as the bear cat, is neither a bear or a cat.

And the honey badger is neither a badger or a jar of honey.

Wow.

Just be careful out there.

That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't put a honey bedger on your toast because it will tear you apart.

There's a type of frog called Alabates niputidia

that was described in 2007.

And it's like a little brown jobby thing.

Like, it doesn't really, it's not very impressive.

And it turns out that it's named after the Spanish phrase niputa idea, meaning I have no fucking idea.

Brilliant.

I think that taxonomists get things wrong a lot, but also the general public.

I mean, it's not really their fault, but apparently, there's a BBC rescue shelter.

Sorry, an English, sorry, a British rescue shelter.

We are.

We're all the BBC.

We all work for the BBC.

Everyone in the UK.

Sorry, sorry.

It was like the Conservatives' nightmare.

You just will say, Britain has become the BBC.

There was a rescue shelter in Guernsey, and the BBC reported that

this shelter is being taken a dead cat which turned out to not be a dead cat but actually a cuddly dog puppet.

What?

It was just a sock puppet.

They also got alerted about a sick seal on a beach which turned out to be a duvet

and an injured bird on the beach which was basically just a blonde wig.

How far are the rescue shelters getting?

Is it like the seal's been in there for six days?

They've gone, it's not eating anything.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

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It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is

that during World War I, a popular conspiracy theory was that German blackmailers had drawn up a list of 47,000 highly placed English perverts.

A list of 47,000 highly placed English perverts.

It's like the original Epstein list.

Yeah, it's now known as the BBC.

So

this is an article in the London Review of Books that I read about a book called MI5 and the Great War by Nigel West.

And it's basically about the enormous amount of anti-German mania that was going on in Britain, especially and in America as well in the First World War.

And there was just these conspiracy theories everywhere that Germany was infiltrating Britain, it was infiltrating America.

Every German person that you saw in the street might be a spy.

And there was a guy called Noel Pemberton Billing, who was an MP, and he produced a list of these so-called highly placed British perverts that he said were being blackmailed by the German Secret Service.

And that they were basically if they'd infiltrated the upper echelons of British society.

And once the war started, that was going to be, you know, we were going to get taken over.

And it's quite hard to work out how they thought they planned this to happen.

So the idea is that the reason that there are these 47,000 highly faced perverts that they've identified is that the Germans can come over, chat to the perverts, say, hello, can you seduce all these other people?

And gradually we'll remove the manhood of Britain, I think.

And this guy,

what was he called?

Pemberton

Pemberton Billing.

He said that the Germans are propagating evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia.

And there was a lot of homophobia there.

So there was lots of, you know, we found loads of gay people.

They'll seduce loads of other people into being gay, and the whole of Britain will lose the war because of that.

It's so hard to work out what we thought the plan was.

No, I think that's the thing.

The thing about conspiracy theories is they do tend to fall down quite early.

I think the thing for me is like, how do you define what a pervert is?

Like, but also, how do you define what a German thinks a pervert is?

Yeah, that's true.

On my moderate online research,

the Germans enjoy a wide spectrum of

nighttime activities.

So,

like, how do you know what they think is perverse?

Yeah, well, I mean, of course, the British royal family is German in heritage, and I wouldn't say any of those guys are perverse.

I don't think any of us would.

But basically, I think, I mean, there was a lot of homophobia there for certain, but they were quite nebulous in their definitions.

And for instance, when Pemberton Billing was sued for libel, he immediately added the name of the judge to his list of perverts.

Yeah, it's he just kind of added anyone that he didn't like in there.

Yeah, yeah.

There were a few stars of his claims, weren't there?

So there was

one star who was called Maud Allen, who was a real focus of his, and she was an actress.

She'd been in a performance of Oscar Wilde's Salome, which had to be a private performance because it was still banned at that time.

And he wrote lots of articles, or he had lots of articles were propagated about how she was spreading the cult of the clitoris.

And there were all these suggestions that Maud Allen was a lesbian, and somehow this conflated with having German sympathies.

And there are lots of rumours also that she was having an affair with Margot Asquith, who was the wife of Herbert Asquith, who'd been the Prime Minister.

But anyway.

I think that might have been true as well, actually.

Were they true?

I just wonder.

We don't know for sure, but for sure, Margot Asquith paid for her apartment for 20 years when they first met.

Well, I take back everything I've said.

I signed up this job entirely.

But she sued Mordallen for defamation, basically, because this MP was accusing her of all these things.

And one of the people who appeared in court in Pemberton Billings' defence, so against Maud Allen, saying, yes, she's a homosexual, she's in league with the Germans, she's having an affair with the XPM's wife, was Alfred Douglas, otherwise known as Bosey.

Bosey.

Bosey, like Oscar Wilde's old boyfriend.

He turntailed, turn-coated.

Yeah, that was weird.

He went that way a bit, Bosey.

He did right at the end, yeah.

This is, yeah, so this whole thing is part of the sort of the weird paranoia.

Well, it wasn't weird.

There was war looming in the distance.

distance that people were thinking the Germans were coming in, they were sussing it out, they were laying spies in there.

So there's this big push to to try and out the spies.

And one guy, Richard Haldane, set up a committee, the Secret Service Bureau, which was a forerunner to MI5 and MI6.

In fact, the people who ran it were Commander Mansfield Cumming and Captain Vernon Kell.

Both of them did go on to be the front people, the heads of MI5 and MI6.

What's amazing is that was basically set up, MI5 and MI6, because the two of them didn't get on and they couldn't work together in the original Secret Service.

So he was like, you guys are terrible at working together, but you're great.

You do six and you do five, and that's why we have MI5 and MI6.

Is that right?

Because of an argument, yeah.

But also, you look at it, and there's a lot of Germans that were just a bit incompetent who came over anyway.

You didn't need to be vigilant, they were outing themselves.

There was a guy called Paul Buchwalt who adopted the alias Sherlock Holmes when he arrived.

Good and dark, Sherlock Holmes.

That's like that's like me going to America undercover as Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

I love the paranoia, the German paranoia, so much because I read that if you encountered a German waiter at a cafe, you were entitled to say no to their service.

And if they said that they were Swiss, you had to be very careful and asked to see their passport.

But the head of the Mets Criminal Investigation Department, Basil Thompson, recorded that it was positively dangerous to be seen in conversation with a pigeon.

Yes.

And a foreigner walking in one of the parks was actually arrested and sentenced to imprisonment because a pigeon was seen to fly from the place where he was standing and it was supposed that he had liberated it.

I thought it was a woman's wig.

I didn't know.

Brian Pemmerton Cumberpatch, what's his name?

Yeah.

Noel Pemmerton Belly.

Noel.

Yes, yes, him.

Apparently he had a monocle.

And the only thing that I could find out about him is he had like a piece of flesh inserted into his cheek to keep the monocle in place.

Oh,

but also just one cheek.

Like, get both done.

Otherwise, you're all going to be askew.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I quite like that idea, though, because I have a very small nose.

And whenever I wear sunglasses, it just keeps falling down.

And I'd love a little ledge on there.

Whereas I've got a huge ledge on my nose, and I never need glasses.

If we could do some sort of a swap, like an organ donation.

Let's chat after the show.

Great.

I'm happy to donate some flesh to anybody anybody who wants to donate.

But leave us bones.

They're for the kids.

In America, there was a worry that the Germans were coming over poisoning all the livestock.

And this was really, everyone thought this was the case, basically, that all their beef and their animals were getting sick.

And it must have been because the Germans were sending over bacteria and stuff.

It turned out that the reason was there was a war happening in Europe.

America was shipping out loads and loads of animals over and they were doing lots of intensive farming.

And obviously, when you do intensive farming and you move animals around, they make each other sick.

That's what was happening.

But it turned out that the Germans were trying to make them sick, but they were just failing all the time.

And there was a group of Germans who were in a laboratory in Chevy Chase in Maryland, and they were cultivating lots of bacteria that they were going to put onto these animals, but they just never managed to get it to work.

Well, it didn't matter because the animals were getting sick.

How did Chevy Chase feel about it?

It's a weird subplot to your story there.

Chevy Chase is a place, as we've said before,

where the battle of Chevy Chase was.

That's right, yes.

And then there was a ballad of the battle of Chevy Chase, and then Chevy Chase, the actor, was named after the ballad of the battle of the place of Chevy Chase.

There you go.

Don't you wish you'd never asked Dan?

We're going to have to wrap up very soon, guys.

Anything before we do?

The paranoia went the other way as well.

So in Germany, they were very paranoid that there might be British spies or American spies there.

And at one stage, there was a lady's maid who was on a train, and she was strip searched in Germany, and they found secret writing on her bottom.

And they photographed her bomb.

And they sent it to German military intelligence and put her in prison.

And it turned out that what she'd done done is because she was worried that the train toilet would be dirty she covered the seat with her newspaper

and it was backwards writing from the Frankfurter Zietung newspaper

it sounds like classic pervert behavior today

I think there's some writing on your bum I better take a photo

we've all tried that but

the newspaper headlines would have read things like you know Germans about to invade and so

now Lennon's knocking on the door.

Have you better talking?

Not your turn.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much to Josh.

Thank you so much, Christchurch.

We absolutely loved it.

That's the end of our tour.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye, Live!

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