566: No Such Thing As Bob Dylan on Mars

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Hello,

and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Auckland.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunt and Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the German Order of Temperance was founded in 1600, and members had to pledge to drink no more than 14 glasses of wine a day.

Do you think you find that tough, Anna?

I think so long as that only means like before 6 p.m., that's fairly generous, isn't it?

Yeah,

there are a couple of extra rules, but I think you could handle it, Anna.

I think it would be fine.

So

this comes from a 1925 book called The Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem.

Just a little light bedside reading for me.

I found in that there was a reference to an 1872 paper.

So all this is quite a way distant.

You know,

the records of the society itself, obviously 400 years ago, not very easy to find.

But basically, there was terrible drunkenness in the 16th century, all over the place.

And the rules of the Temperance Society were, firstly, never get drunk.

That's rule one.

Rule two,

you can only have seven glasses of wine at a meal.

And rule three, you can only have two meals a day.

Okay, so they didn't mind you drinking a little bit.

I think that's the idea, isn't it?

Because temperance is like to temper your drinking.

So they weren't banning drinking, they were just trying to make you drink less.

And even if you were, even if you'd had your 14 glasses, even if you then wanted a bit of wine to help you sleep, you weren't allowed it.

It was very strict.

Even if you have another meal.

Even if you have another meal.

They started doing things like, okay, why don't we cut out certain bits of alcohol?

So they set up a brewery for people who didn't want to drink, as in didn't want to drink spirits, but only beer.

So they would go there instead.

And then very slowly it would sort of morph into, let's just maybe not drink at all.

Maybe we'll just stop it now.

And it was also, wasn't it, that the evil that was alcohol wasn't really wine and beer.

For a long time, it was spirits.

And actually, a lot of beer, especially, but wine a little bit, was promoted as temperance drinking.

I think Guinness was promoted quite a lot of temperance drink in the 1700s because spirits, distilled liquor, was thought to be the evil thing.

And actually, temperance, I didn't realize, it may be slightly more sympathetic towards it, had a bit of a socialist undertone because all the distilled liquor was all sold by landowners who were exploiting the peasants working on their land because they were the only people who could grow all that liquor.

And so, by being

a teetotaler and only drinking 14 glasses of wine a day,

you were sticking it to the landlords.

Were glasses a lot?

You know how

people were smaller, but

people were not as much smaller as the glasses were.

This was not a

land of the hobbits here, but

they were smaller glasses.

Glasses were way smaller.

This would have been an insane glass.

The glass I'm pointing at now would have been a demented volume in the 16th century.

People would have freaked out.

They would have said, but that's a bucket.

Okay.

They were genuinely.

Without be all 14 of your glasses, do you think?

This would probably be a few of them.

And for anyone listening at home, this is not a lot of wine in my glass.

I think it's easy to say, picture a wine glass with some wine in it.

That's what Andy's got.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's not a lot.

I'm fine.

And I can stop any time I like.

Okay.

The rules that I think you sent round a source with all the rules of this original temperance society.

There are some other really good ones, but one of them was that

the society wanted to ban the practice of drinking to people's health.

Cheers.

Here's to you, sir, etc.

Because that promoted drinking.

And it got to a stage where you'd promote everyone's health around the table.

And by the time you'd started talking, then everyone's had 15 pints.

And so I was wondering about toasting.

And do you know why it's called toasting?

Oh.

Well, it was always about putting toasts in the beer or something.

There was, so I think we probably have mentioned before that people used to put soap toast in their beer.

But I liked, and this is just a theory about why it was called toasting from 1837, a thing I stumbled on.

This was in Tatla.

It said, toasting as a word, comes from the 1660s when a beautiful lady was bathing in one of the baths at Bath, Bath Spa, town in the UK, and the men around were all admiring her as she bathed.

So far, so good.

One of them dipped his cup into the water, because it's like health-giving waters at Bath Bar.

So one of them dips his cup into the water, holds it up, and says, cheers, here's to the health of the lady.

And another

person who's described in the source as a gay fellow, half-fuddled, which I think he's absolutely hammered, swore he was going to jump in the water because though he did not like the liquor, he would have the toast.

Who I believe in this instance was the lady.

So the toast, when you're doing a toast, is the naked woman bathing in the port of wine before you.

Is that a slang term for

a hot lady?

No,

it was because, as James said, they used to drink their beer with a bit of toast in it.

So we dig up from that.

This is just a sort of fun riff on the...

No, no, but this is, this is, that's why we call it a toast, because someone drank to their health using the water and then someone made the toast gag.

Very funny

at the time.

Because I was thinking, is it related to the term crumpet for someone who's attractive but it's that's not that is it sure you could make a case the temperance movement in Glasgow that was quite an interesting one because it banned barmaids okay it said we've worked out what the problem is these men are getting incredibly drunk it must be the fault of the barmaids some of these crumpets that we're toasting get them out of here

Basically the idea was men would dally in the bar because they wanted to talk to the barmaids.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

I mean, and if you let a woman into a pub also, they're at risk of being exposed to language um

and to jests and we cannot have that sort of thing in our society we need you know the men to be just getting actually uh

battered in pieces

the temperance lobby who were trying to convince people not to drink started with health about sort of what it would do to you and then they just started lying about things so they would say well you're drinking that you know what they put in it crunched up cockroaches they put um feces they make it with feces they started just spreading all these rumors about what alcohol was mixed with in order to get people to go i guess I don't want to drink.

Really?

Yeah.

You know what?

That wouldn't work on me.

Wouldn't it?

Yeah.

See, this is why I didn't take over.

Have you guys heard of the Wowsers?

Hmm,

Wowser.

This was a New Zealand thing and Australia, actually.

And a Wowser was a person who had a real sense of morality and wanted other people not to do sinful things.

It actually, the name originally was a lout or an annoying person, and then it kind of changed to that meaning.

But the Wowsers were usually the women's Christian temperance union in New Zealand, and not just were they campaigning for less alcohol, but they were really the main people behind women's suffrage in New Zealand.

Because I don't know if the guys in the audience know, but it was one of the first places where women got the vote.

There's a lot of women cheering there, but not many men.

What's going on?

And here's another thing about New Zealand in 1917 there was as part of the temperance movement they came up with a new law which said that all bars and pubs had to close at six o'clock so 6 p.m.

And the thing is that everyone finished work at 5 p.m.

And so what ended up happening is everyone who was working just legged it to the pub at 5 p.m.

and drank as much as they could for an hour.

And it was called the six o'clock swill.

And basically you

did that lead to any problems at all, or was it absolutely fine?

I'll be honest, it didn't go that well.

Some bars changed their wallpaper for tiling so it could be easily cleaned.

Oh my gosh.

A lot of people would drink loads of drinks and then keep all the glasses, and then at like five to six, they would go fill these up, and then they would all get filled up, and then they would neck as many as they could.

But one interesting innovation that might have come from this is, you know, if you ask for Coca-Cola in a bar

and they say, we've got Pepsi, is that all right?

And you say, yeah, fine.

They sometimes give it you out of like a long tube with a gun on the end.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that was invented for this because it made it easier to get beer quickly into people's glasses without having to get them to come away from the table.

Really?

How long?

Was it really, really, really long?

It was really long, yeah.

And there were these amazing maps as well.

Have you heard of these?

The wet and dry maps of the USA?

No.

This is very cool.

America, obviously, very sort of vexed relationship with alcohol.

They had their anti-saloon league.

And this was all pre-prohibition.

This is when they were still trying to do it just through social pressure rather than through banning it.

But there were temperance advocates, and this happened in the UK as well, actually.

Temperance advocates would map out pubs.

They would produce maps of pubs so that people could avoid them.

Which did not backfire at all.

Yeah, I'm going to need one of those maps just to make sure that I don't go near any of these pubs.

that's basically that's basically it.

I'm being a bit flippant but they the anti-alcol movement they printed these maps saying look at how many pubs there are in this town.

We can't need any more.

And that was like don't grant a license because look at this place is absolutely loaded with it wasn't for normal people like a trigger warning so you know that if you really don't like pubs if you're offended by them don't go here no but they it wasn't quite that it was a thing called persuasive cartography which is quite cool you produce a map showing something that you desire or something that you don't want um yeah i i read about we were recently in melbourne and and I read about a group of friends who almost had the equivalent of a map.

It was the yellow pages of Melbourne and it had every single pub listed in it, as you would.

And this was back in the early 90s.

And they decided that they were going to try and visit every single pub on the ultimate pub crawl that they could go on.

And they managed it.

32 years later, they had completed all 400 plus pubs.

Some of them had shut, so they had to just stand outside and have a ceremonial beer outside of their

Three of the five pulled out, and it was only two that made it to the end.

And yeah, when we say pulled out, do we mean died of alcohol poisoning?

Or

pulled out of breathing.

They still have those maps of the US now, don't they?

Because there are dry counties in America and wet counties.

But I didn't realize there were also lots of moist counties.

And this is

nothing disgusting.

It's well, it depends on your opinions.

But like in Kentucky, there are 120 counties in Kentucky.

11 are dry, 53 are wet, and 56 are moist, which is just like some rules.

Can't drink vodka on a Wednesday, you know, don't drink beer all night long.

That kind of just, you know, there's some rules around alcohol, but not many.

But they actually backfired this when there are lots of little counties, because they did a study in 2003 looking at drink driving.

But they found that a higher proportion of dry counties residents were involved in alcohol-related crashes.

And they realized it's because they're having to drive across the bloody border to pick up alcohol from the wet county.

That's amazing.

That's incredible.

There was a Greek playwright called Eubelis, and he wrote: The three glasses of wine is a perfect amount for you to have before you go to bed.

If you have a fourth, that will induce arrogance.

A fifth causes shouting.

A sixth causes quarrelling.

A seventh leads to punch-ups.

In the eighth, furniture was smashed and the police were called.

By the ninth, deranged madness set in, and by the tenth, you pass out.

And that is very much a description of how this podcast is going to go throughout the evening.

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it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that Bob Dylan found Jimi Hendrix's cover of one of his songs to be so much better than the original that whenever he plays the song live now he plays a cover of the cover

That's such a rare thing for a musician.

He plays the restructured.

How do we know?

Just it sounds different.

He's restructured it.

So yeah, he's moved lyrics around and so on.

What's the song?

It's all along the watchtower.

So so this was a song oh thank you yeah you didn't you didn't write it

I felt like I did in that moment you are welcome

so this appeared on an album called John Wesley Harding it was 1967 and it's a great song Hendrix heard it Hendrix actually did a few covers of Dylan's songs he really loved how Dylan was expressing himself he said sometimes I played Dylan's songs and they're so much like me that it seems that I wrote them and that's what Dylan felt when he heard Hendrix playing his song.

He was like, I feel like that's his song now.

When I play it, it's tribute to him.

And so, yeah, so I mean, I mean, Dylan concerts, I don't know if anyone's been to any recent ones.

They have got a bit weird.

I find them really fun.

I've seen him quite a few times live.

And it's always because he messes around with this song so much.

It's always a case of working out what an earth song he is playing that you know incredibly well, but he is hidden under 900 layers.

That's nonsense.

There's a joke, which is that it's so different that while he's on stage playing Blowing in the Wind, someone will jump in and go, play Blowing in the Wind, and he'll go, I am.

Yeah.

He's a very interesting guy, isn't he?

For someone who's very, very iconic and still alive.

Yeah.

Albeit old.

He is old, but he is alive.

So that's the

time of recording.

But he's incredibly unreliable.

Okay.

What's the wrong term?

Unreliable as a dress is a bit disorganized.

He's a hard person to grab hold of.

He lies.

He lies.

He lies like a rug.

It's amazing.

He's done so many different versions of events of his own life.

And he's like, all of them are, well, a lot of them are provably wrong.

So

was he sent to reform school, as he claimed?

Was he foster-parented?

Did he run away from home age 12?

No.

He was brought up by a completely normal, middle-class family.

When he played Carnegie Hall for the first time, he told a reporter he had lost contact with his parents and he didn't know them anymore.

They were in the audience at the game.

Well, he was incredibly private.

I know he was, but I'm still saying he fibs, fibs, fibs.

Was he really a chess hustler in Greenwich Village in the 1950s?

Right.

Well, now he's not.

I wouldn't get worried by all of the research, because I don't know anything about that villain.

And I've been researching him going, this is amazing.

I didn't even know he tried to get to Mars.

Oh, the Wimbledon final, really?

He's 75.

I couldn't believe the naivety of a journalist who interviewed him after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Remember, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

And he didn't say anything about it when it was announced he'd won it.

There was a tiny announcement that came onto his website and then vanished very quickly.

And so everyone was like, oh, we can't get hold of the Nobel Committee, can't get hold of him, not picking up his phone, where is he?

And eventually, weeks and weeks later, a journalist finally managed to get an interview with him.

And he wrote, Poor guy, he wrote, I can now put people out of their misery because everyone was saying, is he going to turn up to the ceremony?

Is he going to come?

The journalist went, I can put people out of their misery.

Yes, of course, he's planning to turn up to the awards ceremony.

I asked him about that and he said, absolutely, if it's at all possible.

Now, obviously, he didn't turn turn up to the award ceremony

because of pre-existing commitments.

Who has pre-existing commitments more important than accepting a Nobel Prize?

Did he win it for his lyrics and his songs?

Yeah.

So, like this one: Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead.

Wiggle, you can raise the dead.

That was one of his.

Yeah.

It's genius.

It's how he tells it.

Yeah, clearly.

Wiggle, wiggle.

Wiggle.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's what the Pulitzer says.

He's just taking the piss his whole life, isn't he?

Like, he, someone, and I appreciate so much the research genius who found this out, that the lyrics from Tweedledee and Tweedledum, which is a very good song,

are poached from various places.

So some like Pruce and Hemingway, Fine, a Time magazine article from 1961, bit weird to take your lyrics from there.

And also a lot of them were taken from a travel guide to New Orleans by a woman called Bethany Boltman.

Is that allowed?

Isn't that copyrighted or something?

Do you know what?

I don't think anyone would have the balls to soothe.

But there were, there were things, you know, so if you hear lines in that song like dripping in garlic and olive oil or parade permit and police escort, just think.

They're just from a guidebook.

Three stars.

Wow.

Nicholas Cage's grave.

That's all I know about New Orleans.

Very good.

Nicholas Cage.

Yeah, he bought a grave in New Orleans.

It's like this amazing pyramid.

But he's not dead.

Unlike...

No, like Bob Dylan.

Yeah.

But it's so similar.

Again, as Heidemann Fricardi.

Oh, God, I really hope we don't curse anything because he is an incredibly valuable guy to the world.

I don't know.

Do you think we have that power?

I don't know.

It's not worth it.

You know the song Mr.

Tambourine Man?

Yeah.

Very, very beautiful, mysterious song.

What are the lyrics?

Can I just say James was actually shaking his head at that?

This is how ignorant James is about Bob Dylan music.

It's one of his really, really famous early songs and it's very beautiful.

The lyrics are very sort of you know rhythmic and poetic.

It turns out it was just inspired by a musician he knew who owned an enormous tambourine.

You know what?

I would have guessed that actually.

Really?

If it was from you know a greengrocer who had an enormous marrow, I would have been really surprised.

That's him as a tangerine man.

You're thinking of greengrocer mine.

He's good.

But he was called Bruce Langhorn and he just had a big old

tambourine.

He went on to start Brother Brew Brew's African Hot Sauce.

So, you know,

amazing.

What a career.

He never had a number one hit in the UK, Bob Dylan.

Okay.

And his highest ever charter was one that's called Like a Rolling Stone.

It is.

Yes.

I think a couple of people in the audience might have.

Okay,

you might know it.

He got to number four in September 1965, and that was his highest ever charting.

But when that was at number four, the number two and number one were I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher, and I can't get no satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.

That's a tough week, isn't it, isn't it?

It's a tough look that.

He should have waited until 2019 to release Like a Rolling Stone when it would have been up against the Saudis Roll Christmas song or something.

But he is

largely his most popular songs are the ones that are covered.

So like Hendrix doing All Along the Watchtower or Adele doing Make You Feel My Love.

Not many people know that that's a Bob Dylan song from a much later album, which was a big hit for her.

Like for someone someone who's as famous as he is, he's not a fame chaser.

In his early days, he had to do interviews.

You had to do them.

By the way, if you haven't read his autobiography, it's incredibly good.

I highly recommend it.

None of it's true, but it's very good.

Brilliant fiction.

Yeah.

So when you read some stories about him,

I picture him as sitting at home, just like, oh, I don't see anyone.

Just he sits on his own, not wanting to do anything.

But he's got all these multitudes of interests that I didn't know about.

One is he loves comedy.

He's really into Jerry Lewis Lewis slapstick style comedy.

And he approached a guy called Larry Charles, who wrote a lot of Seinfeld episodes and was a big collaborator with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And he said, I want to write a sitcom where I'm in it as a slapstick comedian star.

And Larry was like, really?

And he said, yeah.

And he took out

a box that he had.

You've got a very good Dylan on you.

Man, I want to be funny.

Honestly, as someone who has no idea who this person is, this is very funny.

This person?

What do you mean, man?

Probably maybe the most mysterious incident in his life was his bike accident because it changed the course of his career.

This is in 1966.

He had an accident on his motorbike and it was quite bad.

And he ended up having to have healthcare for a period of time.

And it meant that he sort of became a recluse for a long time.

He didn't work for a bit.

No one heard from him.

But the thing is, we don't know what actually happened in the accident.

We don't know how badly injured he was.

And we don't actually know if it happened at all.

But it's the most debated thing ever.

Any Bob Dylan fan has opinions on it.

So, and he always has a different thing about what caused the accident.

The sun got in his eyes.

His bike slipped on some oil.

Sometimes he broke his back.

Sometimes he was concussed.

Sometimes he was fine.

But all we know was he turned up at a doctor's house, which I didn't know he could do.

He knew a doctor.

He turned up at their house and he stayed there for about a month, sleeping on their sofa or whatever.

And that was it.

And I think he has admitted since that he basically was trying to get out of the whole fame thing, didn't like the

rat race.

So baked a bike accident?

Wow.

I think you can walk into most places if you're the level of Bob Dylan.

And if you know where the doctor lives, you just go to their house.

They're not going to go, sorry, Bob.

It was rural, wasn't it?

It was near Woodstock.

Yeah.

Do you think you used to let them stay for a month?

How many months could they stay before you kick them out, even if if they're bobbed in the middle?

How many months can you stay at a doctor's house is actually a rejected line from how many roads must a man walk down

before he will chuck you out.

James has no idea what I mean.

Oh, I assume it's one of his sons.

Can I do another thing that another bit of James baiting here?

Okay, I'll see if you like this.

Okay, because you will like a bit of it.

There is a big, there was for 20 years at least, there was a huge competition between some academics.

In 1997, there were two researchers in Stockholm.

They released released a paper called Nitric Oxide and Inflammation.

The answer is blowing in the wind,

which is clever.

And then several years later, two other researchers coincidentally published a piece called Blood on the Tracks, A Simple Twist of Fate, which I think might have been genealogical.

Anyway, they decided to compete to see how many Dylan lyrics they could get into their papers before retirement.

And then a fifth one joined after he wrote something called Tangled Up in Blue, Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era.

And this has just been going on for a very long time.

Did you come across Karl Gornitzki when you were reading about this?

I don't think so.

So Karl Gornitsky is a librarian who found out about this and he thought, well, what I'm going to do is see how often people use Bob Dylan lyrics in all of the papers.

And he found that there are at least 200 examples of papers that unequivocally use Bob Dylan's words in their titles.

And he found that they're cited slightly less often than other similar articles.

And he said in his papers, he thinks that there will be fewer Dylan references in the future because, and I quote, researchers can see they weren't quite as clever as they were intending.

Maybe he didn't write them in order to be included in the scientific papers.

Or maybe they were trying to quote an old tourist guide that actually has never heard of

the songs.

Do you know the oldest recording we have of Bob Dylan, at least according to my research?

So this was one that was made in St.

Paul in 1960 and it resurfaced in 1978.

And a fanzine writer called Brian Steibel went to the person's house who found it and said, oh, can I listen to this Bob Dylan tape?

And the guy, the owner, insisted that his partner did the dishes while they played it because he was so sure that they were going to record the tape when he played it for them.

So you'd have all that background noise.

And sure enough, they did record it.

And the bootleg is known as the armpit tape because it's such bad quality.

Lovely.

It still exists.

People get so weird about him.

There's an Institute of Dylanology in the University of Tulsa, which is not officially called that, it's the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.

But they bought his archive in 2016 for about $15 million and it's 100,000 documents from his life.

It's really intense.

People get so far into it.

But also, you know, he's not...

the easiest person to recognize sometimes, which works in his favor because he does all of these weird things in public.

Like he went through a phase in 2008, 2009 of wanting to turn up at the houses where musicians had lived in their childhood.

Oh, yes.

He turned up in this random house in Winnipeg where Neil Young had grown up and it was now occupied by just a couple called Kian and Passy who came home from their shopping trip to find a guy on their doorstep who they didn't recognize.

Is that your holiday home, James?

Stony Chase?

Didn't he get on a magical mystery tour bus in Liverpool and go around all of the Beatles?

I think he might have.

I think he might have.

He's a big fan of musicians.

He loved the Beatles.

He said that Beatles transformed America at a time when it desperately needed to come out of a depression and have a hit of happiness.

And when Elvis died, he stayed silent for a week.

He was so distraught from his death.

Yeah.

I'm just showing my own tribute there.

Oh, yeah.

He was going to play for the Pope in 1997.

Uh-huh.

And then the next Pope nixed it.

So he was going to play for John Paul 2.

Yeah.

The second.

In 1997.

That's John Paul 2 squared, isn't it?

John Paul 2.

He was going to to play Scatterpope John Paul IV.

But then Cardinal Ratzinger tried to stop it happening.

Benedict theappropriate, he thought it was wrong.

He thought Dylan was sort of a bit profity.

But John Paul II did give a sermon saying, You ask me how many roads a man must walk down before he becomes a man.

I answer, there is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ.

Doesn't scan as well, does it?

Doesn't see why he didn't incorporate that

Time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the US government runs a lottery where if you win, you get to go and watch fireflies light up.

Oh,

it's so sweet.

Not as good as winning 10 million quid.

Well, you know, in some ways it's better, James, because what's richer than nature?

That's money.

You could buy that forest.

Should have just cut to you guys waving your wallets at a firefly.

Light up!

Well, millionaire Dan, you can't buy the forest because it's in a national park.

And this is a national park, it's the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, in a bit of North Carolina.

And the fireflies every year put on this incredible display, not for the humans, just for each other.

But it is amazing.

It's two weeks, early June, and it's the synchronous fireflies.

It's one one of the only places that it happens in the US, and the only place it happens on this scale.

And basically, it started happening in about mid-1990s when the national park removed the street lights, so it got really dark there.

And fireflies love darkness because their lights show up.

And people realized it was a thing, and they started flocking to this national park to see these fireflies all lighting up in synchrony.

It's extraordinary, just millions of them, you know, like a Mexican wave going on and off.

And there were so many that at first they decided to do do a first come first serve thing with ticketing and the queues were just insanely long so now there are 1800 parking passes given out every year and you can apply for them about 30 000 people applied in 2019 um so it's it's around that level and you might win and if you win you bring your uh foldable chairs you bring your inflatable sofas some people do you bring your teddy be yeah you really settle in for the night and then you wait for the fireflies to light up it's pretty cool are there rules about what you can and can't bring like are you not allowed to bring a torch in case that's confusing to them?

You have to have red light so that they can't see it.

You certainly can't have normal white light.

Yes.

Yeah.

And they get confused by the lights, don't they?

Yes.

If you get a load of fireflies and there's like street lights around, they just won't mate with each other.

And it's so much so that you can get two fireflies and you can put them right next to each other and they might be really horny, but they won't mate.

Right.

And we're not really sure why they won't do it, but we think what it is, is it's because they think it's daytime and they only do it at nighttime.

Oh, sensible fellows.

Doesn't it look a bit like a like Godzilla to them?

Isn't it just like a giant version?

And what does that put you in the mood, Dan?

Because if it doesn't, I think we've got our answers.

I reckon if you and your wife are there and a huge Yeti walks in, I can only imagine that's going to help things in the bedroom.

Absolutely.

I think in a very one-sided way, sure.

Honey, you can leave.

We'll tell you.

You know what they say about big feet?

They're pretty amazing fireflies.

I've never looked into them before.

They're astonishing.

Yeah, they're fine.

I mean, the fire in them is, it's, guys.

It's not a real fire.

It is like a, it's like a, yeah, I know, right?

It's like a bioluminescence.

It's, it's a thing that is made in them as a combination of chemicals that combine together.

The main thing that people try and extract is a thing called

luciferase.

It sounds like Lucifer is being used as the etymology term there.

Well, Lucima means light bringer, which is where Lucifer the Devil comes from.

So I was correct.

Sometimes I like to assume and have it confirmed on stage.

And it's amazing what they can do with it.

It's used for mating reasons.

It's used for competitive advantage.

You will have female fireflies of one species, and there are many thousands of different species.

And they will mimic the light of the male spit in another subspecies to attract the female from mating only to eat them up so that they can steal certain bits of them.

Feminism hasn't got to the firefly community has it?

But did you know

why they do that is not only for food.

It's a toxin right?

Yes, there's this predator repelling toxin and part of the

firefly flash gee wheres.

I know it's really tough.

Just hadn't hadn't had a run-up at that.

Part of the firefly flashing is to attract a mate, but a part of it is also to say to predators, I am toxic.

And they have this

lusibufegan toxin.

Why can I say that first time?

Don't know.

But these, the females, the sort of famphile females, they can't make their own version of that toxin, so they have to eat the males.

They gather, they harvest it from the corpses of the males they devour.

And I just think that's that's pretty pretty cool.

It's cool.

If you order a hamburger that I wanted, it's like me eating you to get it.

Yes, yes.

But these poor poor males are trying desperately to find females of their own species and they know it's a risk as well.

And sometimes it takes them a week to find an actual female of their own species and they're just constantly dodging

predator file flags.

False flags.

False flags, yeah.

Can I just ask a quick, sorry to cut you off, but Andy, well, you've just raised a good point, which is to eat Andy if he's had the hamburger, right?

We were coming into New Zealand and you obviously aren't allowed to bring in fruit, right?

So I had a banana just before we came in, right?

So I ate it on the plane and I got off.

And the sniffer dogs went past us.

And I just thought,

why can't it smell it in me?

Why can't?

Like, it's, it's still...

You're a messy eater, but you didn't rub it all over your,

if you wanted to sneak something into the country, if you could get the stomach of a person, it seems like you could put it in there.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is a good idea.

You just invented smuggling.

That's it.

Oh, yeah.

And a bottom might be even better.

Oh, my God.

You've blown this shit wide open.

No, I'm not sure you have.

We should say the ones, the fireflies that are visited by all these tourists

and for whom the lottery is run, that is just flirting, the flashing.

But it was quite confusing at first, I think, because it's not usual.

The vast majority of firefly species just flash as individuals, and these ones flash in unison.

And it starts off like one will do a flash, and then another will pick up on it, and it starts off looking quite random.

And gradually, as more and more do it, they manage to tune like an orchestra and do it all together.

But the reason they're doing it in unison is because it's all males doing that flashing.

The females flash back, but it's very dim.

You can't really see it if you're a human.

It's all males doing the flashing, and it tells the female that that is the right species.

Because if there's any other species flashing, then it'll not be flashing in time.

But it's quite a shit show for the males because I think the ratio is about 100 to one off on males to females.

So even so, if you're the male, you're just accepting as you flash in unison.

It's like we have to work together on this, even though probably I'm not going to be the one who gets it.

Isn't that sad?

In a way, it's also a kind of lottery, isn't it?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

There's a lottery to see the Firefly lottery.

Wow.

How deep does this go?

Yeah.

Well, the females, they can have dialogues with 10 males at once.

Some species chat back and forth with the flashing.

Oh, with the flashing, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Only the slag.

They mate with only one they pick.

They sort of winnow down from it.

It's a bit love island, actually.

They start with 10 males who they're chatting to, and then they end up.

But are they sending the same message?

Is it kind of like when you go onto a chatbot thing and you think you're flirting and then you realize it's automated answers?

This is an insurance website.

Yeah.

No, I've never seen Godzilla.

One thing about these,

the flashing, it's kind of like, I guess it's like dancing because it's in rhythm, isn't it?

But if you get two fireflies next to each other and they're from the same species, and they're supposed to be able to do it in rhythm, they can't.

They just get all over the place.

If you get three, they still can't, and if you get ten, they still can't.

And it takes about 20 of them to get together and suddenly they all start doing it in rhythm together.

That's really interesting.

That is true of dancing, isn't it?

You know, if there's just two of you on a dance floor, it's incredibly awkward.

But as soon as there's 20, it feels like it.

We are the same.

There's a scary thing, which is that their population is declining globally.

And one of the main reasons is, let's say there's a group of fireflies that are in an area, and then that gets urbanized and it gets concreted over.

They don't then fly and find another place.

They just disappear.

The species just dies.

It has this thing in it where it just goes, all right, that's us, done.

We can't move over there.

So that's really sad as we continue to urbanize.

But also, we kind of don't know how many fireflies there are necessarily because a lot of them hang out in the day.

So we can't see them.

And don't glow.

They don't glow.

So they use pheromones instead of their glow.

There could be a million in here right now.

Yeah.

We wouldn't know.

We would, because it's quite dark, but it's, yeah.

Another reason why they're endangered is that we used to farm them.

Not farm them as collect them.

So there's a company called the Sigma Chemical Company that harvested about 3 million fireflies every year.

And they were trying to get this luciferase, which Dan was talking about, because you can use it in food safety testing and research.

Oh, cool.

Well, they have come in very useful to science generally.

They are particularly useful in energy efficiency.

So I think they let out the most efficient light we know of.

It's the most efficient light in the world, in the universe that we're aware of, because when they let off their light, almost no heat is emitted.

So almost 100% of the energy is emitted as light.

And wait, do you mean they're like LED, as in they're not hot?

Yeah.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

But LED is a bit hot.

They are not hot.

But they made LEDs better.

So there's this so-called thing where there was a physicist called Jean-Paul Vigneron who went, he was Belgian and he went on a trip to Central America in, I think, about 2012, and he saw a bunch of fireflies glowing and he thought, I wonder how they do that.

And this is a science brain.

He just, he took some, he brought them back to his lab and he looked inside them and he saw that the way they were making their light so efficiently was that they had these like really jagged irregular scales scales on their abdomen and that meant that the light was shining really efficiently so that meant that you could get the maximum amount of light coming out for the minimum amount of energy and that's how led lights are designed now and they increase the energy efficiency by 50 you're joking wow no that sounds insane i know they it's good old fireflies could we ethically replace leds with them somehow

like picture your christmas tree right if we had like some kind of pheromone that meant they were happy hanging out by the tree and you had flying led lights around around your entire tree.

Is that possible?

I think the audience doesn't like the sound of it.

I think it's less convenient.

I do.

They have to be, if your lights had to be in the mood

to be on,

probably you might have a few dark Christmases.

Can I tell you one more thing about the

dangerous lady fireflies?

The ones who eat the males.

So not only do they eat males of a different genus, they will sometimes eat males of their own genus if they're merely hungry.

Some of them will break off mid-sex to eat their partner.

Mid.

That can't be mid-sex.

That's just the end of sex.

It's just.

Fair point.

Fair point.

It's an unexpectedly abrupt ending.

But the poor male.

Oh, this is the end, is it?

This is the end.

I've got more.

I've got more in the tank.

I've got more moves.

Ow.

Some males in this genus,

the prey genus of fireflies, they have special arms on either side of their penis that remain outside the female for copulation.

And some scientists believe this might be an incoming cannibalism alert system.

And if the female starts wriggling around because she's starting to feel a bit peckish, the male is notified that this is a risk and it gets a sort of early warning.

Amazing.

And the arms, arms, what, hold on to her or what?

I think they just stick out at the base, if you like.

Okay, so they tap her on the shoulder from behind to distract her.

And then they're off.

Shit!

I was mid-sex

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the scientific paper detection of Noda Virus in Barramundi was co-authored by Dr.

Barry Munday.

I feel like that's shut down the show.

That's the greatest fact ever.

Good night, everyone.

It's incredible.

It is amazing.

So I found out that this guy called Dr.

Barry Munday worked in Tasmanian fisheries.

And I know that he'd done some studies.

So I went through a list of all of the studies they'd he'd done in the hope and the dream that one of them was about Barramundy.

And sure enough, he did do this one, very obscure one.

It's incredible.

He passed away a few years ago.

Yeah, 2003.

Yeah, 2003.

And I found this really beautiful obituary of his entire career online.

And it is so detailed.

They do not say he wrote a paper on a fucking Barry Lundley.

It's unbelievable.

It was really important.

Do you have any idea if he...

Sorry, I do want to know about the important things he he did, but mostly I want to know if he wrote this paper because his name is Barry.

I don't think so.

I genuinely don't think so.

In his head, I'm sure.

Do you reckon?

Surely.

I don't know.

I reckon there's a lot of this about, actually, because I basically googled every fish name I could think of to see

if there are other people like this.

There's a guy called Stephen Haddock, who's working on deep-sea gelatinous zooplankton.

Amazing.

John Salmon was a

fish spotter in the 1980s.

Yeah, he would fly over in his plane and go, There's one.

Really?

No, he wouldn't say there's one.

He said, like, there's a school of fish.

And then he would give the coordinates, and people would be able to go and catch them if they wanted.

Right.

Do you know Sue Wheeler?

I thought when he said fish spotty, he meant someone who puts bots on fish.

And I don't know why they would do that.

That's what I thought.

Courtney Pike was the angling correspondent for the Suffolk Gazette.

That's brilliant.

Jack Trout was the person who read the fishing report show from San Francisco's KNBR 680.

Jesus web James.

Frank E.

What?

Is everyone still here?

What?

Frank Fish E.

Fish

wrote lots of papers all about fish, especially the biomechanics of maneuverability and jet propulsion in fish.

Wow.

That took you most of 2024.

We know it.

You know,

Courtney Trout.

Oh, no, Courtney Pike.

Oh, sorry, Courtney Pike?

It's the question that an angling correspondent would ask.

It's brilliant, that, isn't it?

What do you mean, good?

Courtney Pike.

Courtney Pike.

Courtney Pike.

Courtney Pike.

Got that.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Barramundi, the fish itself.

Oh, yeah.

Hugely popular.

In Australia, it's massively popular, right?

They're obsessed with it.

But one of the issues is that they're discovering that a lot of barramundi is being imported that aren't barramundi.

It's almost like they're a fake...

cosplaying fish.

Not the fish aren't doing it.

It's the humans that are selling it.

But there are rules in Australia that mean that the food service is under no obligation to label whether or not it is a local or imported fish.

So people don't know the better.

They're being misled.

And so this is a big problem, according to the head of the Northern Territory Seafood Council, who's called Rob Fish.

Brilliant.

Are we going to do a full 15 minutes of these?

Oh, please, no.

Do you know one of the main fish that scandalously is being disguised as barramundi is from New Zealand?

It's a New Zealand groper.

Why do you have a fish called a groper?

I imagine it's from the same origin as groper, which is the normal fish we have in the northern hemisphere.

But yes, a New Zealand groper.

The New Zealand groper has tiny arms on its penis, doesn't it?

It's actually, it's...

Do you guys know the groper?

Do you eat groper a lot?

Not many.

But it's really popular and it was very popular in Maori culture.

And in Maori is called hapuka.

But I think hapuka, the word means

that it means to stuff your face with food because it's so popular.

That's cool.

Barramundi, couple more things about them.

They can eat food up to 60% of their own length, which is the equivalent of me eating a four-foot-long sausage.

So that's super thought, isn't it?

Wow.

Yeah.

What's the longest sausage you've ever eaten?

I did go.

There's a restaurant in Vienna called Centimeter where you order your food by the length.

Really?

Really?

And we ordered the special, which is a wheelbarrow full of sausages.

Wow.

It's unbelievable.

They bring this wheelbarrow.

It's a small barrow, but you don't realise how big a small wheelbarrow is because you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's big.

It's big.

So I probably got through a.

No, I don't know if I got through a meter of sausages then.

No, I think you could ease.

I could easily eat a four-foot sausage.

In one go?

One go?

You chew it.

You're allowed to chew.

You're allowed to chew, but you cannot.

I mean, James is just going to get clipped out of that sentence.

Didn't even cross my mind.

Four foot of sausage, come on, even a cumberland's only about.

If it's very thin,

it's not thin, it's a sausage.

No,

you can't just turn it into a pepper army and wolf it.

I'm talking a thick old cumberland.

We're talking.

Like, please, guys, we are talking about sausages.

This is not, there's no side to this.

We need to stop.

So four foot, that's the length that you think.

No, because I read varying accounts of what the largest barramundi that's ever been quarters.

And one went as far as saying it was 5'10.

And that's massive.

I can't believe that's true.

If you want a picture that size, that's the same height as Neil Finn.

That's how big a 5'9,

5'10.

Who's that?

Sorry?

All right.

So, okay, it's a New Zealand.

I thought you'd literally just Googled everyone who was that height and gone, oh, they've got a funny fish-sounding name.

Neil Finn is, there's a very famous Australian band called

there's an incredibly famous New Zealand band called Split Ends, which became Crowded House, and Neil Finn is the

family.

But Dad would have said Neil Finn because of the word Finn.

Exactly.

Well, I'll tell you my working.

I found out it was 5'10, and I sat at a computer and went, please tell me Neil Finn is 5'10.

And he is.

That's the way to do it, Jeff.

That's how you save time.

That's how you save time.

Just play with his life.

You assume and let other things confirm it.

No, they are very cool though.

They sometimes eat baby crocodiles Barramundi.

I mean they're really...

Yeah, they'll eat tiny old stuff.

They have a relation called the Antarctic Toothfish and they eat lots of rocks.

And we're not really sure why they do it, but it seems like the reason they do it is because they just want to eat everything and the rocks get in the way.

Really?

Yeah.

That's pretty much

everything.

They don't eat it.

No, it doesn't seem that way.

It seems like it's just useful for them because it's so rare for them to get food.

Just that if they see anything, they just go for it.

right it's like when you get really greedy people and you look at their finished meal and all the cutlery is gone and everything

it's amazing they do this extraordinary thing as well barramundi which is the males they will start off as male and then there's a first wave of in their life cycle of mating that goes on and they'll go around impregnating as many female barramundi as possible and then once that's done and they grow a bit bigger they then turn into female themselves and the reason they do that is partially because they can store more eggs inside of them to give birth more.

So it's the equivalent of like if you picture like NFL it's like being a quarterback throwing the ball and then running up and catching it yourself because they're impregnating and then they're becoming the ones that are being in it's an extraordinary thing.

Although what I find quite sad is that scientists think that they can't transform into the female until they've done their first kind of copulation, which fair enough is just releasing sperm.

But it does make you think, like, what if you couldn't do it?

You know, and you're just stuck.

You're like a 59 year old barrow mundi who's still male and all the other ones aged three have changed i just think that's embarrassing and sad

have you not seen that film the 40 year old barramundi it's good

and it's actually a lot more interesting than you think it is

um just on australian fishes there's one uh called uh plectorhynchus cariolinthus uh but it's better known as the blue bastard oh yeah uh can you guess how it gets its name the blue bastard?

From the poetic minds of the Australian people.

It must be blue.

It must be blue.

Is it blue?

It's blue.

That's half of it.

Is it a bastard to catch?

That's the other half.

I love it.

This fact was about nominative determinism, right?

So Barry Mundy is doing a thing that his name is associated to.

And I found a few New Zealand examples of that.

So

there is a composer who wrote a Romeo and Juliet opera, who is called Peter van de Flute, which is very sweet.

It's just a very sweet name.

There's an activist who's quite a famous actress who's been being, she's getting arrested for all her climate change protests, and that's Lucy Lawless.

Xeno warrior princess.

Very good.

Lawless.

She's constantly getting taken to police stations for what she's doing.

But I was sitting in a room today in New Zealand, and a guy randomly overheard me talking about this called Wade.

And he came over and he said, My grandfather is an example of nominative determinism.

Can I tell you it?

So his grandfather was the first person in New Zealand to artificially inseminate a bee.

They've been trying for years and years and years, hadn't they?

We just can't find anyone with a small enough penis.

We will keep looking.

Is this guessable, or is it?

Oh, he's called Richard Beebe.

Like, that's okay.

That's his name, and he did it on a kitchen table in Balclutha.

Dick, wait,

that's a bit racy, isn't it?

Many would have started in bed.

Wait,

it's called Dick Beebe.

Come on, mate.

Oh, my goodness.

So, yeah,

the only thing I have, because what I like about this original fact is that it's a double nominative determinism.

It's a Barry Monday, twice as unlikely.

And I think my favourite example of that is probably the world's leading expert in Pete Bogs was called Pete Glob.

We got a couple in the fish inbox.

If you don't mind me sharing their reference.

This was sent in by Pruma Kutcher and she had a dentist called Jintar Gumbite.

Really, pretty good.

And Peter Drake sent in the fact that John Ramsbottom invented a new kind of high-speed piston.

Yeah,

it's brilliant.

Okay, we need to get out of here.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Auckland, you were awesome.

That was amazing.

We will be back.

We'll see you then.

goodbye

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