565: No Such Thing As Tickling A Monk

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Hi, everyone.

Happy New Year.

Welcome to 2025.

It's a square number, so it's going to be a great year, I am sure.

Why am I here speaking to you today?

Well, it is because we have a slightly different show today.

It's a normal show.

It was one that we filmed live in Wellington.

But unfortunately, on the day of this show, Andrew Hunter Murray was unexpectedly called back to the UK.

He had to leave.

And so to save the day, in his place came Leon Buttons Kirkbeck.

Now, some of you will have heard that name and got very excited.

A lot of you might not know it, but he is one of the three members of another podcast called The Crypted Factor with himself, Rhys Darby, and some little-known guy called Daniel Schreiber.

Those of you who have heard that will know that he's absolutely brilliant, as he was on our show.

And those of you who haven't heard it, well, why not?

Once you've listened to this show, why not go to your podcast provider of choice and search for the Cryptid Factor and listen to their show?

Anyway, not much more to say apart from hope all is going well for you in January.

I'm recording this in December, so goodness knows what's happened since then.

On with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Non-Such Thing is a Fish,

a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from running time.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinski, James Harkin, and Leon Buddens-Kirkback.

And once again, we have gathered round 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 buttons.

My fact this week is the fact that the world's longest conductor's baton is actually more than three times longer than Friedrich Chopin.

Stat up.

Stat.

The height of him times three.

That is amazing.

Did he ever use this baton?

Because that would be odd.

No, it wasn't actually.

Chopin didn't actually own this.

That would have been quite amazing.

And was he tiny?

Was Chopin...

Was he a borrower?

No, he was 170 centimeters.

And so that makes the world's longest baton 20 foot long.

Wow.

Is there a useful reason for having such a big baton?

Careful.

Or is it just someone trying to to break a record or what was the reason well is ego is the reason largely it is a record it was a record uh set by brown university band in province rhode island and it happened just this year and it actually happened as uh a form of competition to another band that was in penn state and they they had one that was 15 foot long and they thought what are we going to do that's going to really break their egos and it was like make a bigger baton.

So they went five more foot.

Yeah.

And then they won.

But well, they had a first attempt, which was they managed to get a 16-foot baton, but it was disqualified because the handle was too skinny.

So that didn't count as a baton.

There were so many interesting rules that needed to be adhered by in order for this record to happen.

So if you were shifting the baton to conduct the audience, you weren't allowed it to sort of like go

and bend up and down.

It needed to stay.

So the guy conducting had to like slowly bring it across while the Guinness World Records officiators stared at it.

So it wasn't allowed to be like, you couldn't pull vault with it.

You couldn't.

No.

It's like the opposite of a pole vault.

Yeah.

It had to be straight.

And they conducted three songs with the baton.

And so that's what set the record.

But it is interesting because we tried to break a Guinness World Record recently on stage.

Oh, yeah.

Those rules are tough.

They're really tough.

What was it?

We had to eat.

We had to eat as many cheese slices.

You know, like that plastic cheese you you put on burgers.

Yeah.

But the rule was that you had to take the plastic off as well.

And it just meant that it was impossible because

yeah, and we had one minute to do it.

We had to eat 15 in one minute.

And you're not allowed to drink water in between.

And I trained with water.

It's the only way I could do it.

You didn't.

If you trained for that, then I'm worried about shit.

You ate about a quarter of a slice.

I know.

Yeah, I know.

Because they didn't let me drink water.

I got stuck on stage and it was horrible.

So we didn't get a Guinness World Record.

interesting fact though you got new zealand a guinness world record the other day didn't you stop it stop it okay i helped get a world record with the hacker the world's largest hacker

we took it from the slimy french the french did you know that the

french hacker is exactly that feels culturally inappropriate to start off with

And funnily enough, the people who, the Guinness World Record officiators, actually acknowledged that.

But they didn't rescind the record, but they said, you're welcome to break it.

But of course, then the rules were a lot harder.

They came down real hard.

But we did it and we took it back.

And so it is now officially ours.

And I'd like to see another country go, no, we're going to take it back off them.

The rules in that country.

That would be not going to happen.

I'm not saying that people who are just doing these things to break records have something else missing in their lives.

But I am saying that you don't see the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra competing over who's got the longest baton.

And it doesn't sound like it's that useful.

Maybe they should, because not as many people are going to classical concerts.

Do you think this is what would turn it around?

It would make me want to go.

You couldn't have anyone sing in the front 10 rows.

I haven't realized quite how late the conductor came about as a position in an orchestra, or the conductor as we know it, as in someone who faces the orchestra

and with their right hand keeps the beat and with their left hand does things like bring new instruments in, inject emotion into it, things like that.

But that's relatively modern.

And actually, composers used to do so much more than they do today.

So in the 16th and 18th centuries, composers would also usually be playing the harpsichord

in their pieces while performing, and they would be conducting.

And it's weird, this lasted at least 200 years.

And I don't know how it was effective because, obviously, often to play the piano, you need two hands.

Or in the article I read, it said, to play the the harpsichord well you do need two hands

it's a very low bar so they'd have to nod their heads vigorously conducting the orchestra it's crazy sometimes it would be the violinist as well like the first violinist would do it with their bow yes but again it seems difficult because how do you play while you're waving your bow i don't get it yeah that was

but do we need it do we need the baton oh don't start dan oh my god well so on the show a little while ago dan did say that people who are in orchestras shouldn't need sheep music

because bruce springstein's band don't need sheep music

all i was saying was there was a there was an orchestra incident where the composer got angry with what was going on and took all the sheet music away and then the concert had to be cancelled because they no one knew the songs and i just thought well i mean learn them is that not and i know it's controversial i've had a lot of bassoonists write to me and threaten my life and children's lives as you should yeah but but the but there has been an example where we have seen conducting happening without a baton or even the movement of hands, and that was Leonard Bernstein.

There was that movie Maestro that was made not too long ago about him.

Um, there's a very great video that you can watch online of him conducting an orchestra simply with the movements of his eyebrows,

and it's amazing.

So, he's just like, it's a

and it's just like you know, a little, and then his eyes poke that way,

and

it's not that song, that's the one that came to mind

Dirty had his arms amputated.

He wanted to show the power of when the synergy of an orchestra is so great that you can simply rely on looks and impressions.

Interesting.

There was a time in Soviet Russia where they did away with the conductors.

In what sense did away with

a bit too close to those windows.

No, the idea was in a non-hierarchical communist society where everyone's equal, you don't need one person at the front who's like lording it over everyone else.

And for quite a while, they did do that.

And actually,

in the 70s, Andre Previn in the UK, he did the same thing.

He did a TV show where he said, Okay, I'm conducting and now I'm going to stop.

And he thought, everyone thought, oh, everything's just going to go to shit as soon as he leaves.

But actually, it was kind of fine.

It's like when countries don't have governments, you know, like Ireland, Northern Ireland didn't have a government for about three years, and everyone always goes, huh, didn't realize.

Yeah.

We were talking earlier about: is there an importance to the length of a baton?

And some conductors have a preference for the size, they have a preference for the shape.

Some of them have lucky batons because they had an amazing experience that they become superstitious about it.

So it almost becomes like a wizard's wand in a way to them.

They sort of feel that there's power embodied in it, right?

Fritz Reiner, who was a 20th-century Hungarian conductor, he used one that was so small, it was such a tiny baton, that one musician at the back brought a pair of of binoculars along to mock him to show that he needed to do that to see him fritz reiner saw that and then replied when he was using the binoculars by lifting up a piece of paper that read you're fired on it

written really small

that's so funny you know the um conductors officially live longer than any other profession do we know why they don't live longer is it because they're basically richer and you know they come from and live off nothing but caviar no they uh it is because what they they can only speculate but they think this on the back of this study they think it's because you get so much upper body workout because some of these pieces that they're conducting go for like three hours is it it could be because you only really get a job as a conductor when you're quite old so it's kind of self-selecting all the people who died in their 20s and 30s they never

yeah because i just it does feel like a workout but it's not like you're an olympic athlete is it as a conductor i've seen some of the the famous conductors out there.

In the 19th century, when conducting became a thing, it was really controversial.

Lots of composers didn't like it.

I think

there were, Schumann called conductors a mania and evil.

Verdi was outraged that they got to take a bow because these composers thought these guys are pointless.

But there was, at the time the conductors were suddenly appearing, this one called Louis Julien, and he was so in awe of Beethoven that whenever he played a piece of Beethoven, he wore white gloves anyway to conduct, but he had a specific jewelled baton that was presented to him on a cushion every time he conducted.

And

I should tell you his full name.

Do you know his full name?

No, no.

Do you want me to tell you his full name?

No, please do.

It was

Louis, George, Maurice, Adolphe, Roche, Albert, Abel, Antonio, Alexandra, Noah, Jean-Lucien, Danielle, Eugene, Joseph Robourn, Joseph Param, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Pierre Arbour, Pierre Morel, Barthélemy, Antus, Alphonse, Bertrand, Diodomé, Emmanuel, Rosuet, Vinceau, Luc, Michel, Jude, Laplain, Jules Bertin, Julia César, Julien.

What's his full name?

I think I followed him on Instagram.

He could never get a driver's license, could he?

Did you have a stroke halfway through that?

Always heard with like five Thomases in a row.

I actually think I said one too many Thomases.

There were four Thomases.

Two of them seemed to be hyphenated.

But the reason was.

He's got a double-barreled Thomas?

He's got a mid-name?

There's Thomas Thomas, Thomas Thomas.

But But the reason for this name is that his dad, so this is one of the leading conductors of the 19th century.

His dad was a musician who played in an orchestra, he was a violinist, and he was playing a concert just before his son was going to be baptized.

And he said to the orchestra he was playing with, Does anyone want to be godfather?

And they all said yes.

And so he named him after them all.

That sounds amazing.

I did not know we knew so many Thomases.

It's time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in Japan, you can buy rice bowls that are shaped by women's armpits.

Why?

Well, I don't want to get into the mental state of the people who buy these things.

All I can say is that they exist.

I would say there's nothing I can shape with my armpit that I can't shape with my hands.

So

they're not achieving a magical shape, are they?

No, well, let me explain how they're made and it might give you a bit more of an insight.

So

these are onigiri, these

little sort of rice triangle things.

And they're kind of rice on the outside and they usually have a filling on the inside.

And what happens is that the women who are going to make them, they have their body parts disinfected, but then they exercise to produce sweat.

Oh.

And then they use their armpits to put the rice balls into that exact shape.

And apparently they sell for as much as 10 times the price as regular rice balls.

But a diner in an article that I read said they actually tasted no different to any other rice balls.

And this is just a thing that happens.

And I'm not judging anyone.

That's fine.

It's wild.

The inviting people back to watch them be made is pretty amazing.

So that's a thing that happens.

You go to the restaurant and they say, would you like to see them being molded in the armpits live?

And you can do that.

Do you got to pay extra for that?

Yeah, possibly.

Or maybe it's part of the deal, you know.

Well, otherwise they might do it with their hands.

If you're not seeing it happen, maybe you don't trust it.

It sounds like this restaurant has an OnlyFans page.

Yeah.

It sounds like something else is going on.

The only thing that makes it slightly less gross, I guess, is that like most people in Japan, about 90% of people, don't have odorful sweat, right?

Because they're lacking the gene that makes sweat smell really bad.

So it's not going to be the very, like if we, you know, white Westerners did it, even worse.

I'm not saying it's not disgusting, but this would be even more disgusting.

One interesting thing about this is that onigiri in Japan, there was a study done where they found that 62% of Japanese people would only eat an onigiri that was made by someone they know.

What?

And only 30% said that they would eat one that was made by someone who was completely unfamiliar to them.

Right.

And that comes from like a historical thing where there's been quite a few times in history where people have been poisoned by rice balls.

Or at least according to the stories, they have been.

And so there's kind of this superstition that you should always see the person who's made your rice ball.

You're most likely to be killed by someone that you do know.

So what a stupid rule.

You should only eat rice balls made by someone you don't know.

Don't let your wife make them for you for god's sake

it's very popular globally on a giri there's even a society there's the onagiri society um and it attracts members who love it so much there's one guy who was the owner of the thing called onigiri bongo and she has said that she would like to come back in her next life as a rice ball and

the follow-up question in the interview what flavor would you like to come back she said it doesn't matter onigiri isn't about the shape it is about the soul i want to come back as one that has been made with the whole heart so it's a it's a build i thought they make them with the heart as well

i want to know if the flavors for these rice balls are sort of like rick sona type things like sea breeze oh yeah

africa

but hang on isn't isn't rice got that whole thing with bacteria that you like it's really bad at you yeah you're not supposed to like double cook it right yeah and and that it's like whole it's really good at holding bad bacteria and you're putting it somewhere where

you're such a bacteria.

Honestly, like the bacteria that's in your armpit, generally speaking, is not going to be super bad stuff, right?

Yeah, also, and this is less a fact and more just like a useful life fact that I always remind myself.

It's not a problem.

The rice bacteria thing has been hugely overblown.

Reheating rice is absolutely fine for many days afterwards.

The only thing to do, if you really do want to avoid the still quite slim risk of the sort of poisoning that we're talking about, is you need to make it cool very quickly.

So when you, as soon as you've cooked rice, put all the shit you're not going to eat in the the fridge.

Like have it every mouthful, take it out of the fridge and eat another mouthful, then put it back in the fridge.

And then it's fine for days.

Here's another thing.

So sushi kind of predates, we all associate it with Japan, but there's evidence of it in China.

And so sushi, you would have bits of fish, salted fish, and you would have the rice.

In the very earliest days of sushi, when you pulled out the fish with the rice, you threw away the rice.

They just didn't eat the rice to begin with.

It was part basically of a refrigeration process and making sure exactly about bacteria and so on, not getting into it.

So it took ages before someone went, Should we eat that bit as well?

And they did, and then they went, Well, that's actually good.

And so if a time traveler came forward and saw us doing that, they'd be like, Whoa.

It's like eating a haribo packet.

What are you doing?

Well, actually, on rice waste, I didn't realize, because obviously rice is such an important foodstuff in Japan because it's used as an ingredient for so many other things, obviously, including sake.

And with sake, when they make it, they lose.

If you're making really high-level sake, you have to lose about 70% of of the rice so they polish it every little grain of rice has to be polished until you've sanded down almost all of the outside of it so where's that going

down the train down the train yeah um so really really good white rice really gleaming white rice that's been polished and and looks amazing that was a status symbol for a long time in japan and there was a problem because if you remove those outer layers so what you do when you're polishing rice is you're basically washing it again and again and again But if you remove those layers, then it removes quite a lot of the good stuff, especially the vitamin B1 or thiamine.

Okay, so without thiamine, you get this terrible disease called beriberi and it can-beriberry.

Meriberi.

She sounds a bit harsh, James.

I mean, it might not be up your street, but.

It's beriberi and it's really berry.

I mean, you can die from it for sure.

And it really is strange because it's very similar to, you know, the thing in the west people would get on ships and they wouldn't eat oranges and lemons and stuff and they would get scurvy well in japan they had a similar thing because they were eating this white rice they would get this berry berry and so there's a guy called takaki who was a doctor and he did an experiment where he sent two ships on the same route on the same route sorry And one of them would eat rice all the time.

And then the other one would be allowed to have like meat and bread and stuff like that.

And he thought, this is going to prove that the problem is the rice.

And sure enough, when they came back, the people who were on the rice ship were suffering, but the people who weren't were much better.

And that's when they realized that you can't just eat rice all the time.

And he said that if the experiment failed, he was going to kill himself.

But yeah, within a few years of that, they got rid of this vitamin B1 deficiency in the same way that in the Western world, we got rid of scurvy by just giving people.

It's not funny, but it's interesting.

It is.

I wish more scientists said that they would kill themselves if their experiment failed.

I just think that would really raise the caliber, wouldn't it?

If there was that risk.

Japan eats more dairy than rice.

Interesting, really?

I thought they didn't really eat much dairy.

Well, that's bloody bewildering, isn't it?

Because most of them are lactose intolerant.

What are you doing?

So where are they eating?

Any Japanese people in the audience, why are you eating so much dairy?

Well, they're eating it as milk.

I suppose.

So I I think about 85%,

and estimates always vary.

It's somewhere between 80 and 95%

of East Asians are lactose intolerant.

And it's actually related to the gene that means your sweat doesn't smell.

But still, dairy has become very popular.

And if you eat little bits of it, so what?

You have diarrhea.

You know, it's worth it for a pizza.

But

yeah, the rice consumption has halved in the last 40 years and dairy's consumption has gone up.

So I grew up in Hong Kong, right, until I was 12 years old.

And the thing that always was said about me is that I smell of milk because it's not a big thing in Hong Kong as well.

Milk is not a massive thing.

And that was like a nickname that I always used to like.

There was this one particular mum who was always like, Oh, milk boy's here, is he?

Oh, yeah.

Wait a minute.

So, you weren't being bullied by the other kids in the school.

You were being bullied by the parents.

Yeah, by this one mum.

Yeah, I used to go to her son's house.

He was called Daniel as well.

And she was, yeah, she was like, oh, milk boy's here again.

And

so that really stuck with me, that I was like, reeked of milk all the time.

That's so funny.

Yeah.

You know, the Great Wall of China, they found it has been held together largely by rice, sticky rice.

Sticky rice.

Yeah, that's part of the mortar that they made.

A university in China, the Zhijiang University, they were researching the mortar of the Great Wall of China and they found that in the mortar, along with the lime, is sticky rice.

Interesting.

And back to your point around the polishing of the rice, they think that a lot of it was actually used with polished rice, which means there's a lot of extra work needed to make that water.

Why have they polished that rice?

To get stickier, I guess.

Maybe it makes stickier, sticky rice.

Maybe it gets it stickier.

Why do we not use it anymore then?

Because that wall is going pretty strong, isn't it?

It's great.

Yeah, but they did actually, it is actually the world's first example of composite mortar, which where you're including organic and inorganic material together.

And they say that it is actually very very good

that's what the architect says it in the report very very good very very good sorry

i think we've in answer to your question dan we might have gone with even more efficient building materials now no offense to the ancient chinese okay if anyone is in from ancient china okay

rice a huge source of pride uh in japan in japan and china in fact but like it's a real um patriotic thing Maybe slightly less so now, but I haven't realized that it was illegal to import any rice into Japan until the mid-1990s.

90s.

Or early to mid-90s, yeah, when America sort of bullied Japan into saying you've got to accept some of our exports because

Japan always wanted to be rice self-sufficient and be able to grow all of its own rice.

And even now, there's a lot of skepticism.

I was talking to my friend who has Japanese family in America and was saying that they will often buy at a much higher price rice that's been imported to America from Japan because that they think it's much higher quality.

Even though in blind taste tests, they almost always can't tell any difference whatsoever between American rice and Japanese rice.

But the idea is that it's much higher quality.

I've got one last thing quickly that I can mention.

This is just going back to armpits.

There's an amazing, thank God.

Yeah, there's an amazing festival that used to happen.

I think it's just stopped, but hopefully the mention on this podcast will bring it back

in Nevada in a place called Battle Mountain.

And basically, there was a journalist who called this particular town the armpit of America.

And

they were very upset by this.

And so they set up a competition, which was sponsored by a deodorant company.

I believe it was Old Spice.

And they turned it into a plus.

And so they had the Armpit Beauty Queen contest, whereby

it was brilliant.

So you would go and it would be a big festival and you would have a sweaty t-shirt contest.

Can I just say, so is it who has the most beautiful armpit?

Yeah.

And then in light beauty contests, you have to do like a skill as well.

Yes.

So they're doing that thing where they make fart noises.

Yes.

Yeah, they do the fart noises.

There's deodorant throwing competitions.

So I think who can throw the deodorant the furthest?

There's quick draw deodorant competitions.

Who can get it and spray it as quickly as possible?

And then eventually they crown the armpit queen.

But yeah, they've really leaned into it.

Their motto, which they now have on a sign as you enter Battle Mountain, says, make Battle Mountain your next pit stop.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

It is time for fact number three.

And that is my fact.

My fact this week is that 2,500 years ago, Buddha taught the world that the road to enlightenment could be achieved through compassion, mindfulness, and the eradication of the game hopscotch.

He hated hopscotch.

What?

Buddha hated any game whereby you drew on the ground and you were using your feet to sort of be confined by the drawing on the ground.

And hopscotch is exactly what that is.

It might not have existed during the day, but if Buddha came back now,

he'd be like, what the hell's this?

Did you learn nothing?

I guess these kind of hopscotch type games are very, very old, aren't they?

And they all over the world.

So there would have been something that we would have seen that would have looked a bit like hopscotch.

Yeah.

Yes.

Did he say he banned drawing on the ground and stepping in the squares that you've created, didn't he?

Yeah, I'd say that's hopscotch.

That's hopscotch.

Hopscotch.

Hopscotch.

He also banned all dice games, all stick games, all marble games.

All games where you blow through toy pipes.

All games where you turn somersaults, games where you play with toy windmills, games where you play with toy chariots, toy bows, games where you guess the letters drawn in the air or they're on the back of the bodies,

and games where you mimic deformities.

Yeah.

I think the last one, fair enough, actually.

He sort of got into a good rhythm right at the end though, didn't he?

Also, guessing a friend's thoughts.

Not allowed by Buddha.

Playing with someone's ears.

Why is this?

No wet willies in the world.

Why is this guy such a killjoy?

I know.

Why is he always smiling?

Twin.

And or eyes or nose, to be fair.

No facial parts.

And no Jenga and no pickup sticks either.

Was Jenger around back then?

Well, again, he specified, and it is interesting to see how these concepts go back.

He specified no games that involve adding pieces or removing pieces from piles.

We're still unimaginative humans.

We just generate the same old shit.

Oh, wow.

And why was it?

It was to stop people getting distracted from scripture and holiness, wasn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's a philosophy, and Buddha did say that this should all be altered as we go along, hence, why we now have hopscotch.

I don't think that he said that, therefore, we have scopscotch.

I don't think we were waiting for the thousand-year cutoff, and then we went, right, Buddha said it's okay now.

Get the chalk out.

Well, you say that, there was no hopscotch then, and there is now.

So, I don't know.

One thing we should say, you say, why is he smiling all the time?

That's not Buddha, is it?

Yeah, you're right.

That's someone who we've accidentally labeled as Buddha.

Yeah, so Buddha's birth name was Siddhartha

Gautama, and he was someone who was born into royalty.

He was a very well-to-do person, but then he found a path of enlightenment, basically, and then he brought all his followers on.

And by the smiling one, you mean the big sort of fat Buddha that you get on like...

Yes, the smiling, jolly Buddha.

Yeah, that was a Chinese monk who was called Budai.

So you can understand the confusion.

Close enough.

Tomatoesmata.

Yeah.

One thing that he banned as well was playing with toy carts.

Like a little toy cart.

But I mean, it'd be easy wouldn't it because you'd be like you'd be like oi you with the toy cart be like no it's not a toy i'm actually this is legit i'm just a little kid carrying these stones over there it could be work it could be child labor i'm just transporting fluff

there's lots of ways out of it is this um is this stuff all from there's a book of rules called the vinaya I think it might be from that.

There's some other rules in there that says a monk shall not tickle another monk.

Yeah, or lie down in a bed scattered with flowers.

Well, that's always a prelude to something more sexy, isn't it?

It is,

especially when a tickling comes straight afterwards.

Yeah, it's fair enough.

Well, but so was playing with someone's ears, eyes, or nose, which he was against as well.

And that sometimes is a prelude to.

Well, I mean, where I come.

Anyways,

probably.

I guess all of this stuff in really specific circumstances could be the prelude to some sex.

Particularly the one with the guessing letters traced with a finger and the U are on somebody's back.

That's definitely cock and balls.

Cock and balls again.

Stop.

Can you stop doing cock and balls on my back?

Isn't that what you can say?

And they were Sanskrit letters, weren't they?

Cock and balls.

I

found out a really interesting thing about the etymology of Buddha.

Yeah.

And that is that it's so that's from a Sanskrit term, which is Buddha, to awaken, to you know, enlightenment, awakening.

You can see how it comes from that.

But what I find amazing is, of course, that word originated in India, where Buddhism originated.

And that

nonetheless has the same origin as the word bode.

Our word bode, it bodes well, which is just from old English Saxon languages, because they both date back even further to Pi, which I'm sure you all know is Proto-Indo-European.

And so 8,000 years ago, these two languages sort of split, and we got bode from the same origin as they got Buddha, and now they've met again.

I find that amazing.

I find that is incredible.

Language can travel that far and then meet again.

Look, it's not funny, but it's really miraculous.

That's not

amazing.

It's quite romantic.

Well, I also have an unfunny etymology, I think of hop scotch.

Go on.

Okay.

So the word

scotch can mean an incensed line or scratch in the ground.

Yeah.

So hop in a scratch, scratching on the ground.

And in fact, that got a young girl, a 10-year-old girl, in trouble with the police, believe it or not, in Ramsgate a few years ago.

A young 10-year-old girl was putting a hop scotch scratching and sensing a line in the ground.

And she was done for criminal damage.

She's so mad.

A 10-year-old, the police officer came along and frightened this Bob Allen, the father of Lily May Allen.

She could be be Lily Allen.

Maybe.

Maybe I'm.

I should check these facts.

Maybe some.

Anyways, he was came along and said, oh, that's you're defacing public property.

Yeah, that's crazy.

It's maps, isn't it?

Why isn't it in because this happens a lot, these news stories about people being arrested for, or not arrested for, given warnings by the police for drawing hopscotch things?

It should be page one, police handbook.

Don't accuse a 10-year-old of graffiti and criminal damage because she's drawn a fucking hopscotch.

We're all trying to get kids out of the house, playing games.

She did, to be fair, in the place where you have to write the letters and stuff, she did write fuck the police.

But I mean, to be fair, that's

also probably should be checked.

That's why it goes.

Hopscotch, you're talking about the etymology of it.

Do you know what it was called before it was called hopscotch?

No.

Oh, don't know.

Scotch hop.

Oh.

Yeah.

Just at some point we just went, oh, let's turn that round.

It's like the rice and the sushi.

We just flipped it around and started using it differently.

The first mention is in a book by Francis Willoughby, and it's in the 17th century Book of Games.

And it's a big old book full of loads and loads of different games you can play.

And there's one chapter that's kind of disappeared, and we don't really know much about it now.

And that chapter is called Tricks to Abuse and Hurt One Another.

So he had all it was like games you can play in the garden, games you can play by running around, and then this one which is abusing and hurting one another.

And the the thing is we do have the chapter heading so we know what's in it but we don't know what the games are so there's that also a sexy book with a sexy because where i'm from that's also a sex anyway uh keep going sorry there's um one called buying of mustard we don't know what it is selling of millstones bum to bus a fool bump bum to butter bum to bus a fool oh see sexy as hell

but lots of names.

It was called Hicketty Hackety and Hicketty Hackety Hocketty and just Hocketty and Paliali and Hitchabed.

I like the fact that games used to have so many different names.

Why have we codified them?

Yeah.

Did she just have a stroke?

Yeah, Lele and Kit Kit and Thomas Thomas Thomas Thomas.

When I was a kid, it used to be like we would play British Bulldog where you have to run across the field and then it's up to someone to rubby tackle you and beat you to the ground.

And then the school would ban it and then we would just play it again under a different name.

And we thought that this was a loophole.

That is like, oh, they banned British Bulldog, but they didn't ban Blue Boy, which is exactly the same game.

And then they go, yeah, that's banned as well.

And then the next day we call it something else.

So maybe that was it.

Another bit of enlightenment.

So

in Buddhism, you have enlightenment.

In the Jain religion, you also have enlightenment.

They're really, really very similar religions.

They grew up from the same place.

And in the Jain religion, there are 24 Ford makers.

And these are people who have gone through all of the different cycles and been reborn, reborn, reborn.

And now they're out of the cycle.

These are perfect people.

So one of them is said to have floated perfectly still in his mother's womb, sending not so much as a ripple so that he didn't harm his mother.

Right.

Which is nice.

They tended to be really tall and really old.

So there's a guy called Nemenatha who lived for 1,054 years, 300 years as a bachelor, 54 days as a monk, and then 700 years as an omniscient being.

And then another 200 years as a conductor.

And he was, this guy was 30 meters tall.

So if he was a building in London, he would need a second staircase due to fire regulations.

That's amazing.

I can't believe he tolerated 300 years being single before going, you know what, I'm just going to say I'm a monk.

Five years for me.

So, the idea of Buddhism largely is to achieve enlightenment, and this goes through many different disciplines involved in philosophy.

And so, George Harrison, who joined that whole movement,

he was Buddhist and he went through various other things, became Hare Krishna at the end of his life.

From the Beatles.

From the Beatles, yes, for anyone who's not heard of George Harrison.

We have lots of young, cool listeners, Dan.

Not cool if they don't know George Harrison.

So

he had, I don't know if you all remember, but it was a horrible moment that happened just after the turn of the millennium where someone broke into his house and stabbed at him and he got stabbed multiple times.

He miraculously survived.

It was really amazing.

But the account of when he was dying was George Harrison basically was waiting for the moment to achieve enlightenment to take him to the next level.

So at one point when he was being attacked by this guy, he sort of gave in to it and just said, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.

And he repeated it over and over.

And it was, I need to get to enlightenment before I die.

He survived because his wife leapt on the back of this guy and beat him down with a side lamp that was on a bedside table.

And so blood was everywhere.

It was an astonishingly bad thing.

And he should have died.

Everyone said he should have died, the doctors and so on.

And there's a great story that Eric Idol tells, which is as he's leaving the house and he's on a gurney and they're bringing into the ambulance.

He passes two new members of staff who started that day.

and that was their first morning.

And as they passed, a weak and almost dead George Harrison went, so how are you finding the job so far?

And that could have been his last words ever, but yeah,

I love that.

And so, according to Olivia Harrison, his wife, he did achieve enlightenment right at the end.

She saw him as a matter of fact.

According to his wife,

sorry.

I'm just saying it's a happy ending.

I think, yeah, sure, the second person ever to achieve achieve enlightenment, according to George Harrison's wife.

There is a type of Buddhist meditation that I quite fancy and I didn't know about, which requires you to find a corpse.

This is such a dark note to end on.

Oh, my God.

And dig it up.

And no, not dig it up.

To find a corpse and sit there and watch it decay.

I didn't know about this.

And it's the nine stages of decay.

And you have to sit in front of a corpse.

I don't know what the family are doing at the time.

They just let you do it.

And you start, and it's amazing.

So you start with bloat and then rupture and then, you know, like, I won't take you through all nine stages because I think I might stick with my meditation app.

It's coming up, it's in the next lesson.

But it's done in a very sexy American woman's voice, so you'll find it ring nice.

And you would like to do that.

Sounds pretty fun of a week, you know?

So where I'm from, that's actually quite sexy.

Sorry, no.

Sorry.

No.

I'm from Tim's, by the way.

So

we do things proper there.

All right, Love, we need to get to our final fact of the show.

It is time for our final fact, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that

is that a patio for cats is called a catio.

Very silly.

I just, I really want to say now,

this is the most stupid fact I've ever said on the show.

And I couldn't believe it.

No, listen, but she's always like this.

I don't know.

I'm ashamed, but I'm going to tell you now because you're here.

So, catios are a thing.

And maybe it'll come in handy with your cat-loving friends.

You know, you can be like, have you got a catio yet?

Because every site that's on every company that sells stuff for pets is just like, hey, have you got the best catio available?

And apparently that's just an accepted way to refer to cat patios.

And, you know, it's so that you can let them outside without them.

It's like a patio as we know it, but with a cage around it as they know it, so that they can't escape onto the roads and get run over.

And so that they also can't kill all of them.

Are you being paid for this?

Is this a secret ad?

It's bizarre, isn't it?

Is there an offer code fish at the end of this?

It's not even a brand.

It's not a brand.

It's a generic term.

It's probably in the OED by now.

It's just a generic term that pet owners are accepting, a catio.

So get one.

Ramps, tunnels, swing bridges, they can be yours.

So we just had a heckle from the audience, and I am going to address it.

I wouldn't usually, but it said, Did you know about our native birds?

And we're in New Zealand, and the whole point of a cat patio is to protect the native birds, so they're very in demand in New Zealand.

You don't get other comedians dealing with hecklers like that, do you?

What you go, fuck off, mate.

But that was beautiful.

No, it's a good question, actually.

It was a great question.

Yes.

The Lyles Wren, I mean, how famous is the Lyle's Wren in New Zealand?

Do you all know the Lyles Wren?

And the fact, well, okay, I feel like no.

No, I don't.

I feel like you're not.

Do it for my benefit.

So the Lyle's Wren was a New Zealand bird.

It was having an absolute whale of a time for thousands of years.

And the Maoris arrived

almost a thousand years ago.

And they gradually sort of wiped it out, not intentionally, by bringing rats with them, which killed it.

But there were a few left by the 19th century, and then European settlers arrived, and they really fucked it.

And the only ones left were of this lovely Lyles wren were on a place called Stephen's Island, which I'm sure a lot of you know.

And there was a lighthouse set up in 1894, but the lighthouse keeper brought cats.

And the very, very last Lyles Wren was eaten by Tibbles the cat.

Really?

But the owner kept the kept the body, so we do have the last body of the Lyles Wren from the Mayor of the Cat.

Domestic cats, they're responsible for the extinction of at least like almost a dozen species, I would say, right?

Yeah, they've got a lot of cats.

And they're even eating penguins in New Zealand.

They're running up mountains, eating lizards.

Because when you say a dozen, you mean in New Zealand, right?

Yeah, it's just in new zealand that makes it i know so are we saying death to cats wow

jesus

wow wow

controversial controversial what's his name the trade meet guy that's trying to get them all killed

That guy, yeah, it's a big thing in New Zealand.

There's people advocating.

I think there's even a political party, isn't there?

Kill the cats.

What?

Or something?

I don't know.

I might be.

You might want to check that.

But I got to say, I've watched a lot of New Zealand comedy.

I didn't know that this death of cats was a thread on luxury.

So, we're slightly also talking about luxury for pets, right?

This has a practical purpose, but if you say to anyone, my cat has a catio, you're gonna be, I think, slightly mocked.

And there's amazing examples throughout history of people who have built extraordinary structures for their animals.

So, there was a British surgeon who had two great Danes, and she built what was a 250,000 pound, so it's like 550,000 New Zealand dollars, a giant house for these two dogs.

It was, it was known as Barkingham Palace, and

it was designed by an architect called Andy Ramis, a thousand foot square, and it was uh, it had everything from 18-inch deep doggy spas, uh, it had temperature-control beds, it had a 52-inch plasma television.

And did they just live there on their own, these dogs?

Yeah, the designer lived in another house.

So, is it just covered in feces?

Yeah,

I'm sure there were servants who came to

servant cats.

Dogs know to poo outside.

It's fine.

All you need to do is give them a dog flap and they poo outside.

Give them a dog flap.

Yeah.

Presumably.

Oh, imagine if they missed the dog flap off that 250 grand budget.

Imagine if they were like, we can't stretch.

On the other side is a guy called Bruce Robinson in the UK who he started taking in cats that had been abandoned during COVID-19.

He just took in one or two at the start and then a couple more and then they all started multiplying.

And at the end, he had 300 cats.

And he told a newspaper, he said, I made a bad decision.

I thought I could handle the cats.

And he spent, he ended up spending thousands of pounds every month.

He was, he had to go without food himself because he had to buy so much food for the cats and buying cat litter for the 10 little boxes for these 300 cats.

And in the end, they were taken away by the SPCA.

But they, in actual fact, they they were all in very good condition.

I'm going to say, I'm going to come out and say it.

10 litter boxes is not enough for 300 cats.

No, I agree.

You can't have 30 cats to a box.

I think that's when they saw this is not working.

Yeah.

There's a Japanese architect, quite a famous one, called Tan Yamanuchi.

And he recently designed, and it was very interesting to watch the video of how the design worked.

He designed a house.

for his cats, but that he also lives in, but it was based around the desires of his cats.

And the really difficult thing about being an architect with your bosses being cats is that they obviously don't speak your language.

And so you need to work out what they want.

So he followed them around everywhere to work out what temperatures they like best.

And then he'd take a reading.

And so he's created this amazing house where, for instance, the staircase of the house goes all around the...

outside of the inner wall and that's so that the cats on their way up can always see everything in the house so that there's never any threat there's never any tension and each step is exactly measured to be the height of the cat, so it works for them.

Lots of hiding spots for them.

At the top of this spiral staircase in this beautiful house, you know, millions of dollars, is just a window at cat height.

They get to the top of the steps and they can look out the window.

It's amazing.

And there are also shed loads of books in it.

which I don't understand.

The whole thing is I designed a house specifically for my cats.

And you're looking at this video and you're going, there's bookcases everywhere.

What are they reading?

It's just pictures of mice.

Right.

Some other inventions for cats.

There's a new thing which you can get which is like a mat for your house and it's got a wire that goes down into the ground and it's for according to the people who invented it when there's a lightning storm that goes past there's enough static electricity in the air that your fluffy cat gets loads of static inside them.

You know when you walk on a carpet and you accidentally touch something metal and you get a shock.

They reckon that this is happening to cats all the time.

And so the only way to solve it is to get one of these mats which your cat can go and sit on and it grounds them.

What?

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

What the hell?

We would know if cats were having electric shocks all the time.

I wouldn't think so.

Are you saying I wasted my money?

Okay, I got one more invention.

This is a good one.

I think this is a good one, actually.

So we don't like cats in New Zealand.

Okay, we've decided.

We decided we don't want any animal pets, but you still kind of want a pet.

So in 2010, they invented a thing called a pot pet.

And this is a flower pot that lives in your house with a flower in it.

And whenever it needs water, it kind of follows you around

and sort of makes a little squeaking noise.

And then you have to pour water in it.

Okay.

And then when it needs some sunshine, it goes into a nice sunny place and stuff like that.

So it's like a plant, but it has all the mobility of a pet.

Wow.

It's like a sentient plant.

It's, I need light, I need water.

Yeah, it's saving.

It's like a Tamagotchi, basically, right?

But more 3D.

You fancy one of those?

Sorry?

You fancy one?

A Tamagotchi or the

thing that I just five minutes explaining.

I'm not encouraging this industry.

I think the energies of scientists are going in the wrong direction here.

Unfortunately, the scientist who invented this then killed himself because he didn't sell any.

We're going to have to wrap up fairly soon.

Andy told me a great anecdote.

He read this book recently, which was by Craig Brown, amazing journalist in the UK, and it's all about the Queen.

So it's a new book out, might be out in New Zealand as well.

A voyage around the Queen, it's called.

And basically, we've spoken many times on this podcast about dictators who have dogs, who have more rights and more power than most of the people in their life.

That was kind of the same with the Queen and the Queen Mother, with the Corgi's.

The Corgis didn't have more legal rights than British citizens.

What I mean is

they were big

deals in the Buckingham Palace.

And so there's a story that Craig Brown tells in the book, which is that the Queen Mother was walking through the halls when suddenly she saw a giant pile of dog poo sitting on the carpet.

And she went, who did that?

That wasn't one of my dogs.

And everyone was just tense because they were like, well, it definitely was one of the dogs.

What do we do?

So her private secretary, Marken Gilliatt, stepped in and said, well, mom, if it wasn't your dogs, it certainly wasn't you.

So it must have been me.

That's the power of the corners.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for being here.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

Wellington, you were incredible.

Thank you for having us.

We will be back.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.