562: No Such Thing As The Jam Of Entertainment

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the last episode of No Six Things Fish before Christmas.

We're getting really close to Christmas now, so obviously, very, very much in the last-minute stocking filler area.

But if you have very odd-shaped stockings, then maybe you would like to buy some of our books because probably from some online retailers, you'll be able to get them just in time if you're listening to this on Friday or Saturday.

So, let me remind you what we have.

Andrew Hunter Murray has written a number of novels, but his latest one is A Beginner's Guides to Breaking and Entering.

It is a book that shows off everything you love about Andy.

It's very funny, very witty, and at the same time has his classic thriller structure, as they all do, all of his books.

Dan Schreiber has a book called Impossible Things.

It is a children's book and it is a way to get your children.

children to think like Dan Schreiber.

Is that the kind of thing you want?

Well, let's be honest, it is.

He has a unique brain and his books are absolutely amazing and it really gets kids interested in everything that's going on around them.

And if you're an adult, which you probably are if you're listening to this, then you can get the theory of everything else, which is his adult's version of that book.

When I say adult, I mean it's for adults, not that it has anything naughty in it.

It is complete family-friendly fun.

Of course, Anna and I also have a book.

It's called A Load of Old Balls.

Doesn't sound very family-friendly, does it?

But it is our look at the world of sports.

If you've got any difficult to buy for relatives, but you know that they like any kind of sport, then this is one to get for them because it is a classic QI thing of all the kind of weird facts that even the biggest sports fan in your family will not know.

And actually, even if you don't like sports, we know that you will like this because it's a book full of facts and it really gives you an idea of why humans like this thing that a lot of us really find quite impenetrable.

Anyway, so that's the books from the three of us.

Get them now, they're the perfect present for for any fish fan in your life.

But don't worry if you can't or don't want to get those, it's absolutely no problem.

All we really want is that you listen to and enjoy the podcast, which is free and which will always be free.

So there's nothing more to say, I suppose, then Merry Christmas.

Hope you have a great time over the next couple of weeks and on with the podcast.

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

This week coming to you live from Melbourne.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tushinski, Andrew Hunton Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we 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 Anna.

My fact this week is that to get a good close-up photo in the early 1900s your camera had to be 20 feet long.

Which is tough to take in hand luggage.

We've got a photo of it up on the screen, a black and white photo.

We do.

So there's a picture here of the two people who had to operate this camera who were david and marianne fairchild i think we've mentioned them briefly on the show before she was alexander graham bell's daughter and this is around 1913 and David really wanted to take some close-ups of insects.

He thought they were very, very beautiful creepy crawlies, and he was annoyed that the only way you could look at them close-up was by killing them, squashing them, drying them out, and putting them in a book.

So he was like, let's try to take some pictures.

But in order to get the magnification, you need this incredibly long extension tube, or you did when the tech was a little bit simpler.

And so you've got the lens at one end, which person number one is having to hold.

And then at the very other end of the camera, you have the person who takes the photo.

And eventually you get an insect in very high definition.

Were these insects living, can I ask, Hannah?

They were not.

It was actually quite amazing what they did.

So yeah, so it wasn't, I thought at first, how lovely he wanted to keep them alive to photograph them.

No, he just didn't want them dried out.

So Marion actually came up.

Because I read he needed an exposure of 80 seconds.

Yeah.

Which no insect, no matter how well trained, is going to sit there.

I can't sit there as they sleep.

Right?

They might be asleep.

They might be asleep.

So I've seen insects stay still for long periods of time, but these ones were deceased.

And the way they did it was Marianne would cover a block of wood with a layer of candle wax, and then she'd put a leaf on top so it looks like it's in a realistic position because insects hang out on leaves.

And then, with a little pin, made a few holes for each foot of the insect in the leaf, and the feet would stick to the wax underneath and so then it would look like they were naturally just standing on this leaf.

Right.

Okay.

There are some other ways of doing it these days.

If you go on forums of how to photograph insects they come up with ideas.

One idea is to put them in the freezer for 20 minutes and that will keep them still but it won't kill them.

Right.

Which is good.

Another one is if you let's say it's one that doesn't fly if you put it on a table and then put vapor rub, fix vapor rub around it, then it won't be able to get out of there and so it'll just stay in that little.

I thought you were going to say they're superstitious and they won't step over.

It's like summoning a demon.

That's okay.

They just slip around.

And one of the earliest, this wasn't photography, but one of the earliest close-up books was Robert Hooke's Micrographia.

So that will have been, what, 17th century, I guess.

And he drew lots of pictures of tiny insects that he could see through these new lenses that had been invented.

And the way that he did it was that he would give a fly a quarter of a pint of brandy.

Oh, no.

Sorry.

What do you

give away?

Give a fly a quarter of a.

All right, lightweights.

Even Anna is quibbling over the...

You know, I'm not sure I can...

Would he drop them in it?

Yeah, he would put them in it.

Oh, nice.

He probably could have gone for a bit less brandy, but...

Yeah, they'd be groggy.

The photos, by the way, that they took, so published in the book called The Book of Monsters, and they are terrifying.

And what it really gives you for the first time anyone really had it was the sort of point of view of, say, like an ant coming up against a giant cocker roach or a worm and it's terrifying.

The insect world is it's scary in black and white when it's big.

It is.

They named their camera which is quite nice.

Oh, what would they call it?

Long Tom.

Did you guys come across Frank Percy Smith?

No.

Okay I was looking up pioneers of insect photography.

A crowded field.

I think Frank Percy Smith is the other one.

1880 to 1945 was his lifespan.

And he got okay, I'm just going to read out a quote I found.

Frank Percy Smith got his big break after he was so bored at his day job that he adopted a pet blue bottle, keeping it on a tiny lead and feeding it milk.

That's so amazing.

Now, do we mean feeding it or submerging it in milk?

I was just thinking, we were chatting today, Anna, because I've been playing golf and there's loads of flies everywhere.

And you said that a single fly followed you for about 45 minutes when you were walking to the...

I didn't even know that information about my private life was going to be brought to the table today, but yes.

It was trying to domesticate itself.

And you were rejecting its overtures.

That's very sad.

All the way down St.

Kilda Road.

It's very annoying.

But he genuinely had a pet fly.

He just had a pet blue bottle on his desk.

I mean, that's.

I feel like people should be more staggered about this.

Yeah.

I mean, he had it on a lead, and he found it.

He had it on a lead.

Anyway.

How long did it live?

Source does not relate.

But he took close-up photos of the fly drinking its milk in the morning.

Okay.

And he showed it to a film distributor who specialized in insects, a guy called Charles Urban.

And this was in the 1900s.

So he was a young man at the time.

And he would film amazing footage of a fly juggling like a ball or a piece of cork or some twine.

Really big.

It was a ball.

Bigger than it was,

much bigger than it was.

And it turned out the way he had done this, okay, it's not great, but

what he had done was he had glued it upside down to something so its legs were all sticking in the air and then put a little piece of fluff or whatever on it and it just bats it around with its legs.

And it looks very, very amusingly like it's juggling.

The fly would be dead by now anyway.

I think it's important to say that.

Wait, how is it batting something around with its legs if it's dead?

No, no, no, it was alive at the time.

He glued it upside down to the thing so it would.

And he's just saying that it's not offensive because the fly is dead, but he will have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of relatives.

Exactly.

Many of them in tonight.

They're all waiting for you at the stage door, Andy.

But this was the little thing he said about his work.

He said, I have always endeavoured to administer the powder of instruction in the jam of entertainment.

What a good motto for

the powder is the medicine, like giving your dog some medicine or whatever.

When he was a child, Frank Percy Smith, he was so into nature that he lay down on a frozen lake with his head in a hole, looking at the things that were happening underneath the water.

And his friend found him like that, and he'd become frozen to the ice and had to be freed.

No.

Really?

Oh, my goodness.

That's true.

It's amazing.

I've got a thing on early photography here, and I have a little riddle for you.

And I guess all are you as well.

Which is 1837.

The first ever photo is taken.

It's called Boulevard de Temple and in it you see the photographer is looking down over a sort of promenade.

There's a big road and there's just one human there.

Okay?

So that's all you see.

It's the first photo so far as we know of a human in a photo.

However, the photo was basically taken during rush hour.

So there should have been horses.

There should have been lots of people.

Why?

Is it it just one man?

Vampires, I guess.

Yeah.

I've got it.

I've got it.

Now, hang on, please, guys.

I actually don't really mean you guys.

Let's see if the guy with the microphone can get it first.

Right.

The man who did appear in the photo was a scuba diver who was stuck in a tree.

And

yes.

So it's because of the exposure.

Exactly.

It took seven minutes to get the exposure done, right?

Stay still, living statue.

He wasn't a living statue.

He was having his shoe polished.

So he's standing with one leg up, which is clearly having the shoe polished, and everyone else, all the horses, all the everything that was going, the people, they just didn't connect with the photo because they weren't in one spot for so long.

Can I ask the guy who was polishing his shoes?

Was he sort of

doing this?

You get a bit of him.

He's slightly there, so he almost makes it into the first ever photo of a human, but that's it.

It looks like a desolate area with just one person, and it's not.

Wow.

You see, the jam of entertainment was the quiz, and the powder of instruction was the information.

I think that's very important.

We've got to make it happen.

That's what we do.

The largest camera on the planet.

Yeah.

We're doing a very long camera here, long tom.

The largest camera on the planet was built in 1900 specifically to take a photo, the largest photo in the world, large camera, large photo.

What was it to photograph?

Oh, okay.

Was it a large building?

It was a large object.

The galaxy?

A moving object, smaller than the galaxy.

Okay.

It was new and sexy and cool in 1900, more or less.

Motor cars.

A bit older.

But moving, but moving, I think, yeah.

It was the handsomest train on the planet.

Oh.

Was that its name?

Yeah, it was blurbed as like this was the PR around it was, this is the coolest, most gorgeous train you'll ever see.

And

it was called the Alton Limited, built in Illinois.

And the big deal was it was symmetrical.

That apparently...

I have no idea what previous trains looked like.

Apparently completely bulging on one side and stuff on the other.

Basically, everything was the same length and height in it, and that was amazing.

And they had to make a single photo plate, you know, those plates that old photographers would dip in.

It was eight feet wide and four and a half feet tall.

It was like it was as if a giant needed to drop it into the camera.

And the camera was 20 feet long as well.

And they got the shot.

That's very cool.

That's awesome.

Yeah, love that.

Good shot.

It's fine.

That doesn't say much for the handsomest train.

Here's a little quiz, Quizlet for you.

There is a thing called the Nikon Small World Photo Micrography Competition, and it's a competition where you take photos of very, very small things, and whichever is the most beautiful wins.

Okay.

Okay, so in 1975, the winner was a photo of oxalic acid crystals that were magnified 100 times.

Okay, so that's 1975.

100 times.

In 2024, how many times magnified was the winner?

So it's 100 times in 1975.

It's either going to be 50 quadrillion or it's going to be like twice as magnified.

in

102.

No, 100 times magnified in 1975.

Yeah,

I'll say half a million, 500,000 times.

It's in between of the two extremities that you were going for because it's actually still 100.

So it was 100 in 1975 and it was 100 in 2024 and they haven't been able to improve it since then.

What, really?

And the reason is physics.

It's just physics.

These are not like electron microscopes or scanning tunneling microscopes or these special things that physicists have.

These have got to be light photographs.

And once you get smaller than 100 times magnified, the very light itself starts to diffract into each other and you can't see things clearly.

And even if you push your fingers outwards and outwards on the screen of your iPhone,

eventually, believe it or not, you will reach a limit.

Wow.

That's so funny.

That's so an annoying quiz.

Which is why you said it.

I understand.

Here's another early form of photography that was experimented with.

Have you guys heard of photography?

Thought?

Thoughtography.

Thoughtography.

Picturing parts of your brain and working out what people are thinking about from the neural activity.

No, it's basically psychic photography.

You have to stare at what you want to be appearing on the photo and then gradually it comes onto the photo.

Except it doesn't.

Well, tell that to Yuri Geller, who is able to photograph himself with the lens cap on the camera.

Although for some reason he only takes photos of his forehead.

I can't work out why that is, but that's...

Because Yuri Geller's our source, is he?

Yep.

Cool.

Well, how about this one?

Octography.

Octography?

Yeah, octography.

Okay.

Octo.

Okay.

So, eight-sided photographs?

This is, no, I didn't actually look up the etymology.

It's...

This was something that was actually practiced in in the late 1800s that they thought might be a thing.

It was when someone, if they'd been murdered, you would take a photo of their eyes because they believed that the eyes captured the final image it ever saw and they would see the murderer sort of like in the in the eye going

or whatever and they would then go that's Martin and

it's optography I think with a P, right?

That would make more sense wouldn't it?

Unless people had eight eyes back then.

Only spiders it weren't with that.

And it's always either an old woman or a bird that's the culprit.

I remember reading about this, and I think so many people believed it that there were murders where they removed the eyes because they thought the eyes would give them away.

Yeah, yeah.

Murder is a little bit of a dark.

Well, it would be.

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

My fact this week is that in America there is a secret society called the Order of the Occult Hand whose sole mission is to sneak a very specific phrase into newspapers and we have no idea what that phrase is

so this is this started back in 1965 an American journalist called Joseph Flanders put into a report that he was writing about where there was a murder and these words came up that said it was as if some occult hand had moved porn after porn until they were in the wrong.

It was porn with a W, I think.

Yes, that is.

How does it make sense what it's the other word?

It doesn't.

You could have been murdered in a news agent's true porn.

Which has moved porn after porn.

How did they get the corpse onto the top shelf?

Man found dead in penthouse, the other kind of penthouse.

So it was as if some occult hand had moved porn after porn until they were in the right place and then tragedy.

And so that phrase made it in there, that little phrase about the occult hand.

And he went to the pub and his buddies were giving him crap about this, saying, well, that was such a funny, ridiculous thing.

And they decided we're going to start a secret society whereas many journalists are going to try and slip that exact phrasing.

It was as if some occult hand had dot dot dot into it.

And that was good because it was so pretentious.

Yeah, exactly.

It was just such a a ridiculous thing to write.

And so for 40 odd years, it kept appearing in newspapers and it started to be a thing where editors would find out that people were doing that.

And so when it came to a final proofread of the articles that were going out, they had to do an occult hand check to make sure that the phrase hadn't been slipped into it.

And we only know what the phrase is because in 2006 it got properly outed.

So instead of it dismantling, they have a new phrase now and we don't know what that is.

So in the newspapers globally there is one particular phrase that will still be appearing and until we know what that is it's gonna

it's not Trump has won the election is it

is fantastic and newspaper language is very you know specific about this kind of stuff so obviously the headlines you miss out a lot of conjunctions and prepositions you miss out anything which slows down the phrase ideas like dog bites man not a dog has bitten a man exactly exactly that and so it's obviously it makes it spicier and more exciting and draws the reader in, which is the whole point.

But sometimes you get headlines which don't quite work as a result.

So there was a headline from 2014.

Patrick Stewart surprises fan with life-threatening illness, which

what a bastard.

I'm afraid you won't live long and prosper.

I like there are lots of things that are sort of concealed in newspapers, aren't there?

Lots of kind of within Fleet Street jokes.

Often they happen when there's a bit of a disagreement between the journalists who are writing their stuff and the owners of a newspaper.

And often those journalists don't like those owners.

So in 2001, for instance, Stephen Pollard was sacked from The Express, and The Express had recently been taken over by a guy called Richard Desmond.

And Pollard's last article was just a very innocuous commentary on organic farming.

But the first letters of each sentence spelled out fuck you, Desmond.

Which is very good.

And I also, James May, do you guys have Top Gear?

James, yeah, James May of Top Gear fame.

In 1992, he was fired from Auto Car Magazine because he'd been asked to write 42 pages of like a roundup of the cars of the year, and he had to do a little review of each car.

And I think he thought this is a very tedious task.

But it's 42 pages of reviews, so he had to come up with a very long kind of acrostic.

So the first letter of each review spelled out, so you think it's really good?

Yeah, you should try making the bloody thing up.

It's a real pain in the ass.

Wow, that's really good.

We had to read quite a lot of old articles for this, and one of the ones that I get, this is a bit non-sequitur, but I read this amazing article in the New York Times about the grunge movement.

in Seattle.

This is in 1992, and it had a list of grunge terms, and I just thought I could do a little quiz and see if you could say what they are.

So in Seattle in the 90s, early 90s, what was a cobnobbler?

Cobnobbler.

Oh, a shoe shiner.

No,

didn't really have so many shoe shines in Seattle in the 1980s.

Are you a cob for a dinosaur?

Is it what you call the little thing that you stick into the corner of the cob?

Like it's a little knobbler.

Oh, I see.

It's just a word for a loser.

Okay.

Lame stain.

Lame stain.

Lame stain.

Sounds like another word for a loser.

It's another word for a loser.

Wax slacks.

All right, James, we get it.

You don't like hanging out with us.

Trousers, some kind of trousers.

Yeah, old rip jeans and swinging on the flippity flop.

Oh, that's just being a cool guy hanging out.

It is.

Hanging out.

That is.

Honestly,

that is amazing.

Andy, you could have been in early 90s Seattle in the grunge scene, apart from the fact that they were all made up.

Oh.

They were made up by people who didn't like the fact that their scene was getting into the national press.

And so they did a fake interview where they made up all of these words.

And it got into the Times.

And it was years later when they found out that these were all fake.

And the New York Times dismissed the prank as irritating.

Oh,

they really care about the sort of accuracy of everything.

They sort of check everything so many times.

I do think

what this phrase might be is interesting.

Yeah, because they'll have been smuggling it in.

They will have been concealing the powder of instruction

in the jam of entertainment.

Yes, would be my way I feel about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is food for thought, isn't it?

That's what's called purple prose.

That's what journalists often refer to.

So this was a thing.

It's a style off the back of a quote of a Roman poet, Horace.

Someone would basically patch purple onto their clothing in order to make them look more rich, but it was so badly done.

It was so obvious and so trying to be pretentious that you would notice it immediately.

And for journalists who uses Purple Pros.

I knew that.

Yeah, that was where it was from.

Yeah.

We should talk about Australian hackery as well.

Okay.

Because Australia is home to great newspapers.

And

a great newspaper family.

I'm so glad to hear you say that.

No, sorry.

Who was that?

Was that your Elizabeth Murdoch?

Great Australian headlines.

The Northern Territory News.

I imagine it's

mostly read in the Northern Territory.

But, you know,

if you do subscribe, you will have doubtless been delighted by the 2013 headline, Why I Stuck a Cracker Up My Clacker,

which was a first-person account by a man who put a firework up his bottom.

And it won its writer a Walkley, which I gather is the highest award in Australian journalism.

It's the Aussie Pulitzer, as far as I can tell.

It won.

What is it?

I haven't heard of that.

A Walkley.

Oh, wow.

So this before was about putting things into newspapers or tricking a newspaper.

Of course, newspapers can trick their readers as well, and it often happens on April the 1st.

Usually quite irritating, I think, actually.

There's someone who fell for the old spaghetti tree.

But some of the, like, some of the worst April Fool's tricks.

In 1998, on the 1st of April in Iraq, the newspaper that was owned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday said that President Clinton had decided to lift all sanctions against Iraq.

Guys, it was funny if you were there.

It's a trendy time.

It's mental.

That's amazing.

And then the next day they had to admit they were joking.

I got you.

No goods.

In 1927, Princeton, their internal newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, they revealed that the university was going to begin admitting women.

Oh,

can't believe anyone fell for that one.

And then in 1864, there was the Evening Star of Islington.

They announced there was going to be a grand exhibition of donkeys at the Agricultural Hall.

And so the next day, everyone went to see the donkeys, and of course, they were the donkeys themselves.

Oh, I thought it was.

That's quite a good one.

That's very good.

I thought it was going to be that people all brought their donkeys the next day.

Like a load of donkey keepers would have felt for it as well.

But it doesn't sound like that happened.

No.

If you've got a donkey, you probably can't do things at one day's notice.

You probably have to do that.

And you can't.

If someone announces as an exhibition or something, you can't bring your own version.

If you see this art exhibition on...

Feg to disagree.

I frequently take my sketches to the gallery.

And he turned up at Coldplay with his guitar the other day.

No one could tell the difference.

It is time for fact number three.

That is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that 18th century king of Sweden Gustav III was into LARPing.

Hmm, no.

So LARPing,

live-action roleplay for the uninitiated.

But that is where you pretend to be someone from history.

So what's his excuse?

Because he's from history.

Interestingly, at the time, he was from the present.

Yeah,

right.

Right.

So who was he dressing?

Was he dressing up?

He was dressing up as someone further back from history.

It's altered time works.

That seemed like something I should have asked.

I don't know what happened there.

That was a weird glitch.

So this is something I read at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg when we played Gothenburg quite recently.

And he was a king who was really into the arts and he knew that it would be good for promoting the monarchy.

And so he started these festivals where there was loads of jousting tournaments and masquerades and stuff like that.

That wasn't new, but what was new is that he and his other royals would take part and they would act out battles from the past and show how great the monarchy was.

Right.

And it's not that I made up, I didn't sex it up by saying lapping.

Yeah, no, how could you?

It was, that is specifically what it said in the Gothenburg Museum that it was LaRping.

Okay, but he didn't call it LaRping.

No, no.

Because the initials would be different in Swedish, wouldn't they?

Do we know who he dressed up as specifically?

It will have been his former relatives.

Relatives?

Yeah.

Ancestors.

His ancestors.

Yeah, okay, right.

And this is the really, so he was such a thespy king, basically.

Royalty is already full of pageantry and flummery, and we know you guys love that.

um

but his love of larp killed him

he was I mean it really genuinely did he was he he was at a masquerade look out nerds is what Andy's saying

he was at a masquerade ball which he was excited about throwing you know everyone was in masks and dressed up and all that he was in costume he was clearly identifiable as the king because he had a very notable star medallion on his breast so it's clear who he was he had received multiple warnings not to go by letter saying someone's gonna kill you slash we're gonna kill you slash don't go.

Oh really?

Yeah, he's had loads.

He got the at the very end of supper just before the ball started he got one final letter saying someone's gonna try and kill you disregarded it went along anyway uh and was and was attacked who's delivering the letter like like as in I think it was a spy's warning that I've uncovered some kind of plot everyone's in masks though aren't they so it could have been anyone yeah except except that we know who it was yeah we did well we know who was um killed for it don't we

it was Jakob Johan and Karstrom Karstrom.

Whoa.

It's all what you least suspect.

CSI Stockholm 1792.

We can't keep making encouraging noises after every fact that we say.

Yeah, that's my thing.

Back off.

No, B, the assassination itself was extraordinary.

I'm actually kind of obsessed with Gustav III, and I think he's an amazing person.

if a bit of a weirdo.

And one of the things I love is how the assassination went down.

So it's 1792.

And this guy, Jakob, comes with a cavalry pistol, a big pistol, and it's loaded with two balls or bullets, a bunch of nails, 14 assorted scraps of lead and iron, and he put the muzzle straight into Gustav's back.

It was, you know, it was point blank, pulled the trigger.

Gustav staggered, but didn't even fall over.

And the assassin was so shocked, he dropped all of his weapons.

He had two guns on him and a knife, and he dropped them all.

And Gustave had a hole so big in his back you could put your whole fist in in up to your wrist.

But he still lived for two more weeks.

He did.

That's cool about it.

He tried to walk to hospital to start with as well.

And then he was like, fuck.

And they got him a chair.

And he was the Australian.

Awesome.

Fuck, man.

Put a fist in that?

He was into role play, but not that much into role play.

And then he sat back down on his chair, and they carried the chair to where he was getting medical attention.

It's one of those things where, because it was such a documented moment, you can go visit the masquerade clothes that he's wearing, that he was wearing in a museum.

And they've still got supposedly the chair, which is bloodstained and so on, that you can visit as well, as like relics of Gustav.

And have you heard what he said when he was told who did it?

Oh, shit, mate.

It was it.

Yeah, who's that?

Bonda.

What did he say?

He was told who the culprit was, because they called the assassin.

And he just said, and he's got a fist-size wrist-deep hole in his back at this point, and he just says, I don't want to know the names.

It's only their political plan I should like to know about sometime or other, because I'm curious to see whether there was anything sensible in it.

Wow!

What a guy!

And Castrom was publicly flogged, his right hand was cut off, his head was removed, and his corpse was cut into quarters.

Wow.

Until he apologised.

And he had two accomplices who were stripped of their titles and expelled from the country.

And they were called Ribbing and Horn.

What?

Ribbing.

Ribbing.

Ribbing.

And Horn.

Good.

No further questions.

One more thing on masquerade bowls, really quickly, just because we're on the topic.

There was a moral panic in the UK even about masquerade bowls in the 18th century because they'd become really really popular in the upper class and the Bishop of London said that it was a plot devised by the French to neutralize the beauty of English women.

So he's thought the only way those disgusting French people can get any sex in the UK is by everyone wearing masks.

Yeah, it makes sense.

What are you saying?

What is the tone of sarcasm that I sent here?

I think it's an interesting point because I, in my single days, if you go to a Halloween party, right, everyone looks so hot, but they would be not who they were, right?

It'd be like, wow, look at that skeleton, she's awesome.

And

she took up her outfit.

You put on a lot of white.

But there was a study that showed that people found during the COVID pandemic times that wearing a mask enhanced the hotness of a face.

People

really glamour.

Yeah, exactly.

Mystique.

Mystery.

Hiji.

Sanitizer.

I genuinely, I scored a date at a Halloween party, and then we went on the actual date.

And

unfortunately, ironically, she was frightened more on the date when you turned up.

And I preferred her as a Tetris block.

It was a.

Which one?

The square?

No, she was the L.

Nice.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Just a little bit more, of Gustav III, please.

Sorry to go, sorry, I know we're doing Dan's dating history, but

he was incredibly interesting.

He was the third Swedish monarch to die of being shot in 160 years.

Right.

Apart from his father, who died after eating 14 helpings of Sembla buns.

Just loved buns.

But he did so many different things.

I mean, he was a despot.

He took over and he

rolled government back.

He was anti-democratic, but he banned torture and contributed to culture, so he did a lot of self-promotion.

And one of the most interesting things he did was he was engaged at the age of five,

too young, to another

to be married, to another five-year-old.

Right.

Oh, that's not too bad.

Yeah, a princess from Denmark.

Princess Sophia Magdalena of Denmark.

And then when they were 20, they got married, but he wasn't there.

So

you could do this thing of getting married by proxy.

In the old days, if you were marrying another ruler, then they were busy because they were on a campaign or something.

You would just have someone else step in.

So the bride's half-brother, Frederick, played the role of the groom

just at the ceremony, just sort of in a purely ceremonial function.

And only half-brother.

Exactly.

And then she came to Sweden and they properly got married.

But they did have to have a kind of love tutor, as in they needed to be slightly taught the facts of life.

Because for 10 years they did not consummate the marriage.

And they had to have a coach who was Count Adolf Frederick Munk Alf Fulkeler, who was the.

That sounds like a sexy Dracula.

Well, Count Fulkula.

I want to suck you up.

Never mind.

But there were rumours that Count Adolf was the father when they eventually did have a child.

And it was read by his mum.

So poor old Gustav's mum.

Gustav's mum thought he was impotent, was like, he can't perform sexually.

No way did he father that child and spread the rumor.

Where even in his own diary, Count Adolph, unfortunate name, said that he was obliged to physically touch and guide them to the right positions because, somewhat mysteriously, he said, they had both had anatomical problems which caused some trouble.

What were they?

I must know.

But yeah, the mum was like, my son is bad in bed.

There's no way he's fathered that child.

I bet it belongs to the count.

Gustav III, he gave us the Swede.

You know, the vegetable, the Swede.

Oh, yeah.

It came from him because he's Swedish.

What?

What do you mean?

When you say gave us,

well, I'm going to explain, but it's literal.

So, there was a guy called Patrick Miller who invented a new kind of paddle steamer and he tried to sell it.

This feels like a start of a very long story.

Now we have to go back to Patrick Miller.

You'll see why he's important much later.

So, Patrick Miller

exchange, even if no one else is, tries to sell his paddle steamer to Denmark.

And Denmark said, We don't need your paddle steamer.

But Denmark was at war with Sweden at the time.

And so Miller went to Sweden and said, Do you want our paddle steamer?

And they said, Yes, great.

We love paddle steamers.

So he sent the paddle steamer over to Sweden.

And by the time it got there, the war had already finished.

This is like Grandpa Simpson's story in The Simpsons.

Does he go to Shelbyville with an onion in his pocket?

It was the fashion at the time, Andy.

Okay.

So they got this pointless paddle steamer, but he was really happy, Gustave.

And so he sent Patrick Miller a gold snuff box and a painting of the paddle steamer and a Swedish flag and a Swede.

And the Swede came with finally.

And

the Swede came with some seeds that said, plant me, and he planted them.

And from then on, the UK could grow its own Swedes.

And because they came from Sweden, we called them Swedes.

And is anyone still here?

Because I'm not sure.

Let's be real.

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It's time for our final fact, and that is Andy.

My fact is that some people have tattoos on the inside of their bottoms.

This is really interesting.

Yeah.

So, fashion?

Not fashion.

The reverse.

Necessity.

Is that the reverse of fashion?

Controversial.

Controversial.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is really interesting.

There is a thing called endoscopic tattooing, and it's colon tattooing, so it's tattooing right inside your bottom.

And the reason is that some people have lesions, they have areas of unusual tissue inside their bottoms, and they might become dangerous in future years.

They're not now, but they need to be monitored.

You know, if they change, it's like having a mole that you're keeping an eye on just in case it changes or anything.

So they need to be kept an eye on, and for that, they need to be marked.

And so this, in 2022, the American Chemical Society launched a new ink that was going to be used for endoscopic tattooing.

So that's how I found this fact.

And basically, it marks just sort of next to it, because you can't mark the area itself, but you mark, look, here's the size, here's the shape, here's, and there's a kind of whole code language of what you are showing with this tattoo so that any future doctor can have a look at it and say, oh, that's okay, it hasn't changed, or oh, it has, we need to, might need to do something here.

So it's just a brilliant area of

medicinal progress.

How do they get the pen up there?

Like,

how do they do it?

It's very hard to draw the dolphin with.

I actually don't know.

I think it's...

Like endoscopes.

It's off the endoscope, yeah.

It's at endoscopies.

And it's very common, and it serves a few purposes.

It's, you know, it sometimes marks a site for surgical removal if there's something that has been decided has to come out anyway.

Um, sometimes it says, like, here's a place for follow-up to just check this out.

We've done some surgery, just check it out.

But it is

very cool.

I was very surprised to find a Reddit thread about it from a surgeon who, I guess, operates on areas that might have been previously tattooed to take away certain things.

And a big thing in this industry is not tattooing the rectum.

So

you tattoo further up the colon, but rectum don't need to do it.

In the Reddit thread, the headline was, please don't tattoo the rectum.

Don't worry, we will find a tumor if it's there.

The tattoo gets in the way and makes everything hard to see and dissect.

Please, which I was just very surprised that surgeons are using Reddit as a way to say to other surgeons, please stop tattooing people's rectums.

That's so interesting.

There is, I mean, there are people who will have tattoos down there for fashion reasons.

There's a guy called Randy Candy,

who will ink you anywhere you want, and he'll give you a a discount if you choose to do it on your bum hole.

But I don't want it.

Yeah, but sometimes if you don't have quite so much money, beggars can't be choosers, can they, Andy?

You want to have I Love Mums somewhere.

He's done like an enormous spider exiting someone's body.

Oh, cool.

And that was extremely cheap.

He says basically the weirder it gets, the cheaper it becomes.

Did you guys hear of the project glory in 2016 no whole glory this was it's not as bad as it sounds um there's a tattoo artist called scott campbell who said anyone who puts their arm through this hole will get a tattoo all right you can't decide what it's of which oh i see my god

you get no communication you just put and it was in an art gallery that it happened so you would just put your arm through and he was a sort of very famous and decorated tattoo artist and did he do it like sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad that's right some of them were spelt well some of them were just one in five

swastikas

i don't think i don't even think he did that on swastikas um oh yeah because it's always good to drop them in um

if you were given the chance of having a swastika face tattoo yeah or losing your dominant hand having it amputated which would you choose uh am i allowed to put a big eye patch on over the tattoo for example what is it over your

whole face your whole face i'm sorry it's the whole face I think that Balaclavo, I think.

Yeah,

the mystery that Dan was talking about.

You know, who's that guy?

Why do you think most people would say?

I don't even think I've read a study.

70% of people would rather have their dominant hand amputated than have a swastika face tattoo.

That was fascinating.

And it makes sense.

And what a weird thing to cheer, but yes.

Yeah, yeah.

It does make sense.

Yeah, okay.

Well, how about a wrong tattoo?

I really like these.

So

this year, an England football supporter was so confident about England's chances in the Euros football that he got England Euro 2024 winners and a picture of the cup tattooed on his leg.

He's called Dan Thomas.

He's a data consultant, ironically.

And

he predicted a win for England in the final.

He said they're going to win 2-1.

Anyone might remember, England lost 2-1.

And he said he will get it altered after they win in 2028.

Jesus.

He's so confident.

You can always get the word not tattooed above that crazy thing.

I like, the person I've read about is probably a mate of this guy, but this is a guy called Tom Washington.

He's from Grinsby.

He got a lifetime ban from the airline Jet2 as a result of exposing his Pinocchio penis tattoo on the plane.

And I've seen a photo of it.

It's actually really funny.

So I don't see what the, because he showed, he just showed like the top of it.

So he didn't take out his member.

What's his name?

What you want me to doubly name him?

Tom Washington.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's very funny.

Are you a lot of Tom?

They call him.

But yeah,

there's an amazing thing.

So we're talking about medical tattoos, basically.

Medical tattoos have been happening for basically since we found properly preserved humans.

So Utsi, we've mentioned this before.

So he was the ice man that was found in the Alps.

Yeah, exactly.

And we found tattoos all over his body.

And they think that it was almost like acupuncture spots.

Like it was so that they could spot where he needed to have things done.

But all over the world, tattoos are used for similar reasons.

So there's a tribe in Burma called the Pakoku, and they do a thing where they're a snake society.

They play with snakes and they use them for rituals and so on all the time.

But they're poisonous snakes.

And so what they do is they tattoo themselves once a week where they mix the ink with the venom of the snake and it inoculates them to make sure that if they do get bitten, their body already has it inside.

So that they're okay, and they have to do it as a weekly ritual to do that.

So they get tattooed every week.

Because it is mad that our bodies don't don't destroy tattoos, even.

You know, a tattoo is any foreign object that you inject into your body is bad as far as your body's concerned.

And it was quite confusing for a long time that our bodies don't just get rid of the ink.

And the reason is, much like a lactose-intolerant person who loves pizza, the microphages, the white blood cells, love the taste of tattoo ink but can't digest it.

So it's so interesting.

So if they could digest it well, they would literally just eat the ink up.

You know, know, they'd be like, foreign body, inserted into you, eat the ink up, digest it, get rid of it, the tattoo would disappear.

But they eat the ink and their bodies can't digest it, and so it just sits there.

So when you're seeing a tattoo, you're seeing the stomachs of millions and millions of bacteria with ink inside them, the bacteria with terrible indigestion, going, How do I get rid of this?

And then they die, and another bacteria quickly eats the thing that they found in their stomach.

And it keeps on happening.

Amazing.

That's so cool.

And makes them even more sexy, if anything.

The word tattoo comes from Tahitian and we got it from Captain Cog's first voyage so we got it in English around 1760, 1770.

And according to the OED, the word is onomatopoeic, so it comes from the sound.

So the tat comes from the tapping of a tattooing instrument into the skin, and the ooh comes from the cry of pain from the person being tattooed.

Brilliant.

That's amazing.

That's so good.

Have you heard of 3D tattoos?

No.

These are brilliant.

And these are another medical innovation.

They're so good.

So I was reading about a woman from the Isle of Wight who she had to have a hernia operation and she lost her belly button.

Okay.

So

she felt a bit self-conscious and she decided to get a 3D tattoo.

The photos of it are unbelievable.

I wish I could show you all now.

I wish I brought a bit of paper with it printed out because it looks so, so realistic.

Is she a model with a fake belly button?

Hunger, maybe.

I thought there was a model with no belly button.

Or there's a one with three belly buttons.

No, there can't be a fake with three belly buttons.

There's something.

But the recipient said it was so good that her son wanted to sort of put his finger in it because he couldn't believe it wasn't real.

It does, and it looks unbelievably good.

I think the thing is about belly buttons as well is depending on how high or how low they are, it can be like a visual illusion of how long your legs are or how high your torso is.

So you could deliberately get your belly button a little bit higher or a little bit, well, maybe not right up there.

His legs go all the way up to his nipple.

That's so hot.

Because there was that claimed trend, wasn't there?

In somewhere like China, people having belly buttons put on their stomachs higher up.

Yes, that's what we're talking about.

Unless you have any regrets, Andy, I think if you'd brought an A4 printout of this belly button here tonight, it wouldn't have made a difference to anyone's lives.

Right.

You didn't.

No point.

Another weird, interesting new tattoo that I've never seen before, but someone showed us the other night.

We went out drinking with one of the old wiggles a couple nights ago.

Sam, the former yellow wiggle, and he's got amazing tattoos.

He's got a tattoo on one arm, which is every country he goes to, whatever is stamped into his passport, he gets tattooed onto his arm while he's in the country.

So his arm is covered in passport stamps, but on his right arm, you can't see it.

It's in UV.

You get UV tattoos there, which I hadn't heard of, but that might be very obvious to a lot of people.

But yeah, so...

I've never heard of that.

Yeah, so you have to go under UV light in order to see it, and it comes through, but it's invisible during the day.

Really awesome.

So you have to keep going clubbing.

Yeah, well, he showed me as we were shooting up heroin in a public toilet.

And it really pops when you see it.

But that is it for now.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Melbourne, you've been amazing.

We will be back.

Thank you very much.

For the rest of you, we'll see you next week.

Goodbye.

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