561: No Such Thing As Hot Golf Balls

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish.

This one comes to you from the State Theatre in Sydney as part of our massive Aussie in New Zealand tour that we just finished.

We had an absolutely incredible time while we were down there, as we did in the UK.

But the tour down under had one extra special element that we didn't quite manage for the UK, which was we had merch.

We had awesome Thunderner t-shirts to go with the title of our show.

We had Thundernerd beanies.

We were selling our ultimate guide, a no such thing as a fish tour book, which, by the way, if you haven't got, you really need to get your hands on.

It's got everything from a spread on moss by Andy, Anna's Only Day on Twitter.

There's timelines of everything that we've done.

We've got bios on every guest who's been on there.

There's a lot of behind the scenes.

In fact, there's a bunch of QR codes all throughout the book as well that has secret videos that we've never published anywhere and audio commentary from us.

So it's sort of a mini episode within the pages of the book.

Anyway, along with some pin badges, all of that is available on our website.

Go to no such thingasoffish.com slash store.

And if you get in there quick enough, you're going to be able to buy some of that swag just in time for Christmas.

Now, if you're an Aussie in New Zealander listening to this right now and thinking, damn it, I didn't pick up anything at the gigs and now I've got to buy it back from over in the UK, don't worry, we've got you covered.

Just head to the website and you will find a link there that is specifically for you Antipodeans so that you can deal with it more locally.

Now, if you're looking for a good book to read over the Christmas period, I highly recommend our books.

We're all authors.

We released books this year.

Andy has a new comic novel called A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering.

Brilliantly funny.

James and Anna wrote a fact-packed book, which is the QI history of sports called A Load of Old Balls.

And I've written a non-fiction book for kids ages seven and above, all about the mysteries of our universe called Impossible Things.

Okay, that's it for plugging.

A lot of plugging there, but hey, you're a popular person.

You got a lot of presents to buy.

So there you go.

Problem solved.

Anyway, enjoy the show now.

Coming to you from down under,

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 the State Theater in Sydney.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Anna Toshinski, Andrew Huntson-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in 1944, the filming of the Oscar-winning movie National Velvet was delayed to give its lead actress time to grow a bit taller.

And who was that?

No one's heard of her now, so it's not worth mentioning, but she was called Elizabeth Taylor.

Yeah, this is one of her first films.

Did she fluctuate in height a lot, Elizabeth?

Yeah, she was 35 at the time, but sometimes she'd wake up six foot tall, sometimes five.

No, she was obviously, she was still a child, she was about 12 at the time, and this was every so every child actress was trying out for this part, and I think they've been preparing for years, so a few of the tryouts were adults by the time they finally cast it.

And

how much did she need to make it into the movie?

Well, she needed, so Pandro Berman, who was the producer, met her and thought she's absolutely perfect, we need her, but she needs three inches.

Which is a hefty whack, really.

It's a decent amount.

They also, they asked her to wear braces.

I think tooth braces, not up and down ones.

And they pulled out two of her baby teeth.

What?

Yep.

They also wanted to dye her hair, which seems like a minor imposition after they've pulled out two of your teeth.

And they wanted to change her name to Virginia, but her parents refused.

And because they were really struggling to get the right actress for this role, what they needed was a child who could speak with an English accent and ride a horse.

That was the whole brief.

But what's incredibly confusing, because this is always the claim, is that the basis for it was she was very good at riding, and I'll probably go into her relationship with horses, which wasn't weird, like I've just made it sound.

And

she was very good at riding, and she had been born and a bit of her life brought up in England, so she needed a British accent.

Now, if anyone's seen Natural Velvet, she does not talk with a British accent at any point during that film.

So I'm not sure why it was a thing she needed to have in her backpack, just in case.

Yeah, who knows?

Yeah, maybe not.

She got a very bad back when she was riding King Charles,

um

which was the name of the horse right king charles

and she loved it so much that the head of mgm uh louis b mayer gave it to her as a 13th birthday gift oh wow that's amazing did you read about how they met no her and king charles it's so sweet it is it's like something in a film itself so she had been taken to go riding at this country club by her parents to try and teach her to ride and she'd seen this beautiful horse from afar fallen in love with him said i must ride that horse This is an 11-year-old girl.

The owner had said, this horse is mad.

It's my horse.

I literally won't let anyone near it.

She waited until everyone had left, and then she climbed onto the hay bales and jumped through the hole where they fed the horse hay, landing on his back, and she just lay on his back.

Just lay there in the stable.

And she did this day after day after day until eventually the owner one day went in to ride him and was like, there's an 11-year-old on my horse.

What's going on?

And said, okay, well, she's obviously tamed him and handed him over.

Just a beautiful tale.

True love.

That's lovely.

Her looks, we've mentioned a few things about what they wanted her to do, moving the baby teeth.

She needed more height.

When she was born, the doctor said to her mum, you've given birth to a mutant.

They didn't say those words, Dan.

They did.

I refuse to believe that they do what you mean.

But it's what she has in common with you.

What?

What?

Elizabeth, so I think I know what you're going to say.

So do I, but I don't think Dan has this.

Dan, okay.

It feels like all four of us are holding like a hand of cards about what mutation Elizabeth and Dan.

What I'm saying is excess hair, but

it's distributed differently on the two of them.

So why?

Dan,

a suit man.

Yeah.

I mean, big, big time.

Yeah.

Because we're looking at a picture of Elizabeth Taylor on here, and she doesn't quite have Dan's hairiness.

No, but interestingly, that's me next to her, naked.

We should say for listeners at home that that is Lassie.

But okay, so what she did have is

she had a double set of eyelashes.

So her mum was like, oh, that's okay, that's fine.

They didn't, but it can be dangerous because it can be a condition where if the second layer of eyelash grows inward, it can go into your eyeballs.

And a very low percentage of people who have had it have died of a heart disease later in life, which is how she died, but I don't know if a connection has been made.

Because it's a genetic thing, isn't it?

Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah, it's a gene called Foxy2.

Yeah, it's so cool.

F-O-X-C-2.

Do you know one other thing about her face that she also had?

She once, supposedly, I've read this in a few places, won the title Most Memorable Eyebrows in a magazine poll.

And Lassie came second.

No.

Sorry.

Do dogs have eyebrows?

Well, let's look.

Of course they do.

Oh, yeah.

I would say of the two people on screen, Elizabeth Taylor's are more pronounced.

Yeah.

But yeah, certainly they have the ridge, don't they?

The dogs?

Yeah, they do.

I mean, Lassie was one of her first big hits, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was basically Lassie first, then National Velvet.

She did a very strong line in animal-based films.

Yeah.

Yeah, and

the dog was played by a dog called Pal,

and Pal earned a salary of $250 per week, while Elizabeth Taylor was only paid $100 per week.

But the dog actually was male, so it was kind of standard for the time.

So obviously, for anyone under the age of 70, we should just say that she's, you know, in case you're not familiar with her stuff, she's unbelievably famous throughout the 20th century.

Not only for her films, things like Cleopatra, which was the extremely famous one, but lots and lots more, but for having seven husbands and eight marriages.

Yeah, because she was married to Richard Burton twice.

Was that his accent?

Wasn't his accent?

It wasn't his accent.

Just stuffed up.

Sorry.

Richard Burton's got

Welsh.

That was not Welsh.

Anyway, the list of her husbands is so extraordinary because it goes through all of these.

You know, her first marriage was to this horrible guy called Conrad Hilton, who was the hotel chain.

She was 18 years old.

MGM picked the bridesmaids and invited the guests for her.

So she would have been stepmom eventually or step-grandmother to Paris Hilton, right?

Yeah.

So she married Eddie Fisher as well, right?

Eddie Fisher, who was mother of Carrie Fisher.

So she was stepmother to Princess Leia.

Yeah, you find it...

It's weird when you research people like this because you find yourself getting into very heat magazine territory with celebrity gossip, and it feels okay because it was 50 years ago.

But I found myself finding it so juicy that she was, when she married Conrad Hilton, Conrad himself was actually having an affair at the time with his own stepmother, Jarjard Gabor.

What?

What?

Whoa!

Jarjard's in the story name?

Jarjard Gabor.

Yeah.

The woman who introduced the Rubik's Cube to America.

Exactly.

She's not just famous for that, James.

Is she famous for something else?

Is that why you were fired from Heat magazine, James?

Jarjard Gabor could fit into over 4 trillion positions.

No wonder he liked her.

All of her marriages, they're obviously quite high profile.

But

the double marriage, the most famous one, Richard Burton, that one,

that one was the most interesting because those two ran Hollywood as if they were the king and queen of America.

They would go into parties, they would spend ludicrous amounts of money on it, they would have weird reasons for leaving parties and they would tear up rooms, they would have tantrums and no one seemed to do anything about it.

And so her life, Elizabeth Taylor's life, really, when you read the juicy stuff, it's all about the divaism, all about the amazing demands.

Like for example, in Cleopatra, when they were filming that, she had twice a week delivered to her on set her local favorite meal from Dave Chasin's Chili because she just loved it so much.

And what made that really difficult is that that restaurant was in LA and she was filming in Rome.

So

they got it on airplanes twice to three times a week, just her meal to be delivered to her for lunch.

It was so bad that the Vatican stepped in, didn't they?

And the Pope accused her of erotic vagrancy.

Her and Richard Burton, actually.

And there's an amazing scene in Cleopatra where she's coming into, spoiler alert, coming into the city on a big sort of chair, and there's huge crowds.

And apparently there was a moment where all of these extras, who are all Italian Catholics, are starting to come towards her.

And she thinks they're going to lynch her because it's been in all the newspapers that the Pope Pope hates her.

And then just at the last second, they all turn around and go, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, and they just loved her so much.

Wow.

The filming of that is absolutely insane.

Yeah.

Because they tried filming it in London, it didn't work.

It starred Jackie Chan, a woman called Jackie Chan.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's so funny.

Just there are so many stories of the filming because they could only film if Burton and Taylor both showed up.

And if they had had a row the night before, they just wouldn't.

So the production overran like crazy this is a story from Jackie Chan there was a scene where Cleopatra has a bath on set yeah and the set was cleared of all superfluous people she reported but a Scottish actor who played a blind poet gleefully told me he was allowed to stay because people had forgotten he wasn't really blind

That's very funny.

Just on their mad demands, they both loved animals.

Richard Burton loved dogs, she loved dogs.

There was a story going around that the dogs that they had liked her more than they liked him.

So he bought a dog and it suddenly liked him more than it liked her.

And everyone was like, what's going on?

And then his diaries later reported that the dog had come and it only spoke Welsh and Richard Burton spoke Welsh to it secretly.

But I couldn't verify that firsthand.

But I wouldn't put it past them.

But they did both love dogs and they were staying in the UK and they weren't allowed to bring their dogs to London because of quarantine rules.

So they found a loophole in the law which said that there was no rule that the animals couldn't be on British waters and they leased a yacht for $20,000, I think huge amounts of money, about $2,000 a day, and moored it on the Thames and just kept these dogs on the Thames

on a luxury yacht.

Yeah.

It's very clever.

She did a lot of crazy and weird things, right?

But one thing that she also did is she saved the life of an extremely famous actor at the time.

She was at a party with a man called Montgomery Cliff and they were on the way home, and she was in the car behind.

He was in the car in front.

He had a massive accident.

Car flips over, smashes, and he's trapped underneath.

She gets out of her car.

She goes and climbs in through the broken window in the car to see him, and he's choking.

And so she does something which I think is extraordinary.

Most people would do like a Heimlich maneuver, right?

Most people would tap the back like crazy.

Elizabeth Taylor reaches into his mouth, and because the thing that was choking him was broken teeth stuck in his throat,

she individually picked out all the teeth from his mouth until his airway was cleared until he was breathing and saved his life.

That's stunning.

I've never heard of a choking being fixed by that hand.

I've heard once there was a dolphin who had swallowed some plastic and the world's second tallest man went in with his really long arms and pulled the plastic out.

That's right.

But I kind of think dolphins have wider mouths than humans.

Yeah.

This really doesn't fit.

I don't think if Andy, you had something in your mouth and I'm looking at my hand and the size of your mouth, I don't think one fits into the other.

It wasn't done in the flexion.

It was very, it was quite shallow in the mouth.

She had waited for her fingers to grow long enough.

Yes.

That's the thing.

That's what happened.

There we go.

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Your ring your way.

It is time for us to move on to fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is is that one of the leading investigators in the jack the ripper case whose only major contribution was to arrest someone who wasn't capable of being the murderer was called sergeant thick

that was that was the guy sergeant yeah sergeant william thick or willie thick um okay which is just funny um

he he basically yeah he knocked on the door of a guy called John Piser or Piser and

he said, you need to come with me.

And the person said, what for?

And Sergeant Thick, having no evidence, clearly didn't know what for.

So he had to say, you know what for?

And the guy went with him.

And he was put into jail and then he was released because there was no evidence whatsoever that this guy was guilty.

And Thick, even himself, when he was interviewed later, saying, yeah, I don't think it could have been him.

I don't think he was capable of it.

I don't know why I did that.

So,

yeah.

We should just say, Jack the Ripper was a murderer

because I know we're in Australia and Ripper means something very different over here.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was not cool, this guy.

And by the way,

this is a subject which obviously involves horrific events, and we are probably going to be talking largely about the people who were named as potential killers and so on.

But just as a flip side thing, there's an amazing book called The Five that you should go and read, which is all about the women who often don't get humanized in this.

And yeah, it's an amazing book.

So, Mary Jane Kelly,

she was known in the press as Fair Emma, Ginger, Dark Mary, and Black Mary, suggesting that she must have changed her hair quite a lot in the various times.

Very nice.

There was Annie Chapman, who got into a fight with a female lodger just before she died, possibly over a man or possibly over a bar of soap.

We're not sure.

They are often confused.

I find

there was Elizabeth Stride, who is Swedish, and she went around telling everyone that her husband and her child had died in a shipwreck on the River Thames, that she survived it, but actually there was no such shipwreck.

I have a theory about her.

Well, I have a theory about who the killer is because I don't think we have enough people theorizing about who the killer was.

And it's related to her because she lived with a man called Michael Kidney.

Now, Jack the Ripper famously removed people's kidneys.

Okay.

Coincidence.

Probably.

I don't think so.

Almost certainly.

Otherwise, you're just going around looking for someone with the surname murderer, I think.

Did anyone try that?

I don't think so.

But

the women are kind of, they were written up.

A lot of it was done.

It was made very,

you know, it was made exciting.

It was made to sell papers.

There were so many London papers at the time, about 20 daily papers, all trying to get information and sell copies off the back of it.

So they were often written up as kind of low women or fallen women or women who sold sex.

And actually,

like one or two of them had done or may have done, but actually, most of them were out late at night.

Is the other one that there should be any remote difference between someone who sells sex for money and doesn't sell sex for money in terms of whether or not they should be murdered.

But

I wasn't trying to imply that.

I just sometimes think there's a bit of an implication of that.

They couldn't afford lodging, some of them.

And so that's why the killer had the sort of means or the opportunity to kill them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so Jack the Ripper, I think this is quite a fun little detail.

There's so many fun details about the guy.

In a poll in 2006, he was voted the worst Briton in history.

That was before Brexit, though.

That was.

That's true.

Yeah.

Who else was in there?

Do you have any details of who else came?

Yeah, I've got them if you want them.

Yeah.

So Thomas Thomas Beckett came second.

Thomas Beckett.

Yeah.

King John came fourth.

When was this pulled on in the 12th century?

King John Fair.

Yeah, Edric Strioner.

Who's that?

Good question.

Sir Richard Rich, Lord Rich of Lees.

I don't like the sound of him based on his name, but

I don't know.

Hugh Dispencer, the younger, who you might know, Thomas Arundel and Oswald Mosley and a few others.

But basically the way that they did it is they got a load of historians and they were each allowed to nominate one person.

And so some of them went really straight down the line and said, Jack the Ripper.

And some of them said, here's someone you've never heard of.

Hugh Dispenser.

Like, you know, all those anti-COVID things you see everywhere.

Yeah.

He invented those.

That's great.

It's an easy gig for the history against Jack the Ripper, isn't it?

Murdered loads of people, pulled their organs out.

I win.

That's the thing about the case is that a lot of people get very obsessed with it in, I think, a slightly unhealthy way.

And it's written up sometimes as the first ever true crime story, you know, just because there were lots of people chucking in their own theories and debating with each other and all of that, and slightly sort of gamifying it.

One of those theorized to maybe be the murderer was Dr.

Thomas Cream, who was a doctor who was eventually hanged for an unrelated murder at Newgate prison.

And his last words were, I am Jack the

and then he was hanged.

No, yeah,

but it probably wasn't him.

Was that bad timing?

I think it was incredible timing by him.

I think

so.

Wow.

Because he was in prison at the time the murders happened.

I mean, it's just very, very, very unlikely that he was actually.

I think he was just...

He just had flair.

I think he just had flair.

Having a bit of fun right at the end.

Why the hell not?

The industry is pretty wild in the UK and the Jack the Reppet tours are quite mad.

But my favourite tour is a tour that was set up in about 2017 in Clitheroe, which, for those of you who don't know the UK, is in Lancashire, about 250 miles away from Whitechapel.

It's the Jack the Ripper tour.

It was started by a tour guy called Simon Entwhistle, who just sort of noticed that bits of Clitheroe actually haven't been developed very much since the 19th century.

So they look a lot more like what Jack the Ripper would have experienced than London.

Yeah, because that bit of London is completely developed now.

It's all skyscrapers.

Yeah, I've got to say, having grown up near Clitheroe, or as we used to call it, Clithero, hero it

i don't know it's very nice little town i stopped after guitar hero i just didn't think

well it's much more difficult fingering than that one

and you never get any points because you can't find the fucking thing it's

um how interesting clitherow yeah that's that's really weird there's there are all sorts of

there's slightly sort of unpleasant like okay is this tasteless a fish and chip shop called jack the chipper

Is it, you know, some people say it's been long enough and that's fine.

The proprietors said it was history, never a celebration, which, and then they said, we've already shown our respectfulness by offering a 50% discount for women, which

is that okay?

We chop them in half as soon as they come in.

My favorite theory about Jack the Ripper is that there was no such person.

Okay.

And this is the one I actually believe.

This is a guy called Peter Turnbull who wrote a book called The Killer That Never Was.

His idea idea is that these people obviously were very sadly killed, but a lot of them were copycat crimes.

And they were done by people who'd read the stories in the newspaper and thought, I'm going to go and do that same thing.

So there wasn't a single serial killer.

And his theories say that there was no consistent modus operandi.

So the way that the people were killed was different each time.

It wasn't over an extended period.

So normally serial killers kill over several years, whereas this only happened over 13 weeks.

And it all took place in a very single area whereas usually serial killers will kill over a little bit more of a wide area

and some of the really terrible things like that when they were disemboweled the victims they occurred after people in the newspapers had speculated that that might happen right right so that's I think that might happen so the first one wasn't the first one wasn't disemboweling because she was the one who drew lots of tourists right the industry's been going on since the start as soon as the first person was killed oh no I think it was the second person when people started to think ooh something's going on here.

It was in 1888, and locals paid a penny to go and see her there.

And then when she was taken away, then locals kept paying a penny.

And it was the people who lived next door, which good business minds started charging people just to come and look at the bit of pavement.

Right.

Wow.

There's quite a few other people who were being named.

Obviously, there's a big, big list.

There was a guy, this was a big one, Francis Tumblety.

which is the most unserial killer name I've ever heard.

You can't really judge people by their name.

I'm going to judge Francis, I think.

So he was supposedly, not only was he Jack the Ripper, but he was also complicit in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

So supposedly he'd done that and he'd come over.

But what he was was a miracle quack who just used to sell medicine.

His big invention was called Tumbletee's Pimple Destroyer.

So even if he was guilty, you know, he did some good and he did some bad, right?

I mean, pimples are a real blight in a lot of adolescents.

Have you heard of Richard Mansfield?

Oh, the actor?

He was an actor who got caught up in this completely, like this was nothing to do with him.

But at the time the murders happened, there was a play on which was a dramatization of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, which is about a doctor who drinks a potion and then becomes, you know,

changes personality and becomes evil.

And people thought that he might be the murderer simply because he was such a good actor at playing both Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

And the production was shut down.

But the stagecraft was so unbelievable, people couldn't work out how it was done because he changed physically.

And people thought, I can't believe what I'm seeing, right?

It was so effective that they thought people sat with opera glasses trying to look at what this guy had done on stage.

Like physically, like some people said, oh, he's just putting a mask on.

And actually, can I just tell you what he did?

This is so good.

They had pre-painted his face in a way that standard theater lighting wouldn't show.

And then they introduced a coloured filter in the lights in the theater, which showed up the grease paint.

And he would contort his face a little bit, but it would completely change the colour of his face.

And I

have not done that tonight.

But imagine if I had, how interesting that would have been.

Wow.

And he got completely caught up in it, but nothing to do with him.

That's exciting, yeah.

We're going to have to move on in a sec, guys.

Have you heard of Jack the Flipper?

Jack the Flipper.

An aggressive dolphin in a 2013 study.

Jack Jack the Dipper, on the other hand, there's an ice cream shop in North Carolina.

Are you culminating in Amsterdam's Jack the Stripper?

I've got to...

I'm really anxious about what's coming up.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

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

My fact is that German mini golfers refrigerate their balls.

Doesn't it hurt when they close the door?

Lovely.

Lovely stuff.

Very good.

This was a great piece in the FT about the world of mini golf, which is just, this is not crazy golf.

It is big golf made small.

Mini golf, as the title implies.

There are no windmills, there are no clowns, there are no dinosaurs.

Crazy golf is a segment of mini golf.

The fun guy segment, if you will.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All crazy golf is mini, but not all mini golf is crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

And

the correspondent went to see the world finals the seniors mini golf world championships and they take it very seriously and the germans chill their balls they have special ball fridges to ensure they have ball homeostasis and it's it's a very big deal and and you know some players keep their balls in their socks they tuck them into their trousers all right because you want you want consistency of temperature you want consistency of rolling how do you make your shoes fit if you've got a is it you just have to buy a much larger shoe

your sock goes higher than your your unless you're wearing those ankle socks, that's not going to work.

Oh, sorry, it's not like I was imagining at the end of the sock.

I believe it's at the end.

It is at the end of the sock, but it's at the other end you're thinking of.

I think we've said it before that these balls that they use in mini-golf, they're not golf balls, are they?

No, they're kind of rubbery things, which I guess makes it more important that they're the right temperature.

They're still golf balls.

Are they mini golf balls?

They're mini golf balls.

Mini golf balls.

And they are, you can pick your own balls.

I think we said, did we say that?

No.

If you play golf, you'll have a, you might like select select your club, or you've got a caddy.

Is it your caddy carries your clubs for you?

Yeah.

Does that happen?

Do you have a

like?

Do you have a caddy when you play golf?

You can on occasion.

Okay.

But you can, if you're a mini golfer, have a ball caddy because you've got so many balls to choose from.

And you can choose which balls you play on which holes.

So when professional golfers say, give me the nine-iron or whatever that language is, in mini-golf, it's the opposite.

Give me the red ball.

Give me the big round ball.

Big round ball.

They're all the same size, we should say.

So what are you choosing?

Well of course Andy.

Come on now.

You can't play with a marble some of the time and a beach ball some of the rest of the time.

Are you sure?

This one is twice the size of the hole.

Yes I'm big.

James,

Tiger Woods once, this is something I don't know about golf.

He played the big championship that he won.

He ran out of balls.

Okay.

And he was only down to like one ball and you can't just request more balls.

Did he have to use one of his balls?

The ultimate supply.

Tiger Woods famously used his bowls a lot.

But

in golf, however many you bring with you on the first tee is how many you have to end.

You know, you can't get any more from the club.

The ones you've got are the ones you're stuck with.

That's extraordinary.

And here's one really interesting thing that is different about mini golf and maxi golf.

And that is in mini golf you refrigerate your bowls.

In maxi golf it is against the rules to warm your balls up.

Explicitly, you're not allowed to warm because it changes the way that they might fly through the air.

You are allowed to warm them up before the round, but then they will go cold quite quickly.

But during the game, you're not allowed to it.

And it's to such an extent that when you play golf in a country that isn't fucking boiling, like this one, you get cold a lot and you would have like hand warmers in your pockets.

You'd be advised not to put your balls near those hand warmers because your opponents could say you're artificially warming them up you're gonna get kicked out aren't you allowed but you're allowed to pocket your balls you can put them in your pocket can you put them in your armpits can you keep them in your mouth

can you i'm not going to ask any more questions but there are i can think of a few locations it's interesting oh my god which would ensure every holes a golf

the um

the the rule specifically says you're not allowed to artificially warm your golf balls but is my buggy doesn't specifically is your bug artificial?

It doesn't specifically say it would be a case-by-case basis.

So I can assure you, my bum is 100% real.

You know?

I feel like it might affect your stunts.

I think you failed the caddy interview, is all I can tell you.

You're caddy.

Just walk to the spot you're teeing off and just squeeze their cheeks and drop.

If they can land it directly on the tee, that is a great caddy.

That's a caddy.

Oh my god.

Moving on to the ball.

You brought it up.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Moving on to the balls up the bottom.

Hey, check this out.

A 2009 search for the Loch Ness monster.

Oh, my God.

How do you do it?

How do you do it?

It didn't find the Loch Ness monster.

It found 100,000 golf balls.

And basically, they've worked out that there's a driving range where golf balls have been logged into Loch Ness and they're just all over the ground.

They were registering all these signals and there was 100,000 of them.

They thought, my God, they're baby Loch Ness monster eggs.

And

I quote.

They all had time bliss written on the side.

Yeah, they didn't think that.

That's what I would have thought is what I mean.

But yeah, so lost balls.

I mean, this is an actual job that you can get at a golf course, not a mini golf course, but they have scuba divers who are paid to go into all the bits of water and they go hunting for balls and they get paid by the ball that they found.

So that's a job you can get if you're

incredible.

Yeah, they build up so much over time.

Have you heard of Glenn Berger?

This is a guy who has exactly the job that Dennis just described.

He's been working, he was profiled about 10 years ago.

He had already collected 15 million balls.

What?

His personal best is 17,000 balls in a day.

What?

How?

He's employing lots of people to do his balls work, right?

Yeah, but that's, I think, his personal best.

That's him going down.

Yeah, because if you go somewhere that has been played on a golf course for, you know, tech years and years.

Yeah, I guess if you're literally just dredging them, maybe.

He's dredging, or he goes down and he'll just pour them into sacks, you know, because they all settle in the same place.

There is a website called golf.com, a very good website.

If you like golf.

If you like golf, yeah.

It claims that

in the late 1990s, there was a golf ball diver who spent several hours stuck on the bottom because he was pinned down by an amorous alligator.

Right.

Oh, my God.

Who was trying to flirt?

One way of of improving your golf balls, perhaps, might be to make them radioactive.

Oh, okay.

In 1910, there was a company called the Worthington Golf Ball Company that started making golf balls with radium in them.

And they said they were wise enough to stop at a reasonable position and not develop unduly a power that could be dangerous.

So I think they just had a little bit in.

Why were you doing it?

Is it so you can find them?

Well, the idea is in those days, they thought, because radium was this new sort of wonder material that they found, they thought you could add radium to anything and it would just make it better.

They had radium condoms, for instance.

Radium crockery.

I saw some of that recently in a shop.

Yeah.

And I walked past at night and I thought, oh, what a cool light display they've got.

And it was just a display of, I think it was uranium.

Really?

Were you shopping in the 1910s?

It was an antique shop, but it was.

It was very good.

I think it's kind of, you're not supposed to really buy too many of those, are you?

I think they're kind of, yeah, but they did these in 1910, but they they didn't really sell very well but then they came back and in recent years there's been some scientists at the atomic energy of canada who have said that they have put their golf balls in radioactive position and they travel 20 to 30 yards further than conventional balls really yeah they put it in an electron beam um but they have said that they won't make any claims you know claims in the shops to say this definitely will work uh they said that would require study and we don't intend to study it.

Okay.

That's science.

There's actually a stopgap in between your 1910 and then more recent ones, which is in 1951, there was a guy called Dr.

William L.

Davidson, and he supposedly was creating golf balls, but with little quantities of radioactive material inside.

And as you say, Andy, it was for if a golf ball got lost, you would go with a Geiger counter and you would be able to locate your ball.

That's a pretty good idea.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is a good idea.

Do you know how many balls there there are out there?

This is in America alone, USA alone, 300 million golf balls go missing every year.

Wow, that's almost exactly the population of America.

For every person in America, if you're listening to this in the States, there is a golf ball for every year of your life waiting.

It's out there.

And you'll never find them all.

Oh, oh, yes, yes.

Right.

What a sobering thought.

We don't know what happens to them either.

No one knows what happens to a golf ball that doesn't get touched.

There's no like recognized study.

So they just last a thousand years.

We have no, they just don't degrade.

Yes.

The cockroaches will be able to play golf in the future.

Just a sort of lateral thinking test for you.

There was, so golf balls used to be surrounded by a very hard, vulcanized rubber shell, which isn't quite the same as they have now.

So that was replaced with fully synthetic rubber in the end.

But it was in 1965 that the transition started to be made.

It was a chemist called Harry Lander, who was one of the people who did it.

And he was trying to make a really durable golf ball and he made one and it was successful, but it didn't have that hard shell.

And so he had to make a tweak to it, a special change, because it didn't do something that all golfers wanted it to do.

What did he have to add back in?

Okay, what did it not do?

So it wasn't hard on the outside.

Yes, it worked still just as well.

Okay, so they just like the sound of the thing.

They liked the sound, James.

You've got the mind of a golfer.

He had to add the click back in.

Really?

They came back and said.

Like a car door.

Exactly like a car door.

They added the click back into golf balls.

That's so funny.

I'm going to have to move us on, guys, to our next one.

Can I do a 2018 headline from the UK?

Man filmed having sex with ninth hole of golf course.

And a quote, from where he was, it looked like he had his penis in the hole while he had the flag in his backside.

Interesting.

It was the most weirdest thing I've ever had the misfortune to see.

All I can say is if my ball ever goes in the ninth hole at Brackenwood, it can stay there.

And that's where the 300 million others are as well.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that MMs deliberately made their green character sexy because of a school ground rumor that that coloured sweets were an aphrodisiac.

This is Ms.

Green,

and for people who can't see her on the screen, she has pouty lips and eyelashes and high heels.

And she was invented by a marketing agency called BBDO, who wanted to transform MMs into a brand, into a more iconic brand, I should say.

And they came up with these ideas of spokes candies.

And in their press release, they say that the green MM, she adds credence to the rumor that her mere presence is a turn-on.

And it turns out that kids throughout the previous 20 years or so had all been saying, if you eat the green ones, it's an aphrodisiac.

And they thought, well, we might as well run with it.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing that every single color of an MM was associated with a kind of schoolground or workplace or general life myth, right?

Like it just, it was everywhere.

So green ones were an aphrodisiac.

The last one you pulled out of the bag was red.

You need to make a wish and it will come true.

If the the last candy that comes out of the bag is yellow, you can call in sick and stay at home.

Orange.

No one ever did that.

Did any boss ever receive that call?

Please write in, if so.

Orange MMs, good luck.

Brown ones, bad luck.

It was all, that's just, that was, that's what people said when you pulled the thing out back.

I just feel like a lot of people are probably similar to myself, ate packet after packet of MMs without being aware any of them had personalities until now.

Really?

I certainly didn't know until I read this.

I couldn't believe she was sexy.

Did everyone else know this?

Yeah.

Well, it's...

No.

I was a loner at school.

I didn't pick up on those things.

But the rumour, I think the rumor was that.

And I had no idea about the connection.

I just thought they'd been a bit weird by making one of them

a bit fit.

And it's got controversial lately, hasn't it?

I mean, to a certain extent.

Oh, got extremely controversial.

How come?

Why?

Well, you know, should we have one who's wearing high heels with no pants on, to be honest, looking at that picture?

None of them were wearing pants.

It's weirder if one of us wearing pants.

I don't like the thought of an MM wearing pants at all.

They did attempt to replace the green one's high-heeled boots with trainers, and they put like sensible heels on the brown one who used to wear little kitten heels.

And then there's a huge backlash by which, I mean, I think one person wrote an article about it, and so they reverted, you know, because it was wokeness gone mad.

Yeah.

There was one bit where she did a sports illustrated swimsuit modeling thing.

Weird.

where she sort of unzipped almost her entire body to reveal the chocolate inside oh wow which feels more like a horror movie thing than a sexy thing that's like that's why cats got in trouble because they had a cat taking off its or wearing cat wearing a fur coat and I was like where'd you get that fur coat what's it what's the fur do you remember Judy Dench in cats is wearing is

a cat but she's also wearing a fur coat and it's everyone was like a bit well that's a bit rum isn't it is it oh it's a bit rum anyway was it more or less controversial than the huge minem controversy?

I mean, no, it's extremely controversial.

Well, let's be real.

They're just Smarties, right?

They're just Smarties.

What?

What?

Oh, come on.

Can I just say

for legal reasons, they are not just Smarties.

They are basically Smarties.

But also, don't they predate Smarties?

No.

No, Smarties just predate them.

So Forrest Mars is the scion of the Mars dynasty.

He had broken with his family firm, but he was of chocolate pedigree.

And he was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Unclear why he felt the need to stick his beak into the Spanish Civil War, but

there was a lot of beak sticking happening.

He spent time with George Harris from Roundtree and the story, which may not be true, but it may, is that he noticed some soldiers with Smarties and they have a hard candy shell and they don't melt as in the fierce Spanish sun as easily as just normal chocolate would do.

And miraculously, he then thought of M ⁇ Ms.

What gave me the idea?

We'll never know.

And he's one of the M's of M ⁇ Ms.

So it's Forrest Mars.

And then the other person is Bruce Murray, Murray who was part of Hershey's and it was a sort of collaboration, right?

Where they had the chocolate, he had the idea stolen from the Spanish Civil War and then they came together.

And that's why it's MMs, right?

So it's the apostrophe M means it belongs to both of them.

So it means MMs means belongs to Murray and Mars.

But that means that a single M ⁇ M that still belongs to them both, right?

Sure.

So that I reckon a single M ⁇ M really should be an M ⁇ Ms because it belongs to Murray and Mars.

And that means I I reckon a full packet of MMs should be MMs

and that's what I will be asking for in the shops from now on right

this is gonna be the next big controversy isn't it

one panino and two MMs is great

I completely forgot to check something speaking of the M's and the M's on the sweets and I meant to So sorry, I wouldn't normally ask the audience, but if you are listening at home, please try it.

I read in, I was either The Atlantic or the New York Times times that if you pour a packet of ms into some beer the lettuce will peel off from their shelves and float around the beer on their own like a ghost trying to spell out a message

but the ghost was just saying

in fairness he's in a pint of beer so that's true i think didn't they they invented it or they changed and innovated an existing machine specifically to print the m onto the mm

they're very secretive about their machines yeah right there are stories that if you're an engineer and a machine goes wrong at the the MM factory that you're led in to repair it blindfolded.

It's not clear at all.

It's not a secret where it is in the factory.

You can't fix it blindfolded, presumably.

I don't know, I think not.

But suppose that maybe you don't see the oomper lumpers as you pass them by, is the idea.

Right.

But you'd hear them singing.

You'd hear them singing.

But they're really that like Forrest Mars, we have mentioned before on the show, he was insane.

So if executives had meetings with competitors or outsiders, they would sometimes turn up in disguise with a false moustache or whatever.

Supposedly, even their bankers don't have access to their financial records.

What?

I don't know what's going on there.

But he was a total recluse.

There are no photos of him.

Or there might have been one photo of him ever taken.

Publicly.

He might have a lot in his family album.

Maybe.

But yeah,

he never wanted to be seen in public.

Yeah, someone in 1999 tried to find out the name of the president of the Mars Company, right?

1999, no one knew the name of the president of the Mars Company, one of the biggest companies on the planet.

A journalist phoned up and said, can you tell me who's the president of the Mars Company, please?

Only to be told, I'm sorry, I can't give out the names of our associates.

Phone was hung up.

Really?

They had a cult of total secrecy for a long time.

Has that changed or is that still the case?

It's still pretty much his descendants who are running the place now.

It's a tight ship.

It's very clever what they did with MMs with giving each of the M ⁇ Ms a different colour because the colour became the personality and hence people trying to fill in the gaps and work out what they brought to the table.

And I was thinking,

could we do that?

That doesn't work because we're a podcast.

We can't wear colors.

People won't be able to hear the colors.

And then I thought, actually, someone did it for us the other day because we were at a gig here in Australia and someone gave us a little fanzine that they've done of us by George Rex Comics.

And they've actually given us words to define who we are.

Well, you mean like the Spice Girls.

Like the Spice Girls, exactly.

So that's how we need to exist, right?

So in this quiz, which is which member of no such thing as a fish are you, here are the four options for what we could be: sarcastic,

northern,

boring,

and an idiot.

That's devastatingly bagged, right?

So we've got boring spice, stupid spice,

sake spice, and scouse spice.

Golden spice.

Scow spice, great spice.

I know, I was trying to think of another S S that was in the north.

I got it wrong.

Sounds like a really great quiz, Dan.

And really relevant as well.

That was great.

I'm just because I'm sarcastic.

Hello, yes.

And I was such an idiot, I had no idea what you were.

Hey, up, hey, up, let's get on with it.

I can't think of anything interesting to add.

Let's talk about M ⁇ Ms a bit more.

Can we talk about Van Halen?

The thing.

Oh, Oh, of course.

Because we were on tour and they toured and so basically we were a rock band.

This is a really interesting thing about, you know, supposedly Van Halen, when they, the rock, big rock band in the 70s, 80s, they had a line in their rider which said, we want a bowl of M ⁇ Ms with all the brown M ⁇ Ms removed, right?

That is a story that has done the rounds for such a long time.

And the story was...

It was so they were checking that the venue was reading the rider in full and doing everything right so that all the amps were in the right place and the lights.

It was actually a way of testing to make sure the venue were reading and paying attention.

That has been turned on its head.

This is the exciting thing.

Double debunk.

I was reading Doug Mac's Snack Stack, which is a food and snack-based blog and is terrific.

It is so good.

All right, boring spice.

So story A is just

they've got a big ego.

Story B is that it's actually more complicated.

But story C, think about it.

The person whose job is to remove all the brown MMs is not the same as the person whose job is to check the amps or the safety of the overall gig.

That's an insane way of trying to ensure the safety.

And actually, they caused huge amounts of damage to dressing rooms.

Like when they found some brown MMs at a gig once, they caused 100 grand of damage to a dining room.

It now seems that they were just being wankers.

Right.

So why are we assuming that?

Just because they trashed the place.

They could have been trashing it because they were pissed off.

They hadn't read the rider.

They trashed the place, but also based on their quotes, it sounds like they genuinely did want it.

It was kind kind of a way of throwing it around.

Because also, by the time anyone knows about it, it's no longer an effective test of whether a venue has read The Rider.

So it seems like it has been double debunked.

Double debunked.

You heard it here for us.

Do you want to know something about blue MMs?

I haven't got much of a look in.

Are they?

The dye in blue MMs could repair your spine if your spine is damaged, but it might turn you blue.

And this is a really cool, the dye is called Brilliant Blue G.

And like scientists were just testing, studying it a few years ago, and they realized it blocks a chemical that makes your injuries worse if you've got a spinal injury.

So it blocks a chemical that causes inflammation.

So it basically means that you don't get the horrible repercussions of a spinal injury that you otherwise would.

And they're looking into it.

But the only thing is that it does turn you a bit blue at the moment if you're a rat.

But we do know.

That could be the case.

And it just reminded me of another dye sweet based story that I loved that came out recently, which is that the food dye in Doritos and pretty much much any other yellow thing, like macaroni and cheese, any yellow gummies, Cheetos, cereals,

twisties, sure.

Are they yellow?

Orangey, yeah.

Twisties, orangina, it makes mice transparent.

The dye in that.

And they think there's no reason why it wouldn't also make humans transparent.

Not if they eat it, right?

No, if you rub it on their skin, sorry.

No way.

Yes?

Are we surrounded by invisible mice now?

That have been rubbed with Cheeto dust.

When you do,

they're not empty on the inside, Andy.

You would see.

You would see a big bag of mouse.

It's Hellraiser for mice.

So how many Doritos do I have to rub on myself tonight?

Well, just keep trying, James, and eventually you will go transparent.

There are two brands of chocolate milk in Australia that are made from cows that eat chocolate.

What?

It doesn't come out when you milk them as chocolate milk does it

no that is definitely not what I said

okay but it wasn't easy the chocolate chocolate's made

milk is made from the milk from cows that eat chocolate but

you have led down at the garden path

does it can you is the milk any different to standard milk no no it's just milk it's just a coincidence really but you get these you get these brands of chocolate milk it's carton's a farmers union and purer flavored milks.

And the cows that they take the milk from are fed with stuff from the nearby Cadbury factory that's just like offshoots that they don't need anymore because it's a really easy way of giving cows energy.

So it's kind of the circular economy.

Because some of that milk will have been in some of the milk in the chocolate will have been in a cow.

That's true.

It's a closed system.

We've solved sustainability.

Just feed the cows some some chocolate.

Okay, everyone, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Sydney, you've been awesome.

Thank you so much for having us.

We will be back again.

And until then, we will see you.

Goodbye.

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