559: No Such Thing As Fishing In The Sea Of Tranquility

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Perth.

my name is dad shriver i am sitting here with anna tashinski andre hunton 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 a particular order here we go

What do they put in the water here?

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if you run a restaurant, one of the best ways to sabotage a rival is to get them a Michelin star.

What?

It's the kiss of death.

Isn't it?

It's the kiss of death for a restaurant.

This is so cool.

So this was a study.

It was published in the Strategic Management Journal.

Basically, the author tracked down restaurants that had been awarded a Michelin star recently and found that they are likelier to close over the following, however long it is, let's say a year.

Do we know why?

Yes, we do you become famous for a start oh yeah that's terrible your customers change people start coming from hundreds of miles away because you've got a Michelin star you know they get more demanding you match their demands you do fancier food costs rise chefs want their salaries to go up they're likelier to leave because they've got the golden aura about them now the whole thing is a disaster and you're like you're likely to end up shutting down it's a kind of it's like a resource curse basically yeah so yeah and it happens and then once you've got one or two everyone chases the third and that's when it gets really dangerous because it gets incredibly expensive.

So restaurant owners have started rejecting them, saying, we don't need this in our life.

We don't need to be seen as good.

We're fine.

Well, they can't, they're not allowed.

Well, they officially weren't allowed to, were they, until quite recently.

You can't reject a Michelin star.

Well, I think what Michelin said for a long time, because Marco Pierre White, I think, was the first person in the 90s to say, this is bullshit, can't take the pressure, take it back.

And they were like, it's not yours.

It's the restaurant's, mate.

You can't give it back.

But I think they did make an exception.

Finally, there's a guy called Sebastian Bra

who ran Le Souquet.

And he just hated having a Michelin star so much that eventually Michelin said, it is difficult for us to have a restaurant in the guide, which desperately does not wish to be in it.

So they did agree to remove it for the first time.

But it's the pressure, isn't it?

And the fact that you don't know, and I didn't realize this, but you don't know why you've got it.

You don't know it's coming.

And when it appears in the guide, there's not like someone writes a review explaining, here are the elements of your dishes that we we enjoyed.

And as you say, you overturn your menu.

So it could be that the reason you got it was for that amazing slice of white bread as you enter.

And once you ditch that from the menu straight away, you're nothing again.

That's the thing.

You don't know that someone is in your restaurant judging you for the Michelin store.

But not only that, people who work at Michelin don't know who those people are as well.

Like

the top level, they have no idea, right?

Yeah, so you get hired.

Someone within the company obviously brings you in to do it.

And you're out on the road for so many weeks per year.

It's it's in the middle of the day.

I used to work as a secret restaurant person.

Out.

You're a Michelin.

I'm allowed to talk about it now because it's been so long, but for quite a long time you're not allowed to say anything.

Are you serious?

Well, I'm half serious.

Yeah, this isn't true.

The start of it was serious and then it went into whimsy quite quickly.

You used to work.

I did used to work as a person who went round restaurants, sort of seeing how good they were.

For Michelin?

No, for Michelin, no.

For some just some company in Bolton in Bolton.

Right.

The Michelin of Bolton.

What are they, what are they called?

I can't say.

Oh.

James, we'll have to wipe all of your memories on the way out now.

Well, can I just say, I like some of the amazing things that they have on the menus.

So, Muggeritz in San Sebastian in Spain has edible stones sitting atop an edible mold.

Wow.

Does that sound nice?

No, it doesn't.

Okay, well, at Quints in San Francisco, they have a meal which is served on an iPad.

It's a truffle meal and then it comes on the iPad and then there's some beautiful sort of stuff on the iPad that you can press and stuff like that.

Is it wet?

Like a little wet meal on the iPad.

I suppose it's a little bit moist, but not wet enough.

These days, you know, iPads and iPhones, they're quite waterproof, aren't they?

Did they put a cork up the

entry port?

Maybe they put it in plastic.

I'm not quite sure.

Have you had that, James?

No, I haven't.

I haven't had any of these.

These are all places I want to go to.

So Bros in Lecce in Italy, they serve a ricotta foam served in a plaster cast of the chef's mouth.

Wow.

Okay.

Now, you have to, have you read the review of Bros, which is the greatest thing you'll ever read?

And it is on a blog called Everywhereist.com.

And it does talk about Bros.

It's 27 courses, lasts almost five hours, and basically you don't get any food, seemed to be the conclusion.

So, um, they.

Because actually, the chef's mouth is closed when it gives it

the mouth just eats the meal before you can get to it.

Um, so they serve things like frozen air that suddenly melted before they could eat it.

Nothing is bigger than a tiny, tiny teaspoon.

There was one moment in like course 19 where one of the women said she got excited because they put a little drop of sauce on the plate, and then she thought, oh, they'll put a piece of meat on top.

And then the waiter comes by with an eyedropper and squeezes a droplet on top of it and says, We've infused these droplets with meat molecules

is this a positive review it's unbelievably negative so much so that

the owner of the restaurant actually replied and said okay you know on trip advisors sometimes someone leaves a bad review and the restaurant owner replies underneath and he's saying don't get involved mate don't what are you doing and this guy replied with a drawing of a horse underneath which he said this is a drawing of a horse it doesn't make me an artist and it went on and on into more and more beautiful um analogies what is art?

What is food?

What is a chef?

What looks beautiful?

What is someone who owns a restaurant shouldn't be asking, what is a chef?

No.

I think a lot of people agreed.

That was probably quite good for their business.

Bad reviews can be quite good.

Because if you see a restaurant on Google or whatever, and it's got five stars, you do suspect, don't you?

What do you suspect?

Well, you suspect that

what should I suspect?

It was a lie.

It's a fake.

It's all the restaurant owners' friends.

You know, it's just nonsense.

You see a 4.2, you think that's my level.

I don't deserve better, nor do I want better than 4.2.

In fact, Ash,

soundy,

his favorite rating, he was telling me the other day, is 3.7.

Ash!

Okay.

That is outright crazy.

Michelin, by the way, had three star ratings that you could get right.

So one meant it was worth a stop.

If it was one-starred Michelin.

Two was it was worth a detour.

So if you saw that on the way, let's go out of our way.

And then three is worth a journey in order to get to it.

But they've changed that in recent years where you can get Michelin sort of labels to attach to yourself.

Okay.

One of which is for restaurants that are deemed not good enough.

Not good enough for a Michelin star, but still worth eating at.

Just 3.6.

Yeah, 3.6, exactly.

Yeah.

They do other things now for sustainability, for how green the produce and all that stuff is.

So there's multiple Michelin levels now.

That thing you're saying about them being worth a journey, worth a detour, blah, blah, blah.

That's all from the very early days, which I think we mentioned in the past, which is where it was all set up basically by Michelin, who make tyres to sell more tyres.

What if we just send people around France on road trips for food?

They'll wear out their tyres, they'll buy more tyres.

The whole thing mushroomed.

It's a tyre-selling enterprise that has got way out of hand,

basically.

But they contributed, I love this, to D-Day Michelin.

Because the Allied officers who landed on the beaches at Normandy in 1944 were all carrying the 1939 Michelin guide to France in their pockets.

Really?

Because they had incredible maps of France.

Like there were no, you know, there were no comprehensive guides.

I think they had removed the restaurants.

I think they might have slightly adjusted it.

Surely you tear the page out.

They held up in northern Normandy for a few days because there was a really brilliant mool restaurant.

You've got to get everyone through.

You have to try this, Barry.

You have to.

Do you know we've got behind us on the screen for the audience to see here, we've got a logo of the Michelin Man, very famous character.

Incredible how big and rich the history of the Michelin Man is.

It was voted the greatest logo of all time by 22 designers as part of advertising logos.

He was known as the Road Drunkard to begin with.

And his name is a translation of drinking to be done.

And then originally.

Sorry, the Michelin Man.

His name is Berbendum.

Exactly.

Sorry, yeah, in his French name and Latin name, rather.

And so he became massive.

But the question that I never thought to ask is: tires obviously are black.

Why is he white?

And the answer is that tires used to be white.

Yeah.

Which is so he predates black tires.

Like, this is how old this logo is.

Yeah.

And he's looking good for his age.

And he's called the drinking, he's drinking stuff up because that's what these tires can do.

They drink up the road.

That's the idea.

By drinking.

I think it is a Gerond Bibendum.

We are linger sign.

They still get their money off tires because they make a huge loss on their guides.

They don't make any money from them because they have to spend so much freaking money on five-star meals.

So there was even, I was listening to an interview with the head chef at Alinea in Chicago.

I mean, foodies will be cringing at my pronunciation probably, but it's a very good restaurant in Chicago.

And they said the amount that they spent sending Michelin judges to that restaurant alone was much more than the total profit from all the guide selling in Chicago.

I mean, it's unstable.

Amazing.

It's not a money maker.

I thought I'd look at some Australian fine dining.

Oh,

dinners were here.

Yeah.

And then when you couldn't find any, you went to France.

There is a vegan restaurant in Canberra that was fined $16,000 because they had a cockroach infestation and they didn't want to kill them because they didn't want to kill any little insects.

Oh, really?

Apparently, they had a real problem with German cockroaches, and a single female German cockroach can give off 100,000 offspring in a month.

Whoa!

So there was a news story that came out, I think it was in July of this year's or something.

German cockroaches.

So that's the cockroach that is everywhere in houses and in restaurants and so on.

Well, here's the amazing thing.

For 250 years, it's been a mystery as to where they come from.

And a scientist in Perth, as part of the university here, has discovered German cockroaches aren't actually from Germany.

No.

Huge discovery.

Huge finding.

Do we know where are they from Austria?

Because that's kind of Germany.

It's kind of Germany.

Wow.

No, it's the bay.

They did DNA testing on it, and it's from the Bay of Bengal in India.

Yes, they trace it and they mapped out this whole journey.

It would have had to get on a boat and travel over, and they worked out all that stuff.

But they don't appear in the wild.

All the cockroaches that we have appear in the wild.

Well, they only appear in five-star restaurants.

Yes, they're Michelin star roaches.

Yeah.

No, you will never find them in the wild.

It's purely on our houses and restaurants and shops and so on.

That's nuts, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The first Australian cookbook was written by Edward Abbott.

It's very Australian, I have to say.

This guy once assaulted the Prime Minister of Australia with an umbrella.

The book has recipes for roast wombat and kangaroo brains.

And at one stage, there's advice of what to do if you're having a conversation and a drunk person interrupts you.

What's the advice?

I didn't write it down.

At one stage, it says, we advise ugly people not to go to parties.

Okay.

And that men who aren't that handsome may at least endeavor to not appear uglier than they can help.

Good advice.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in America, you can buy designer snakes with emojis on them.

Look at that.

Isn't that cute?

We have a picture behind us.

It's not cute.

It's not.

You can't even see its head.

Something can't be cute if you can't see its head.

It actually looks more

jack-o-lantern.

It looks like a Halloween snake, doesn't it?

Yeah, well, in fairness, this is nature doing this.

It's not a computer, so you know, you have to take what you get.

Right.

Really?

But this is a few people in America, in particular, someone called Justin Kobilka.

And Justin Kobilka has been breeding these ball pythons for quite a a long time.

And one of the times the egg hatched, and what should come out?

But this snake patterned with these orange faces on its body.

And he could sell it.

And he makes lots of other snakes.

You can get ones with two heads.

You can get ones which feel like human skin when you touch them.

Horrible.

No, you don't fancy that, perhaps they're amazing.

Snakes feel quite, they do feel quite nice.

Yeah, everyone thinks they're going to be slimy, but they're not actually.

They're not slimy at all.

They're nice and smooth.

But I think if you touched a snake and it felt like a human,

it would be worse.

Weirdly.

Do we have a snake yet?

Because you know they shed their skin all the time.

Do we have one that's like a pass-the-parcel where it's a new design under each head?

That's a good idea.

Yeah.

I bet they're working on it.

That'd be cool.

So these are, like I say, they're ball pythons.

And we think probably because they evolved below ground, they kept a lot of mutations which allow them to change their colours because they wouldn't have so many predators under there.

So, normally, if you're living on the surface, you either have lots of colours to scare people off, or more commonly, you blend into the background.

Because they're underground, they have all these extra genes.

What's amazing?

So, this is like I'd never heard of this before, James, before you telling us this.

And this is there's a huge market for this, and these snakes go for such huge amounts of money because they may give birth to snakes, and then you have further designer snakes, right?

So it's like.

So, it is like he's made them, right?

Just to be clear, it's not like he's sitting there randomly hoping like he literally chooses two snakes to breed so he'll say I have a design in mind I'm seeing a picture of the Eiffel Tower and then two years later he'll have a snake with the Eiffel Tower on it because he makes them have sex

well he has like one that looks like Stonehenge and it mates with one that looks like Big Ben and eventually it comes

and how he does it is he'll put them in a room get some barry white on just put a nice little spread out and just watch them go actually one thing that happens is these snakes whenever there's a thunderstorm they all get really horny.

And if there's what, if he's not expecting a thunderstorm and suddenly he hears a bit of a rumble, he has to go, shit!

And he has to run in and get all the snakes that he wants to have sex with each other and put them next to each other so that they'll have sex.

Wow, that's amazing.

Also, he does basically reveals they so what they what they call this, they're called morphs.

They're when he's got a new design that he's invented and he drops.

It's like he's a TikTok musician or Beyonce.

He just drops the latest latest snake and then you've got to get in quick and buy it as quick as possible, right?

So people monitor his site and his place for the next drop.

And you get a preview, don't you?

And this is the sort of thing, you have this weird thing when you do our job where you start researching.

And because everyone in the field knows about it, you think, does the whole world know about this?

So story of the whole world knows about this, but Python breeders, anyone who owns a Python, tends to cut their eggs open before they hatch.

Yeah.

And it's so weird.

I think everyone in this room knew that.

knew that, right?

So often in the wild, they don't survive.

So quite a lot of the time, Python's egg teeth, the tooth they have to crack themselves out of the egg, doesn't work properly, or they can't break themselves out.

They suffocate, they're a bit weak.

And so if you are a snake pet owner, then you'll open the egg to sort of help them out a bit.

And for this guy, it really helps him out because he opens the egg, takes a picture, puts it on TikTok, and you can see this little snake inside the egg with the perfect pattern.

I think he live streams the cutting of the egg.

So you can watch some people tune in.

Like, what's it?

It's like it's a kinder egg, you know.

Like, I feel like...

Andy, I don't think you approve of this practice.

I don't.

At all.

It's just interesting, isn't it?

People have such fun hobbies.

It is.

There's something disgusting about it, and I can't work out what.

He has, and it's like going to Jurassic Park.

Like, he has this giant warehouse where there's over 2,000 pythons.

He's constantly, as James says, like running around in matching pairs.

Oh, there's a thunderstorm.

He's running around, getting all the horn dogs.

He's like bringing them all together.

together.

He says his language, because each of these morphs get given their own name.

And in the interview that James, I think, found this fact from,

this guy, Kobilka, he says that he was aiming for, and then all that I'm about to say are types of different morphs that he's invented.

An orange dream, yellow belly, enchy, leopard, desert ghost carrying clown genes.

So a clown gene, just to give you an idea, is a snake that's morphed where it has little tears.

It comes out of your pocket, but it keeps coming out of your pocket.

Is that it?

That's it.

Or you open an egg and there's like 20 of them inside.

I should just say, because Dan alluded to it, yeah, this comes from an article in the New Yorker by someone called Rebecca Giggs, who wrote it.

It's a great article, and I recommend you look it up.

Yeah.

And sorry, just because you jumped in with a brilliant joke.

Sorry, I won't do it again.

No, no, so the clown gene is he's morphed little tears under the eyes that you might get on a clown.

So like it's like it's really specific.

Or a murderer in prison.

Yes.

Sorry?

Yes.

You remember your time in the big house?

Those people weren't crying.

Yeah.

And they weren't clowns.

It's got that snake that's got thug life across its belly.

So Pythons in general.

Oh, yeah.

Have you heard of the Florida Python Challenge?

No.

This is a great challenge you can do.

Is it a cinnamon challenge?

You don't get to eat them, sadly, but you do.

Basically, Florida is overrun with Pythons.

They arrived, and since they arrived,

since 2000, the year 2000, 90% of furry animals have mysteriously gone missing in Florida.

Oh.

Because the Pythons have gold them up.

It's not mysterious, is it?

It's not mysterious at all.

All the biomass that used to be covered in fluff is now Python, basically.

That is the problem.

And they're now eating each other.

So the florida are trying to keep a lid on it they're eating the fluffy animals

too soon that is too soon

that is weirdly the most disturbing thing that's happened in this podcast so far

um but they set up basically this python challenge and the categories are novice professional and military and um the humans that is and they you have to There's a woman called Donna Khalil who I read a great profile of.

She's 62 years old.

She won this year for catching 19.

She rides them.

She kills them.

She rides them.

She rides them to kill them, to catch them and kill them.

Because you have to sort of throw yourself on them, wrestle them.

And they're massive.

Oh, because they're so big, sorry.

They're huge.

One of them she caught was 18 feet long.

It's amazing that she, over her life, has caught and dispatched nearly 900 pythons.

That is mental.

And they are crazy.

They are making a difference.

I think

there were 150,000 there, a 99% decrease in wildlife.

And I think they've euthanased 11,000.

They say euthanased, so it doesn't sound like that.

We're just sending people out into the wild to murder them.

There were 150,000, and now they've got 11,000.

No, no, they're still about 149,000.

They've just caught 11,000.

Oh, true.

Sounds like that problem has been solved.

I think so.

There was actually, very sadly, the story I'm about to tell: a dog dies in it, a chihuahua, but this happens in Australia as well.

There was a story in 2014 where an Australian python managed to make its way into a kennel of a dog, a little chihuahua, and the owners found out that their chihuahua had been eaten and it couldn't get out because the chihuahua had been chained inside of the

kennel.

So there was just a python sitting there with a chain coming out of its mouth

and it couldn't get rid of it.

And it was just like, oh, it was a bit awkward.

And me?

It jumped in there.

And they had to take it to a vet and remove the chain from the python.

Um, so it just, yeah, it just caught in the act.

I can't believe you did, I can't believe you just felt the need to give us a trigger warning about a chihuahua dying.

I know that is sad, but come on, we've got to grow up a bit, haven't we?

Okay,

thank you for

telling me off in front of

one word, just trigger warning, uh, people might die in this.

Um, this is

a snake called the Matza Coatl.

And if you drink a tincture made from its venom, according to the Aztecs, you will continually have an erect, virile member and constantly eject your semen and die of lasciviousness.

Basically, you'll spap yourself to death.

Really?

No.

According to Aztecs.

Continually.

Continually, yeah.

So you end up just a husk.

Ironically, like a snake that shed its skin.

You'll just be like a...

That is ironic.

Wow.

But you've had a damn good time, haven't you?

All the husks have their thumbs up.

Their thumbs up what?

I have a very niche fact here that no one except me and my children are going to like.

Oh,

there's a very famous WWF wrestler called Jake the Snake Roberts.

Any Jake the Snake Roberts fans in?

I've heard of him.

Yeah.

Well, all your kids are in tonight.

And yeah, so Jake the Snake Roberts, he used to come to the ring with a live snake in a bag.

And his move was at the end of the match, he would reveal the python or viper onto onto the state.

And it was real.

It bit into wrestlers, and it really harmed a lot of them.

It was quite a dangerous gimmick.

Wrestlers, they traveled for basically the entire year to a new city for every single wrestling recording.

And this was something he had to lug around America everywhere he was going.

And he revealed not too long ago that actually he is terrified of snakes.

His entire career, he has been petrified.

He wakes up in his hotel room at night going, fuck, where has it escaped?

And so the thought was, because wrestling often the wrestlers get given the gimmicks and they have to make a career out of it.

I didn't know that.

Turns out he created his own gimmick.

And they said, why would you do that?

And he said, I was stoned and

I pitched it and they went yes and it stuck.

So his whole career has been in fear.

Yeah.

Wow.

Anyone would think these people aren't the smartest tools in the shed.

Smartest tools in the shed?

Sure.

I don't know if Australia is home to any native species of snake, but

exciting news from the UK.

We've just got a new one.

The new one is called the Isculapian or Aesculapian, and it should be too cold for it to live in the UK because it's a bit cold there.

But it finds warmth in human-built attics and wall cavities.

Oh, it sounds like a nightmare.

It's a house snake.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

And they mostly live in Wales, in a place called...

Oh, sorry, they live in walls in Wales, mostly.

But there was a scientist from the University of Bournemouth called Tom Major, weirdly,

who said, you do get the odd person who is not a fan of them being here, but generally they are well-received.

I call bullshit.

He said, if you find one in your attic, personally, I would just let it be, as you wouldn't really know it was there.

Fair enough.

Just move out.

They're very shy.

What was weird about him being called Tom Major?

Well, it sounds like Major Tom.

Oh, I thought you were saying it sounds like former Prime Minister John Major.

That too.

That too.

If the snake was found in space with an astronaut called Tom Major, that would have been...

Do you know what snakes do in space?

I found out.

Oh my God.

Slam dunk.

They don't live there.

They don't live there.

There are no snakes in space native to space.

But if you put a snake in space,

they will either

get a bit confused, as you would, but they either attack their own tail, thinking it's a rival, or they hug themselves thinking they found a friend.

How far do you think a snake swallows itself before it realizes it's it's

and how embarrassing is it when they have to reverse out?

I saw the Michelin start.

I just thought this was a good place to eat.

So let's go on to fact number three and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the largest Catholic diocese is Orlando because it includes the moon.

But you didn't know that.

This is based on the Catholic Code of Canon Law 1917, which I know everyone's memorized, which says any newly discovered territory is placed under the jurisdiction of the diocese from which the expedition which discovered that territory left.

And of course, in 1969, Apollo 11 went from Cape Canaveral, which is in Orlando, to the movie theatre where it was faked.

So according to some people, landed on the moon.

And the Bishop of Orlando at the time was a guy called Reverend William Borders, who did seem quite endearingly keen to emphasise that he was now Bishop of the Moon.

He kept banging on about it, didn't he?

He met the Pope in 1916.

There was a bit of a joke in 1968, Bishop, he was the founding bishop of that diocese in 1968.

That was sort of when it was properly instituted.

And there was a bit of joshing when Apollo 11 launched, like, oh, who's this?

Oh, who owns that then?

Oh, and he was like, oh, it's me.

It was very, very funny.

And then he was a little bit more.

I don't think you're delivering it as good as.

At some point,

he met the Pope next year, and then he suddenly became deadly serious.

He said, well, of course, the moon is mine, Your Holiness.

It's canon law.

And I mean,

it's a dubious.

Apparently, the current Bishop of Orlando is a guy called Bishop John Noonan, who does not consider himself the Bishop of the Moon.

Well, that's what his press secretary says.

And I want to know if she's run it by him when she says, I'm sure he doesn't consider himself.

I bet he read that news story and went, Fuck off me.

Yeah.

Why do you think I took the job?

When they had that first discussion, there was this guy Borders who said that he was the bishop.

There was Cardinal Cook, who was the the military ordinariate at the Air Force base.

So he was like the priest at the Air Force Base, and he said that he should.

And then there was the Archbishop of Miami, who was Coleman Carroll, and he said that he should be the bishop of the moon because the moon is always over Miami.

Yes.

What the fuck is he talking about?

No, it's not.

Sorry,

priest banter.

Oh,

sorry.

But what I think is that.

But I don't get it.

I don't get it.

It's not always a Miami.

No, it's probably a phrase, Andy.

I think you're taking it too seriously.

No, no, I'm with Andy because I googled this.

I was like, this must be an in-joke Miami thing.

The moon's always over there.

No, no.

What he's saying is, oh, yeah, when we look up at night, the moon's always there.

That's not good to anyone who doesn't live in Miami.

That's the joke.

No, I see.

That is a good joke.

That's a good joke.

I don't think I was cut out for the priesthood.

I just don't.

I wouldn't have fit in.

What's the actual largest Catholic diocese on earth, would you say?

Can you define diocese quickly?

Okay, yeah, it's the area that's looked after by a bishop.

Okay.

So, for instance, there will be a diocese around Perth, perhaps, and it might involve quite a lot of Western Australians.

They don't need them all over all the little villages.

We're non-very broadly inhabited.

So, Mongolia would be a good guess.

Yeah, that's a good guess.

It's quite close, actually.

It is in Irkutsk in Russia.

And interestingly, if Irkutsk, this Catholic area, decided to secede from Russia, so it's not part of Russia anymore.

Good luck, guys.

They take quite a dim view of that.

Well, they're busy on the other front, so they.

Okay.

If the people of Irkutsk, the Catholics of Irkutsk, which admittedly is only 0.4% of the area, but if they decide to secede, Russia won't be the biggest country anymore.

Do you know what will be the biggest country?

The current second biggest.

So

Canada, Canada, Canada.

No, not Canada.

It would be the newly seceded area of Irkutsk.

No.

Because it's more than half of Russia.

It's that diocese.

Oh, they've got to do it.

It would be so funny.

Now you're liking the bishop jokes.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe I would have been good.

You know the whole thing about moon ownership?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's like sometimes you can buy a plot of the moon.

So all of those things are fake, basically.

There have been a load of, there's a load of jostling at the moment because everyone's kind of agreed that no one actually owns interplanetary bodies.

But at the moment, the USA, for example, are trying to set up a thing called coordinated lunar time as a kind of proto-colonization.

Like, if you control the time, it's sort of an acknowledgement that it's kind of yours.

But, I mean, really, no one owns it.

And all those things where you buy an acre of the moon are all madey uppy.

So, Robert Coles was a guy in 1955 who sold off huge chunks of the moon.

The Interplanetary Development Corporation sold it off for a dollar an acre, pretty cheap, if real, which it wasn't.

But you got the, you got, it was quite good, this though, because you got the mineral rights to anything under your acre of moon.

You also got beach and fishing rights in the sea of tranquility.

See what you did there.

And you got the right to participate in all winter sports on the lunar Alps.

Cool.

Okay, cool.

I think it was fun.

Apollo 11 is when this bishop was claiming ownership of the moon, right?

A lot of the Apollo astronauts were surprisingly religious.

James Irwin, who was Apollo 15, he was a literal creationist.

He went up to the moon to prove that God created the Earth in seven days.

And there was a moment when he was up there when a thing happened where a decision needed to be made.

And he thought, I could message NASA and say, how do I fix this thing?

Or I could just ask God.

And so he asked God and God said, oh, it's the blue wire or whatever.

And he did what God said.

What?

And it worked.

Yeah, so this was on the moon, an isolated man.

And he basically told him the thing that he got told in his training.

That's one way of looking at it, absolutely.

To be fair, the reception to God is much better when you're on the moon, isn't it?

Yeah.

You're way closer.

There's no conflicting circumstances.

Exactly.

But so when he came back to Earth, he set up a religious group and his first expedition post-going to the moon was going to Mount Ararat to look for Noah's Ark.

Did he find it?

or he thinks that he did find a few bits of you because you'd think it would be obvious when you did find noah's ark yeah yeah you'd think so but it's broken up now it's not just it's not a giant ark i think we would have spotted it yeah with all the animals or like a pair of animals looking out of each window they'd be dead now um it's it was but check this out there's this one fascinating story when he was up mount ararat looking for it so he was he was climbing and he got really tired so he decided okay today abandon the trek head back to where our base is and let's recuperate and go tomorrow.

So while he was walking down on his own, he took a pause and he kneeled down to put on some crampons onto his boots.

And he was struck suddenly from behind by a giant falling rock.

And it just knocked him down the hill.

He knocked out five teeth.

He had deep cuts to his eyes and his nose.

He sprained his neck and he messed up his ribs.

So he just camped there for the night.

Unfortunately, once he had got his sleeping bag out of his bag and got into it, he zipped himself up.

And once he was asleep, he slid down the mountain like a sled

and hurt himself all over again when he bashed into multiple boulders.

So he woke up lower down and it was on a slide.

And God is like, this was for bothering me while you were on the moon.

So he climbed back up.

in his sleeping bag and just before he got to the like a worm like a yeah like a like he went back up and then he slid back down again and crashed Yeah, for fun.

Sorry.

Because he was like, that was a nice green one.

Every time he went and got near to the bit that was flat, he slid back down.

It happened three or four times, smashed his face.

You've got to climb it up on the sleeping bag, mate.

How dumb is this guy?

He eventually passed out and he woke up and he was connected to his pillow because there was so much blood that had solidified on it.

Yeah, he should have died on Mount Ararat.

It's the most like Mr.

Bean adventure amongst this

search.

But he was a creationist on the moon any idiot can be an astronaut that's what we've learned here give it a go i do think it's interesting because he must have had a conception of where heaven is and where god lives and like where do you think heaven is up

It's up.

It's somewhere vague, right?

Opposite of hell.

It's in a parallel universe, it's opposite of hell.

So I think we often think of it as somewhere a bit different dimension-y.

But until people like Galileo, Christians thought there were three heavens.

The first heaven was bird heaven.

That's where the birds live.

That's where they're flying around.

The second heaven is star heaven.

Oh, sorry, but does that mean that all the birds are already in heaven?

They've been very, very good.

Exciting new theory.

Yes.

So bird heaven.

And then above that, do you say star heaven?

Star heaven.

And above that is Imperian heaven.

And that's where God lives.

And that's where you'll go.

And if you asked a medieval person, where will you go when you die?

They were very clear.

They look up where the birds are.

They're like, and then above that, if I kept going up in a ladder, there's stars.

And if I kept going up, there's where I'll die.

And it's such a weird way of conceiving of it, right?

So when Galileo and Ko saw planets and worked out that different things went around different things, that really fucked it up more than we can imagine.

So just for clarity, were the birds higher than birds actually flew?

No, they just thought heaven was low.

They didn't think birds were high.

They thought he was low.

If you climbed a tree, you didn't get into bird heaven.

You couldn't just say like,

I'm just going to cut my losses.

I'm going to stay in bird heaven.

I know I'm in bird heaven.

Anna, what about emus?

Have they just been really bad?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, the devil's bird.

Oh, yeah.

What I'm trying to say is, where is the living birds?

Are they flying next to the ghost dead birds?

Oh, yeah.

No, no, no.

All the dead things are in the top heaven.

Just where the birds are.

We're like, well, that's the first layer of heaven.

Okay, so it's beyond where.

It's not bird heaven, as in it's where birds go after they die.

It's named after the people who live there.

I got confused.

I got confused.

But that was like, people did hold on to that theory for quite a long time.

And when the hot air ballooning was invented, there was a group called the Muggletonians, and they wanted it to be banned because they thought people who hot air ballooned would bump into heaven.

It's cheating.

They refused to accept the laws of gravity.

But your mate should have done that, right?

And they believed that God takes no notice of everyday events on earth and will never intervene in anything.

That checks out so far.

Yeah.

But that meant that there was no point doing any kind of worship because God clearly isn't listening.

So let's just not go to church.

Let's just, and let's just balloon.

Well, no, no, you're not allowed to do that.

Because that's cheating.

That's true.

Yeah, exactly.

You might be in heaven, everyone you met in heaven, you'd have to say, are you a good guy or just a balloonist?

Because you weren't going to, because God wasn't listening and you weren't worshiping, you would have meetings instead and you'd just go to the pub and chat.

Sounds nice, doesn't it?

Describing the modern day

of modern secular society.

Yeah.

We were talking about a very big Catholic space,

the big dioceses.

I thought I'd try and find a very small Catholic space.

Great thinking.

Thank you.

So I don't think we've ever talked about priestholes.

So 16th century, a lot of persecution on both sides.

To be fair, a bad time to be anybody, the 16th century.

Anyway, but if you...

When Catholicism was illegal in England, if you were caught with a priest, they would be taken away and tortured and executed, and you might be as well.

So lots of houses had these priest holes where you just hide your own priest and

there's a place in england called hunglip hall which has 12 separate priestholes some priest holes had their own priest holes were you hiding a priest from the other priest

you were

swear you're our only priest it was it was basically a bluff if they come in and they find your priest hole

you've got a priest hole and you'd be like yeah but there's no priest in it then they leave and you open up the second hole and you're like you're right you wouldn't you wouldn't put the shitter priest in the in the you might put the shitter priest in the outer hole and think, well, if we lose one priest, that's fine.

You got it.

That's it for this household.

Bye-bye.

Guy who built these holes, he was a Jesuit brother called Nicholas Owen.

He spent 20 years creating the chambers in various houses, you know, hidden walls, hidden compartments, everything.

He was caught and tortured for it.

He is now the patron saint of illusionists.

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It's time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the Oscar-winning movie, The Summer of 42, is the only movie to be based on a novel that was written after the movie was made.

What?

What?

Explain.

Time travelers, everybody.

That's what I'm talking about.

No, so this was a big movie in its day.

It was called Summer of 42.

And there was a writer called Herman Rorscher who wrote the movie.

The movie went into production.

It was being made.

And then, as often happens, novelizations of the movie are written.

So Herman Rorscher wrote his own novelization of the screenplay.

They released it prior to the movie coming out, but it became such a massive hit as a book that everyone started going, oh my god, they're making a movie of this book, even though the book was of the movie.

And then the people within Hollywood went, well, let's roll with that.

So the movie was billed as based on the book.

Summer of 42 by Herman Rauscher.

And so it was very confusing because it got nominated for a bunch of Oscars.

It won an Oscar.

It was not nominated for best adapted screenplay.

It was just outright screenplay because they knew inside.

But yeah, so it's one example where the popularity of the second product was so big that it eclipsed.

The only example.

There's not pretending it all conjured.

No, yeah, maybe you're right.

It's pretty amazing.

Was it 1942?

When was it?

No, the summer 42.

This was a 1970s movie, in the 70s.

Yeah, I feel like, just to interrupt, I feel like Andy might have another example.

Do you?

Step in.

I've got a kind of, it's a kind of example of things getting incredibly tangled with the novel to movie thing.

So Bram Stoker's Dracula was turned into a novel after the film came out.

Was it?

Yeah.

With eight pages of color photos.

They said, let's do it.

Let's do a book of the film of the book.

Got it.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

And great expectations, that was novelized again.

Like, it's a novel.

You don't need, I don't know.

I found it weird.

Dumanji, I love this.

Dumanji was based on a book, right?

By Chris Van Alsberg.

That was turned into a screen story.

which was turned into a screenplay, which was turned into a film, which was then novelized into a novel.

so it started as a book it went through the entire sausage machine and ended up being a different book i want to ask you to repeat that but i will just i'll re-listen when the edit comes out because i didn't follow it the mark of confidence i don't want to i don't want to listen now but yeah

there was one um so robert sheckley a writer wrote a book called the 10th victim in 1965 and that was a novelization and i think novelizations were slightly more respected then because they were they were newer basically so people didn't know they were all going to be shit.

So it was a novelization of an Italian film by the same name called The Tenth Victim, but the film was based on another book by Sheckley called The Seventh Victim.

Okay.

And I know no more about that, actually.

There is a movie that was based on the poster.

As in the poster came first and then the movie first.

Can we guess it?

Because this poster has done so well.

Yes, I think you can guess it, actually.

The screen.

Done.

I said, oh my god, first, which is the equivalent of buzzing in.

Sorry.

And I believe the first person to say, oh my God, was Anna Toshinski.

Is it Scream?

No.

For fuck's sake, Darren, what a stupid,

I reckon the audience might get it.

It's a very iconic poster.

Work of art.

Star Wars, no.

Snakes on a Train, no.

Shrek, Shrek 3, though.

Shrek's based on a book, actually.

Is it?

Yeah.

It's...

Jaws?

No, the answer is the usual suspects.

Oh,

and apparently, a reporter at the Sundance Film Festival asked the guy Macquarie who was making it, he said, What's your next movie?

And he had this idea of these people lined up, and he said, Oh, I guess it's about a bunch of criminals who met at a police lineup or something.

And then, because he had the idea of the image first, and then he thought, Well, how are we going to turn this into a movie?

Yeah, right.

I've never heard of this example I'm going to mention.

So, when we just said to the audience, name, someone said Star Wars out there, right?

Okay, so when A New Hope came out, there was so much money that was behind that first movie.

And they were hoping that George Lucas was going to write the second movie, which became Empire Strike Back, right?

So the novelization of A New Hope was written in 1976 by a guy called Alan Dean Foster.

And he was contracted to do two books in case the first movie bombed and they couldn't produce George Lucas's next movie.

So So Alan Dean Foster, the novelization guy, write a sequel using all the props that we used in the first movie so that we can make your novelization instead of George Lucas' idea for Empire Strikes Back.

Wait, I don't understand.

In case George Lucas's didn't work.

Because they could save the money because they already have the props.

Exactly.

So if it didn't work, if that first movie didn't work, we were going to get a second movie called Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

And it was published before Empire Strikes Back came out.

And it has a completely different plot.

It's based on a jungle planet.

Han Solo and Chewbacca are not in it because Harrison Ford hadn't signed up for the second movie yet.

So they didn't want to include him.

But no one had told Alan Dean Foster at this point that Leia and Luke were brother and sister.

Spoilers, Dan, sorry.

Sorry.

So the whole book is sexual tension between brother and sister.

And I've got some extracts.

Luke felt the warmth of the body next to him framed in the light from above.

The princess looked more radiant than ever.

Leia, he began.

I,

and then pulls out, but not pulls out in that respect.

Oh, for shape.

Yeah.

Come on.

The princess grew aware of how tightly she was clinging to him.

The proximity engendered a wash of confused emotion.

It would be proper to disengage, to move away a little, proper, but not nearly so satisfying.

And then Empire Strikes Back came out, and and Alan Dean Foster was like, what the fuck, George?

I've written an incest novel.

He is amazing, Alan Dean Foster.

But with Star Wars, they refused to show him what anything looked like.

They refused to even tell him what anything was, really.

So he had to write the character Jabber the Hut without knowing whether he was a human or a massive slug.

And so he just fudges it in the text.

And this happened with, like, he did the novel of the film Alien.

And again, they refused to send him any pictures of the alien because they were keeping it under reps.

So he just had to kind of...

Jabber the heart is just a combination of a human and a massive slug, right?

Oh, Anna.

No, he's a massive slug.

Oh, right, but with a human face.

No, he doesn't have a cute face.

But he doesn't have a slug's face, I'll say that.

Maybe I know some weird-looking people.

Okay, sorry.

He's just a slug.

Got it.

Didn't know that.

Oh, he's a sort of space.

Anyway, he's a space slug.

But he has done absolutely everything, Alan Dean Foster.

He's done Star Trek, he's done Transformers, Terminator.

His first job was for an Italian Lady Tarzan movie, right?

Which was in Italian, no subtitles available.

So he had to completely like

guess what was happening throughout the movie.

Well, I mean, what's Italian for?

But he did exactly what your guy did, James.

He based it on some production paintings.

Oh, yeah.

Turned that into the novel.

And when the book came out, someone from Disney said, we love this book.

Can we turn it into a film?

And he said, no, it's a film already.

It's an Italian Lady Tarzan film.

I I didn't know that Star Wars left the EU.

Sorry.

This is actually, this is like being within the bubble.

So every single listener to this podcast will know this, except me, until yesterday.

But the EU, of course, is the expanded universe, which I didn't know that that was.

What are you talking about?

Yeah, the expanded universe of any film is the...

It's when you do a video game or you do a novel.

It's the expanded non-canon movie, but it's still canon.

So, oh, like the spin-off novels and all that other shit.

And the phrase expanded universe was invented for Star Wars

and it left the EU in 2012.

And I just think it's very interesting that Star Wars is now divided into sort of two different quantum realities.

So, what do you mean it left the EU?

Well, I mean that George Lucas made three more films.

Yes, and they are mostly about trade negotiations, actually.

So, it's kind of perfect that this is the EU.

Help me, Boris Johnson.

You're my only hope.

I'm a giant slug.

Why you tell me then?

With a human face.

This is what we're talking about.

And it was incredibly controversial amongst Star Wars fans because...

People had been told when the first three Star Wars films came out that the only subsequent films would be prequels, which they were, right?

The next three were prequels.

So everyone who was writing in the expanded universe, novels and comic books and stuff like that, were writing sequels, the stuff that happens after the first three films.

Then, of course, Disney took over 2012 and released the next three, which, correct me if I'm wrong, are sequels, right?

They happen, the events happen after.

So that completely fucked with the Star Wars universe.

And so they split into two universes now.

They've left the EU.

In 2011, the distributor of the film Drive, you know the film Drive?

Yeah.

Ryan Gosling.

Ryan Gosling.

Right.

Was sued by a woman from Michigan called Sarah Deming for saying it didn't contain enough driving.

She's sued, saying it bore very little similarity to a chase or race action film, having very little driving in the motion picture.

Is he in the car the whole time?

He's in the car a lot of the time.

But it's more in the first half.

The second half is a bit more depressing and a bit less driving-based.

How much did she sue for?

Oh, probably some standard American amount, like $5 zillion.

Anyway, I don't think she won.

It wasn't successful.

But you can sue based on trailers, can't you?

Can you?

There was that film yesterday, which was a Richard Curtis film about what if the Beatles never existed, but only one guy remembered them.

That was sued by a couple of fans

because the trailer had featured Anna de Armas, who's a famous actress, and then she wasn't in the final film.

And they had paid $3.99 each to watch this film on Amazon Prime.

So naturally, they sued for $5 million.

Wow.

I think she is in the final film.

Well, I think she's...

I think she's on the chat show bit.

She's drastically cut because she was a much bigger part of it.

Because she was basically cut from the final film, it's like she never existed, and these two losers are the only people who remember her, which is the plot, which is the plot.

Oh my god!

Yes!

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Perth, you were awesome.

We will be back again.

And until then, tune in next week for another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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