551: No Such Thing As President Iceberg

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winner, best book.

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Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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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 Glasgow.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that according to DNA analysis, Beethoven wasn't very musical.

Is that saying something about Beethoven or about DNA analysis and how useful it sort of is not?

We might come to Beethoven.

In fact, I'm sure we will.

But this is basically a study where they looked at Beethoven's DNA and they looked at the DNA of a load of students in a couple of universities, one in Tennessee and one in the Netherlands.

And what they were saying is that DNA tests can't really give much to historical people and tell you about their characters, really.

It's kind of a warning against that.

But in actual fact, Beethoven, well, he wasn't like Mozart.

Like Mozart, when he was age four, could play incredible pieces.

But Beethoven was on a tune.

He could not write a tune.

No, he wasn't really.

I like him.

I don't love him.

I like him, but he could not write a melody to save himself.

And I bet he'd say he was above that.

You know, when you get avant-garde pop stars who say, I don't write the catchy songs because they're beneath me.

Lots of them perform in Glasgow, actually.

Wait, so we've got.

Yes, all of Beethoven's very uncatchy tunes, like da-da-da-da.

Oh, come on.

Yeah.

That's the only one.

It's a pretty solid career.

I'm sorry, I disagree with that completely.

Just on this study of Beethoven, the sort of DNA that they studied, they had a lock of hair from Beethoven.

And in fact, they had eight locks of hair.

This was really exciting.

But only five of them were genetically identical.

Oh,

so what's that?

Three of them were fake.

Oh, they were fake.

He wasn't like some kind of chimera who was half Beethoven, half someone else.

Well, was it the dog Beethoven?

It was the dog Beethoven.

Oh, yeah.

There was one lock of hair which turned out to be from a woman, and that was the one that said, oh, you've got terrible lead poisoning, so that's not true.

But the thing they found, which is exciting, is that they've studied some modern Beethovens and they studied the identical locks of hair from him, and they found that the Y chromosome is different between the two.

And what that means is that in his family line, somewhere, there is an extra-pair paternity event.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Oh, someone's been playing a false note.

Yes.

Dave Grohl of his day.

Wow.

Can I ask, do we know if it was headhair or hand hair?

I don't know.

I assume head hair.

Yeah, I'm assuming head hair as well.

Not everyone's hands are as pursuit as yours are, Dad.

Well, mine, I've got a bit of hair, but like apparently he was like, he looked like Wolfman, according to some reports I read.

Yeah.

And so if you were going to see if he was musically talented, maybe it was more on the hand hair than it was the head hair.

Because that's where the genes would be.

They would be in the fingers there, wouldn't they?

Were these the hairs that

I mean, I don't know where these ones came from, but I know about one person who stashed a load of Beethoven hair.

A musician called Ferdinand Hiller, who, and when you were a fanboy in the olden days, you snipped hair off dead people that you liked.

Was that from him?

And what I like about this is that every strand of hair was counted.

It was 582 strands, and they were bought by a urologist.

And do you remember?

Oh, yes, yeah.

He's the guy with most, he gets constantly approached to get DNA analysis done on the strands of hair that he has.

He does, but wait, wasn't it also a urologist who collected Napoleon's penis?

Yes, it was.

Yes, urologists, something weird about them.

Wow.

That's interesting.

Anyway, could you in theory, with the Beethoven hair that we have, could you stretch them and make a sort of very tiny piano using the hair as...

I don't think so.

I think they'd snap.

But a tiny piano.

Yeah, come on, James.

No one's going to hold you to this if you say it's possible.

I just think if I say it, then Nan is on our next target.

I go, where's my fucking piano?

Yeah, okay.

Sure.

There we go.

You've just made him happy.

There we go.

Can we talk about Beethoven?

He's kind of enjoying the whole piano.

I'm sorry.

No, no, go on.

What were you going to say?

Him going deaf.

Oh, yeah.

Going deaf.

By the age of 30, he could not hear conversation.

And that was at a period where he was composing most of his most amazing music.

And this just is so interesting because...

One of the things he did was we know how he communicated because he had conversation books.

This is so interesting that they survive.

So what's that?

Well, if you're Beethoven, you carry a notebook.

Okay.

And if someone wants to ask you a question, they write it down in your notebook and then you answer it.

So we have a list of questions that Beethoven was asked, and we don't have any of his answers.

It's exactly the wrong way around.

And sometimes we have his shopping list as well.

That is less revealing about the mind of a genius.

And then the thing was, he had a secretary called Anton Schindler, who became kind of the keeper of his flame.

And he was his first biographer.

And he was very, very much, he sort of wanted to keep this to himself.

So he would answer the door wearing Beethoven's old dressing gown.

Pretty creepy.

But what we also found was he had a lot of these conversation books.

And if he found a blank page in one of them, he would just forge an entry himself.

Oh, this is really quite frustrating for biographers because they've only just done handwriting analysis and worked out, oh, yeah, some of this is lies that were never asked for.

But I guess, yeah, he is only forging the questions.

Yes.

Unless he's writing an interesting shopping list.

Well, they might be.

They can tell a lot of shopping lists.

And actually, you can lead a lot from the conversation books by what the people are asking him.

Like, there's a really nice one.

He was very, very close to his nephew.

We might go on to talk about his relationship with Carl, his nephew.

But he was very close to Carl, and they were in a restaurant one day.

And this is in 1818, which is when he just started to do these conversation books.

And we have Carl's question to him: Just because you eat sausages by taking the casing off and only eating the meat inside, it doesn't mean I have to.

You see?

And Beethoven said, That's not a question.

That's rich.

He did have, you compared him to Mozart, James, and he did have this sort of sad relationship with Mozart or connection to Mozart, because, you know, Mozart, very famously, child prodigy, very pushy dad.

And Beethoven's dad really wanted Beethoven to be the next Mozart.

He was a guy called Johan, he was a court musician, so he expected that one of his kids would go into music.

He realized Beethoven was quite good, but he used to lock him in the basement.

He'd drag him out of bed in the middle of the night and force him to play piano over and over again.

He, you know, he beat him a lot.

He was a very unpleasant person, it sounds like, desperate to make him rich and famous because of being so talented.

And also, he convinced Beethoven that he was two years younger than he was.

So for years of his life, Beethoven thought that he was born in 1772 because his dad was so desperate to make him this child prodigy.

There's a story that he did meet Beethoven as well, that he was presented to him Yeah,

and Mozart was really pissed off that he was having to break away from his personal writing to meet this kid that everyone was saying, oh, he might be really good.

He sits down and he starts playing a piece by Mozart to him.

And Mozart says, stop that.

I want to hear what you've got.

And he plays a little original piece.

And supposedly, Mozart did the old, you got it, kid.

And everyone was like, whoa, he's got it.

And so that was like a seal of approval kind of thing.

Yeah, he said, watch out for this guy.

We're still in Vienna, aren't we?

It feels like we've moved to California at some stage.

No, you know, like when Billy Joel brings someone up to play the piano and afterwards, he's like, watch out for this guy.

He's going to be making...

No, you don't watch YouTube clips like that?

Okay.

Are you saying Denise Mozart said that to literally everyone?

Every kid who came along went, watch out for this guy.

Well, this guy.

So he did nine symphonies, didn't he?

And the ninth one was the one when he was really deaf and he was conducting.

And there was another conductor on the side because he was conducting.

He couldn't hear what was happening.

So he's just basically waving his arms.

And all of the people in the orchestra were told to watch the other guy, basically.

And then, as soon as the symphony finished, he was carrying on conducting because he didn't realize it had finished.

What a shame!

It's tragic.

If you just had to follow what he was doing, you would have got an original Beethoven piece and it would have just kept going and kept going.

And that would have been one of the most amazing nights of music ever.

You say that?

Yeah.

One of the worst nights of live music ever

was

in 1808, Christmas in Vienna, picture the scene.

Oh, it's frosty, sparkling, it's beautiful, these incredible buildings everywhere.

It was the marathon performance of Beethoven's new stuff.

And

we're talking the premiere of Beethoven's fifth, da-da-da-da.

Premiere of the sixth.

No gap.

Just straight on through.

Here's another symphony.

Choral fantasy.

Another piano concerto.

Four hours of music.

Oh my God.

Bit long.

It's like when Stuart Lee does back-to-back shows in one evening.

It was a complete disaster on the night because all the best musicians in town had a rival booking, so they couldn't come and play.

So the orchestra was a bit of a scratch job.

And it was extremely cold.

The critics hated it.

One piece, they hadn't rehearsed it enough.

The choir just sang it wrong, and he had to stop the whole gig and say, no, no, no, we need to go back to the beginning.

It was just a total fiasco of it.

Yeah, it was a nightmare.

So then he did his ninth symphony, and then he started his tenth, but he never completed the tenth.

He died before he completed it.

But luckily AI has completed it

in 2021.

And the piece had its world premiere in Bonn in Germany.

Apparently it's very good.

Unfortunately, you need six fingers to play it.

Any goods?

What are the critics saying?

Yeah, they still hate it.

Sounds a bit like Beethoven.

Fine.

What a review.

That's what you want.

Beethoven, by the way, his name means vegetable garden.

Cool.

And his full name, Ludwig van Beethoven, means loud fight in the vegetable garden.

Which is what a lot of his music sounds like.

No, I think he's brilliant.

He just doesn't write melody.

But do you know what his last words were?

Aren't they the two versions of it or something?

So Beethoven famously died during a thunderstorm.

Quite cool, quite classic, Beethoven.

And his last words were, pity, pity, too late, because he'd just been informed that he'd received a gift from his publisher of 12 bottles of wine.

Which...

I know the saddest thing about his life.

They won't be your last words.

Start opening them now.

Let them breathe.

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

My fact is that one of Scotland's most eminent 19th century illustrators was called Willie Hull.

Go.

That's him there.

And there he is in all his glory.

Why is that interesting, Andy?

Why is that interesting?

I think

he's an under-celebrated artist.

Okay, yeah.

And you're bringing him to life tonight.

Absolutely.

I think this is the most immature fact.

Anybody see me dogged.

And you know what?

I thought it would be James.

My money was on James for the fact that it's just a rude name.

I'm sorry.

I do feel a bit ashamed.

But I also feel thrilled that we can talk about him.

He was called William Hull.

But in day-to-day life, who's who's got the time?

I'll challenge you, Anna, for a more childish fact.

His dad was called Dick Hull.

Yes.

Oh, true.

He had a name Richard Brassy Hull.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And his mother was called Anne Byrne Hull.

This family just had it stitched up.

Yeah.

How many people here, they didn't have it stitched up?

Sorry.

Who here has heard of Willie Hall?

And shame, shame, shame on you.

Wildly.

Just imagine if there'd just been a roar of recognition for Lilly Hill.

He was quite obscure illustrators.

At the time, he was very eminent.

He was a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

He illustrated books for Robert Burns, for J.M.

Barry, Robert Louis Stevenson.

I know they weren't all alive at the same time, but he was alive at the time.

He lived from 1846 to 1917.

And, you know, I just think undercelebrated.

And don't confuse him with another Willie Hull, who was the person who designed all of England's coins under James I

yes yes and he proto Willy Hole he was amazing because I think was it him James who yeah it would have been the same time he invented the colouring inbook

he really published this series of maps there was this poem called Polyolbion which was about all the parts of England and Scotland and it was there was the beautiful maps of you know like weird things the rivers were all on there and there are weird sort of mythical beasts all over the map and it was fashionable to hand colour your own maps back in the day.

And that was a big trend in the 1620s.

Gentlemen's manuals said, you know, if you're going to be a proper gentleman, you've got to know how to colour in.

Right.

That's amazing.

Don't go over the lines if you want an eligible lady to marry you.

Yeah.

We also shouldn't forget William J.

Hull, Willie Hull Jr., the American film director, mainly known for his B movies.

Really amazing.

He did a movie called Hellbound, which he made for producer Howard Koch.

Yeah, and then he did Speed Crazy Crazy in 1959, which starred Charles Wilcox.

So this is just going to be us all listing people with rude names, is it?

Well, I actually looked to the Wikipedia list that's called

other people who are called Willie.

And

yeah, there's over 218 notable Willies out there.

You've got the professional golfer in America called Willie Tucker.

Lovely.

There's...

And does that help in golf?

James, you play golf?

It can get in the way of your swings.

There's the Austrian footballer called Willie Fitz.

There's the Kenyan runner called Willie Cumming.

Brilliant.

Superb.

That's all my research at the time.

The history of illustration.

Now.

Yeah, I've got some quite dry stuff on the difference between a wood block and a wood cutting.

That's what we want.

But no, this was.

So William Hall was at the tail end of a period where basically illustration was the only means of getting any visual information to anyone else.

As in.

There was no YouTube, no TikTok, there was no TikTok.

Uh, that was in the 1870s after his period.

No, and basically, it was it was hugely important and hugely legally contentious as well.

Oh, really?

So, yeah, I was reading about James Gilray, who was the sort of the most famous artist of the early 19th century, who did caricatures, but they were so offensive and insulting that he was charged with blasphemy.

Wow.

That was, he drew the wise men, and he was charged with blasphemy.

Actually, the real reason was that the Prince of Wales was clearly in the picture being, you know, as one of the wise men or just like popping up behind, like he's photo-bombed.

There was a disgusting baby in there, and you know, there was all sorts of...

Jesus, I mean, sorry, in the drawing.

Turkey might be arrested for blasphemy.

Sorry.

In the satirical drawing.

I'm not afraid of blasphemy charges, am I?

But basically, and you know, he was interviewed by George Canning, who was later the Prime Minister, saying,

Look,

I want a caricature of me.

And so the charge against him, the blasphemy charge, was was dropped and he was given a government pension.

Gilray is the man who was responsible for everyone thinking that Napoleon was short.

Oh, really?

Because he drew him short.

Napoleon was normal height.

It's entirely thanks to someone drawing him 200 years ago that we think Napoleon Bonaparte was short.

That's so interesting.

So that's the power these images had, just repeated and amplified and caricatured.

What an influence.

So Willie Hall, he did caricatures of quite famous people, right?

Like he did, I think, J.M.

Barry and a few people like that.

I think he mostly did the work, as in he mostly would, J.M.

and Barry's books he would illustrate.

So not the authors.

I don't think so.

He illustrated Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde for Robert Louis Stevenson and Kidnapped.

I read that Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde was written in six days and six nights while Louis Stevenson was on a cocaine bender.

Oh, yeah.

And

according to RobertLouisStevenson.com, that's a myth.

Oh, well, they would say that would

feels like it.

They said that he was on medication,

but there's no evidence that he took cocaine for recreational purposes.

Willie Hole's grandmother or great-grandmother was Jamaican.

Okay.

It's very just unusual to have a mixed-race couple in the 1790s.

But his Scottish father married a Jamaican woman in the 1790s.

And the resulting child went on to be the first student of African descent at the University of Edinburgh and then governor of Sierra Leone.

And that's that's Willie Hole.

That's my Willie Hole facts.

It's good.

It's not about a funny name.

But we're all learning.

But we're all

learning something.

Can I tell you maybe my favorite artist of the period?

So

George Cruikshank, right?

Again, hugely influential caricaturist, satirist, drew outrageous things.

He once got a bribe of a hundred quid from the king himself, saying, Please do not caricature his majesty in any immoral situation.

So that's how powerful he was at the time.

Imagine if the current king paid, I don't know, Michael McIntyre not to do any jokes jokes about is Michael McIntyre known as the most hardcore political satirist of our day?

Okay, Anton Deck, fine, whatever.

But he was a dreadful guy, Crookshank, in his personal life.

So he ill-treated his wife quite badly.

He was an avowed anti-drink campaigner, right?

So strict, strict, strict, because his father had died of alcohol poisoning.

He'd just won a drinking contest and then died, his father.

Oh, right.

Died happy, though.

Second worst result possible.

That feels like a disqualification after the match, right?

That feels like, well, you've got to live at least a month.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, okay, here's the amazing thing about George Cruikshank, right?

He was on his deathbed.

Yeah.

And he was talking to his wife, who he hadn't been terribly nice to.

And he said, what will become of my children?

And his wife said,

What do you mean your children?

We haven't got any children.

Now he had been married once before.

Uh-huh.

That marriage hadn't produced any children either.

What?

It turned out...

This is spicy gossip time.

It turned out he had been leading a secret double life, and he had a mistress with whom he had had 11 children.

Whoa!

The last of whom was conceived when he was 82 years old.

Can you imagine the number of times you'd have to say, oh, I'm just popping out.

It's so funny.

His obituary said, there never was a purer, simpler, more blameless man.

Something childlike in his transparency.

A week later, the will was read out to which he left all of his money to his mother.

You know, there's only one image of Shakespeare that we have.

Okay, yeah.

It's done by an engraver called Martin Droschut.

He was Flemish, and it's kind of, you'll see it.

Like, if you ever see a picture on an old book of Shakespeare, it's the one that you see, which is like black and white.

And he's got bold, he's got his hair on the sides.

Now, it turns out that Martin Droschart was a terrible, terrible drawer.

Like, he was really, really bad.

And we only have one other portrait that he did, Francisco de la Peña.

And it looks almost identical to the one he did of Shakespeare.

And it seems like he only really knew how to draw one person.

Oh my god.

So we don't know how likely it is that this actually looked like Shakespeare at all.

He actually had a Mohican, according to sources at the time.

Did you know, speaking of the influence that illustrators have, it was an illustrator who invented macaroni.

Or who popularized macaroni.

Okay, the pastor on the penguin.

No, if you're being pedantic, neither the pastor.

It was a like a look, wasn't it?

A dandy, a dandy.

The dandy, yes.

This, so a macaroni in England in the 1770s and 80s was there was a fashion for men to be really effeminate.

They had like huge hair, they particularly had massive hair and then they wore a tiny hat on top, which is just so cool.

And sort of striped stockings and really tight pants and fancy walking sticks, bright colours.

Anyway, there's a woman called Mary Darley.

In fact, it was a husband and wife team, Matthew and Mary Darley, and Mary was the real caricaturer.

She sort of made caricaturing a thing, invented the art of caricaturing, like exaggerating these effects.

And they made their name by having the macaroni print shop on the Strand, where she basically drew caricatures of all these effeminate men, created, popularized the macaroni.

Yeah.

You spoke about dandies before.

Of course, The Dandy is a Scottish illustration of sorts.

What a great link.

Thank you.

Just leapfrogging from the 1760s to the 20th century comic book.

That was very impressive.

Made by D.C.

Thompson.

And D.C.

Thompson is also home to the world's oldest magazine, The Scots Magazine.

And in one of their early issues, they had a first-hand account of the Battle of Culloden.

That's how old that is.

Wait, sorry, that wasn't the first issue of The Dandy.

No, sorry.

Sorry.

That was in a DC Thompson.

Because it's Desperate Dan had been on side.

It could have gone the other way.

Yeah.

What was, can I?

Sorry to be ignorant, but what was the Battle of Cologne?

That is.

Why don't you just ask someone in the street later on?

Okay.

Well, I don't know what's known here.

You don't know who Willie Hole is, but you know that battle?

What's going on?

I'll tell you.

I will tell you later, and I will tell you at some length, but it's really interesting.

On the subject of comics and DC Thompson stuff, I thought we could have a quick game of comic strip or darts nickname.

Oh, amazing.

Because I realise that some of these comic strips have kind of got similar names to the darts player.

It's like Calamity James.

Is a darts player.

No.

Is it a BDA?

So, for instance, Bow and Arrow.

B-E-A-U and Arrow.

Is that the name of a comic?

Or is it the name of a Darts player?

It must be Darts Player because what is a Dart but a tiny arrow?

Well, it's got to be a comic book, otherwise you wouldn't have presented it and tried to trick us into thinking it was a a darts book.

Do you get tag teams in darts?

Do you come?

Is it like

an arrow?

You chuck it halfway along the distance and they lean over and hammer it home.

Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.

No, you lift your arm up and Bo pulls it back,

releases you.

The answer is: it was a double bluff hannah.

It's Bo Graves, who's the current back-to-back two-time ladies world champion.

Okay.

He's a darts player.

Dirty dick.

Oh.

Darts player or...

I feel it's too obscene to be a comic.

I'm going to say darts player.

Yeah.

Dirty Dick.

Comic.

Yeah,

comic.

It was a character from the Dandy, known as a boy who generally is in need of a good scrub.

What about this one?

Master Bates.

I always thought that Master Bates was the myth from Pugwash.

That claimed that it was, but it wasn't Master Bates didn't actually exist.

Yeah, so you're going for Darts Player.

Yeah.

Well, the truth is, technically, it's both.

Because there was a character in Oliver Twist called Bates, who's sometimes called Master Bates, and there is quite a few etchings of Master Bates.

But also, it was the nickname of dance player Owen Bates.

He's known as the Master.

He always has one hand in his pocket when he's playing.

He always has it on his back.

It says Owen the Master Bates.

But when he qualified for the World Championships, they didn't allow him to use it.

You don't want to bring the noble sport of DARS into disrepute.

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

My fact this week is that the title Prince of Thinkers was awarded in France to a philosopher whose greatest published work claimed humans were descended from frogs.

I'm sure you've all, like Willie Hull, have heard of Jean-Pierre Brissette.

This is a guy who was a philosopher.

He was a writer.

He was a thinker.

He was a bit of an outsider.

He lived basically in the same bracket as Willie Hall, by the way, year-wise.

Yeah, Willie Hall was born 1846, died 1917.

Jean-Pierre was 1837 to 1919.

Did they ever meet, do we know?

Oh, good question.

No, they obviously didn't.

Yeah, they didn't.

He was a fascinating guy.

The first thing that he wrote was a thing called Learning the Art of Swimming Alone in Less Than an Hour.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It's basically five illustrations that show you how in the confines of your home, so it's not even within the water, you can just practice moves hundreds and hundreds of times so that when you eventually jump into the water for the first time,

you know how to swim.

If you do it 600 times, basically you know, and then that's it.

It might be that he got his humans are descended from frogs theory, which we should say now is not true.

From well, hang on, it's not, has not yet been proven.

Yeah, thank you.

But because if you view a swimmer from above and they're doing something like breaststroke, they look a bit like a frog.

And so that might have linked frogs and humans together in his mind.

This guy, yeah, we should say he wasn't an actual proper philosopher.

He was a nobody.

But it is quite amazing how famous he sort of became to a niche bunch of people.

So the only reason he became famous was because there was a prank organized by a bunch of kind of the literati artistes led by a guy called Jules Romain

who decided to award this Prince of Thinkers thing.

Jules Romain had come across his book.

I think he'd just been rifling through a library, hadn't he?

And he'd come across his book that was like, humans are descended from frogs.

And the logic was so mad.

So he believed that any words in a language that sounded like other words, that wasn't a coincidence, that told you something very important.

So for instance, the word ren for queen sounds like the old French word renn for frog.

So he was like, okay, frogs must be really important.

He was then walking past a pond when he noticed not only do frogs look a lot like humans in their bodies, so he thought, but they also were saying co-wa, co-wa.

which is French, of course, for what, what?

That's so good.

And the idea being that when frogs finally got self-conscious and understood that they were part of the world, the first thing that they would say is, what?

There you go.

There you go.

It's all very interesting.

We should just quickly go back a second on the Prince of Thinkers thing here, because

it's quite a mean thing that happened.

He was told that this big vote had happened and that he was being made the Prince of Thinkers.

And they brought him into Paris on a train and he was met at the station by a group of people and he was given flowers by children and some poet had written a very special piece specifically for him he was asked to make a speech in front of the rodan's statue the thinker yeah that was his kind of acceptance speech it's unbelievably unkind in hindsight yeah imagine if the most eminent authors in the world invited you dan saying we have like richard osmond's saying it um

dan brown's in there mcewan ishiguro all of the biggies yeah they write to you dan and say

we actually think your book is going to change the world.

It's seminal.

Please come to the British Library and stand in front of the statue of Isaac Newton and make a speech.

And then it turns out it was a prank.

And they actually think the book is rubbish.

Well, that's basically what happened to this guy.

It is cruel.

He never knew.

I can't see any evidence that he ever knew.

And I think they might have felt a bit bad.

So Jules Romaine...

Shit, it's my fault.

He did, then.

It was in the newspapers the next day.

It went too well.

So I think Jules Romain left money for a banquet to be held in in his name every year thereafter.

And it did go on to 1939, possibly because he felt a bit bad about humiliating this guy.

To be honest, reading up on it, I'm a bit confused about what they genuinely thought.

Because if you read Marcel Duchamp writes about it, and he knew of the work of Brissaillo as well, I think they were taking the piss, and it was elaborate, but they were surrealists, and they were doing a surreal thing here.

But I think they admired the thinking.

I think they genuinely thought this guy is a weird thinker and we should be celebrating him.

They were doing all sorts of stuff like that, weren't they?

Yeah, it was like found art kind of thing.

It's like we found this thing, we're going to turn it into art.

We're going to turn it into something special.

I think Richard Osman really liked my book, actually.

But there were quite a lot of these, what are known in English as outsider writers and in French as foux littéraire, like means mad writers.

But there were quite a lot of them at the time.

For instance, there was a guy called Alexis Vincent Charles Berbaguier, Newfoundland, Time, who wrote books about the imps that were following him around.

His surname, Thyme, was chosen because he thought that the thyme, the herb, repelled the imps, and he planned to plant an enormous thyme field so that it would repel all of the imps.

So that was one of them.

I did read about him because he read that the imps and the leprechauns that followed him around made him sneeze and fart enormously.

And that was a huge problem.

No, it's not me, it was the imps.

He wants to buy himself a dog.

There was a guy called Raymond Russell who wrote these really long poems but instead of rhyming each line was kind of related to the previous one by the words.

So you might have a line which is about a dog and the next one's about a bog and the next one's about a bot and like that.

But they're really, really, really long.

It would have footnotes explaining what he'd done to make that line that was related to the previous line.

And his footnotes could have footnotes.

And that could go like five footnotes deep for all of it so it was all footnotes the David Foster Wallace of his time and equally tedious but according to the French Wikipedia perhaps not surprisingly Roussel was unpopular during his life and critical reception of his works was almost unanimously negative

yeah but there's loads of them around I think it was just like pretty much anyone could get stuff printed yeah

but I feel like a lot of them were self-con they were self-conscious they were often rich white men yeah yeah and they knew what they were doing whereas this guy didn't I've I found something quite random about Brisset, which is that, so he was in the army, and I think something quite odd about him, and this is often surprising today about people who hold very strange beliefs.

Dan, you know a lot of these people.

They function very normally in the rest of their life.

And so he, as we've said, he worked on the railways.

They did try to sack him a few times from the railways because he did have some quite strange ideas that they attributed to a head wound from being in the army.

What did he have from all the ideas?

Well, there were a lot of the stuff we've just talked about, about how all humans are descended from frogs, that kind of thing.

Oh, he talked about that.

That's a train specific.

Yeah, it made it sound like he was saying the trains should all run.

Sorry, he made the trains run fine.

He just kept on whanging on about this whole humans from frogs idea.

But he was wounded in 1859 at the Battle of Magenta, which was a battle of France and Italy versus Austria.

It was a huge success and victory for the French, and I just didn't know that that's where the colour comes from.

From the battle.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

So it was this big success, the Battle of Magenta, Magenta, for the French.

And at the same time, a French chemist produced the colour that they called Fushina.

And then they were like, hang on, we've just had this big victory.

Do you mind if we rename that magenta?

What colour is magenta again?

What colour?

The one in the printer that always runs out, even though you never use it.

Thank you.

Hello, old friend.

Okay.

Language.

How we got language in the first place.

Oh, yeah.

The theory, the theory, because the 19th century was a time when lots of people were trying to work out how did we get language?

And the theories were fantastic.

Yeah, it was because we just had the theory of evolution had come in with Darwin and people thought, well, surely language must have evolved in the same way, so can we fill in some of the gaps?

Yeah, exactly.

So the bow wow theory.

We came from dogs.

We came from dogs?

No, it's the language comes from animal sounds and that humans started language off by doing impressions of animals

to communicate with each other.

So for example, James, I've got if we don't have language, I've got no way of saying there's a dog behind you unless I say woof.

Right?

Sure.

But how do you say it to someone in another country that doesn't know the word woof?

Like, because in English we say woof, but dogs don't objectively say woof, and they don't say bow wow.

And in all different countries, they say different things.

Yeah, but I'd go, oh,

you would know there was a dog behind you.

We're in the same room.

This is 30,000 years ago.

We're Neanderthals.

We're Neanderthals.

And the guy who came up with this was a guy called, I love this, Johan Herder.

Oh, yeah.

What do dogs do?

Has he worked out what he thinks the words have evolved into?

Like, what does that, wow, wow, wow, what does that become?

I don't know enough of what this is.

Late 18th century, so I haven't read enough of his stuff.

I think it was that you start off with

and then eventually you get to woof.

And then, like,

you know,

a few more steps I'm not going to spell out, and then we've got this podcast.

Do you know what dogs say in Burma, just while we're on this subject?

What do dogs say in Burma?

They say, woke, woke, woke, woke.

Like a GB news presenter.

Because they're pissed off everyone's calling it Myanmar, aren't they?

Listen, Andy.

That's the best Burma Myanmar joke you'll hear on this day for weeks.

How much do we believe him?

Because I believe this theory 100% right now.

This sounds like the most sensible thing I've ever heard on this podcast.

It's the first thing that kids do.

Like, you're speaking to your kid, you teach them the noises that animals make.

Of course, language came from there.

But what about the yo-hi-ho theory?

What's the Yo-Holy?

Oh, hang on, because this sounds better.

We all evolve from pirates?

Basically.

Basically, yeah, this is Edward Burnett Tyler in 1871 proposed that language evolve when you're doing manual labor together, you might be rowing, you might be hauling logs, and you have to say, row, row, or yo-hi-ho, or whatever.

And that gradually evolves into more complicated structures.

But it's basically you need some kind of shared sound that we all make when we're pulling a log.

There's also the poo-poo theory.

Oh, what is the poo-poo?

The poo-poo theory is that it comes from automatic responses from disgust or happiness or something.

So you see something, you go,

you just make that automatically, it's not a word, and then eventually words evolve from that.

I think it's the woof-woof thing.

There's a very famous philosopher and linguist called Ferdinand de Saussure,

who you've all heard of, as had I before I started researching for this, of course.

But

he's one of the founders of linguistics, apparently.

Anyway, so he's very well respected.

He died in 1913.

Sometime after he died, eight cardboard boxes were found that belonged to him that showed he was obsessed with the idea that all of classical literature had hidden anagrams within it.

And people still talk about this.

People still kind of write papers about what this means and whether it's justifiable.

But he just got obsessed with like the idea there are all these weird anagrams and phoneme matching and patterns in classical literature.

It's really interesting.

It's so weird about finding the patterns.

It's the same with Brisset, I guess, because he said, okay, we've all evolved from frogs, and these frogs say croix,

and then that goes into what in French.

But he kind of assumes that French is the original language, right?

Yeah, that's the big problem with this theory.

Well, he says it, but what's the nickname for the French?

Frogs.

Oh,

I'm just saying.

Holy shit, maybe there's some.

Have I just blown this shit wide open?

Blown this shit wide open.

We need to move on to our final fact of the show.

All right.

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

My fact this week is that in 1968, a pig was nominated as a U.S.

presidential candidate, but was arrested in the middle of his acceptance speech.

When we are saying his acceptance speech.

They're very eloquent pigs, if you would just listen.

This...

Yeah.

Don't say, oh, yeah, that made sense, Doug.

Honestly, I was thinking of the pig from Babe, and I was like,

he was eloquent.

It wasn't that pig.

It was a different pig.

This is a pig called Pigasus, and he was

a presidential candidate of the Yippies, which were a political party slash incohate group of late 1960s, sort of activist dissenters who sort of didn't like the war in Vietnam, as no one did.

And they made a big fuss about it.

And one of the big fusses they made was this was two days before the big Democrat conference national convention and they showed up they called a press conference and they rocked up with this pig candidate and one of their leaders Jerry Rubin started to do the acceptance speech on the pig's behalf because the pig was very shy and

interrupted halfway through by the police who genuinely arrested all the candidates including the pig and took them away.

I read a rumor that he was subsequently eaten by one of the police officers.

Yeah, I heard that as well.

That's a rumor.

I don't think it is and the reason I don't think it is, is that it's quite difficult to just go from a live pig in your possession to it being on your dining room table.

You've got to have kit, haven't you?

You've got to have the gear.

Actually, I read a different rumor that he was married off and taken to a farm to live with Mrs.

Pigasus, which is a nice one.

That's a nice one.

Yeah, and I think that's plausible as well.

Probably somewhere in between, is the truth.

Probably rehoused and then eventually eaten.

Yeah.

There we go.

Well, I read a further rumor that months, like five months after this incident, the Yippies held an honorary, what they called, inhoguration for Pegasus.

Lovely.

Yeah.

It's all great stuff.

It's good stuff.

I think they were...

fun.

Protesters had quite a lot of fun in the 60s as well as being very angry.

Well, this is Flower Power, if you want to put a name that's connected to it.

Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, they were all part of this big moment of saying anti-war and peace is needed.

But they were pranksters and they were also pulling stunts like this to sort of get themselves in enough trouble that it made a statement.

But nothing, you know, bringing a pig to a nomination is not really.

It wasn't even in the building, you know, it was sort of easy to go.

They were nicknamed the Groucho Marxists.

But

the Yippies, as they got called, this was, it stood for the Youth International Party, but actually...

they were named because one of their founders, a guy called Krasner, was going through the alphabet for words that rhymed with hippie and eventually got to like almost the last gasp, he got to yippie.

He thought, well, yeah, we could make that stand for Youth International Party if we, you know, mangled it a bit.

Yeah.

And so they didn't get the name first and then come up with the acronym.

They came up with the acronym first and then backformed it.

Yeah.

And they did take it seriously as well as being pranksters.

Like the whole pig thing, there was a big argument about it.

So I guess the three main people were Abby and Anita Hoffman, who were a couple, and Jerry Rubin.

And Abby and Anita Hoffman bought the first pig for this big press conference and presented it to Jerry Rubin, who rejected the pig out of hand, was furious, said, This is too small, it's too attractive.

We need a big pig, we need an ugly pig.

And he had to himself.

I've got another picture here.

He's not that.

I've seen bigger pigs.

I've seen ugly pigs.

I agree.

It's an attractive pig to my eyes, but it was supposed to represent sort of political power of the day, I suppose.

And that was ugly.

So

that's the satire there.

The other thing they did very famously was walk to the Pentagon and try and levitate it.

Yeah, that's right.

It's really interesting.

When you speak to people who were on this march, and there was a lot of them, most of them say, yeah, we were just going for a long for the fun and you know, we weren't really going to levitate it.

And then some of them...

admittedly who were kind of off their tits on LSD, they actually thought they were going to levitate it.

I genuinely think some of them thought they were.

Yeah, they thought they were going to send psychic energy towards it until the building itself turned orange with the energy and vibration and then it would slowly levitate and And they were going to do it by psychic energy, Tibetan chance.

And as you say, they knew it was a joke, but then there were people that thought, well, if enough of us did it, maybe this would actually work.

And it was, you know, I mean, the names that keep cropping up, if you know your counterculture America well, this is...

Wait, what happened?

Sorry.

Oh, yeah, so it lifted up.

It turned orange.

It's still there.

It's still in the air now.

It's a nightmare.

You got to get in by ladder.

It's insane.

Nothing happened, Andy.

It didn't work.

Sorry.

Well, Alan Ginsberg, who's one of these counterculture guys,

he said the Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people's minds.

Yeah, that's such a crap excuse.

That's like my facts on this show.

It is true if you just believe hard enough.

Hoffman, by the way, I'm saying that he was sort of part of a peaceful movement and so on, but you know, he did write a very infamous book, which was called Steal This Book.

Kind of like the Anakis Cook book.

It had a lot of stuff in there that you don't want people reading.

You know, there was bomb making, that kind of stuff in order to.

But it was largely a book about how can you help with the troubles that are going on?

How can you make a point, but have little hacks to get through it.

So, for example, if you need to talk to a large crowd, don't spend ages like doing what we have like here, you know, like

booking a theater, all that stuff.

There's a lot of money, you know, go to a show where there's a theater booked and before the show starts, jump on stage.

They've got a PA system.

Just use what they're using and go and don't do it here, obviously, Glasgow.

But that's what what his suggestion was and always do it prior to a show because you don't want to preach to people who are going to get angry at you for interrupting a show that's fine that's not too dangerous the bomb-making stuff is bad but I think interrupting someone's show yeah

I'm okay with that no arguably the most dangerous thing about the book was it's called steal this book encouraging everyone to not pay for it in the shops that they were and that's what they did did it happen yeah it did get stolen it did get stolen he should have called it buy this book Or buy 10 copies of this book.

Yes.

I think that might have defeated his object, while yes, making him some more money, James.

I think he did call his autobiography something like Coming to a Theatre Near You or something like that, soon to be adapted into cinema.

Yeah, so he did have titles like that.

I think on the last page of the book, it has a list of other books worth stealing.

Nice.

Oh, that's nice.

Oh, I thought you were about to list all of our books there as a bit of sly publicity, but no, okay.

They invaded Disneyland in 1970.

They managed a huge victory there.

That night, Disneyland had to close slightly early.

Wow.

Take that, the man.

But it supposedly, Andy, was only the second time in Disney's history where they had to shut and get everyone out in order to deal with the situation.

So for Disney, it was a big deal because they were going to liberate Minnie Mouse.

They were staying on Tom Sawyer's Island.

They wanted to liberate Minnie Mouse and cook Porky Pig.

Again, another very pig-based...

They clearly turned to violence by this point.

It's just two years after they were being nice to pigs.

But you're missing the main thing about that.

Porky Pig's not a Disney character, so it's not even there.

So they got there and there was no Porky Pig.

You've got to know your genre,

your brand.

Hoffman, played by Sasha Baron Cohen quite recently, if anyone's ever seen the film, The Trial of the Chicago 7.

And very confusing.

So The Trial of the Chicago 7 was basically there was a huge riot and they were all put on trial, these guys.

And Hoffman and Rubin went into court wearing judicial robes, basically disguised as the judge.

This was even more confusing given that the judge was also called Hoffman.

And then, so confusingly, Ruben, the other one, went on to meet a nemesis.

He moved to Miami and he decided to lead this thing to occupy a golf course for one to achieve one of his aims with a bunch of people.

And he met his nemesis, who was also called Ruben.

So it was Ruben versus Ruben, faced off against each other in this church in Miami.

And then he turned into a stockbroker.

And they went on tars with Yippie versus Yippie, didn't they?

They did.

This is after Jerry Rubin became this big shot stockbroker and kept saying, but it's good.

It's all part of the be good plan.

What's a yuppie again?

What's that defined?

Obviously mobile professional person.

Yeah.

Someone from the 80s with a big mobile phone.

Yeah, okay, right.

So they, Anita and Abby Hoffman had a child that they called America.

America with a small A because they didn't want him to be pretentious.

But actually, it does seem okay, actually.

That'll come across really well over the phone, won't it?

No, no, no.

He later changed his name to Alan.

Still with a small A?

No, he's now half Alan and half America, because he's changed his name back to America, but he's kept the capital A from Alan.

General political protests?

Yeah, sure.

Now's not the time, Andy.

I've gathered us all here for a reason.

No, I was just reading about other protests of various kinds.

So pig-based protests actually specifically I started looking into.

There was one in Taiwan a few years ago.

It was a big debate.

Do we let in American pork which has been treated with this particular chemical?

It's banned in lots of countries.

Anyway, this was the report from, I think, the New York Times.

Members of the Kuomintang on Friday threw pig hearts, intestines, lungs, and other innards.

This is in Parliament.

Just Parliament became a like a...

What's it called?

Mardi Grada tomato.

What's the tomato thing?

Oh, tomatina.

Yeah, it was like that, but with pig hearts.

And they threw other innards, leaving the chamber's crimson carpet streaked with ropey strands of intestine and milky viscera.

Some lawmakers donned rain jackets, others brawled in business suits soiled by what appeared to be bits of pig fat.

So, you know, just when you think our politicians are bad, that's.

No, that's great.

We could do with more of that.

We would all tune into BBC Parliament if we were expecting offal to be hurled around.

That is true.

Similarly, in 1975, there was a group of vegetarians in Michigan that protested McDonald's.

It was a two-floor McDonald's.

They went to the top floor and all vomited onto the people below.

On command.

They all downed a mixture of mustard and water and then immediately vomited.

Wow.

But not in unison, right?

You can't, and that would take so much practice.

It wasn't like the fountains of the Bellagio, I don't think, but it was

kind of around the same time, at least.

Okay.

And the newspapers got a press release afterwards, which they reported was written in either blood or chocolate syrup.

I'm going to go for the latter.

Yeah.

There was an election in Iceland this year, and one of the candidates, or someone who's trying to become a candidate, was Sneesfelljörkadl, which is a glacier.

The rules say that to become president, you have to be an Icelandic citizen.

And actually, in Iceland a few years ago, they made a new law that all of the glaciers are now citizens.

Oh, okay.

So it passed on that.

You had to be age over 35.

Glacier, 700,000 years old.

And no criminal record.

No criminal record.

And the only reason that it didn't become is they didn't get enough signatures.

People didn't sign.

Otherwise, there's no reason why it couldn't do.

And it's actually the glacier that's mentioned in Journey to the Center of the Earth by Julian.

That's the one they go through.

So that could have been presidents of Iceland.

Oh man.

They're going to go for it again next time.

That would have been so nice just for someone for Joe Biden to stand next to and feel young and sprightly.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

We will be back again next time with another episode.

But thank you so much, Glasgow.

That was awesome.

And we'll see you all again.

Goodbye.