547: No Such Thing As A Mystic Beluga

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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 the Edinburgh Fringe.

My name is Dan Schreider.

I'm sitting here with Anna Taszewski, Andrew Hudson-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 my fact.

My fact is, earlier this year, the town of Midcham was invaded by Midges.

Superb.

Yeah, so Midcham is Midjam, maybe?

Midjam?

Maybe.

Absolutely maybe.

So yeah, Midjam is located in West Berkshire and is

a tiny town.

It's got 350 people who live there.

And very recently, they were invaded by huge swarms of midges.

Obviously, hilarious, but I should point out, as the article accentuates, the population are not laughing because

the midges will fly into their mouths.

It's a nightmare.

They can't walk out.

If they open their mouth, they're swallowing big mouthloads of midges.

That's what they're saying.

It's not biblical.

It is.

That's what they said.

It's as many midges as pretty much every single Scottish person has dealt with in any place.

No.

Yeah, but

the people of Berkshire are not used to midges.

Exactly.

They're not hardy like you.

They're sensitive souls.

They said you can't even walk without swallowing a few.

Okay, a few.

Okay, yeah, a few.

Also, I've just realised it's the Edinburgh fringe, so there'll be more people from Berkshire here than there are from Edinburgh.

It does sound bad.

It also did really affect the nearby village of Woolhampton, but that doesn't have a funny name.

So it's got no airtime.

The invasion of sheep there two years ago was hysterical.

Midjum, I think, having googled it, is not interesting in any other way.

Wow.

Oh, my God.

Here we go.

Strap him.

Midram is Berkshire's least used railway station.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And that's from 2020 to one.

Although, so you might think it was due to lockdowns and stuff.

Actually, it was also Berkshire's least popular station in 2019 to 20.

And also, it's not in Midram.

Midram station is just outside Midram.

Woolhampton?

It used to be called Woolhampton, but then people kept sending it stuff for Woolverhampton, which is much bigger and a long way away.

Oh, right.

So they changed it.

Okay.

And

okay, so that, yeah, I've got one more

thing that has happened in Midgum ever.

Yep.

Please.

Peter Gray, a 72-year-old farmer, saw a giant ice block of frozen human urine smash into his lawn.

Oh,

from an airplane?

Yes, from a plane.

No, from the mole people.

Where do you think?

Pissing aliens.

So in Midgem, I did have a look at if if it's been invaded by midges before, because I thought this is the kind of thing that tabloid journalists just desperately hope happens and make happen.

And there were two other instances in the last 12 years where it's reported as being invaded by midges.

And I have to say, we haven't seen any invasion plans or, you know, got these stats.

So it may be that the people of Midgeum are just very whingy.

Out of curiosity, the first time it happened, did they find it funny?

Is that just jaded Midgeom now?

Going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, first of all.

I think it is, yeah, it's hysterical.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was reported on both times as ironic, which is very upsetting.

Oh, you've got a big thing about this.

Everyone has a big thing about this ever since.

Ever since Alanis Morissette invented having a big thing about it.

Because it's apt, not ironic.

Well, indeed.

Right.

Has anyone...

So who here has experienced Midges?

Okay, good.

Who here has been to Midgeum?

Get out!

What is their train station like?

Were you there when Berkshire Live sent a reporter to see just how quiet it really is?

I arrived before 8 a.m.

on Wednesday at what you presume would be the height of rush hour.

However, there was no one at the station at all.

There you go, you weren't there.

Does anyone here use the midge forecast?

Oh, so this is the thing.

There is a real, there's a midge forecast, which some of the people here use.

In Scotland?

It is in Scotland, yeah, yeah.

And the serious level is one to five.

One is the least serious, which is called called No Flies on Me.

And number four is great.

It's That's No Mist.

That's Midges.

It was really good.

I think it's entirely sponsored by Smidge, which is the UK's number one of, as far as I can tell, two midge repellents.

Yeah, and

it's a great.

That's cool.

Did you check out today's Midge forecast?

No, I didn't.

Oh.

Did you?

Cocky?

I didn't know it existed until 20 seconds ago.

I actually checked it out and it's looking pretty good.

Yeah.

For all this talk of how, you know, midges are so bad throughout the summer, and sometimes they have two phases, I think, but this year they reckon they have a third, and in September there might be like a third hatching.

It's fine, it's mostly at twos.

And then I think one spot

was at a four.

So stay away from, I think it might have been Sterling.

Oh no, it was Glencoe.

Glencoe.

There you go.

Right.

I'm not sure if I've ever encountered a midge.

You know, you worked with it.

Yeah, right.

It's pretty bad.

Okay, right.

Because

supposedly, according to Scottish midge studies, 40,000 of them can land on a single unprotected arm in one hour.

There are 37 different species in Scotland.

It has caused major problems here.

So there's an estimated 20% of working forestry days in Scotland are lost because of the clouds of biting midges.

You have to stop.

And it can cost up to £268 million a year in lost tourism visits as a result of the reports of them being here.

Really?

However, what's very exciting is you do make up that money a bit by the £41 million that is brought in annually by visits to the Loch Ness monster.

So what?

That's what Nessie's bringing to the table.

That's nothing to do with what we're talking about.

It's completely non-relevant.

The Edinburgh Festival brings in lots of money.

That would have been a more apt thing to say, ironically.

Yeah, but we're talking about animals.

Yeah.

Some which exist.

And some which are yet to...

Yeah, yeah.

They're symbiotic, Nessie and Midges, I think, is what you're saying, isn't it?

They have a symbiotic relationship, so one can't exist without the other.

I'm pretty sure that must be Dan's point, otherwise it would be completely

an insane thing to bring up.

You did say there's lots of species of midge.

Yeah, they are often named after their penises

because they all have very distinct penises.

Well, they don't all have distinct penises, but many of them do.

Other people that are named after their penises are Vikings.

So, there are quite a lot.

We've done a fact in here before where there was a Viking called Small Penis.

And I just wondered if you guys wanted to have a game of Midge or Viking.

Yeah, okay.

Sure.

Lovely.

That's quick.

That's what we're all here for.

So I'm going to give you the name of a name, and it's either the scientific name of a midge or it's the name of a Viking, okay?

Okay, okay.

Spiny penis.

A lot of the audience are saying Viking.

I'm going to go Midge.

Yeah, I think Midge because they do have spiky penises, don't they?

Harry Penis.

I'm going to say Viking.

Some of them do have spiny penises, and indeed this one does, because it's a midge.

Yes.

Nice.

Butter penis.

Please, I'm Viking.

Please.

Always dropping things with his penis.

Yeah.

Just use your hands, mate.

Or is it just butter penis?

Like, is it used in that?

Lovely.

What a

spelling, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The answer is it was a Viking.

Butter penis.

Butter penis.

What do we know, butter penis's story?

No, we don't know it.

It was just in a list of Viking names.

He was friends with Butterballs, the Viking.

What about Curvo penis?

Curvo?

Yeah.

Curvo.

Curvo penis.

Is that just a name, or does it describe the curviness, perhaps?

I'll say midge.

Viking.

I'm going Viking.

This side of the table's going Viking.

No, it was a midge.

It was discovered in 2011 by a guy called Wang.

Brilliant.

Super.

Nice.

And you could have had baripenis,

denta penis, oxypenis, convexi penis, and debilipenis.

They're all midges.

Oh, barry penis.

Well, here he comes.

Barry penis.

It's just a good, that's a good nickname.

It's really good.

You were saying, James, earlier, because we've got another James H on the tour, and you're like, I need a nickname for this tour.

We're not making Barry Penis.

Barry Penis.

Brilliant.

Hey, here's the thing that the people of Midgeum are missing, right?

Yes.

Because they've got food flying into their mouth.

Free.

You can eat midge.

Midge ham.

Exactly.

So there's a thing which is, have you guys all heard of kunga cake?

Yes,

kunga cake.

Yeah, exactly.

Fly cake.

Fly cake, and midges are used in that.

And so what you need to do is you need to turn your issue into a tissue.

What's the phrase?

Turn your issue into a tissue.

Turn your issue into a tissue.

By you go out, and this is what they do when they're making kunga cake.

You just bring a frying pan outside and you coat it in oil or in butter and you just wave it through the swarm and they stick into it and then you just go home and cook it and make that into a tissue.

I think they squash it.

They get loads and squash them down, right?

Yeah.

But I think the ones that happen in Africa is way, I know they have problems in midge ham, but I think the ones in Africa are absolutely insane.

Like as in you can hardly walk through them.

There's just so many midges.

Right.

I think so.

Yeah, I think you're right because it's it's sort of they get more hatchings and you get like in places like Cameroon you get a hatching every three weeks.

Yeah, it's bad if you get what three in a year.

It's actually the warmer the place is the more hatchings they get.

Okay.

The baby midges are these tiny little lavas.

They look like little caterpillars.

And in the golden rod goal midge they have this amazing way of jumping where they get all their internal flip all in internal fluids, push them down to their tail, turn themselves into a little sort of circle and then hold on, hold on, release, and then they jump into the air.

Okay, it's an absolutely amazing way to get about.

They can move 28 times more efficiently than a caterpillar can crawl.

Than one of the trams.

Are they still a joke?

No?

Okay, good.

If a sausage could jump that quickly,

then it could get to the top of the Great Pyramid at Giza in three seconds.

Oh my God.

Wow.

That is context.

That's incredible.

Imagine that sausage.

Their eggs are actually sausage-shaped.

Well, their eggs, biting midge eggs, are either cigar, banana, or sausage-shaped, which is a cool range of shapes for an egg.

There are quite similar shapes.

Cigars and sausages.

Yeah, cigar and sausage is a.

I was wondering about the difference.

I think it must be the ends, right?

The tapering, yeah, yeah.

The tapering.

Very few sausages which sort of tail off at the end.

Yeah.

Yes.

But cigars, loads.

Hey, we're going to have to move on in a second.

Can I tell you an audience fact?

Yeah, yeah.

This is from a Scottish listener.

So it's Bev Clark.

and I suppose you're in.

Anyway, she sent in a fantastic fact, right?

This is actually about bats, but she submitted it as: a pipistrel bat has to eat about one-sixth of its own body weight in midges every night to survive.

That is the equivalent to an average Scottish nine-year-old child having to eat 23 tins of baked beans, one bean at a time, whilst flying every night.

Just such a good fact.

That's brilliant.

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We do need to move on to our next fact.

So it is time for fact number two and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that there are radar detectors and there are radar detector detectors

and there are radar detector detector detectors.

Wow.

But

as far as we know there are not yet any radar detector detector detector detectors.

But

that's only because we don't have a radar

plus one to find it.

How would we know?

There's always going to be one more detectors than we know about.

I don't think so, right?

Because your radar is used by the cops.

So the policeman with a traffic gun, that's a radar.

So then the police need to know if you're breaking the law by getting a detector.

So they have a detector, detector, detector.

But if you get the next level up, you're already breaking the law with your other detector, so they don't need the second one.

They don't need to know.

That's a good point.

And that is basically what it is.

So this is from radar that's sent out by speed cameras, bounces off your car a couple of times, and then it sees how fast you're traveling by working out what distance you've traveled in that time.

That's a radar detector.

No, that is just a speed camera.

And then you in your car, because you're a criminal in lots of places, where these things are banned, you might have a device that's a radar detector.

Dan, have you done your driving theory test yet?

The theory test?

Yeah.

No.

Well, I hope you're listening to this, because this all will come up.

Yeah, I did slightly blank out.

What are we talking about?

So I, if I'm driving and I put a radar detector in my car, that's to tell me when there's a speed

camera.

Exactly.

Okay, so then the police officer has a radar detector to see if you have a radar detector to see if he has a speeding camera.

So the police officer, well, not the police officer, the speed camera in it has a detector that will detect if the driver has...

a detector.

So that's a detector detector.

Exactly, because it sends off little vibrations.

But the way of detecting in the camera is to vibrate a little bit itself.

So some of the radar detectors also have within them detector, detector, detectors.

And that's the complicated world of radar detectors, basically.

And the thing is, like, even in your car, you might have a thing where in your sat-nav it tells you where there are speed cameras.

Yeah.

And that's perfectly legal in most places, but not in all places.

So if you're driving in America, for instance, and you go into Virginia, Mississippi, or Washington, D.C.,

technically, you have to turn that off in your car.

Now, fuck knows how you do that but like in theory you would have to do that in order to or you have to prove that you're ignoring it by speeding through every speed curve

that's very cool do you know what the fastest ever speeding ticket was

as in like

you were given it two seconds after

sorry oh my god you pedded um

but i'm used to this stuff from james when it comes to dan i've got no defenses

is it um are we talking in the uk It is in the USA.

Okay, it's in the US.

Word is.

What do you want to have a guess?

Well, no cars would go more than 200 miles an hour.

Aha.

Ah!

Well, there's lots of stuff online saying the fastest ticket ever was a sports car.

It was a special sports car.

It was in Texas.

It was in a 75-mile an hour zone, and it was going at 242 miles an hour.

There's a lot of stuff on the internet saying that.

I didn't find the exact initial story behind it.

I have a theory that the fastest ever speeding ticket

was someone who was caught going at eight miles an hour

because the speed limit was two miles an hour at the time.

And that just makes them faster.

Well, relative to the limit, it's the fastest, I think, ever.

Four times the speed limit.

That's crazy.

You wouldn't drive 120 in a 30, would you?

No.

So technically.

Ah, okay, technically it is.

And that was the first one ever issued.

That's amazing.

It was 1896.

Whoa!

That is the exact same year as the first ever speeding ticket that was given over here in the UK.

This was in the UK.

Yeah.

How ironic.

Wait.

He started out talking about the US, but we did.

Very near we used to used.

Oh, yeah, God, I got to start listening, man.

That was.

We're talking about the same thing here.

Yeah, okay.

It was in 1896.

And it was eight miles an hour.

Eight miles an hour.

Yeah.

Supposedly, he was followed by a police officer on a bike for five miles.

There was a guy a couple of years ago called Nigel Mills who was clocked speeding 88 miles an hour in his car, which was a

DeLorean, as the audience got.

He had to go to court.

He paid his fine, but in court, he did deny that he was attempting to break the space-time continuum.

I learned something that I think probably I should have known.

This definitely would be in the theory, in fact.

The thing that always accompanies speed cameras, which I didn't know about, or the main speed cameras that you get, which, as I'm sure you know, are the Gatso cameras, which are the big yellow boxes.

Although I think in Scotland they're yellow and red, diagonal stripes.

Is that right?

Yep.

But they always are accompanied by lines on the road, which I just never noticed.

It's going so fast.

It's just a blur.

And also, you're pissed out of your brain.

Yeah.

You can't be expected to concentrate on this sort of thing when you're lying down.

But they...

So, one way you could fool them is you could cover up the lines on the road before you got to the speed camera.

Wait, hang on.

Do I have to park my car a mile back, walk up to it with a black cloth or something?

With a sheet or something that can cover the lines up.

Because basically, what the lines are doing, speed cameras do two things to make sure that you're speeding or not.

They send out some radar, and so it's like two pulses of radar, and they work out how far away you are with each pulse of radar, and then they work out how far you've traveled in the time it sent out the two pulses.

But also, they need a backup way of telling how far you've traveled.

So, they also take two photos as you're traveling.

And they need to see where you are in the first photo and where you were in the second photo and then see how long it took you to get from one to the other.

I always wonder when I'm going past one of those, if I swerve into another lane, will they not be able to take the second photo?

They're on every lane, sadly.

So

the white lines.

They'll think it's a different car with

the same license plate.

They can't put a glove on me legally.

I think you might have to go on the verge.

And that's a whole other contravention.

But yeah, they can only tell where you are because the lines are like the lines on a ruler.

So they can tell how far up the ruler you've gone.

So Gatso is named after Maurice Gatsonides,

who was a racing driver.

We very briefly mentioned him about...

nine and a half years ago.

His first speed gun that he invented was two rubber tires on the road.

And you still see those, you know, when you're driving just around the...

around and about there's just two little rubber lines.

They tell you how many cars are going along so that people can make rules and stuff like that and check out what the speed limit is, but they also tell you the speed.

What do you mean, rubber lines?

What like that you've got?

It's like two little rubber wires that go across the road.

Tiny cords.

I always assumed that they were testing whether they should put a speed camera in there.

Well, and they would, and I would slow down for them because I don't want people to know how fast I normally drive over that bit.

That's sensible.

They are doing that, but they're also checking how many cars go across there.

I've never noticed.

Do I never look at the road?

Oh my god.

He was a racing driver and he invented the speed camera to speed himself up because he wanted to know how fast he was going.

And he would keep going around the corner loads and loads of times and his speed camera would say, You're going at 60 miles an hour, 70 miles an hour, 80 miles an hour.

And he would try and get as fast as possible.

But he was also, he invented a charcoal-burning petrol generator during the German occupation of Holland, which kept the country going.

He was part of the resistance during World War II.

And he took up engineering after he was turned down as a pilot for KLM due to a mangled finger, which he got after a bicycle accident as a child.

A mangled finger?

Yes.

I don't think that should discount you.

They were more picky in those days.

Right.

I don't know.

You couldn't even do it if you're.

I think they're very picky.

You can't even do it if you're short-sighted.

Totally true.

No, you certainly couldn't back then.

But I'm short-sighted.

Well, I'm sorry to, you know, rain on your parade, Andy, but you're going to have to stick with the podcast.

And he also invented his own car, which had a glass dome over the top of it to make you you think you were driving an aeroplane.

Oh cool.

You know like that one that Homer Simpson makes.

Yeah.

Yeah it's quite like that.

I've got another inventor just to bring up.

This is taking it to radar very quickly.

Have you guys heard of Dr.

Robert Rines?

Incredible radar designer.

So he sort of innovated the resolution of what radar and sonar images could achieve.

And the stuff that he did allowed for the Titanic to be found.

It was using his advanced technology to find the wreck of the Titanic, to find the Bismarck.

Absolutely incredible.

But what he applied using that sonar to most of all was his big passion, multiple expeditions, to find the Loch Ness monster.

Yeah.

He went on like six, seven expeditions.

He found a perfumer to create a scent that would lure Nessie up from the loch.

The easiest day's work for that perfumer.

I mean, he trained dolphins to carry cameras that they could send through the lock and try and search.

Yeah, I don't know if he ever actually did did that, but that was the attempt.

And he was amazing.

Outside of sonar, he invented, he patented a hinge that you could use for chopsticks.

And he tried to invent something that would stop tornadoes from materializing, but it never happened.

But yeah, one of the great Nessie hunters, local hero.

Yeah.

I was reading about radar and I came across a really fun kind of paper that was written in 1946.

This is a really short time after radar was basically invented.

So we only worked out how to use it usefully in the Second World War, and it was for use in aircraft and aircraft detection.

And

on boats and on submarines, they kept picking up ghosts or phantoms, or sometimes they called them echoes.

And there's all these sources of people writing, speculating about what it might be.

So in Germany, there was speculation that it was probably a matter of sharply bounded areas of discontinuity in the atmosphere.

Now it turns out, well, that's another word for is birds.

But they just couldn't put two and two together.

It's bizarre that in 1946 a story was written, like, actually, we've worked out that it was birds all along.

Is it not true that radar was invented because they were trying to make a death ray?

That's true.

That's interesting.

I think so.

So, there was rumors that Germany would be making a death ray by firing radio waves at people, and it would just make them disappear.

And it was taken seriously by the British, and they thought, well, we're going to need one of our own.

And they found this guy called Robert Watts at Watt, and they asked him, can you make us a death ray, please?

And they offered him, if he could zap a sheep from a hundred paces away, they'd give him a thousand pounds.

And

he did his experiments and realized that it was impossible.

But then he realized also that he could use this radio waves to bounce off things and work out how far things were away.

Wow, that's incredible.

He must have considered trying to blag it by getting his friends to dig a hole near the sheep, and they did hell it down.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in 16th century Wales there was a financial crisis which meant that lots of families could no longer afford to keep a household bard.

Wow, very huge wow.

And they ten a penny, every house would have its own bard.

And now?

Or very few.

Yeah.

Very few.

You've got to be pretty loaded in modern Wales to have your own bard.

Bards were

a big noise back in the day.

Bards were multi-the taskers, weren't they?

Oh, they did it all.

I mean, they mostly read poems and played the harp, but they probably held with the washing up if required.

Actually, there was a medieval document called the Triads of Britain, and they say that the three principal tasks of a bard is one, to learn and collect sciences, the second is to teach, and the third is to make peace and put an end to all injury.

Fucking it's a big remit, isn't it?

Isn't it Joe Bad?

Who's CB?

If there is heavy washing up,

you will be redappreciating it a bit.

It was just an interesting time.

And it was a time where around this period the Welsh language was kind of being demoted

and English was being promoted.

And you know, the aristocracy were anglicising.

And there were a lot of popular poets at the time who proper classical barristers thought were trash.

So they were nicknamed, like the modern poets, poets were called poets who sing at fairs.

Gross.

And some of them didn't even play the harp.

Hang on, sorry, were these like the English imported poets?

Yeah, yeah,

I think that was like a newer like.

I always associate poets with a lute rather than a harp.

I associate harps with like angels and stuff.

I don't know what a lute is.

That's my.

You see this big screen?

Yes, I do.

Yes.

That is a huge loot.

I would say a harp is more like at a wedding you see someone playing a big harp.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was the thing for bards, though, wasn't it, the harp.

The triple harp, in fact, tended to be what they played.

Little

handheld jobbies?

Well, bigger than what.

Do you know what jobby means in Scotland?

Good boy.

Yeah.

Sorry.

No offense.

Bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Triple harp.

That sounds cool.

Yeah, yeah, three layers of twang.

What are they called?

String slits.

But is it like when a guitarist has two, you know, those awesome guitars with two necks on it, or are they layered on top of each other?

They're layered on top of each other.

And in fact, I was interested to learn that Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly was written by a bard, a Welsh bard.

Yes, the most famous Welsh bard, John Parry, who was a blind bard, as many were, because they were thought to have sort of extra sight, which gave them this wisdom to write.

But basically, we say that the job of the bard

they were pretending to cure all ills or something, but basically it was to massively kiss the ass of the posh people, wasn't it?

Yeah, that was lit.

It was quite fascinating.

And particularly in Ireland, in fact, which had a huge barding history, you essentially went around touting your wares to posh nobility, praising them and writing verse about how amazing they were and how big their houses were and how beautiful their wives were and how great their penises looked and

whatever it was.

And that's how you got your gigs.

Lovely penis barry, the plus one as well.

And they could be be quite dangerous bards, couldn't they?

Like, there was an idea that their songs could bring up insurrection and stuff.

I think the English thought that a lot of the Welsh bards, they're a bit worried about the Welsh bards.

Same with the Irish, in fact.

They think they inspire the nobles to revolt.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same with the Scottish, I must say.

No one knows English.

The Scottish ones just love the English, actually, throughout history, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But let's try and get out of here alive.

Everyone's from Berkshire, it's fine.

In 1282, apparently King Edward of England decided to get rid of all the bards in Wales because he was worried that they might cause insurrection among the Welsh.

And apparently he had a massacre of 500 bards.

How did he lure them all to the same place?

Did he have a big like loot sale and then advertised in loot?

Advertised in loot.

Brilliant.

That was a good joke about 30 years ago.

That's such a good joke.

Does anyone remember loot, the magazine?

Then why didn't the four of you laugh?

It's so weird, though, this thing, right?

So apparently, he supposedly massacred these 500 bards.

No one really knows about it in England.

No one really knows about it in Wales, but everyone knows about it in Hungary.

Ah.

What?

Because there is a song that Hungarian schoolchildren memorise.

And it's like almost like a nursery rhyme kind of thing, which is about the massacre of the 500 Welsh bards.

No.

And so all Hungarian children know it.

No.

Yeah.

You know, they're dangerous for other reasons as well, as well as possible insurrections.

They also were able to kill a rat by talking to it.

And this was a thing that has been written in multiple plays.

Shakespeare references it.

Lots of plays reference it.

And it was the idea that there was a very famous bard from Ireland who came home one day and some mice had eaten the meal that his wife had prepared for him.

And so he sort of went, you fucking assholes.

And they died.

And that became a thing that you would bring a bard over to your house because you had a mice problem.

Yeah, and they would use their words purely to kill it.

That can't have lasted long because the proof's really in the pudding when you get the rodent guy around.

I don't believe it.

I just.

Do you know one of the most famous ever bards?

It was called Yolo.

Yeah.

I-I-O-L-O.

His real name was Edward Williams, but he was.

He deeply deeply loved Welsh.

He became a Welsh bardic scholar, basically.

And a lot of what we know or what people thought they knew about bards in the 18th and 19th centuries is because of him.

And he also made up a lot of stuff and pretended it was by a 14th century bard.

He did a lot of forging works.

But he held the first ever Welsh Gorseth, which is the gathering of the bards, in

Wales.

Primrose Hill in North London.

He wanted to kind of show England and London that this was Welsh bardic culture and how amazing it was.

And he was responsible for a lot of England being kind of druid mad for a long time.

But he made a lot.

Yeah, as you say, he made a lot of it up.

And no one knew that at the time.

It was sort of like in the 20, he was, what, the 18th century, they found out in the 20th century

through some academics reading into it and finding out.

And he had all these details about his life that sounded so badass.

Like, he said that he learnt to read by watching his dad carve names into gravestones.

Like, that was where he learnt the alphabet, and that's where he learned his life.

Yeah, yeah.

Is it Mary Shelley or Mary Wollstonecraft who is Mary Wollstonecraft, isn't it?

Or Mary Shelley who learned to write her name by tracing her mother's name on a gravestone.

Oh yeah, and she also lost her virginity on it as well.

Yeah.

Did.

Yeah, I touched it the other day.

It was amazing.

Pervert.

Very creepy.

Yeah, it was actually creepy, isn't it?

Well, what did you touch it with?

Every country has their own bards, don't they?

Or every country has their own storytellers.

And I think the reason they exist everywhere is because they're a repository of knowledge for people who can't write or read, which is sort of everyone until here and today.

And so I didn't realise that hula dancers are bards.

So a hula is not a dance.

It's a way of acting out a story which is being told at the same time, traditionally.

That's cool.

This is in Hawaii.

In Sicily, you have an ancient storytelling method passed down from one person to the next, which is called kanto.

Stop it, Anna.

It's just improvised, sung, verse, and spoken prose.

The kanto, and then

it's the bottom.

Andy, I see it.

That's nailed on.

Andy.

Andy, weren't you looking for a tour nickname as well?

Wow.

Sorry to doubt you, Anna.

Absolutely does say that word.

Highly respected.

The kantisti, of course, who tell the stories of the kanto.

Good luck.

And there are lots of others as well.

Just put an O on the end to keep saying it.

You've got to stop doing that.

I've never had the courage to say it before.

I didn't realise this would be what it took.

The six Marks brother, who is not allowed on screen.

In 16th century France, they had an anagrammateur royale whose job was they were with the royal family and whenever a dignitary would come they would make an anagram of their names.

That's quite cool, isn't it?

So

Anna Tashinsky

could be Zaney Payne Skank.

Probably a million miles off.

She's not Zaney or Zane.

You guys.

Andrew Hunter-Murray, untrue Rwanda Rhymer.

Untrue Rwanda Rhymer.

Yeah.

That is me.

And then Daniel Schreiber, incredible ass.

Wow.

Wait, wait, did you say incredible?

You do have to put the H at the start, otherwise it doesn't work.

Wow, what's James Horkin?

Oh, there are no anagrams of that.

So yeah, overseas storytellers, I was reading about the Benshi of Japan.

Oh, yeah.

I'd never heard of the Benshi before.

During the 20th century, theaters, movie theaters in Japan, when all the movies were silent, would hire these storytellers to come and talk over the movies and explain what was going on or give their own narratives about what was going on.

So, yeah.

Don't invite a banshee.

Just have

all the way through your film.

What's a banshee?

That's like a mythical

screenshot.

I would have assumed that you would be all over that, Dan.

Oh, don't give him away into another fucking Loch Ness Monster factor.

We should talk about Scotland's national bard, Robbie Burns, shouldn't we?

Yeah.

I guess.

And he's in tonight.

Some words from Burns's

poems and see if you can guess what they mean.

Swankies.

Trousers.

Not a million miles away, but no.

Socks.

No, it's swaggering, strapping fellows who are in their prime.

Ooh, great.

Okay.

Are you looking at four of them tonight on stage?

Bickering brattle.

Oh, it hubbub.

Oh, yes, that's good.

No, it's the way that a mouse runs along the floor.

So, like, this way, that way, this way, that way, kind of thing.

Trying to get away from the bard.

Canti.

It's an Italian, it's a Sicilian form of traditional storytelling.

It's the excess of good spirits at the point of bursting into song.

And lunt.

Okay, right.

Lunt.

Is it lunt?

It's when you get lint in your crotch area.

Very annoying.

Oh my God.

Yeah, that's a thing.

That's a thing.

That's a thing.

Yeah, Lint gathers on your clothes, isn't it?

Can I tell you the answer?

If you've got new pants, you'll experience lunch.

Yeah.

No matter what you've got going on down there.

Yeah, yeah.

It's to walk away while smoking.

Oh.

Not nearly as good as Amazon.

Yeah.

Much pretty Amazon.

That's great.

We've got to move on in a second.

Before we do, this whole fact was about basically families not being able to afford things anymore, people not being able to afford things anymore.

And you know,

a group of people who've really experienced that hard in recent times.

And thank you, James, I almost forgot to mention, are Nessie hunters because...

Things have got so expensive now in Scotland that any of the local areas that rent out the holiday homes, the Airbnbs, the hotels, you can't afford to go and sit by the lock anymore.

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Rules and restrictions apply.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that some whales communicate by wobbling their melons.

Oi oi.

A

A skill exclusive to them and definitely does not occur with Loch Mess monsters.

So these are belugas, and there's a picture on the screen.

Beluga.

The funnest whale to say, I think.

Oh, come on.

What's funner than...

Beluga!

Sperm.

Okay.

That is a good one.

That's a fun one to say.

We shouldn't spend the rest of this listing whales, shouldn't we?

What are

these?

Whale whales.

So they're white whales.

They get the name from the Russian for white.

They have

this kind of muscly bit of fat on the top of their head, and they can contract it and move it around.

And we didn't really know why they were doing this, but a recent study from the University of Rhode Island has found that they do it 34 times more often during social interactions than they do otherwise.

So we think that they're communicating with each other.

Right.

I think that makes it.

It's like an interior hat they've got that they can kind of tip to a lady.

Yeah.

And they can, they've got all these moves.

They can squish it up and they can flatten it down and they can move it round to the side.

And it's amazing.

Well, it's crazy.

They've got five moves, haven't they?

Which is good.

They can ripple it.

They can ripple it back and forth.

Really?

It's insane.

Have you seen the video?

I've seen a video.

Wow.

So it's literally like a wave pool.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's brilliant.

What are they saying?

I don't know.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows.

I think, haven't they?

They had a look at when they use them most often.

And the shake, as in the wobble, I guess, seems to be mostly males towards females during courtship.

And I think then two of them, so there's flat, lift, press, push, and shake.

I think a couple of them are more playful, and then push is maybe a bit more aggro.

So it's like having a language with only five words.

Okay.

Why haven't we worked out what those five words are then?

We only just figured out they'd do it.

Give them a chance.

Okay.

Apologies to the marine biologists.

They're the only whales that can nod.

I really like that.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

All the other whales have got like fused necks, but they can go, uh-huh, to the hat, to the lady.

I couldn't work out if that fused neck thing meant because we have unfused necks.

Yes.

Our vertebrae are mostly, they've got bits in between that mean we can wiggle our neck around.

I was trying to work out if that meant a beluga could look to one side while you were swimming along next to it.

And I don't know how far they can move their heads.

That's a great question, but I think not.

Okay, okay.

They are the most the cats of the ocean, basically.

They're the most flexible whales there are.

Yeah.

They're nicknamed sea canaries, which I love.

Oh, yes, because they can make all sorts of noise.

They can whistle and sing and moo and click and squeal.

And speak.

Speak human words.

Why don't they know?

Yeah.

So there was a beluga whale called Nosi.

And Nosi had been part of like...

the army was kind of training him and stuff like that because there is a bit of that that goes on with the US and with Russia or the Soviets.

And one time there was a Navy diver and he was underwater and someone said, get out.

And he got out and he said, who said that?

And it turned out none of the humans had said it, but this beluga whale had said it.

Really?

What are you talking about?

It's true, honestly.

And there was...

No.

In 2012, there was a paper called Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry in a Cetacean, which was about this particular beluga whale.

And we have actual evidence of it making sounds that are a bit like human voices.

So it's a bit like a parrot might copy you that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you know where a lot of this studying is going on on of these belugas?

A lot of water, isn't it?

Yes, in the water, but obviously you need them contained and you need to be studying them, right?

So there is.

I'm a little suspicious of what you're going to say, Dan.

It's called the Mystic Aquarium.

And where is it?

In a village called Mystic.

Okay.

In Connecticut.

Yeah.

That's brilliant.

So annoying, because I thought that that whole thing, that maybe they were looking into telepathy or something like that, but actually it's just, it's the town called Mystic.

Well, who named it who named the town?

Oh it's some whales.

Oh

no.

Okay.

Don't encourage it.

They're amazing.

They're amazing things.

Yeah.

They're really beautiful.

And they live so they live in the Arctic and then they come down during the summer months and they feed and breed and then they go back up I think during the winter months.

And the whole thing about a beluga is that they don't have a a dorsal fin on their back, right?

They don't have a poppy-uppy fin that say a killer whale does.

And killer whales prey on belugas.

They love to eat them and the part of the reason that the beluga is able to avoid the killer whale is that they live under the sea ice in the Arctic.

So the sea ice is a really important environment for them.

Even if it's 96% sea ice and there are these tiny cracks in the ice where there's sort of air above it, they can approach that crack and they can stick their back up so their blowhole finds that crack perfectly.

They can breathe.

Oh, wow.

Because they're mammals and they have to breathe air.

Exactly.

And so that's how they avoid orcas because the orcas can't follow, because the orcas can't risk getting their fins stuck in sea ice and they can't be under sea ice that long.

It's kind of like hiding, I'm trying to work out, it's like hiding from a really tall person in a short, in a small, in a low-roofed room, isn't it?

And every time the tall person tries to get in, they hit their head.

I mean, it is like that.

Yeah, but you need to very occasionally pop out of the room for something.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You have a snorkel leading out to the attic.

I don't think it needed a terribly complicated.

just for anyone who didn't understand.

The lack of dorsal fin means that it's quite hard for them to steady themselves in the water

but to help that they have love handles so they have bits of fat on their sides and again they're attached to muscles and they can move them along their sides and it helps them to be steady in the water.

Yeah that's pretty amazing.

And their skin as well they they go slowly off.

every year.

Oh, they just their skin goes a bit off yellow and they just look a bit mankey and so they have to swim to a bunch of rocks and sort of

like grating cheese, just grate themselves away.

You mean like getting one of those files for your feet skin?

Yeah, a full body one.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because they go through seasonal malt, but it doesn't just come off.

So they have to go down and literally just rub themselves against rocks until it is quite gross, actually.

It's like you rubbing yourself against a gravestone.

How do you know that my thing malts?

Oh, God.

God, that's a fucking odd sentence.

It's horrible.

And you call me Barry Penis.

No, you're Panto.

I'm Barry Penis.

No, I'm Barry Penis.

Fun fact about the film Spartacus.

I think we should say that all toothed whales have a melon.

It's not.

So belugas have the big, this big one that sticks out that they're famous for, but all toothed whales have one.

And I think they must be used in communication, because I think it's for, they obviously echolocate, and it's almost for transmitting their clicks.

But sperm whales have one as well, but theirs often gets called the junk.

Actually, they have it's sort of split into two bits.

So they've got their junk and then underneath they've got their spermaceti organ.

And I never knew why they were called sperm whales.

And why so you know this spermaceti organ is the organ that's kind of in their head.

Oh, well, it's an organ in their head filled with white liquid.

Okay.

And it's, we believe, for, yeah, connectivity.

And they keep that next to their junk.

They keep an egg to their junk.

What is it for?

It is like the melon.

It is the melon.

So we think it's for basically transmitting echolocation signals and helping to control them as they leave.

And it would come back into like a chamber where it echoes around and they can.

Wow, so cool.

That's so cool.

But the reason they're called sperm whales and the reason it's called spermaceti is just just because when they first found it, everyone thought it was their semen.

Really?

So, whalers in the 19th century cracked open sperm whale heads.

Weren't there white stuff in here?

That must be where they keep their sperm.

I was reading a thing, an exciting new idea about belugas,

and it's a research paper that's been released recently.

It is the idea that belugas could very well be the Loch Ness Monster.

And it's called, Could the Loch Ness Monster Also Be the Result of Lake River Sightings of Belugas?

And so someone has put forward.

That's a very sharp paper when the answer is just no.

Well,

they're saying there's a lot of stuff that would be very similar.

The body length is kind of in a similar length, a two-meter length, the dorsal fin is absent.

That is a big thing: that teeth are present, clearly visible, recognizable.

The paper has a bit that says problems.

One, geographical location.

That's an issue.

But you do get belugas off the fjords that are out to the right of Infinite.

They've got rivers.

Exactly.

And they've been found in the Thames and so on.

They're slightly salt/slash freshwater agnostic.

Exactly.

So could the beluga well actually be the lock?

What do you think?

Do you think?

Yeah, totally possible.

Who peer reviews the papers that you find online?

This was published on mysticaquarium.com.

That's such a rare four out of four for you.

We normally don't get that.

Yeah, it's very impressive.

Guys, that's impressive.

I heard the booze, and that's, that's, I appreciate that.

We are going to have to wrap up fairly soon, guys.

Any more beluga?

Well, just that.

What does a beluga have in common with a blonde in a joke that's offensive to blonde people?

Melons?

Okay, do you remember that joke that's like, there's a blonde with

headphones on all the time?

I don't approve of this, by the way, if you're blonde.

With headphones on all the time.

And everyone's like, why is she wearing headphones?

Why are you wearing headphones?

Eventually, someone takes the headphones off and she dies.

What were the headphones saying?

It's saying, remember to breathe in and out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in, breathe out.

But beluga whales need the headphones.

In fact, all whales, they need, breathing is not an unconscious thing.

They actually need to remember to breathe, not just to go to the top to breathe, which they do need to do, but if they don't actually tell themselves to breathe every time they do it, they just stop breathing and die.

What?

Yeah.

But is it genuinely a problem?

No, sometimes it happens in aquariums where they think they just decide that they've had it and you can just stop eating.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so good to end on a fun one, isn't it?

It's so good to end on a.

I think whale suicide is going to be a good punch now.

I think whales' population is getting a bit better, right?

Isn't it?

Like, the whaling has gotten less and less as the years have gone on.

We have more whales now than we've had in recent years.

And the thing is, when they're more sort of spread out, they find each other for mating by singing.

And now that there's more of them, they actually do less singing and they kind of fight each other a lot more.

So that means that whales are wailing less due to less wailing.

Very nice.

Very nice.

Guys, I'm gonna have to wrap us up.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

James.

At Barry Penis.

Andy.

I'm saying mine.

You've actually been banned recently, haven't you?

I've been let back on.

And Anna, where can they get to us as a group?

You can go to Twitter, No Such thing, or no such thing as a fish on Instagram, or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are there.

We have a club called Club Fish.

If you haven't joined it yet, please do.

And also check out all of our upcoming tour dates.

Thank you so much, Edinburgh.

This was the start of our Thunder Nerds tour, and that was fucking awesome.

So thank you for being here.

We'll see you again soon.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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