528: No Such Thing As A Toilet Haiku

Transcript

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Speaker 7 Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Phish. Before we get going, we have a very exciting announcement.
Anna?

Speaker 13 Thanks, Dan. Our announcement is that our esteemed colleague, Andrew Hunter Murray, famous podcaster comedian galore, does want to say that? He's also a published author.

Speaker 13 I'm sure you've read his first two novels, which were brilliant thrillers. He's written a third, which is so much fun so far.

Speaker 13 I'm only about a quarter of the way through because look, he didn't send me the proof on time but it is fantastic. It's called A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering.
It's really fun.

Speaker 13 It's got elements of comedy. It's got elements of thriller in it so far.
I really love the main character because he's doing something that I can really imagine myself doing in life.

Speaker 13 Don't just believe us.

Speaker 13 It's been complimented by The Guardian, which says it has a propulsive plot, an ingenious narrator and lashings of intrigue, making it a genuine and thoroughly enjoyable page turner.

Speaker 13 The Sunday Times has called it hugely entertaining, laugh out loud, funny, and impossible to put down. Dan Schreiber, what do you say?

Speaker 7 Well, I actually am a third of the way through the book and I can say it absolutely gets better after the first quarter.

Speaker 7 So if you want your books great in the first quarter and then accelerating to an even better place, you've got to get a beginner's guide to breaking and entering.

Speaker 7 It is the story of a guy who breaks into the second homes of the wealthy. He lives in them.
They don't know it. He steals nothing.

Speaker 7 But one day, after he accidentally bumps into a group of people who also do the same thing, they witness a murder and they get embroiled in a thing that they can't escape.

Speaker 7 And it's one of those comedy capers that just gets further and further into the chaos of it. If you've read Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club series, this is the perfect accompaniment to it.

Speaker 7 It's comedy, it's thriller, page Turner, you're gonna love it.

Speaker 13 So, go to your local bookshop or any online bookseller or Amazon, look up a beginner's guide to breaking and entering by Andrew Hunter Murray.

Speaker 7 Now, okay, on with the podcast, on with the show.

Speaker 7 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 7 I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 7 And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is James.

Speaker 14 Okay, my fact this week is that children's author Margaret Wise Brown died from doing an overenthusiastic can-can kick.

Speaker 7 I think now having read up on her, she would like that we laughed just then. Yeah,

Speaker 7 I think so. Definitely.
So

Speaker 7 is there an underenthusiastic can-can kick? Is there such a thing as that? Yeah,

Speaker 7 I've been to the Moolan Rouge a few times and that was my money back

Speaker 7 barely got above the knee you've got your protractor out in the front row

Speaker 7 that's disgusting on me

Speaker 7 they really look down at that

Speaker 14 so margaret wise brown is most famous for a children's book called good night moon she's written lots of others but this is the biggie what i liked about this is in this podcast The number of times I've got a book out because we've talked about that author and I've got about 25% of the way through it and never finished that book.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, this is probably the first time I've got through the whole book. Oh, you finished it? I managed to finish it.
440-ish words, right?

Speaker 7 I thought you were going to say pages then.

Speaker 14 I was going to say, no, that wasn't the book I read. Yeah, it's a very short book.
Actually, the first, maybe the first of those board books, you know, that you give to children.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Apparently, it was the first of those.

Speaker 14 But she unfortunately died in 1952. She just had emergency surgery on either an ovarian cyst or an inflamed appendix, depending on what you read.

Speaker 14 And she was ready to leave the hospital and be carried, as she said, in a sedan chair by four of the village boys to a hilltop estate where she would convalesce.

Speaker 14 But to show the medical staff that she was in good health, she kicked up her leg, Cancan style, and she had a blood clot, dislodged it, blacked out, and never died again.

Speaker 7 According to what I read, died instantly. Yeah.
Like just can can kicked and just out. I mean, sad, obviously, but that's how I would love to go.
Can't cast well. Can't cast.

Speaker 13 It's a good way to go, I think, if you've got to go at that age. Yeah, I mean, she was young.

Speaker 7 She was so young. She's 42.

Speaker 7 The other cool thing about this, she was on her way to meet, I think, her lover, one of the junior Rockefellers, who was going to pick her up in a boat and sail away to Tunisia with her. Yeah,

Speaker 7 he was on his way on the boat. Yeah.

Speaker 7 So sad.

Speaker 13 I think that was maybe the saddest thing is that she'd had a very unlucky love life. And she'd met this guy sort of the year before, I think.

Speaker 13 And I was reading a bit of a biography of her that he wrote many, many years later. And he was so, obviously, so in love with her.
And she had finally found the love of her life. And then, yeah, bam.

Speaker 13 He was nicknamed Pebble, but it was James Stillman Rockefeller Jr.

Speaker 13 And he was junior. He was 24.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Oh, wow.
Toyboy. He later married a descendant of the Carnegies.
So it's a real powerhouse couple, that the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Carnegies. Carnegie's, I would say.

Speaker 7 Carnegie's the ones who come up to you in the bar and say, that's a shit shit.

Speaker 7 That's not how you neg.

Speaker 7 The neg is a compliment and then a backhanded compliment. What should I be doing? You should say, I love your shirt.
I saw six people wearing it earlier tonight. Oh, that's good.

Speaker 7 That's better than mine.

Speaker 14 But yeah, Margaret Waz Brown was an absolute legend.

Speaker 7 What a gal. She was.
And she sort of, the fact is, is that she's often referred to as almost like a Hollywood dame. Like she was going around in high-class parties.

Speaker 7 She was doing the weirdest of stuff socially.

Speaker 7 She took on

Speaker 7 she had things like the Birdbrain Club, which was a club where the decision was anyone who was part of it, if they said on the day, it's Christmas, you have to go over and celebrate Christmas.

Speaker 7 It's a fun idea. It's a great idea.
I don't know.

Speaker 14 No, it's a tiresome idea. It's a fun idea the first two times you do it.
And even by the third time, it's annoying.

Speaker 13 I think it was used wisely.

Speaker 7 I'm sure some people were kicked out of the Christmas club or whatever. It's

Speaker 7 Birdbrain Society.

Speaker 7 She could run as fast as a dog. There we go.

Speaker 7 Witch dog. Not a greyhound.
No. You're absolutely right.
Well, she was an avid, I've written in my notes, she was a lifelong beagle. She was actually a beagleer,

Speaker 7 which is where you chase hares on foot and you have a load of beagle dogs with you. And supposedly, she was noted for her ability to keep pace with running beagles.

Speaker 7 Her relationship with rabbits gets intense when she's an author because she published a book which was called Little Fur Family.

Speaker 7 The illustrator is the same guy, Gareth Williams, who did the illustrations for Charlotte's Web.

Speaker 7 She had a first print run of 75,000 copies for this book, and each edition of it was wrapped entirely in the fur of a New Zealand rabbit. No, I don't believe you.

Speaker 14 And were they all ones that she caught herself while being with me?

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 it's amazing, isn't it?

Speaker 7 Right?

Speaker 14 Apparently, it was because of a surrealist artist called Marette Oppenheim, who you might know this, like, it's like a teacup with rabbit fur on the inside and the outside, actually.

Speaker 7 Oh, I don't know that.

Speaker 14 It's in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is it, I think? And it was the first surrealist thing that they bought.

Speaker 14 But yeah, she decided she would do her own thing with books and make them really furry.

Speaker 7 But it's 75,000. 75,000.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's mad.

Speaker 13 Dan, you mentioned that you haven't read Good Night Moon, so you won't be aware, as I am, as someone who reads it every single night to my daughter, that the main character in that is also a rabbit.

Speaker 7 In fact, they're both rabbits.

Speaker 13 So having read this about her, I look at that completely differently now, every page where you see this old rabbit in a rocking chair.

Speaker 7 It's a fantastic book, we should say. It's so good.
Oh, yeah. It's pretty good.

Speaker 14 It's like one of the first ones that just was like slightly weird and just rhyming stuff.

Speaker 7 Yeah. It's just a little bunny going to bed, and it's all the stuff in the room, you know, good night clocks and good night socks.
Yeah, all that. It's just very gentle, sort of lulling for a child.

Speaker 7 I'm sure I always read it lots, I think.

Speaker 14 But she also didn't like children, as well as not liking rabbits. So it's kind of weird to make a book about rabbits for children if you don't like either of those things.

Speaker 7 Yeah, because she also did another book which had a print run of 80,000, which was entirely wrapped in the skin of five-year-olds.

Speaker 14 She said in an article for Life magazine, she said, I don't especially like children. And in another note, someone she wrote, How many children have you got? I have 50 bucks.

Speaker 14 So she saw, yeah, I think she saw the books as her.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 13 All right, they are less trouble. Have you seen all the Easter eggs in Good Night Moon? This is just what happens when you have read it over a hundred times now.

Speaker 7 I read it again. You are.

Speaker 7 There's so much new stuff to discover.

Speaker 14 Don't tell me it's the same with Les Miserable because I'm not reading that again.

Speaker 13 As long as you've got the illustrated version. Well, I won't give it away so you can discover it.
But if you do have a copy, look at the clock on every page and look at the moon.

Speaker 7 Does it go backwards? No, it doesn't. Oh, like memento.

Speaker 13 That would be so much better. Why didn't you do it? It just goes forwards.
Just goes forwards. And so you know that it takes an hour and 10 minutes to get this rabbit to sleep

Speaker 7 when you watch it go forwards, which is actually a long time. Yeah, that's the best.

Speaker 13 And look at the book on the bedside table. What do you think the book on the bedside table is?

Speaker 7 Is it the book itself? It's the book book itself.

Speaker 7 Is it?

Speaker 7 Midnight Moon still innovating all these years later. She wrote her book, she said, in a sort of 15 to 20-minute period.
That's the first draft. And then the second draft.

Speaker 7 This is like talking about your books, isn't it?

Speaker 7 So it takes her 15 to 20 minutes for the first draft, and then it takes her between one and two years for the second draft.

Speaker 7 And that's where you're going, wrong, no second draft.

Speaker 7 Oh, the edit's hard. The edit is hard.
Can we talk about the great thing she did with the royalties? Yes.

Speaker 7 Margaret Moyce Brown gave the royalties for every single one of her books, basically her entire estate.

Speaker 7 She said, I leave it all to this little nine-year-old boy who lives next door, who I'm friendly with, and, you know, I'm 40. Nothing's going to happen to me.

Speaker 7 I'll probably change the world when I gain dependence or whatever. Anyway, she then dies.
Two years later, Ryan? Two years later, she dies.

Speaker 7 And also, Good Night Moon was on the, it was not selling big anymore. It was probably going to go out of print shortly.
Obviously, it's never been out of print.

Speaker 7 It's sold millions of copies and he was called albert clark and by the time he was 21 there was 75 000 waiting for him unfortunately he had uh become a bit of a tear away

Speaker 7 a bit of a bit of a bit of a rogue bit of a rogue burglary joyriding vandalism he was a very very very naughty boy kicked out of school for fights all that sort of thing yeah and he had this bizarre life where he was always broke and getting into trouble and being arrested and banged up and then every year publishers would say right there's another two million quid waiting for you for you.

Speaker 14 It's like the Lotto Laut. Do you remember him?

Speaker 7 No, I don't. Do you not remember him?

Speaker 14 He was like when the lottery first started. Okay.
I'm sure he's a very nice guy, so apologies if you're listening.

Speaker 14 But he won a load of money on the lottery and then just spent it all within like two years or something. And he was in all the tabloids, so he was being a bit of a rogue.

Speaker 14 But it's like that, but then if then once he spent it all, he won the lottery again.

Speaker 7 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
So the first initial batch of money that he got, he gave a lot to his parents, which was nice. He gave 35,000 to his parents.

Speaker 7 He spent 4,000 on clothes for him and his two brothers. He had two brothers.
And then he bought a Chevy and Parla. As soon as he took it out of the shop.
got smashed into, immediately dented it.

Speaker 7 Oh, it's not his fault.

Speaker 7 No, no, but I read an interview with him where he was sort of saying, look, yes, I've done bad things, but also just like bad things just happen all the time that throw me into situations of such weird details.

Speaker 7 It's like he had a dented car and 14 pairs of alligator shoes. That's all he had in life.
And then the next check comes in. And the only thing he's kept with him wherever he goes is the will.

Speaker 7 He keeps the will that she wrote. And the alligator shoes.

Speaker 13 It's a naked man wearing alligators on his feet, clutching a will.

Speaker 14 Like she was putting rabbits on her books.

Speaker 14 He was putting alligators on his feet. This is like the least vegan fact we've ever heard of.

Speaker 13 I just mentioned her love life earlier, which was, again, not something you imagine when you're reading it because you picture this old lady who's writing these books.

Speaker 7 Her name sounds old, doesn't it?

Speaker 14 Margaret Wise Brown.

Speaker 7 It doesn't sound like Wise, yeah. I suppose in the 1920s that was her only sex name.
Margaret is now a more old-fashioned name. I think that's fair.
Is that fair to say? Well, my mum's a Margaret.

Speaker 7 There we go. And she's very cool.
Yeah. Kind coming every weekend.

Speaker 13 She had an interesting love life.

Speaker 13 And so did Margaret Wise Brown. And

Speaker 13 she went out with a woman called Michael Strange, confusingly, who the I Like the LA Times in 1992 described Michael Strange as a writer and performer of limited gifts and voracious ego.

Speaker 13 And she did seem to be not a great partner for Margaret Wise Brown, but they got together in 1940 and pretty much lived together or lived in next-door apartments until Strange died in 1950.

Speaker 7 They did share a butler.

Speaker 7 The two ladies. Yeah, so they had an apartment opposite each other.
So in the corridor, the butler would just sort of go out the door, go through the next door, and sort of.

Speaker 7 Wait, do they know? Did they know that they were sharing a butler or was he doing a sort of

Speaker 7 take the mustache off, yeah.

Speaker 7 Why do you need to take the mustache off? Why would you take the butler off? Because they're dating. Oh, you're right.
Oh, yeah. How's your butler? Well, he's still without a mustache.

Speaker 7 You must get one. Mine looks dashing.

Speaker 7 That's really fun. That's a great thing to do.
I looked at a few other kids' authors. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 Well, basically, I went through my daughter's books and googled all of their authors. And I was looking at the Tiger Who Came to Tea,

Speaker 14 which is by Judith Kerr.

Speaker 14 And Michael Rosen, who was the children's laureate and the writer and stuff, he has drawn parallels between the tiger who came to tea and Judith Kerr's early life because Judith Kerr's father was on a death list from the Nazis

Speaker 14 and they had to leave Nazi Germany when she was nine years old. Wow.

Speaker 14 And Michael Rosen said that maybe the tiger is based on the threat that they faced when they were children because it disrupted their life so much.

Speaker 14 They took everything that the family owned, like the tiger who came to tea drinks all of the water and eats everything in the cupboards and stuff like that.

Speaker 14 And Judith Kerr has said that the tiger represents nothing more than a tiger.

Speaker 7 Well, I believe Michael.

Speaker 7 It's got a very weird ending, the tiger who came to tea. Yeah, they, well.
Doesn't the tiger just leave?

Speaker 7 No, I think Daddy comes home and it's really annoying because, you know, the tiger's had all his like drunk all his beer. Drunk all his beer and had all the food for tea.
Yeah. So then.

Speaker 7 He says, I've got a very good idea.

Speaker 14 We'll go to the cafe and have sausage and chips and ice cream.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah. Yeah, daddy takes them all out for meanwhile.

Speaker 13 There's a drunk tiger.

Speaker 14 The tiger goes unaddressed, exactly, yeah. No, because then the next morning they buy loads of food to fill the pantry up and they buy a tin of tiger food in case he comes back and he never did.

Speaker 14 Oh really?

Speaker 7 Interesting. I think if I was a dad walking back home,

Speaker 7 I opened the door, see my three kids and my wife sitting by a table,

Speaker 7 no, no, just like in my story,

Speaker 7 And in the corner is a drunk tiger.

Speaker 7 I do think my first instinct is to not make a deal of it. Hey, kids, we're going out now.
Okay, exactly.

Speaker 14 The tiger's already left when daddy comes home.

Speaker 7 Oh, I thought you said he was drunk in the middle.

Speaker 14 So the daddy comes home

Speaker 14 and all the food's gone. Yeah.
All the water's gone. There's no water in the taps.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 Wow. And mummy and Sophie tell daddy what's happened and said the tiger came in and ate all of the food and drank all of the drinks and all of your beer and took all the water out of the taps.

Speaker 14 And then daddy goes, let's go to a cafe. That's how it works.

Speaker 7 It sounds like Daddy doesn't believe a word of this. It sounds like it's happened before.
Yeah. And

Speaker 7 all the beer's gone, has it? Oh, the tiger, right? Someone's turned the water off, Abbey.

Speaker 7 And the water bill over here, that's not the paint.

Speaker 14 But the interesting thing about that is when they walk to the cafe, it's nighttime. So all the street lights are on and all the cars have their headlights on.

Speaker 14 But there's a little cat that's walking by near where they live that looks exactly like a tiger, but it's

Speaker 7 acknowledged as a...

Speaker 14 no it's not acknowledged but it's obviously like what inspired her lies yeah

Speaker 13 this drunken reprobate lady's lies as she boozes up on her husband's drinks here's what we're gonna tell dad

Speaker 7 tiger he's never gonna believe it mum i wish i'd been able to because i was on a sofa with michael rosen yesterday were you yeah but it was such a long sofa that i couldn't ask him about this it was an enormously long sofa well he wouldn't have heard you honestly he wouldn't i would have had to get up and walk to the other end of the sofa Wait, did you genuinely think, oh, I'd love to talk to this man, this legend of literature?

Speaker 7 Oh, the sofa's too long. He had picked the absolute opposite.
He had picked the furthest other part of the sofa to sit on. It was very clear to me that he wasn't looking for a pal.
All right.

Speaker 7 Well, you're in DFS.

Speaker 7 It was a corner sofa as well, so I could have walked the hypotenuse.

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Speaker 7 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

Speaker 13 My fact this week is that the city of Matsuyama has over 90 post boxes specifically for mailing haiku.

Speaker 7 Hmm. Lovely.

Speaker 13 Or, as you could say, Matsuyama has over 90 post boxes for mailing haiku.

Speaker 7 Brilliant. Is that right?

Speaker 7 It's right.

Speaker 14 Amazing.

Speaker 7 Well done.

Speaker 7 Why? Why? Why did you bother making that haiku?

Speaker 13 They're bloody easy to make, aren't they? This is the capital city of Shikoku Island, which is one of Japan's islands.

Speaker 13 And it's because the city sort of calls itself the home of haiku, because very famous haiku poets lived there.

Speaker 13 And so the first post box was installed in 1968 to commemorate one of these poets' births. And now they're all over the place.

Speaker 13 They're like monuments and baths, public baths, and they're really beautiful as well. And lots of different designs.
And

Speaker 13 every three months, the local haiku poets go to the post boxes, or they send an envoy, and they empty them out, and then they judge all the entries.

Speaker 13 Oh, and the winner gets published on the city's website.

Speaker 7 That's so good. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 7 I hope there's a walking trail

Speaker 7 between them, which is called the Take a Haiku. Love.

Speaker 7 That would be good.

Speaker 7 But there is a walking trail. Sorry to jump in on your choke.
No, no, I didn't see it coming.

Speaker 7 You should be able to see by now that long, that distant look in my eyes, which shows something's brewing. The fact he's been silent for two minutes, Dan, that should have been a killing.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, they do in this place as well, the Matsuyama area, they have certain haiku bars that you go into and you go up to the counter and you write a haiku and the cocktail they make you is based on your haiku.

Speaker 7 No. It's just, you know, they love a haiku.
They love a novelty thing to do there, yeah.

Speaker 14 What do you say? Jin and Tartnick, please.

Speaker 14 Is it Pasho who was from this place or is it someone else? Because he's the most famous haiku guy.

Speaker 13 He is, yeah. There seem to be sort of four kings of haiku and he's like the king king, king of kings.
But no, it's Masaoka Shiki, who was the person who rejuvenated haiku in the 19th century.

Speaker 13 So it basically sort of died or was really dying. And he lit a fire under its ass and renamed it as well.

Speaker 7 And gave it its name. Gave it its name haiku.
It was called like Hoku or something before. And then he was.

Speaker 14 And he didn't change it much.

Speaker 7 No, he just put a stamp on it. He just went, this is, yeah, this is the Shiki Shiki stamp.
It's really interesting what Shiki did, because he was obsessed with haiku.

Speaker 7 He failed his exams at university, partly because he was writing so many haiku and reading haiku and, you know, he was engrossed in the world of haiku.

Speaker 7 He sort of added to the rules about haiku. And the first, the most important thing about haiku as we know them is that it's an observation of what's around you.
It's an observation of nature.

Speaker 7 So that's a key element to haiku.

Speaker 14 So actually what Anna did at the start was not a haiku.

Speaker 7 No, no, it was not.

Speaker 14 No, it had the right number of syllables in, but it has to have something to do with nature or something to do. It has to have a word that's something to do with one of the seasons.

Speaker 14 So, for instance, there's a really famous one by Basho, who I mentioned earlier, which goes,

Speaker 14 an ancient pond, a frog jumps in, the splash of water.

Speaker 14 In Japanese, it works as a haiku. But for him, it's the word frog refers to spring.
It's a spring word. And so you need one of those.
And so unless you're using the word post box to refer to...

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's a classic autumnal word. Postbox.
It's in the glossaries.

Speaker 7 I get it now. So, I read that earlier, that one, and I thought, you know, it was like this was one that he published and became famous, and he was like dining off it for years.

Speaker 7 Like, man, that haiku was insane. And I didn't find it impressive at all.
I didn't make the spring and the frog connection.

Speaker 13 That's and now are you wowed by it?

Speaker 7 I do like the

Speaker 7 punnery and the kind of double meaning. Are we saying it because frogs jump? No, no, no, no.
That's not it. Oh, then I just like it again.
That is what was going on.

Speaker 7 That wouldn't work at all in Japanese.

Speaker 14 No, it's just that frogs come out in spring, as in they're born in spring, so they're associated with springtime.

Speaker 14 And it's supposed to you read it and it just puts you in that position of being in a garden in spring.

Speaker 14 The frog jumps in, you know exactly where you are, you know what's happening, you're one with nature. That's it.

Speaker 7 Do you get it now? I get it now. Listen, it's no good night moon.
It's like

Speaker 7 what it's meant to be is like, it's like a shot in a film almost. Yeah, it's a shot that crystallizes something and expresses something.

Speaker 7 I really like them. I did not know they don't have to be five, 575.
No,

Speaker 7 you can be a bit flexible.

Speaker 13 And actually, I was very interested to message my Japanese friend after I'd read about this because, yeah, people who write about haiku properly and who know about it say, Look, the syllables thing, it's a misinterpretation in English anyway, because it's not syllables, it's sounds.

Speaker 13 And she wrote me a few haikus at random, I think, while she was sitting on the toilet, and none of them had the right number of syllables.

Speaker 13 And I was like, sorry, I don't know if she would have wanted me to share that, but I have.

Speaker 7 She said, an ancient toilet and turt jumps in with a splash of water.

Speaker 13 And she said, the only thing I think a haiku needs is the seasonal reference. So there you go.
And it is, they have, Dan, these glossaries that you have to stick to, don't they?

Speaker 13 You can buy a glossary, a haiku nursery.

Speaker 14 Dan, could you maybe say some words that you think might be summer words?

Speaker 7 Summer words? Yeah, like a word. Sun.
That might do it. I reckon.
Although you do get sun in the other, you know,

Speaker 14 a nice

Speaker 7 seasons. Winter sun.
You sort of get it all year round, don't you? At the old sun.

Speaker 7 Harvest.

Speaker 7 That'll be an autumn one. Bikini.
Beach. Yeah.
Bikini. Yeah, yeah, that's a class.
It's in the list of summer words. A blockbuster.

Speaker 14 So summer could be insects.

Speaker 14 Autumn, scarecrows,

Speaker 14 nice. Winter, tangled twigs, empty fields.

Speaker 7 Oh, lovely. I really like.
Can I show you the prop I brought along? Yeah, the laggy-related prop. Hang on.

Speaker 7 Because I don't know if you guys know this.

Speaker 14 You're not on Michael.

Speaker 7 Sorry. I don't know if you guys know this.
You've got Michael Rosen in your bag.

Speaker 7 I've brought the sofa.

Speaker 7 Okay, so there's a British haiku society. Oh, I am.

Speaker 7 Do you guys find that? Yeah, yeah. Of course of your research.
Well, I'm very proud to announce they've gained a new member this week. Oh, God.
No. I've joined us.

Speaker 14 Have you stopped your subscription to the Lighthouse Society?

Speaker 7 The Association of Lighthouse Keepers have lost a member.

Speaker 13 Is it like having citizenship? You're only allowed to be a member of one or the other?

Speaker 7 I think it's lapsed now because I haven't received a copy of Lamp magazine for a while and i was a big fan of that lights out

Speaker 7 i am now a member of the bhs yeah and british home

Speaker 7 that's right

Speaker 7 and look i've got the journal here which is called blithe spirit

Speaker 14 so andy is holding an a5 white book yeah with blithe spirit written on it does it have a lot of haiku in it absolutely jam-packed with really good haiku just loads just randomly pick one yeah give us a great haiku a spring one if you can you're not going to believe this this is by philip murrell called home, I scrape away moss to find his name.

Speaker 7 And you can see why I signed up.

Speaker 14 I like the way you pretended that was just random.

Speaker 7 It's fallen open to this page because the spine is so cracked.

Speaker 7 All right.

Speaker 7 A baby shower immersed by cherubs. Botticelli.

Speaker 7 What do you guys...

Speaker 7 I have to, I admire the idea of haikus. I really like them.
It doesn't do anything for me.

Speaker 14 Certainly something like reading through a book like that just i imagine if i was sitting in nature and then someone sent me a haiku about the area that would be really nice and poignant but do you guys get something from haiku um i have done having done research for this i would say until that i hadn't until i understood what it was i didn't really get anything out of it but i like the idea they have these clubs where you know a hundred people will go to a beautiful place in nature and they'll all just write as many haikus

Speaker 14 and you're just kind of like you're trying to capture one moment where you're with nature in just this kind of slightly formulaic, but you can go out of the rules if you want to.

Speaker 14 Way, I kind of do that.

Speaker 7 That's a lovely conceit, definitely.

Speaker 7 I like it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I really like it. As James says, reading about it, the analysis of it, as with any kind of poetry or art, because I'm not smart enough to understand it face on.

Speaker 13 But when you read the analysis, I think you get it. And maybe you could be lured in by the punchline element.
You know, often you'll do a comedy set where at the end it's got a big reveal.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 7 all the haikus have them.

Speaker 13 Haikus, exactly. There's supposed to be this moment of realization.

Speaker 7 That's why I thought the spring with the frog thing was a... Sorry, not that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 More like the one I read that I really liked was bass picking bugs off the moon.

Speaker 13 And the way it was explained was, you're bass, it's a type of fish, it's plucking bugs, and then it's off the moon, because suddenly you realize to them, they think they're picking bugs off the surface of the moon, because they're always looking up at the moon.

Speaker 7 Oh, that's lovely.

Speaker 13 To us they're picking up the surface.

Speaker 14 All of the haikus would have like a word in it which is kind of hard to translate into English but they're like a surprise or a cut.

Speaker 14 They call them a cutting word online a lot and it might be aha or what?

Speaker 7 Sorry?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's just like it's like an it's almost like an exclamation point.

Speaker 7 Do you know what I mean? My favorite haiku that I found is and I hadn't heard of this and I really think this is beautiful the idea of the death poem. Oh yeah.

Speaker 7 So the death poem is a Japanese tradition whereby, if you know that you're about to die, let's say an execution is going to happen, because this has been going from centuries and centuries, this death poem idea.

Speaker 7 You were encouraged to write your final poem, and that can be presented in sometimes as a haiku. So, there was one that was written by a guy called Moriya Senan,

Speaker 7 and his was, Bury me when I die beneath a wine barrel in a tavern. With luck, the cask will leak.
Okay, so that's that's his

Speaker 7 thing.

Speaker 7 What's really nice is the line, hopefully the cask will leak, or the cask will leak. The Japanese wording for that is mori ya sen nan, which is his name.
Lovely. Oh, that's clever.

Speaker 7 Isn't that wonderful? Yeah, that is clever. No one else can do that, can they?

Speaker 7 No one else got a chance in a bad competition. Hey, doctor, watch this.

Speaker 14 I'm doing a big can cam.

Speaker 7 Uh-oh. Oh, shit.
Shit.

Speaker 7 Beautiful.

Speaker 7 Really good. Where's the seasonal reference in that?

Speaker 7 Did you guys hear tell of

Speaker 7 this is now he's a member of the haiku society. This is how Andy speaks.
Everything has to scan.

Speaker 7 Did you hear tell of the 2014 haiku artist who operated out of Sainsbury's in North London?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 This was the Baud Baker who

Speaker 7 smuggled complaint poems into the Sainsbury's treats that he was bagging up. So, for example,

Speaker 7 enjoy your cookies. Each bite is a minute.
I'll never get back.

Speaker 7 That's a nice one. Anyway, he was identified and immediately fired.
And then Sainsbury's apologised to customers that said it should never have happened. I love it.
Come on, I love it. I liked it.

Speaker 7 I liked it.

Speaker 13 You'd be absolutely delighted if you've got it. It's like a fortune cookie, isn't it? But instead of your future, you get some abuse.

Speaker 14 This city is Matsuyama,

Speaker 14 which led me to read about Hideki Matsuyama, who was the first ever Japanese professional golfer to win a men's major golf championship.

Speaker 7 Oh my god. What year are we talking?

Speaker 14 2021.

Speaker 7 What?

Speaker 7 Wow, that's the first time.

Speaker 14 First time a Japanese man, at least, has won a major golf championship. And he was once disqualified from a competition due to Tipex.

Speaker 7 Riddle me this. Yeah, okay.
Disqualified for him.

Speaker 14 Famous in the golfing world.

Speaker 7 Painting his balls. Painting his balls with Tipex, where they're already white.
Yeah, but does it add weight to it or some kind of grip that you wouldn't have?

Speaker 14 You're getting really close,

Speaker 14 but it's not the ball.

Speaker 7 G tipx over his score on the board and then we're gonna get a different score.

Speaker 7 It's the um, it's the club.

Speaker 14 He would he would put it onto the club itself on the so he put like a little target on the club so that he could see where he wanted to hit the ball or tip X, and that's allowed.

Speaker 14 You're allowed to do that, but he put too much tipx on it, which made it slightly raised, which would change the grip. That when the club hit the ball, it would change the way that the ball flew.

Speaker 14 And they measured it, and it was like a millionth of a millimeter too thick.

Speaker 7 How amazing was that?

Speaker 14 From a competition.

Speaker 7 God, the forensic down to the millimeter is fantastic.

Speaker 7 Like someone said, yes, you are allowed to put Tipex on your club, but only a bit.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And you exceed that bit.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Wow.

Speaker 14 So that's just me shoehorning some golf interviews.

Speaker 7 There was an exciting thing in the world. This is sort of, he was the first Japanese golfer to to do this.

Speaker 7 There was an exciting thing in the world of haiku in 2017 when a very prestigious competition was won for the first time by a non-Japanese person. Really?

Speaker 7 And it was Gracie Starkey, who was a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Gloucestershire. Wow.

Speaker 7 And she was learning Japanese at the time, and her teacher encouraged her to enter it. I think there were 18,000 entries.

Speaker 14 It doesn't say much for the entire population of Japan, does it?

Speaker 7 It doesn't. This girl who I'm sure is great, but has only just started learning the language.
Yeah, it shows that the barter entry is low for haiku, I suppose.

Speaker 14 Like, I can't imagine her winning the Japanese Open Golf, for instance.

Speaker 7 Um, and her poem was printed on millions of there's a green, there's a green tea drink company that's was sponsoring it, and so her poem was printed on millions of these bottles.

Speaker 7 And the coder to the story is that Gracie then decided to drop Japanese for GCSE,

Speaker 7 saying the Japanese language is so hard.

Speaker 7 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that in the early 1900s, there was a debate over whether cinemas should be dark or fully lit.

Speaker 7 Do we think they got it right? I think they did get it right.

Speaker 14 For me, yes, I think dark is better.

Speaker 7 For the screening purpose, yes. For the rest of society, maybe not.

Speaker 7 Go on. Well, this is this is this was the brainchild of a guy called Roxy Rotherfell, early cinema entrepreneur, and he announced in 1910 that he had perfected what he called daylight pictures.

Speaker 7 He said they were absolutely flickerless, they wouldn't tire the sensitive eyes of the audience out, and you could see everything in the room.

Speaker 7 And that was a kind of crucial point because he was a big part of making cinema socially acceptable.

Speaker 7 Whereas, you know, before it was fairgrounds and peep shows, and it was a bit raucous, and it was dark, and you couldn't see what was going on, and people might be, you know, getting up to hanky-panky, and you know, men and women were sitting next to each other in the dark.

Speaker 7 You know, why have we allowed this to happen?

Speaker 7 And he basically said, Look, here's a lovely, bright, nicely lit screen. And

Speaker 7 he said, You can see the picture perfectly, but you can also see the room. And it's just a nice, more sociable way of watching.

Speaker 14 But actually, even the very, very, very, very earliest cinemas, so when Edison's motion picture patents company was first sending out projectors, they said that you should install ambient lighting to deter misbehavior.

Speaker 14 So even from the very first moment of cinemas, they were saying, let's not have it too dark because you never know what's going to happen.

Speaker 7 Exactly.

Speaker 13 Imagine if they'd stuck to it. I wonder how many children wouldn't have been conceived in the back row of a cinema.
It could have done damage to the population of the world.

Speaker 13 No, it would have ruined a lot of people's cinema experiences, wouldn't it?

Speaker 7 In their youth. There's a cinema that's reopened in Leeds recently called the Hyde Park Picture House, and they are gas lamp lit.
And

Speaker 7 they basically were saying that the reason that there were gas lamps in there was to stop the groping.

Speaker 7 Not necessarily hanky-panky, but actually attacking women in the dark sitting in the cinema and so as they were restoring it they've been putting up photos online of all the things that they're finding like sort of under the floorboards and the seats and stuff and one thing they're finding is giant hat pins and this used to be a suffragette thing where

Speaker 7 yeah you would you would have they had to legislate the length of hat pins because they were being used as weapons but in the cinemas women would bring hat pins with them because guys would come and latch onto them because and no one could see it and they would start poking them with the old hat pin

Speaker 7 yeah

Speaker 14 because it was a thing that you had on you anyway. Like you could say, Oh no, this hat pin, it's not for stabbing people, it's for keeping my hat on.

Speaker 13 But you knew if you're a pervert and the woman you were perving on's hat fell off, you knew you're in trouble.

Speaker 7 Get out of there, it's my advice.

Speaker 13 It's really cool.

Speaker 7 If we ever get back to Leeds for a live show or whatever, you know, um, the cinema's back open, it's the only gas-lit cinema in the world now. It's pretty cool.

Speaker 14 One of the things about the darkness in cinemas is that you know how if you go to the theater or the opera or you know whatever, it's dark. Well, that wasn't always the case either.

Speaker 14 And it mostly came through Gustav Mahler, who decided everything should be dark. And he was probably inspired by the cinemas.

Speaker 14 So I think it seems that in the early 20th century, he insisted on dimming the auditorium.

Speaker 14 And actually, when he did so, the audience were protesting because if you go to the opera in Vienna in the early 20th century, you're wearing all your best clothes. You want everyone to see you.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah, you didn't go to see the opera.

Speaker 13 You went to see your rivals, didn't you? In the box over the other side of the audience.

Speaker 14 You didn't want it to be dark, and you have to concentrate on the opera because, as we all know, opera is incredibly dull.

Speaker 7 It's literally just a filler.

Speaker 7 They've got people's dresses.

Speaker 7 That's great. I didn't realize, I'd love to have visited back then just to watch the social situation.
I didn't realise it was literally social gazing, basically.

Speaker 7 People went sort of every night of the season and they were not concentrating on the play beyond night one. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Wow. There's a thing now where there's a lot of controversy about when the lights should come back up in a cinema.
Oh, at the end of a movie.

Speaker 14 Well, I think it's useful, right? Because if the lights haven't come up and the credits are starting, that's probably because there's an end Marvel thing at the end, right? Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's usually what happens. Well, do they do?

Speaker 13 Do they do like a little scene at the end?

Speaker 7 Yeah, like all the Marvel movies would have a little scene at the very end. And has never ever watched a Marvel movie, and I respect that so much.

Speaker 14 But they wouldn't put the lights up, so you kind of knew that was coming.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 7 That's very clever. So, what's this red hot debate about? Well, the red hot debate is that it's a health and safety thing, right?

Speaker 7 Most people, when the credits start rolling, want to get out of the cinema as quick as possible. Maybe they need to be somewhere.

Speaker 14 I just hate seeing the names of people who've worked, it's just serious

Speaker 7 sake, guys. You've done the job.
I don't need to know about who's the best boy. Oh, it's not bragging.

Speaker 7 So, they want to get out of there. That can be very dangerous.
They can fall over trip hazards, all that sort of stuff. The issue is, modern cinema uses its credit sequence now as part of the film.

Speaker 7 So, there's one film where basically the final scene is happening as the credits are rolling.

Speaker 7 But you don't have the old day projectionists in most cinemas these days. Let's say in modern cinema, they get a hard drive and it has a stamp throughout the hard drive.

Speaker 7 This is when the credits arrive. So they'll pre-program the lights to come up.
So a lot of people are missing the end of movies in terms of the Atmos because lights are coming up.

Speaker 7 And so yeah, it's a raging.

Speaker 7 How many films are running their credits over the final scene? That feels very on guard to me. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Dan, have you ever been... I ask you this because you're Australian.

Speaker 7 Have you ever been to Broome?

Speaker 7 No, I haven't actually. No.
Because it's a very long way away from the rest of Australia. It's in the northwest.
And it's got a cinema called Sun Pictures.

Speaker 7 And it's one of the first. It's a very early cinema.
I don't know if it's Australia's first, but it's very old. 1916.
It was,

Speaker 7 I just like it so much because every night the cinema at Broome was flooded by the tide.

Speaker 7 It was on the coast and there was tidal flooding, and most nights the street would be submerged.

Speaker 7 And apparently, some old timers who remembered it back in the early days said you would be able to catch a fish during the screening

Speaker 7 under your feet. That's so good.
Yeah. Great if you're watching Titanic or something in your answer cinema.
Absolutely.

Speaker 13 It was more fun when projectionists had a bit more control on the day, wasn't it? Because people, you almost had a relationship with your projectionists. And actually, even

Speaker 13 I think momentarily when you're in the cinema, you could say, you know, put the music on louder louder in old Nickelodeons or whatever. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 Or in 1939, a newspaper in Newcastle reported on a really exciting innovation that it said is going to take off in cinemas, where in musical films, of which there were quite a lot back in the day, like Singing in the Rain or whatever.

Speaker 13 After one of the good songs, they'd bring the lights down to black, and then that was the cue for the audience to shout encore.

Speaker 13 And if they shouted Encore long enough, then you rewound the song and you played it again.

Speaker 7 That's great. Oh, that is good.
That's really good. Could you say, I didn't quite.
Who's this?

Speaker 7 Can you play that bit again? Is she married to him?

Speaker 13 Yeah, it would be incredibly annoying watching it with a granny or a child or me.

Speaker 14 You mentioned Nickelodeons.

Speaker 14 So that was in America, right? And it was, you paid a nickel to get in. And it was like usually in a shop or something like that.
And they would pull all the blinds down, make it really, really dark.

Speaker 14 And you'd be able to watch one of these old movies. And obviously, very dark, and it was very cheap.
So they attracted the poorer classes.

Speaker 14 And so it was worried by higher-class people that they'd get pickpocketed or whatever as soon as they went in. So, again, the darkness was thought to be a problem.

Speaker 14 But in the UK, we had our own version of the Nickelodeons, and they were called penny gaffes.

Speaker 14 And obviously, the difference being that in the UK, they were one penny to go in, whereas in America, it was a nickel.

Speaker 14 But the problem was a nickel was worth 2.5 pennies, and so the people who were making the penny gaffes were making two and a half times less than the Nickelodeon people.

Speaker 13 They just did it for the catchy title. Call them Topney Gaffs.

Speaker 14 I guess it was like the smallest.

Speaker 14 They did have pennies in America, didn't they? So they could have done pennies as well. But yeah, it was just, I suppose they thought that it was the only price they could charge.

Speaker 14 But there was a worry at the time. I read some newspaper articles saying that young children were robbing from their parents so they'd be able to attend the penny gaffes.

Speaker 7 Always, always social worries. Any new technology.
So interesting. Just how is this going to ruin the youth?

Speaker 14 Yeah. And the other thing that they did is because these penny gaffes were in shops, so it was a normal shop and they'd be like, okay, we'll put a load of chairs up.

Speaker 14 We'll charge people a penny to come in.

Speaker 14 But there was, people tried to shut them down. And one way they did it was saying you don't have a music hall license because there was no cinema licenses because cinemas didn't exist.

Speaker 14 And so loads of them would play the movies in complete silence. And so you would go in, it was completely dark and it was completely silent.

Speaker 14 You'd be watching the moving pictures, but there'd be no music.

Speaker 13 And that, because usually you'd have a piano or something, wouldn't you?

Speaker 7 Being played live along with it.

Speaker 14 But they couldn't do that because if they did, they'd get closed down for being a musical.

Speaker 13 To be fair, I think that's fine. I mean, mostly if you're watching a silent film, you're not watching it for the piano music, are you?

Speaker 7 A lot of the music was composed specifically for the reels.

Speaker 7 So they'd be handed this cheap music. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ambience matters.

Speaker 13 But I don't think it matters as much as with a film with dialogue, for instance, where you wouldn't know what was happening.

Speaker 7 If you're watching a silent film, you still know what's happening. I would like more ambience in my movies, you know.

Speaker 7 If you think Star Wars, which has dialogue, would be as good without the score, then let's experiment. We should have it completely music-free or Indiana drones or whatever.

Speaker 7 Also, I need someone to drown out James going, who's that?

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Speaker 7 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the oldest diving clubs in Ireland is the Muff Diving Club.
And what's so funny about Ireland?

Speaker 7 Nothing.

Speaker 7 It's interesting because

Speaker 7 it's how old it is.

Speaker 7 It's one of the oldest.

Speaker 7 Wow. How old is it? We're talking a good like three decades.

Speaker 7 Oh, my God.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, this is the Muff Diving Club. Yeah, it was just set up by a group of guys who obviously spotted a good gag and they wanted to do it.

Speaker 7 And they've not only been pushing for it to be an old, long-lasting diving club, but they want it to be the largest, the biggest membership of any diving club in the world.

Speaker 7 And so you go to their site, you can buy t-shirts,

Speaker 7 you can get a membership card.

Speaker 14 There is a lot more t-shirt selling than actual diving in this club, I think.

Speaker 7 I'm finding it so hard when I'm looking into it, and I still haven't got to the bottom of it if any diving happens.

Speaker 7 What is a diving club? What is a diving club?

Speaker 7 Diving instructors teach you how to dive? Scuba diving. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Oh,

Speaker 7 I thought it was high diving. Did you not even see the logo? Did you research this?

Speaker 7 Not follow the link you sent. I've tried, but I've got a child lock on my computer.

Speaker 7 how interesting. I mean, you could have a high diving club as well.

Speaker 14 People who like to high dive might get together and practice together.

Speaker 7 I guess. But if all your facts are about high diving, then you are going to be lost for the next half an hour.
I've gone purely muff, actually.

Speaker 7 Muff directional.

Speaker 14 Well, me too. I went to the Irish sort of version of Company's House to see how many other muff companies there are in Ireland.
Right. Muff Engineering, Muff Service Station, Muff Soap, Muff Direct.

Speaker 7 Muff Direct. Is this all in Muff? These are all real.

Speaker 14 They're all in Muff.

Speaker 7 Muff After School. And

Speaker 7 what?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 How do the parents send your kids to that?

Speaker 14 It's just like an after-school place where kids go to, like, while the parents are still working at the Muff Liquor Company.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 14 Which the Muff Liquor Company, this is really interesting. I went on their website and it doesn't seem to be a joke at all.

Speaker 14 In fact, if you go to the website, it looks like they haven't realized that muff liquor could be quite rude because it's a proper, like, it's a vodka company and they've got a history of this guy, the grandfather of the owner who started it all these years ago.

Speaker 7 So there's no sort of sly wink at the fact that this is an amusing phrase, like that salad company called TOST.

Speaker 14 No, unless I've completely missed it.

Speaker 7 I think they've just gone deadpan. No, I think you're right.
I think it's just, we're in muff, we make a liquor, let's put it out. Oh, fair enough.

Speaker 13 They do know, but they've gone, we're above that. These fucking muff divers next door, we don't need to stoop to that level.

Speaker 13 We'll put it out there, we'll let people chuckle to themselves, and we'll sell them some vodka. No t-shirt t-shirt necessary.

Speaker 7 I was reading an interview where a lady called Caitlin was over in Australia, and she was on a TV show, like a family fortunes kind of thing. And she was from Muff.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, it's not got a big population, Muff, but she was from there. And the guy couldn't believe that she was from there.
And she said she went to a school that was called Hollybush.

Speaker 7 So that was a nice

Speaker 7 connection. And she says that when you come, when you're driving in, that there is a sign that says you are now entering Muff.

Speaker 7 And I've not seen that online. I've been looking.
Seems plausible. It does seem plausible.
You can say you see Welcome to Muff,

Speaker 7 but I haven't seen a you are now entering Muff.

Speaker 14 House prices are struggling in MUF.

Speaker 14 Yeah, apparently the prices are lower than you might imagine.

Speaker 7 I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop on this joke.

Speaker 14 Well, it's for a slightly different reason than you might think. So you would find

Speaker 14 people who live on shithouse lane or whatever,

Speaker 7 always complaining in the newspapers, oh, I can't sell my house or whatever.

Speaker 14 But in actual fact, the reason that they can't sell them very well is because they're on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Speaker 14 And Brexit has meant that the bottom has dropped out of the muff market.

Speaker 7 There we go. There we go.

Speaker 7 I knew something was coming. Was it worth it? Was it worth mortgage news from math?

Speaker 7 It was not a written joke.

Speaker 7 But then you were on the phone to a local estate agent.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 if I say this, am I I technically right?

Speaker 7 Do you want to buy that or not?

Speaker 7 Oh, dear. Shall we talk about muffs themselves?

Speaker 7 Fur muffs. Fur muffs that people would wear.
Okay. You know,

Speaker 7 hand muffs, as it were, how you keep your hands warm.

Speaker 7 They used to be completely gender-neutral. Men and women alike would wear muffs.
It was just a thing because...

Speaker 7 It was really cold. It used to be a lot colder.

Speaker 7 Some of you...

Speaker 7 Bumble warming, guys.

Speaker 7 It used to be be a bit colder, but also they were more cold. In the 16th century, you know, people did not have well-insulated homes and clothes were, you know, you didn't have lovely puffer jackets.

Speaker 7 You know, people needed to keep warmer and wearing fur muffs to cover your hands. Really useful.
Okay. Furry muff.
Furry muff.

Speaker 7 And I think it came from muffuli, which is a medieval Latin term which describes these big leather winter mitts that you'd wear. Right, yeah.
Muffuli.

Speaker 7 And there was a great article all about the history of the word muff on on the Oxford University Press website by Anne Anatalie Lieberman. And it's all these different words come from muff.
So

Speaker 7 Danish muff means clown.

Speaker 7 And Dickens uses muff to mean something like an annoying person or a fool or whatever. German has muffeled, which means sulk.
Miff might come from muff. Miff.

Speaker 7 I'm feeling a bit miffed. Oh, miffed, right? You might really be actually muffed.

Speaker 14 You say muff. We use muff in American football.

Speaker 7 It's a term.

Speaker 7 Oh, you've muffed it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's what it means, basically. As in someone kicks the ball to you and you try and catch it and you don't quite catch it, but the ball's still in place, so someone else can get it.

Speaker 14 That's a muff. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7 That's quite a technical term. Because I would say, yeah, you've muffed it to mean sort of, oh, you just messed it up.

Speaker 14 You do say that, and I actually checked all my WhatsApp messages, and you're the only person who's ever WhatsApped me the word muff.

Speaker 7 No, really? Yes. And to you to mean muffed it up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, wow.
That is interesting. I'm going to search my WhatsApp.
Well, no, not now.

Speaker 7 Okay, yeah, I'll do it later.

Speaker 13 But muff is also slang for a woman's vulver.

Speaker 7 No. What?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 13 I know, it's so weird.

Speaker 7 Wait a minute. So, what about the muff diving club?

Speaker 13 I think that could be you. That should be a euphemism.

Speaker 7 That sounds like funny.

Speaker 7 What about the thing that James said about the bottom dropping out of the muff market?

Speaker 7 That's even funnier than it was originally.

Speaker 7 I thought it was just funny because James said the word bottom, which is a bit funny.

Speaker 13 No, it's actually true.

Speaker 7 But also, it's cool.

Speaker 13 But it has been slang for that for so long. I like how quickly we turn this into slang.
So it started meaning a hand warmer in the 1590s, and by the 1690s, it meant a woman's pubic area.

Speaker 13 Because I suppose you carried it down there, it's a big hairy thing that's around your crotch.

Speaker 7 So, of course. It's 100 years.
That's a long time for it to make the leap. When it's first written down there, I bet they've been saying it for decades.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you could get muff warmers?

Speaker 14 Is that to warm your muff?

Speaker 7 Or? Yeah. I thought muff was are to warm you.

Speaker 13 Yes, but the muff warmers warm the muff.

Speaker 7 But who warms the muff warmer?

Speaker 7 They were little ceramic things that you would fill up with hot water. And I imagine actually that you'd leave them in the muff.
Yeah, you would. And then when you're going out, that's clever.

Speaker 7 You warm the muff up. Maybe you're going out in an hour.
You say, well, pop the muff warmer in the muff. Then you come to go out, you just get your muff.
It's lovely and warm.

Speaker 7 Andy,

Speaker 7 idea.

Speaker 14 Have you got any money to invest? Yeah.

Speaker 7 Good. Okay, so

Speaker 7 a mannequin. Yeah.

Speaker 14 But it's heated. And you put your coat on the mannequin.
And then when you go out, you can take a nice warm coat and put it on.

Speaker 7 Oh, yes. Ring the dragons.

Speaker 7 Ring the dragons. That's great.

Speaker 13 If you're really wealthy, you just have a human coat warmer. Someone who wears your coat for half an hour before you go out.

Speaker 7 I see that.

Speaker 14 Mine is just a one-off purchase, whereas yours is more of a subscription purchase.

Speaker 7 Very much so. Yeah, I do see that.
I mean, mean, when you get into bed, it might be nice to. I mean, a warmer bed isn't.

Speaker 7 I know you two, two widows, you like cold beds, but I like getting into a bed that's slightly warm on a winter's night.

Speaker 14 Do you do like they used to do on the Grand Tour, where they would put a live pig in their bed before they went to bed to warm it up and to get rid of bed bugs?

Speaker 7 Is that a real thing?

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's what they used to do. On the Grand Tour.

Speaker 7 You saw the Clarkson show.

Speaker 7 Wait, what were you talking about? That's what I thought you were talking about.

Speaker 14 I was talking about in the when would it have been in the like 18th century when you would go around Europe?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. Have you heard of muff boutiques? This is great.

Speaker 14 Okay, not a company in muff.

Speaker 7 No. This was a thing.
It's from a book by a 19th century dandy called Octave Uzin. And he was an admirer of ladies' accessories.

Speaker 7 And he wrote a book which was called L'Ombrelle Le Gant Le Monchamp, which means the parasol, the glove, the muff. And he said that in Renaissance Italy...

Speaker 7 There were muff boutiques where you could either go and buy a muff or in the off season when it gets nice and warm, you don't need your muff anymore you go and you store it in the muff boutique and they delouse them

Speaker 13 if true that's very funny it's a brilliant book that isn't it it does sound great i've only read secondhand about it there was a it's actually quite it's all available online and it's quite short um so i did read it and yeah it's the sunshade the glove the muff and it was published by this guy in response to the previous year's incredibly successful the fan um which was his history of the fan oh that was great yeah yeah i know that book really published sort of 1881.

Speaker 13 Were you there for the first time?

Speaker 7 No, I know a modern one. Someone wrote a hot book about.

Speaker 13 No, it's great. The Sun Take the Glove, the Muff.

Speaker 13 And he tells, my favourite story from it was he says there's an account in the late 1500s of towers being besieged and at the front line of defenders who are defending themselves from these from this siege is a woman with muffs and a halberd in hand, a halberd being a sort of poker, pokey sticky thing.

Speaker 13 Spear.

Speaker 7 Spear, thank you.

Speaker 7 A woman with a muff defending the city. Wow.

Speaker 7 For a reason. Keeping her hands warm.
Keeping her hands warm while...

Speaker 13 Because you've got to be quite dexterous to operate a spear, I suppose. Absolutely.

Speaker 14 You can't prod a Haldane with cold hands, can you?

Speaker 7 Very difficult, yeah. There were muff chains, which was to hang your muff, I think, when you're not using it.
Your hands out of your muff, you just put it on your muff chain around your neck.

Speaker 7 Oh, right.

Speaker 7 Muff pistols? Okay.

Speaker 7 To shoot your muff. To shoot from your muff if you're approached by footpads.

Speaker 14 Oh, I see. They weren't like the sex pistols.

Speaker 7 The muff pistols. It was like the female sex pistols.

Speaker 7 No, that was just a tiny gun for ladies to protect yourself if you were out and about and someone approaches you to rob you.

Speaker 7 One place in Ireland that would have used the muff divers, I think, quite usefully is a town where the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. in the 1880s.
Oh yeah. So that was there.

Speaker 7 That was in Ireland.

Speaker 7 It was a little place called Spunk Cane.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's where the first transatlantic cable was placed. Spunk Cane.
Spike. Spunk Cane.
So it's great. Okay, here's another fact.
The word spunk also can mean ejaculate. No.

Speaker 13 That's a really funny name for a place to start the cable.

Speaker 7 I thought it was just like a good-looking dude, you know, spunky, you know? That's disgusting now. Spunk cane.

Speaker 14 The town of Muff, where the original fact was, is where Amelia Earhart landed when she did her first solo flight.

Speaker 13 Cool. Not her last one.

Speaker 14 No, unfortunately, we don't know exactly where she landed that time.

Speaker 14 But her first one, she landed just outside the village of Muff.

Speaker 7 Oh, wow.

Speaker 7 The man who composed the theme music for Gladiators is called Muff Murphy.

Speaker 14 Gladiators a TV show. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Ah, that's a good name. Muff Murphy.
Yeah, Muff is a name. It's a man's name.
Muff. I don't know.
And he was a nickname as well. Yeah.
I don't know any Muff.

Speaker 13 I'm not familiar with.

Speaker 7 The brother of Spencer Davis, who obviously founded the Spencer Davis group. Obviously.
Obviously. it's called Muff.

Speaker 7 You know the Spencer Davis group. Give me some loving.

Speaker 7 Is that a band? Oh, it's a band. Yeah, it's a band.
Give me some love. That one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Oh,

Speaker 7 hang on. Isn't that?

Speaker 13 I've always thought it was Gimme Summer Loving.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 14 I have thought it was Give Me Some Muffin.

Speaker 7 James has inserted a muffin there. Anna has thought it was a haiku.
It's supposed to be a summer reference.

Speaker 7 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 7 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, you can find us on various bits of social media. I'm on Instagram.

Speaker 7 You can get me on at Schreiberland. Andy.
I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M. James.

Speaker 14 I now have 400 followers on TikTok

Speaker 14 on No Such Thing as James Harkin, despite the fact that I have no intention of posting anything on there.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where do they go?

Speaker 13 You can go to Instagram, which is no such thing as a fish, or Twitter at no such thing, or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 7 Yep, if you want to find anything else out about us, go to our website, no such thingasafish.com. There is the links to get you into the world of Club Fish, which is our secret members group.

Speaker 7 And there's a great Discord that you can join. There's lots of bonus content that we put out through Club Fish.

Speaker 7 Or you can just get access to all of our previous episodes as well as bits of merchandise that you can get your hands on there. Otherwise, just come back here next week.

Speaker 7 We're going to be back with another episode, and we'll see you then. Goodbye.

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