495: No Such Thing As A Peanut Hall of Fame

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Your ring your way.

Hey, everybody, Dan and Andy here, and we have two very exciting big announcements before this week's show starts.

That's right.

The first one is that we are joined by a very special guest this week, and that is the incredible Neil Gaiman.

Yes, Neil Gaiman has done so much stuff.

So he's written brilliant novels.

He's written for the screen.

Neverwhere, American Gods, Stardust.

He co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett.

He's done it all.

That's right.

And it's not even just the books, you know, the TV work as well.

The Sandman was converted into a show.

Doctor Who, his episodes of doctor who are some of the best episodes of the modern era and then of course good omens comes to amazon prime and then they do a second series despite the fact that terry pratchett has passed away i was quite nervous it comes out it is brilliant so the guy just continues to deliver extraordinary goods uh i i binged it in one go by the way i don't know if you've seen it yandy it's it's incredible and so yeah we're very excited because what was he gonna talk about this mystical man was it gonna be ghosts was it gonna be graveyards was it gonna be the history of norse gods What was it gonna be?

Andy, what was it?

Bagels?

Bagels.

It's bagels.

The man loves bagels, and he needed to tell us about it.

So that's why it's so exciting because Neil is a thunder nerd, just like us.

Anyway, that's announcement one.

Announcement number two, Andy.

The other huge announcement we've got is that we are going to be doing a live show really soon.

We're going to be at the London Podcast Festival on the 14th of September this year.

Now, it's sold out in the room, but there are still streaming tickets available and they're available for a few days after the show.

So if you buy a ticket, you can watch it at your convenience and there is a really good reason to buy a streaming ticket.

In fact there are two reasons.

The first reason is that it's going to be our 500th show.

We've moved Roman numerals.

The last one we had was C, now we're doing D.

This is amazing.

So that's the first big reason.

The second big reason is that we have a special guest.

Now In all the months that we've been having special guests since Anna went on maternity leave, our guests have been great.

But there's one guest who we've been really excited to get.

And for this show, Show 500, our special guest is Anna Tazzynski.

yes she's back yes we're so excited Anna will be joining us live on stage so if you want to be part of that party as we're surrounded in giant D balloons I'm so regretting letting Andy organize the balloons now

you can do that by simply heading to no such thingasofish.com slash live you'll find a link to the live stream tickets for the London podcast festival that's where we'll be if you're a fish accordion you can chat about it online with everyone else as it goes out streaming live and let's make this into a massive party and a proper return for Anna Tashinsky.

Yeah, no such thing as a fish.com slash live.

Get your tickets now.

That's it from us.

On with the show.

On with Mr.

Gaiman and his bagels.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week from four undisclosed locations around the globe.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Neil Gaiman.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Neil.

My fact is that the bagel in the form that we know it only ever came to exist through Polish anti-Semitism.

Now I could have gone for something much more sort of easy to chat about with bagels, like the fact that every year over 2,000 people are taken to hospital in America alone with bagel-related injuries.

Neil, I'm going to pause you there.

I want to know what a bagel relates.

As in, I cannot think of anything less likely to injure me than a bagel.

And I feel like I would have to be misusing a bagel in some terrible way in order that I would need to go to A and E with it.

I could tell you, Andy, it's cutting them open.

It's finger cuts from.

And quite often people try and cut them while they're still frozen.

I do that sometimes.

I do that.

I try and crack them.

There are frozen ones.

There was a report in 2008.

Bagel-based injuries were the fifth most common injury by knife reported to hospitals.

I read that, Dan.

But did you see the...

Did you see what the other four were?

Yeah.

What were they?

Okay, so number one was chicken.

Chicken-based cutting would get you in.

Number two, and I don't know if these are in the right order, but the other three are potatoes, apples, and onions.

Wow.

And then you get the bagel.

Cheese comes afterwards.

Cheese is very safe to cut.

In America, though, they don't really, they just have to take it out of the plastic sheet, don't they?

Oh, yeah, ouch.

There we go.

A bit of sledging for our American listeners about the quality of your cheese.

Nice try.

But apparently it's so prominent that you would have these bagel-based cuts that someone went in and said the nurse looked at the cut and went, Were you cutting a bagel?

Because the horizontal cut of the laying down of the bagel would be

similar to the cut.

These are all way more wholesome than my interpretation of what you would end up in hospital with a bagel for.

So that's good.

So good.

So sorry.

Medieval Polish anti-Semitism.

Let's get on to the real meeting.

It says medieval Polish anti-Semitism because the initial way that a bagel was made is it was boiled.

And there were laws enacted in Poland that forbade forbade Jews from touching bread, baking bread in particular.

So when forbidden to bake bread, they made their bread into essentially rings and started boiling them.

And that was where our bagel begins.

I got heavily into bagel making during lockdown.

Oh.

In the way that one does.

You know, I had my little pot of sourdough fermenting away in the sideboard and three times a week I would make my bagels and just started getting into why you boil them.

Okay.

Drop them in boiling water and then they rise, they float to the top.

And then and only then do you slam them into the oven.

And I'm assuming those original bagels were not even ovened.

I know that there were various sort of laws being enacted and lifted.

At one point, there was a very nice Polish prince named Bolislav in 1264 who actually pronounced a law saying Jews may freely buy and sell and touch bread like Christians, which was incredibly kind of him.

I think, I mean, when he says like Christians, I imagine there are still some restrictions on Christians just touching all the bread they like.

I mean, if I was running a bakery, I would not want people, no matter what their creed or denomination, to come in and just touch the sellers.

Touch the bread.

Yeah.

I think the theories were like, well, there are a few various theories that are put across, but like one of them is that obviously bread was used for communion by the Catholics and so there was a worry that if the Jewish people were touching the bread they might touch communion bread and there was also at one stage the idea was that Jewish people were poisoning bread basically

yeah it was basically the anti-Semitism of you know the Jewish people are trying to kill us and they're gonna do it through our bread do you know what I mean so and the boiling could have been to show that it wasn't poisoned.

You know, if you boil something, then that shows that there's no poison in there.

So

that's one theory as to why they're boiled.

Right.

That's so interesting.

Did you guys hear about the bagel baker's local 338?

No.

It sounds like a chat line, actually, but it's not.

It's the...

They were the group of bakers in New York in the early 20th century, and they were all Jewish.

And if you wanted to get in, you had to be able to roll 832 bagels in an hour.

That was the

criterion for entry.

That's awesome.

I know.

They all had this special bagel muscle on the outside of their elbows.

Like, I've just pointed to it on the screen.

You can see mine is not very well developed, but it's like here.

So it's just above your elbow.

Or maybe just below, actually.

I think it's the one that's the same as if you open a lot of bottles of wine.

You get an incredibly strong muscle there.

Exactly.

Mine is tiny.

You have a person who does that for you, Andy, don't you?

Yeah, I've got an incredibly strong shouting at the butler muscle, but not the.

No, so

they were crazy unionised.

They had really good careers, great pay, great benefits.

You could take home 24 free bagels every day, every individual baker.

So you're laughing.

And if they didn't get good contracts, they would go on strike and the city would have a terrible bagel drought.

And then, sadly, bagels started to be machine-made, and

they all bought the jobs.

So, when did they actually come up with machine-making bagels?

I think it was the 50s.

Yeah, it was.

It was the late 50s.

Yeah, it was a guy called Daniel Thompson, wasn't it?

And he came up with what he called an apparatus for making a toroid.

But he did say in his patent that it was specifically for bagels, because people had tried to make bagels using doughnut machines, but the dough was too thick, so it wouldn't work on the doughnut machine.

So this was an improvement.

And the one other thing that Daniel Thompson invented, this is so random, he invented the first wheeled folding ping-pong table.

So what?

Two things to give the world, like automatic bagels and the folding ping-pong table.

Oh, what would you headline with on the headstone?

I'm not sure.

Probably the automatic bagel.

I think so.

Yeah, I'd go with the bagel because it's changed more lives.

So, am I right in saying that a common filling for bagels is something called cream cheese and lox?

Has anyone heard that?

Yeah, yeah.

You are, absolutely.

What's lox?

Smoked salmon.

Yeah, it's smoked salmon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The really interesting thing about this is that the word lox hasn't changed in sound or meaning for 8,000 years.

Wow.

And in the English language, we think it's the oldest word.

That if you got in a time machine and you went back 8,000 years, they wouldn't understand anything that you said apart from if you asked for some locks on your bagel.

Well, bagels might not have existed then, but if you asked for some locks, they would know what you mean.

Isn't that amazing?

And

it's a word that they use to kind of prove Proto-Indo-European, you know, this old language that kind of spread out and all the different European and West Asian languages come from.

They worked that out by using this word locks because it comes in old Germanic, in

all sorts of different languages.

This is bizarre.

I have a link to Proto-Indo-European and bagels that is not the lox thing here, because I was looking up where the word bagel comes from.

And bagel comes from a Proto-Indo-European root, which is bleag,

b-h-e-u-g, and it means to bend.

So a bagel is bent into a circle, so there.

And b b

also features in

bow, you know, when you add add the verb to bow.

It features in bow, like bow and arrow.

It features in bow, like the bow of a ship, also bent.

Elbow.

Oh,

same.

Yeah, and buxom also is the other word that derives gradually from boyg.

So when you've got bagel's elbow, you're doubling up on the bow in descriptors.

Oh, that's lovely.

I love the idea that it's 8,000 years ago.

You're wandering around Proto-Europe, and

somehow you're able to persuade somebody to give you a roundish piece of bread with smoked salmon on it.

Cream cheese, by the way,

the most famous type in Britain at least, and I think probably in America, is made in which city?

Philadelphia.

I'm afraid not.

It was invented in New York, but it was named Philadelphia because the Philadelphia area was so famous for making good dairy products that they wanted to name it after this area, but it was actually invented in New York.

Right.

So now you're saying American cheese is good, James.

Interesting about face you've done on this podcast.

Just very quickly, just while we were talking about the words for bagel, what's quite surprising is that up until 1951, bagel wasn't really a known word outside of the Jewish communities in the major cities of America.

So it was in 1951 that when the New York Times was writing an article about the strike that was happening, that they actually had to provide a pronunciation guide to show, so B-A-Y-G-L-E, just that's how this word that you're now reading is pronounced.

It's quite amazing.

My mother, who is 89, whenever the subject of bagels comes up, as it doesn't as often as you'd expect, always gets a little bit aggrieved because she's like, it's not bagel, it's bagel.

E-I-G-U-L.

And she says, and I know that because my mother's aunt and uncle, Rosie and Mick, owned the Johnny Isaacs fish and chip shop in the East End.

And

outside the fish and chip shop, there was the little old bagel lady.

And my mother is still slightly put out about the fact that the pronunciation has gone bagel because all of her childhood they were bigels.

There's a book on the bagel that was written by a lady called Maria Wilenska and she finds an old pretzel tin and it's got baigel on it as a name.

And it turns out that there was a family in Poland called Beigel who were part of the Jewish baking community.

in pre-Nazi Krakow.

And she thinks, ah, is that where baigel first originated from as a term?

There is another Krakow link, weirdly, and this is like the act the origin of the bagel, because there's a story that it came from the siege of Vienna in 1683 when the Ottomans besieged Vienna and you know there was to celebrate the victory and the breaking of that siege, blah blah blah.

It's not true.

I mean, no, it's not true because at least 70 years before that, in a Jewish Krakow, there was a statute saying you are allowed to give bagels to a woman who's given birth.

It was a kind of fertility thing.

It was a kind of, if the woman's given birth, you give her a bagel, give the midwife a bagel.

Any women or girls who are present at the birthday, get a bagel to, you get a bagel, you get a bagel.

I think it's because it's ring-shaped.

It's sort of as a fertility thing.

Is it like what you were thinking about how you would end up in the emergency room, Sandy?

It's not far away from that home.

It's pretty close.

From Australia to San Francisco, Colin Jewellery brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab grown diamond engagement rings to the US.

Explore solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom piece that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewels behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our Union Street showroom or explore the range at colonjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that it's actually not that bad to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill for it only to roll down again every time.

Sure.

That's how I perceive making this podcast.

Yeah.

It's not that bad after all.

You know, it's like it's supposed to be this eternal punishment and, you know, it's it's kind of fine.

So this is Sisyphus and it's the great Greek mythology story, right?

Pushing a boulder up a hill but can never make it up to the top as the punishment.

That's right.

You never hear him complaining, do you?

Or does he?

It's definitely a punishment from the gods.

It is a punishment.

Look, this is something that I read, a study called Idleness, Aversion, and the Need for Justifiable Busyness, which was a study from 2010 from the University of Chicago, University of Shanghai, and a few other places, which I read about on Improbable.com, run by our friends, that website.

And the idea is that now that humans don't have to spend their day just trying to survive and run away from lions and collect food and all that kind of stuff we need to be kept busy in order to be happy and what they did was they did an experiment where people were in a room and they had to do a survey and then at the end of the survey they had to take their paper either to the front of the room or they had to walk 10 minutes to another place and put their paper there right and in both places they'll get some candy as a thanks for doing the survey now when they did that study most people just went for the box which was right next to them because why not it's right there.

But when they told them that in one of the places it'll be plain chocolate and the other place it'll be dark chocolate, more than 50% of them would start going the 10-minute walk and the 10-minute walk back rather than just doing the short one and then waiting for everyone to come back from wherever they've been.

So people would rather go and get the candy than sit around idly for 20 minutes waiting.

And the weird thing is, no matter what you did, if you put the milk chocolate in one place and the dark chocolate in another, or you swapped it around, people still make that walk.

And the idea is that people prefer to do something rather than sitting around doing nothing when they think they're going to get something for their efforts.

And it doesn't matter what the thing is that you think you're going to get for your efforts, you're going to do something.

Yeah, that's very clever experiment design because otherwise it would have turned into a referendum on which is better, plain chocolate or dark chocolate.

That's an unintended consequence.

And so, what they thought was, these people who did this study, and they speculate about it in their paper, is that people are just happier when they're given something to do and that Sisyphus, which they actually mention in the paper, Sisyphus would be happier rolling the rock up and down the hill every or up the hill every single day and then it goes to the bottom and he has to do it again and do it again and do it again.

He would be happier doing that than if he spent all of eternity just sitting around twiddling his thumbs doing nothing.

And that's the idea.

Yeah.

I mean, they mentioned things in the paper that's written in the science paper where where they say homeowners may increase the happiness of their idle housekeepers by letting in some mice and prompting the housekeepers to clean up.

Yeah, I did read that.

Yeah, governments may increase the happiness of idle citizens by having them build bridges that are actually useless.

And then they put in practical examples where people have done this, where they've shown that by stopping the idleness, that happiness is hopefully increased, and that's in airports.

And that is extending the distance between getting off the plane and the baggage carousel so that you don't just get straight there and then you're idly waiting for the bags to come out.

That's the idea: is that at least you're walking to something and you're using up your time.

I don't know if that's true.

I think that one is apocryphal, isn't it?

Or it's not absolutely nailed on because I think the claim is that Houston Airport did that because they were getting loads of people complaining because the plane landed a minute from the baggage carousel and then they had to hang around waiting.

And then when they just switched the arrival gate and sent the bags so that people had to walk for the eight minutes basically before the bags got to the thing, then complaints dropped.

So, yeah,

Sisyphus, founded Corinth.

I've been to the hill which he

pushed the rock up, supposedly.

Oh, really?

Which is on the outskirts of Corinth.

What, so did he complete the gig?

No, but it's like a story, isn't it?

Yeah, it's like a story.

So the people of Corinth say, oh, this is the hill, or the tall guide says, this is the hill which he did it.

So I've disgraced myself

as a mythologist

and as somebody who's written books on mythology and written stories set in mythological times, and even even had Sisyphus as a character.

The one place in literature he gets to stop rolling his rock is when Orpheus goes to the underworld and sings and I've written that.

And I've just realized I'd completely forgotten what he did to be punished to do that.

Is he one of the ones who accidentally did he feed the gods his son accidentally?

Was he one of those?

No,

it was Zeus, wasn't it?

Yeah, he tricked Zeus.

He did it twice.

Basically, it was a second offense.

I think that was the thing where the gods get really annoyed with you.

So the first thing was that Zeus had run off with a woman, and Sisyphus had seen it happening, and he snitched on Zeus.

And so Zeus decided, well, I'm going to strike you down with a thunderbolt.

And then he tried to cheat death by chaining death up so that he couldn't take into the underworld.

And then a second time he tried to cheat death by saying that he needed to go up to see his wife because his wife hadn't done a proper funeral or something.

Yeah, yeah.

He'd already instructed his wife.

He said to his wife, don't bury me, right?

This is going to be great.

And then when he got to Hades, he said, oh, I haven't had a proper funeral, so I need to go and punish my wife and arrange the proper funeral.

And then when he got back, he just reunited with his wife.

Yeah.

And they said, well, if you're going to try and stop, you know, dying and try and stop death in general, because he tried to stop death for the whole of the world.

They said, well, we're going to make death really, really shitty for you.

I've got to say, it's one of the, I think the punishments are really good in Greek myths.

I'd never heard of this one.

This is Ochnus.

Have you heard of Ochnus?

I mean, maybe Neil, you've written about Ocnus.

I don't know.

Tell me about Ocnus.

So Ochnus is punishment.

I actually don't know what the crime was, but he had to perpetually weave a rope out of straw.

But no matter how fast he wove the rope, the rope that he's already woven gets eaten by a donkey.

And I have to say,

that sounds like a sort of holiday activity to me.

Yeah.

You just have to weave some rope.

Do you think?

And you get to be friends with a donkey.

Well, it's not having your liver eaten every day, is it?

Pecked out of you by a bird while you're trained on a rock.

It's very much like parking a fence level of punishment.

That's how much you like weaving, doesn't it?

Well, that's true.

And there's always a thing, oh, in life he hated weaving, so actually, yeah, that was his least favorite activity.

There was Ixion,

who was a murderer, killed his father-in-law, the first man guilty of kinslaying in Greek mythology, and he got bound to a burning wheel.

And his wheel spun across the heavens.

Oh, my goodness.

I would say definitely take the weaving ahead of that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

I was trying to find out whether or not there are any modern examples of someone trying to push something up a hill and finding it quite hard.

Last year, 2022, a Colorado man attempted to ascend to the top of a 14,115-foot mountain called Pike's Peak on his hands and knees while trying to push a peanut to the top of the hill using his nose.

So you can see footage of this.

He has a mask on his face where there's a sort of black spoon that's attached to the front of his nose.

He starts at the bottom.

He's got the peanut there.

He's brought multiple peanuts because it turns out he's not the first person to do this.

He's the fourth in Colorado history.

The first person to do it was in 1929 and it took three weeks for that person to do.

But squirrels were stealing the peanuts and so the efforts were quite messed up.

So he has multiple peanuts that he took with him on this trip and it took him seven days, but he got there.

But is he going on hands and knees?

Yeah, hands and knees.

Yeah.

Pushing is so painful.

Does he take the peanut back down afterwards?

That feels easier, doesn't it?

Yeah, kicking in the deck.

Or is there a miniature can of three previous peanuts that have been there and he's just adding to it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, like a whole lot of stuff.

It sounds like a weirdly something.

There must be more going on in Colorado.

If you're in Colorado and you're listening to this, please write it in and tell us what else there is to do.

I have a couple more boredom things.

So there was a study in 2021 about what people are willing to do when they are bored and whether it changes people's perceptions of morality or what they're prepared to do.

This study found that if you ask people to watch a boring 20-minute long video, people are more willing to shred maggots in a grinder.

The scientists gave people a few maggots and they even named them.

They called them Toto, Tifi and Kiki.

And they left people.

They said, look, wait, I'm just going to pop out of the room while you've watched this video for 20 minutes.

Here are Toto, Tifi, and Kiki.

Here's your grinder.

And

just have a great time.

And

way more people.

So it wasn't.

They must have.

Sorry, Andy, they must have put the idea into their heads that the maggots can go into the grinder, surely.

If you leave someone with a maggot and a grinder,

you can only combine those things in one way.

And basically, so it wasn't everyone by a long way, but 67 people who watched the very, very dull video.

Out of how many?

So

that was the total.

67 people watched this dull video.

Of them, 12 dropped a maggot in.

And

obviously there was a a control group.

When they got to watch an interesting documentary,

I don't know, maybe an Attenborough, maybe a Thuru, doesn't matter.

It was just one person out of 62.

Well, it makes a difference, actually, Andy, if they're watching like a nature documentary,

then they might feel more empathetic towards the maggots.

True.

But they might feel empathetic towards the lions.

You know, nature's grinder.

That's a, yeah.

Anyway, you will be relieved to hear that no maggots were actually ground up.

There was a fake machine in the fake machine.

Wow.

That's funny.

I've seen one of those before.

I did an escape room where I had to put my hand in a food processor to get the key, but obviously it was a fake one, but they didn't tell you it was a fake one.

And I killed it.

So you were willing to grind up your hand for the sake of

getting a clue.

I was quite aware that we were in a controlled environment, that they wouldn't let me do that.

They wouldn't let me mutilate myself.

So I was fairly certain that if there was a real food processor there, someone would come over the tanno saying, don't do that.

Yeah, you know, you meet an awful lot lot of one-handed men around here who were equally as certain.

I've done an escape room with you, James.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that you would be willing to risk serious physical injury to get a personal best.

It's true.

Here's an interesting thing that I've been reading about, and I don't know, it's quite complicated, so

let's see where it goes.

But I was reading about neuroscience, and there is a theory in neuroscience at the moment that the human brain is only built to solve one problem.

Ooh, what is the best way to cut into this bagel?

That would be more.

What am I going to eat next?

Yeah, I see what you mean.

Yeah, I think all of these could be subcategories of what these neuroscientists are saying.

They reckon that your brain is created to make sure you don't have any surprises in your life.

Oh, yeah.

And basically, everything you do, everything that your brain does is trying to stop that from happening.

And that's the reason why people like routine because they know that there's not going to be any surprises and it'll be the same all the time.

But it also, in theory, explains people being curious and people inventing new things because what you're doing is you're slightly pushing the boundaries so you can test it and so that your brain doesn't get surprised if anything beyond those boundaries happens.

And I just find it a really interesting idea that, you know, this incredibly complicated thing in your head is only really trying to do one thing.

But it just everything else feeds from that.

I feel like that's true.

What about, well, so what, I mean, I feel like I like like to be surprised by works of art, like a book or a film.

I will like a surprise.

But to be fair, I only like a surprise within certain parameters.

Yeah.

So if I'm going to see Mission Impossible 7, there is a set number of things which I'm prepared to adore,

but if they introduce like a time travel thing,

I will be unpleasantly surprised by that.

It's like the idea that what you want when you're seeing a film is for it all to end in the way that you wanted it to, but not in the way you were expecting.

That's nice.

Yeah.

You need surprise parameters, because at the moment where you can literally call off every beat in a film by the numbers, you start looking around for maggots to grind.

Whenever I watch an episode of the Big Bang Theory, the maggot toll is absolutely astronomical by the end of the 20 minutes.

It's been a while since you had got the Big Bang Theory, Andy.

That's a gold back.

We're trying to surprise our listeners, but within, like, people know my limited range of references.

And that's what.

That's half our listeners you've just offended.

I was on the Big Bang period.

I was a guest star.

I played.

Oh, wow.

I didn't mean that episode, obviously.

That's the one where no maggots went and were harmed in the watching of this episode.

What were you doing on it?

It was an episode about a comet, and it begins with the gang up on the roof looking at the stars.

And one of them gets a note saying, oh my god, god, Neil Gaiman was in my shop and he tweeted about it.

And they're all sort of vaguely baffled because obviously they would have known.

And then you cut to me in the shop trying to join their conversation and being rudely rebuffed and insulted.

Nice.

It's kind of fun.

I like, I now have this sort of peculiar tiny career of playing versions of Neil Gaiman in the shows, of which the best one of all is still The Simpsons, because I got to be an evil, murdering book thief who couldn't, who it turns out, couldn't even read,

and who poisoned somebody in the final moment.

So it was kind of, I like him best.

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

My fact is that beekeeping was only legalized in Minneapolis in 2009.

I knew this.

I knew this because I was a beekeeper a little way out of Minneapolis.

I lived at the time in a little town an hour's drive from Minneapolis and I would have sad, nervous Mineapolitans

come over to my house and gaze longingly at my bees and explain that.

Right.

You weren't in the banned zone.

You were far enough out of the beach.

I was far enough out.

I was far enough away that my bees were entirely legal bees.

What would happen, Neil, what would happen if your bees flew over the state lines, as it were, into anti-bee territory?

Great point.

I think nobody would actually have, you know, put little trackers on them to find out.

But actually, I believe bees have a maximum five-mile radius.

So I think my bees would have been okay

unless I decided to drive them to Minneapolis just for a day out.

Come on, bees.

We're going to see the world.

I will show you the sights of Minneapolis.

I'll show you Minneapolis-St.

Paul Airport.

I will show you all these exciting things.

Yeah, it was really strict.

I think it was because it was an urban environment, basically.

It was saying, you know, look, this is a built-up area.

You can't have just hundreds of thousands of bees around the place.

And even when they legalized it, you had to get permission from 80% of property owners within 250 feet of your home.

Wow.

That's a lot.

And if you live somewhere with apartments, you might have to ask 100 different people's permission.

Yeah.

And, you know, get 80 of them to sign off on it i think it's slightly loosened up a bit

i suppose if you live in an apartment in um a tower block you probably don't have much room for bees anyway no i think that's true and i also it's it's it's a bit it might be a bit cruel if you don't have the flowers the flower space because you can't just keep bees in a you know in a in a box

you can keep them in a box well i mean you do keep them in a box sorry you have to in fact right that's that's kind of the rule i was reading about utah the beehive state oh um And in Utah, it is illegal to keep bees unless you have government permission.

You need a license, basically.

So just not any old person can have bees in Utah either.

But their state emblem is the beehive.

You might have seen it on the Utah flags and stuff.

It's like that sort of...

It's like...

Skep.

Is that what it's called?

A skep?

It's called a skep.

They were made of woven straw.

They'd weave straw together and circle it.

And that was what bees were in until Mr.

Langstruth came along and invented the modern hive.

Yeah and these modern hives they have like

things that you can pull out is that right?

They do.

The biggest problem with the initial bee skeps was that you had to destroy the skep to get to the honey.

So they didn't have openings and what Langstruth came up with was hives with removable slats exploiting the concept of bee space.

Okay, so space.

Can I just be boring for a moment?

Yeah, because I love B space.

Andy, put those muggots away.

So the way that bees work is bees are kind of like people in rooms.

If a bee sees something that is room size for a bee, which is to say more than twice the size of a bee, or twice the size of one bee climbing over another bee, it will try and fill it with comb.

If it sees something much smaller, it will seal it off.

However, if you get your bee space right,

a bee will regard your bee space as a corridor and not build comb and so on and so forth.

So Langstroth's genius was the figure-out bee space, figured out the exact size and shape of one of these

hives that you put the slats in.

But it was basically unpatentable.

The moment he had discovered it and figured it out, every farmer with nails and a tape measure could build their own hives.

And so his discovery caught on immediately and hugely.

But he was not a happy man.

Yeah, he seems an interesting guy.

So he was a pastor, and he was going over to one of his parish members, and he noticed that they had a bowl of comb honey.

And he thought, wow, this is pretty tasty.

This is pretty amazing.

He said, where'd you get it from?

And he was led to the attic where he was shown near an open window.

There was a hive there, and he just immediately went, This is what I want to be doing.

This makes me happy, because he was suffering from bouts of depression.

There's quotes from him saying that he would ask for his books to be hidden away from him because even the letter B, seeing the letter B, would just make him miss his own bees and go into a sadness while he couldn't leave the house.

Yeah, so he was deeply troubled.

But I mean, happy earth day to you.

But quite an extraordinary character when you read into a story.

And those

hives now, a lot of states, you have to use those, don't you?

You can't use the old skeps.

You have to use these ones.

So I'm thinking of like the filing cabinet where you like the hanging cabinet where you're at first.

That beehive or the filing cabinet?

Because I feel like they've nicked from each other.

One is based on the other, surely.

Interesting.

I don't know that, actually.

Filing cabinet, early 20th century.

I know, but I mean, these beehives sound like they were early 20th century.

So unless there's guys.

1851 is when he

goes to the corner.

I think beehive first.

Yeah.

Wow.

So maybe the filing cabinet has borrowed from nature's filing cabinet, the beehive.

Which is not nature's because it was invented by a human.

Yes, yes.

Well, that in itself is thought-provoking, I think.

Invented by a human, but exploiting this 60-million-year-old insect who

astoundingly, you know, I mean, things like their use of the hexagon because it's the most efficient use of wax and stuff.

Yeah.

I get all excited about bees.

Did you get stung much?

Obviously, I'm sure you had all the beekeeping kit

when you were doing it.

I got stung about four or five times during the course of the six or seven years that I was active in beekeeping.

I actually kind of liked that.

I felt like everybody should have a hobby that could kill them.

And

mostly it would be my own fault.

And it got a little more stressful.

One day I got stung, and all of a sudden, my hand blew up like an inflated rubber glove.

And my breathing went all wonky.

And I went, oh,

this is that anaphylactic shock thing.

This is actually, it's now happening.

It's been primed.

So I had to go and buy EpiPens for future beekeeping just in case, but did not get stung after that.

Very recently, a beekeeper who had a very distinguished job of looking after the Queen's bees

was given the task of having to tell the bees that the queen had died.

And this is an old tradition of when there's a notable death within a family that owns hives, that the bees need to be informed and you need to put black ribbon on the outside of the hive and so on in order to show that there's mourning.

But so the queen has had, for the last 15 years of her life, John Chappell, who was the official palace beekeeper.

And that was his job to do, except for some reason, he had no no idea that that was a tradition so on the day that the queen passes away an email pings up in his email box saying from the head gardener have you told the bees and he must have thought that was a very parte stat joke yeah exactly but so yeah so he just he had to go around and he had to tell the bees he had to say the line the mistress is dead but don't you go your master will be a good master to you and that was how he broke the news to the to the queen's bees that she was gone It was a tradition.

You tell the bees not just of deaths, but important family news.

There's even a Kipling poem about it.

Right.

Did you tell the bees stuff, Neil?

Did you just pop down and...

Was there a benchmark of the kind of news that you would impart and then stuff be like, oh, they won't be interested.

It's too small a deal.

You know, I would never tell them just sort of casual internet gossip because I figure bees are above that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I would tell, you know, I love the idea of being part of the beekeeper tradition.

So there were definitely a couple of times when I would tell bees things.

And I'd just go down to the hives and say, right, my son is engaged.

Can I just quickly say one or two things that are illegal in Minneapolis?

So I checked this for sure.

I've checked in the code.

This definitely exists.

In Minnesota law, so this is the whole of the state of Minnesota,

no person shall operate, run, or participate in a contest, game, or other like activity in which a pig, greased, oiled, or otherwise, is released and wherein the object is the capture of the pig.

Or in which a chicken or turkey is released or thrown into the air and wherein the object is to capture the chicken or the turkey.

Some laws, it feels like some laws are made out of basic principles, right?

Like stealing or murdering or whatever.

And it feels like some laws are created in response to specific incidents which have gone badly wrong.

And you're saying this might be the latter i think it might be yeah yeah

um yeah so pig greased pig chasing is is explicitly illegal in minnesota uh and if you go on the internet you'll see a lot of people saying that it's illegal to cross the minnesota wisconsin border with a duck on your head

apparently this isn't true and it's because there was a thing called cotton duck and cotton duck was a type of woven cotton fabric which comes from the dutch for linen which is duck and cotton duck is a specific thing, and you weren't allowed to cross the border with that because it was, you know, they were trying to help the cotton makers.

And so they said you couldn't do that, but people mistook it to think that you couldn't cross the border with a duck on your head.

I love those sort of industry-specific things.

I remember talking to old people in Wisconsin while I was out there, and they were saying that when they were young, margarine could not be yellow.

There were local laws that only butter was allowed to be yellow,

but that they would sell margarine,

and I don't know if this is true or not, they would sell margarine with little yellow colouring things so you could mix it together

and have a yellowish thing to put on your bread.

That's so funny.

Yeah, because they wanted to protect the buttermakers in Wisconsin, right?

And that's why they did it.

Because I think margarine comes from the Greek for pearl, like the name Margaret does, because it had to be pearl-coloured in the olden days.

That is very cool.

I didn't know that.

Me neither.

I can also tell you that it's no longer illegal to have a dirty threshing machine or to impersonate a straw inspector

in Minnesota, but that they have been true in the last hundred years.

To impersonate the straw inspector.

Finally, comedy clubs around Minnesota are back in with the classic straw inspector impersonations.

Thank God.

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

My fact this week is that the author Douglas Adams once put his back out while buttering a slice of bread.

So

this is a fact that comes directly from the creator of QI and is a friend of Neil Gaiman's, Mr.

John Lloyd.

He a long time ago, wrote the foreword to a biography of Douglas Adams by a guy called MJ Simpson.

And in the forward, he just talks about his sort of day-to-day life.

And famously, within the circle of friends, he was always mocked for the fact of once putting his basket in.

So, do we know,

was he really buttering the bread in an extremely ostentatious way or something?

Heavy knife, thick cold butter?

It was just literally, he was just standing there, probably whistling.

I don't know, Neil, have you got any insight?

Douglas was gloriously accident-prone.

I remember him once telling me about breaking his nose with his own knee playing rugby, I think, as a small boy, about the time that he first bought a fancy car with hitchhiker money.

He bought a Porsche, and on the way home from the showroom, going round Marble Arch, he managed to total his Porsche.

And I remember...

once turning up at some incredibly fancy event for Hitchhikers.

It had sold a million copies or something like that.

And his publisher Pan presented Douglas very proudly with a book on mushrooms.

And I said, Douglas, why are you now holding a huge book on mushrooms?

And it turned out that he'd gone to France for a gastronomic thing the week before.

and on day one had eaten the kind of mushroom that you were not meant to eat and had not eaten anything else for the following five days.

I once read that if you go to France and you go to any pharmacist, they can tell you if a mushroom is poisonous or not.

No.

As if they're all trained for it.

That's what I read once.

I've never tried it.

We must try it.

We must all try it.

We must gather mushrooms and march into French pharmacies.

In American pharmacies, I'm not completely convinced they will be able to identify it as a mushroom.

What is that thing?

So, you, I mean, we should just quickly say that, Neil, you wrote a biography on Douglas Adams.

You knew him, right?

It was your, I think, second book that you'd written, non-fiction book, called Don't Panic.

I did.

It was called Don't Panic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion.

And it also contained a lot of biographical stuff about Douglas, because there's only so much you can say about hitchhikers.

And I got to know Douglas relatively well, but always from a sort of position of you are a fancy author and I am a small journalist who first interviewed you when he was 22.

So he was definitely the grown-up.

He was so impressive to me.

He'd had all of these amazing careers like being a bodyguard for the Saudi royal family.

I said, what did that job entail?

He said, well, basically, it entailed standing around in a hotel corridor, going out occasionally to bring back enormous quantities of McDonald's and planning to run away if anybody with a gun showed up.

Oh,

I found a kind of related fact on that, which is...

So Hitchhiker's Guard was turned into a TV series, wasn't it?

Quite soon after it was a radio series and then a book.

It was a teleseries.

And one of the guys who plays a bodyguard in the TV series of Hitchhiker's is Dave Prouse, aka Darth Vader.

Oh, really?

He's in it.

Yeah.

Wow.

I have no idea if it's a speaking role or not.

It's been a long time since I saw the series, but...

That's so interesting.

I know.

So was Douglas Adams very tall, Neil?

That's why I read about him he was he was very tall he was uh about six foot five six foot six ish i i remember him saying that when he discovered how tall john cleese and graham chapman were he decided that he had all the qualifications necessary for comedy yeah the reason i ask is because um tall people are very susceptible to back injuries that's what i was reading about there's a few like mechanical reasons for that but one of the reasons is basically the world is just made for averagely heighted people and so they always always have to squeeze themselves into various places.

But I read that he was six feet tall by the time he was 12 years old, Douglas Adams.

And that would be only three inches shorter than the record tallest 12-year-old in the UK.

That's so cool.

Oh, did you find the trousers shorts thing, James?

No, it was.

It was great.

So he was at school.

He was in shorts like all the rest of the boys in his year.

And I think there was a point where he was going to go up to being able to wear trousers with the rest of his year.

But unfortunately, at exactly the year that everyone went to trousers he discovered his school tailor had no trousers in his size because he was so much taller than everyone else that they they they just couldn't fit him so for this key four weeks of his life he was the only boy in his year wearing shorts and that obviously is psychologically scarring especially if you're so much taller than everyone else i can't believe he had a school tailor in my school they used to just set fire to the bottom of your trousers

i know it does say something about that do you remember there's that bit of qi isn't there where stephen talks about his school prep school tailor being called Goringe.

Yeah, that's uh

and it rhymes with orange.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I was I was looking in today, I thought I knew quite a lot about sort of the cultural impact that hitchhikers had on the world.

And there were so many elements of hitchhikers that you'll find in pop culture.

So Radiohead had a song which was called Paranoid Android, which was named after Marvin the Paranoid Android.

You had the fact that the 42 is just the answer to the meaning of life question.

People know that sort of generally.

But I didn't realize that things like in the X-Files, Fox Mulder lived in apartment 42, which Chris Carter said was a direct nod to hitchhikers.

You've got Coldplay, whose very first song on their debut album was called Don't Panic.

And they also have a song called 42, which again is a direct link.

The Allen Telescope Array, which is a telescope which is looking for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The antenna has 42 antennas paying tribute.

Like, it just is seeded everywhere.

They must have been going for around 40.

They weren't going to have two and thought, well, let's add another 40 just to make it the right number.

That's true.

Absolutely, yeah.

I love the way that hitchhikers has kind of weirdly penetrated the culture, but I also love that those little bits of hitchhikers that have changed with time.

Like, there's that line in the opening of hitchhikers about how human beings were so primitive that they thought that digital watches were a pretty neat thing.

And in 1978, oh, we thought that digital watches were a neat thing.

We thought that digital watches were miracles.

We had the power of science suddenly appearing on our wrist, and it had numbers.

Andy still thinks this, I think.

Sorry,

I just want to say that a watch that functions on a wafer of silicon is amazing, that it counts the, you know, however many thousands of the piezoelectric effect, Andy.

That's what I'm saying.

I mean, yeah, sure, the Swiss guys can make the cogs very small, but

that's not the same as vibrating silicon.

I mean, I think actually, I think that was a red misfire for Adams, and I think

we should be calling it out.

Can I tell you guys about the...

So obviously, Hitchhikers was his first book, and he'd amazingly become friends with all five members of Monty Python.

And, you know, he'd even appeared in the later series of Python as a couple of times.

And wrote for it.

He was one of the reasons.

And wrote for it.

And

he was only a few years out of...

school and university.

Like it was amazingly fast to be meeting kind of comedy giants like that.

Anyway, on his first book, he got quotes from all five of the main members of Monty Python.

John Cleese said, really entertaining and fun.

Terry Jones then said, much funnier than anything John Cleese has ever written.

Graeme Chapman then said, I know for a fact that John Cleese hasn't read it.

Eric Idle wrote, who is John Cleese?

And then Michael Palin wrote, really entertaining and fun.

So good.

That's really good.

I was reading through the Oxford English Dictionary to see if Douglas Adams has been the first first citation of any words.

And as far as I can see, there is only one word that he was the first person to ever say, according to the OED, of course, which is, you know, it's just what they found.

Do you want to have a guess?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

First of all, I can tell you you won't guess, but you can have a go anyway.

Is it Slarty Bartfast?

That's not in the dictionary.

Yeah, Golga Frinchen isn't going to be in there anyway.

A frude.

A frude is a word from hitchhikers.

Frood.

Poopy.

poopy.

Poopy fruit poopy.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

No, it's actually not from Hitchhikers.

It's from a comic relief Christmas book that he wrote in 1986.

And the word is Todger.

Oh.

Yep.

He's the first person in print to use the word Todger according to the OED.

Wow.

And before that, the word was Tadger.

People used to refer to their penises as Tadgers,

possibly a northern dialect for like a tadpole or something, but he was the one who turned it from Tadger to Todger.

Wouldn't it be amazing if one day all of his legacy is forgotten, all his books, and just the one citation sitting in the dictionary is all we know him for.

But the Todger guy.

That will one day happen.

There's one thing, one of the big mysteries of Douglas's career for a lot of people is what is behind the number 42.

How did he come to the number?

I remember John Lloyd sort of saying that they were in a garage together and they were just going, well, what number shall we use?

But supposedly, Stephen Fry says that he's the only person that Douglas ever told what the meaning was to, and he's going to take it to his grave.

He's never going to say what it is.

So there was a kind of meaning behind it.

But 42 would always pop up in interesting places.

And before Douglas passed away, the Hubble telescope was trying to find the defining parameter of the expanding universe.

And it got identified as 42.

And for Douglas, that was just like, ah, look at it, look at this synchronicity that I've managed to come up with this number, which is the speed of the expanding universe.

So that's the only time that we've got a sort of hint of Douglas's interest in it having meaning.

But otherwise, no one knows.

But I wonder if a drunken evening between you and Stephen, Neil, has led to the reveal.

I've never heard anything from Stephen.

I remember asking Douglas my theory, you know, when I was a 22-year-old asking him for the first time, I suggested that it might have been from Alice in Wonderland's Rule 42: all persons more than two miles high must leave the court.

And Douglas talked about how traumatized he was by Alice in Wonderland and how terrifying he found it when he read it.

But what Douglas said to me

was that he was trying to find a number that didn't sound funny.

Prosaic, not terribly interesting.

37

sounds like it's the kind of number that has interesting things going on.

42,

it's not prime, it's not even an odd number, it wasn't interesting.

It didn't have anything about it that was interesting.

You know, because I think he tried a few in the 40s and settled on 42 as a punchline.

It's a punchline to the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything is.

And a computer has been cogitating on this for millennia, and now it gives the answer, and the answer is 42.

And it needed to be a letdown in every way to be funny.

121 sounds like there's something going on with it 42 sounds like what that's not the answer but then the universe is a wonderful place and it accommodates us and once 42 was was let loose in the universe i'm sure the universe has been running with it ever since

Okay, 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 Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harken, and Neil.

I'm at Neil himself, but I'm on Twitter less and less and less.

So I'm probably much more likely to be Neil himself at Threads or Neil-Gaiman at Tumblr.

or over at Blue Sky as soon as the rest of the world gets their invitations and it becomes a giant party.

Nice.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, let's all head over to that party with Neil.

And you can get us otherwise on at no such thing.

Or you can go to our Instagram account, which is no such thing as a fish.

Or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

But most importantly, make sure you head over to Amazon Prime because the return of good omens is here.

Good omens 2, written by Neil Gaiman himself.

Make sure to check out that entire series.

I've heard previews, response.

It sounds absolutely incredible.

So really exciting.

Do watch that.

And otherwise, come back next week for another episode with us.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.