494: No Such Thing As A Human Wind Turbine

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Hi, everybody.

Andy here.

Just before we start this week's show, we wanted to introduce our special guest.

She has been on the show once before, and she was so great that we thought we had to have her back.

It is the brilliant Sophie Duca.

If you don't know Sophie already, if you didn't listen to the episode she was already on, if you haven't seen her on Taskmaster, she is a fantastic stand-up.

She's really brilliant, and you're about to hear that on the show.

So there's no need for further evidence of it, really.

But if, once you've heard this show, you would like to see or hear a little bit more of Sophie's comedy, as you will, there are a couple of ways to do that.

So firstly, she had a tour earlier this year, which was called Hag.

That tour sold out, and also it's in the past, so it's impossible to see it.

But there are new dates added to that tour.

They're all on her website, which is SophieDuca.com.

A very Ron Seal website there, but it does contain those dates, so that's why you want to visit there.

The other thing she's doing soon is that on the 26th of October this year, she is hosting a one-off edition mega show at Hackney Empire in London.

It's a show she's done loads of times before, it's called Wacky Racists, but this one is going to be a bigger and better edition than ever.

There are going to be all-star guests, there are going to be stand-ups, there are going to be songs, they're going to be stupid games.

You name it, it will be there.

It's going to be great fun.

That's it for this introduction.

I hope you've enjoyed it, but not as much as I hope you enjoy the show itself.

On with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Soho Theatre in London.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and Sophie Duker.

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 Sophie.

What an honor.

Oh.

Oh, you're welcome.

My fact is, Barbie,

the lady of the moment,

was based on a high-end German cool girl.

Oh,

that's right.

There's a sex worker in your child's bedroom.

That little freeson, that was 150 people just being slightly titillated by

shocked.

Yes, shocked as well.

Yeah, she's based on a different doll, is Barbie.

Picture the scene.

It's 1956.

Cool.

You're Ruth Handler.

Yep.

The inventor of Barbie.

My mum was born in 1956, and now I've got my mum in my head, which might make this next bit difficult.

It will.

You're there with your mum.

It's pretty sexy.

And in the window.

Tan's mum has just been born.

Oh, sorry.

Back to the feature games.

Way

way beyond.

Your mum's been born.

She's in a crib somewhere.

She's not involved.

Cool.

You are the doll.

It doesn't matter who you are.

You are.

It's 1956.

There's a doll in a window.

The doll is Bild Lily.

Bild is a German tabloid and Lily is the doll that is sold in association with that tabloid and she was sort of a sexy floozy okay and that is what barbie is based on right when ruth handler saw lily in the window she said and i quote i didn't know then who lily was i saw only an adult shaped body that i had been trying to describe for years which i love because presumably all around her were adults.

But I would say no adults in the same shape as Barbie, though.

No, true.

She's got weird proportions.

And dolls, dolls were for children and they were of children, weren't they, at the time?

Yeah.

Yeah, that was the revolutionary.

At the time, I mean, if anyone's seen the Barbie movie, which we are not promoting because their budget is big enough.

But if you see the Barbie movie, you'll see that a lot of dolls for kids were just of kids.

But Barbie was this, like, sexy...

Well, not sexy.

Barbie's not sexy, but she was kind of like older, mature.

Yeah.

I read, there was a journalist from the New Yorker magazine called ariel levy who later referred to this as a sex doll lily now she was still only six inches high right right oh really so i don't know it takes some imagination to use that as a sex doll i imagine but they used to give it to people like if you went on a stag do you might get this sexy doll right or they would some men would hang it on their windscreen of their car and stuff like that it's just like uh because that's what you do with your sex stories you put them

barbie gets a lot of stick for being regressive.

But I think Ruth Handler was very progressive.

And she was a very...

She was an ambitious businesswoman.

It was her and her husband, Elliot.

They founded the company together.

They made all the decisions about it.

And I think the idea was that Barbie would never get married.

Barbie was able to...

It was to expand girls' imaginations about what they could do and that their imaginations should extend beyond marriage and motherhood is the basic idea.

Okay, right.

Yeah.

So in that sense.

And she did start as a fashion model and then became a fashion editor the next year and then a fashion designer.

But

baby's career progression.

Okay, Barbie did do a lot of stuff other than that.

She went to space before Mad even went to the moon.

There was Astronaut Barbie.

Four years before Mad went to the moon, there was Astronaut Barbie.

Okay, but we did go to space before we went to the moon.

Just not to.

Yeah, okay.

So

before, right, yeah.

She is, yeah, okay.

Has Barbie been to the moon?

Before women could even have bank accounts.

Oh, yeah.

Barbie bought her first dream house.

Oh, okay.

In 1962, 1962, she bought the dream house.

Wow.

With whose money?

Ken's.

Yes, Ken's money.

That's amazing.

I like as well, just speaking of astronauts, the fact that Barbie was designed by a guy called Jack Ryan.

At least the physical making of Barbie was.

And he was a guy who was

an engineer for the Pentagon.

He made missiles.

So he was, yeah, he was someone who had a whole different career.

And then Mattel hired him and he worked out amazing things like the fact that she had a twistable waist.

That was a new innovation to toys.

And I don't know if you remember this, and i very much remember this the clickable knees of barbie how do you remember this because i used to bring to school every day a disembodied leg of barbie with me

mr shreiber mrs schreiber come in yeah it's not a problem it's nothing there's nothing bad um

so i used to when i was younger and i still kind of do and i should have a barbie leg on me again actually and this is advice for everyone listening um i click my fingers a lot obsessively click my fingers and i needed something to stop me and the clickable leg of a Barbie gives you the same sensation as clicking your own finger.

So I used to sit in the back of the bottom.

I was just a disembodied leg.

Yeah, I just used to sit clicking Barbie's leg over and over and seeing.

And your sister had to bring in a Barbie with at least one of its legs missing.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, she wasn't too happy about that.

But genuinely try it out if you've got a problem with clicking your fingers.

Okay.

Pretty.

But I also think it's really interesting.

I didn't know that the guy that designed Barbie was a missiles designer because he actually made some quite big that well Mattel made some quite big changes to Barbie when they changed her from the original prototype of Billed Lily at the model which Mattel then bought up they softened her eyebrows relaxed her lips yeah upgraded her plastic and whitened her skin okay oh

well like oh but we don't know what she could have been green

and at one point the nipples and breasts of an early prototype were daintily filed off Oh,

can you daintily file nipples?

It's a more difficult process than that.

But related to that, of course, is Ken's bulge.

Oh, yeah.

Which I haven't seen the movie, but I believe they reference in the movie.

And Ruth Handler, who created Barbie, she wanted Ken to have a proper bulge in his groin.

And the people at Mattel were having none of it.

They thought that no mother would buy a doll which had a bulge in its groin.

And this became a really big argument.

They brought in a Freudian psychologist to ask them what to do.

And he said, oh, yeah, well, all the girls are just going to want to undress Ken.

so you know you're going to have to think about it, you're going to have to do something.

What were they thinking when they brought in a Freudian psychologist?

He'd say, yeah, completely fine and normal.

Yeah, don't worry about it.

Yeah, bringing a leg of a Barbie into school, completely normal.

It's normal to fancy your mum when she's just born.

That's absolutely.

But they came up with a solution, which was they were going to mold the swimsuit directly onto Ken, so you wouldn't be able to get the swimsuit off.

Yeah, and they were going to put a very slight bump in the the groin.

So just enough that would keep Ruth happy, but not enough that would scare people off.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

But the problem was that it all came down to finance in the end.

So putting the shorts up, molding the shorts on cost a couple of cents.

Putting the extra lump on was about half a cent worth of plastic.

And they decided over the millions that they were going to make, it wasn't worth it to do it.

And so that's why he ended up with the bulge.

Yeah.

Wow.

Battle of the bulge.

Wow, yeah.

And we were talking about Barbies in space earlier.

Yeah.

Something about sex dolls in space.

The Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, he spent the record amount of time on the Mir space station.

And according to him, the Russian government offered him a sex doll for his time on Mir.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Wait, what was the record?

Do you know the record time?

14 months he was there.

Long time.

It's a long time without a sex doll.

Long time, yep.

But Polyakov decided that he wouldn't take the sex doll onto Mir.

Can you guess why he decided not to?

Because it's so embarrassing.

There's no one up there.

It's not like the aliens are going to turn up and go, what's this?

Because of what, Polykov, we're getting your broadcast louder cla- wait, is there an extra astronaut floating past you?

No, that wasn't it.

Because he was married.

Oh, um, he was married actually, but that wasn't, I guess it was kind of the reason.

Uh, he decided that if he started using the sex doll in space, he might get so used to it that he wouldn't be able to give it up when he got back down to earth right whereas on earth you do is it different in space to sleep with a

I suppose you're lonely you might form an attachment like Tom Hanks and Wilson exactly

yeah yeah did he have sex with that it's implied

it's pretty heavily implied guys

I don't know the Russian history with sex dolls

but I did find out a fact when I was researching sex dolls, not for this,

that in 2018 the mummified remains of a Russian man were found in his home and he was embracing a sex doll on the sofa, like in Pompeii.

When I said like in Pompeii, I meant nothing like Pompeii.

We don't know that the sex dolls weren't in Pompeii because they would never have survived the volcano, would they?

That's a good point.

They'd have been the first things to go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've got another

Barbie thing.

Okay.

Can we talk about the Teen Talk Barbie?

Okay.

This was a later varietal.

So it was 1992, this was released.

And each of the dolls sold said four of 270 possible phrases, right?

So the...

Oh, okay.

So my doll might say four different things to your doll.

Is that what it is?

And they worked out that they would have to sell 200 million of these things for there to be the odds that two of them would say exactly the same four phrases.

That's a big selling point, obviously.

But this was a controversial one because it's the one that said math class is tough as one of the phrases.

And that's been slightly misremembered as her saying maths is hard, which she didn't say, but she did say something.

It's pretty much the same thing.

It's the same thing.

Yeah, it's pretty similar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so this is prompted a bit of a pushback from people saying this isn't a great message to say to girls.

And in 1993, the next year, there was this group of performance artists in Manhattan.

They called themselves the Barbie Liberation Front, right?

And this is what they did.

This is so good.

They took a load of, they bought a load of Teen Talk Barbies off the shelf.

They also bought a load of gi joe talking duke dolls right they swapped the voice boxes

and then they put them back on the shelves so you you ended up with like people who bought gi joe dolls which said will we ever have enough clothes

let's plan our dream wedding

And meanwhile, the matching Barbie was saying things like, eat lead.

That's so good.

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

My fact is that eastern screech owls have live-in snakes as housekeepers, which their children sometimes eat.

There's quite a bit going on here.

There's a new book out, a new owl book out,

by Jennifer Ackerman, and it's called What an Owl Knows.

It's a great book.

And she quotes this amazing study.

There was a scientist called Frederick Gellbach who studied the Eastern Screech Owl, right?

This is an owl, it lives in a nest, it lives in kind of Texas and thereabouts.

Oh, it should be kind of called the Western Screech Owl.

They probably know what they're doing.

Forget it.

Imagine if they listen to going, fuck, we're finally rumbled.

We had like 100 years of no one noticing.

Murray?

And basically, it turns out one in five nests of this eastern screech owl contains a a live snake because

the parents go and get food for the chicks and they bring back these snakes alive to the nest.

And

they bring them back and some of them get eaten, a few do, but a lot burrow down into the nest, which is full of stuff that snakes love.

You know, it's half-eaten bits of food and pellets and all sorts of

fecal matter.

Yum, yum, yum.

And they,

and so a lot of insects turn up to eat those horrible things.

And the snakes actually, they like to eat the insects.

So they tidy up the nests for the owls.

And it's good because the owl chicks in snakes which contain a live housekeeping snake grow up bigger and stronger and healthier than the chicks in the nests which don't contain a live snake.

Yeah.

So it's actually

a neutral thing.

Here's the thing though, just for people's image at home of what's happening here.

When we say snake.

Yeah, it's probably like a cobra, right?

Exactly.

We're talking like, you know, they're twirling up and stuff.

These things are like smaller than worms, right?

Like they're super tiny.

Exactly, because there's a cool image in your head of like a giant snake.

Yeah, yeah, these are like little, tiny, little...

Oh, yeah.

But they're snakes.

They're small snakes.

Oh, no, no, absolutely.

If you saw one, you would genuinely think it was a worm.

The only difference is they have scales, but the scales are almost impossible to see.

It literally just looks like a worm.

Yeah.

But

they eat a lot of other insects, like they eat ants and stuff like that.

But they like to eat baby ants and they go into their ants' nests.

But obviously, all the ants are going to attack them.

And so, what they do is they secrete a noxious chemical and they shit at the same time.

And they mix these two things up and they roll around in it so they're covered in noxious shit.

And then the ants will not go near them.

And then they can nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

I didn't look up any fats about the tiny snakes, but I did think, how did these owl babies get here?

It's got to be through owl sex.

And oh,

owls have sex in a really interesting way.

So like they don't have sex how we would imagine.

Yeah.

How are you imagining just for the...

It's 1956.

Do you imagine like a sort of...

I'm finding it.

I'm thinking Italy.

I'm really trying to imagine.

I'm thinking like doggy style because they can move their heads 360 degrees around.

Just like peck meat.

But I think, yeah, that's going to be a scary moment.

What?

Just when the head of me is...

It's a doggy style and then suddenly the person's face is staring at you.

It's basically like exorcist, isn't it?

I'd call an Uber at that point.

It was so nice meeting you.

Blue eyes, I never properly noticed.

I think you can have some respect.

Call it Owlie style.

Owley style.

Owly style.

Yeah, yeah.

God.

Owley style sets.

They only have sets in one position, so you don't have to learn a whole bunch of different things.

They've got a kalawaka, which is an eternal chamber with an opening.

And when it opens, an eternal chamber.

What a nice way of putting it.

The eternal chamber.

The eternal chamber.

It's a temporary chamber, opens up temporarily.

Inside the chamber is either, depending on the sex of the owl, testes or ovaries.

Wow.

It's like a rib of requirement for the owl's jump.

And

when the owls want to

get jiggy with it, get owly with it,

their cloakcaprude slightly and they rub them against each other.

And that is owl sex.

Like the sperm goes into the female cloaca, fertilizes the egg, just one position.

Okay.

No kissing.

Nice.

No kissing.

But it is called a cloakal kiss.

So it's a kiss in a way.

Oh, that is sweet.

Do you know how Eastern screech owls persuade their children to move away?

Did they explain to them how they had sex?

Clearly.

The eternal chamber is opening.

Fly, my children.

No, they it's they withhold food

and then they remove any food they've stored in the nest.

They basically empty the fridge and the cupboards.

Oh wow.

Sorry, you're going to have to shift yourself.

And they also have a particular call which equates to go away.

And it's all obviously it's it's good.

It's to persuade them to you know move on to the next stage of their life.

So it is a good thing.

Right, that's good.

Yeah, but all owls have different tactics for getting their children to, babies to fledge.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, so in

sort of Western culture, we might have the boogeyman as a terrifying thing for children.

Do you know in Hungary what they have?

What a Hungarian is.

Is it the boogie owl by any chance?

It's the copper penis owl.

Whoa!

God.

And if you're not careful, copper penis owl is going to come for you.

So what it is, is if you picture a boogeyman, this is the same thing, but it's an owl.

With a copper penis.

With a copper penis.

Is it copper coloured or is it just metal?

No, it's like metal.

It's a copper penis.

Is it oxidized?

But what's the threat if it's just

a penalty?

The detail of the copper penis is not relevant, in fact.

It's like

he just happens.

It's noticeable.

Like if you describe, describe the owl that took your child.

He could do the head thing and then there was this metal penis.

Well, it's weird not to mention it in a way.

Yeah.

It is like owls are associated with death around the world, I think.

Quite often, there'll be a superstition where if you see an owl, someone's gonna die really soon.

And there's quite a few theories as to why that happens.

So there was one guy who's an owl expert from South Africa who reckons that because people quite often have heart attacks in the middle of the night and that's when owls are around, perhaps people have died and they've heard an owl and they associate them together.

There's another theory from Italy that you would put a body outside when someone's died and you would put candles around it and the moths are attracted to the candles and then the owls are attracted to the moths so that's one possible version and another version from india is that possibly like it's in cemeteries you might leave food offerings for people and then you might get like mice and rats coming for the food offerings and then the owls come for the mice or the rats okay so that's probably why all around the world people have this association it does because

and they get a really bad rap in lots of places as in they're not beloved universally around the world and there are some places where they're yeah still really ill omeny yeah yeah in in Ghana in the in the forest a lot of people associate that with witchcraft but it's actually really important the owls stay because otherwise the forests are full of rats right right yeah exactly yeah there was a prediction in 2015 that wind turbines might all be made like owls to look like owls to be given feathers

Because owls fly so quietly.

Of course they do.

It has to do with particular feathers they've got at the leading edge of their wings.

Right.

And there was a suggestion, why don't we just put feathers on all our wind turbines?

Yeah.

So that they can can turn faster and be quieter.

And I don't want to live in a world where we don't have feathery wind turbines.

Yeah, that's cool.

I just love it.

Not as part of research for this, but I was reading today that we might be turning humans into wind turbines soon.

Go on.

So

it's a technology.

I didn't fully read it, so I wasn't prepared to talk about it tonight.

But what it is, is you'd have a contraption on you.

And what they've worked out is that when we're walking, we're moving our arms all the time, right?

So we're generating movement.

We're generating energy in the same way that a turbine might so why not bottle our arm swing and then we can power ourselves at night i know they can't see you on the podcast but you're literally walking like a lego bad yeah

also dad sorry i can power myself at night already

i don't need the harnessed energy of my arm swing from the day what do you mean we can power ourselves at night well it might charge your phone when you're asleep exactly all that arm movement no no but you're generating because okay look we're different i need

but you do get i've read about um there's been some gyms where they attach the treadmills to the lights and they get the lights going by people going on the treadmills all day.

That is very cool.

Yeah.

I like that.

It's possible.

Okay, he likes that.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

Sophie, we're one for and one against at the moment.

Could you make the final call?

I don't like it.

Okay.

What if you've not got very strong arms?

Long arms?

What if you've got no arms?

Oh, dear.

Is this the hair to die on?

Okay.

Okay, this is not Dragon Stend.

I didn't invent this.

This is

the thing that is happening.

Can I ask, can you attach it to other parts of your body that swing

while you're walking?

What a confident way of putting it.

You think, oh, I'm actually powering a small turbine down here.

Actually powering the whole of Milton Keynes just walking to my shops.

Can I tell you about the International Owl Centre in Minnesota?

This is an amazing place.

They do lots of brilliant work with owls.

International Owl Centre.

And staff have to be able to to do owl noises to get a job there.

It's so cool.

Is that just what they claim with the interview?

What did you put on, like you put on your C V, you know, barn, grey, all of that?

No, because people come into the office saying, I heard a particular owl.

Can you help me identify it?

And the staff obviously have to be able to say, oh, well, did it go, woo!

Or did it go, wow, or whatever.

And that's it.

That helps you identify it.

So, you know, they may as well.

Apparently there's a there's the hardest owl on the planet to replicate is the brown fish owl which is so low that most people can't even reproduce the sound.

Okay.

It's almost impossible to do.

I'm the farm brown owl.

Brown fish owl.

Brown fish.

Brown fish owl.

You've got enough, but you misnamed yourself, so you have to identify.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, good.

Yeah, you have,

like every everyone obviously thinks that owls just hoot and go hoo-hoot or whatever.

But they shriek, yap, chitter, squeal, squawk, warble.

This is all from the book that you read.

The sooty owl makes makes a noise.

It only speaks to Matthew Cormann.

Really?

What's that, sooty owl?

Is it named after us?

No, it's because it's sooty as in the colour of soot.

They make a sound like a dropping bomb.

What?

Wow.

That's amazing.

I'm not sure if they have the bum bet at the end.

I think it's just the thing.

That's very cool.

And the northern saw-wet owl, if he wants to find a, if it's a male and wants to find a female, then he does exactly 112 toots per minute to try and attract her.

And he'll do that from half an hour after sunset until half an hour before sunrise.

So all night, he's doing 112 toots per minute.

Wow.

Isn't that incredible?

If a female comes into his territory and he notices her, he ratches it up to 260 toots per minute.

Right.

And then if she buggers off, then he'll follow her doing 160 toots per minute.

Wow.

Toot, toot, toot, come back, come back, come back.

Do they have secular breathing?

Is it like beatboxing?

Can they do...

It's a great question.

You'd probably need that, wouldn't you?

I would say so.

I don't know how the syrinx of an owl works, but yeah, you would think they would have to breathe as well.

Here's another question.

It's so odd that this is a part of the show because of the last fact.

But we used to leave my sister's Barbie dolls outside

on a little veranda bit in Australia where we lived.

And we didn't play with them for a long time because you know none of them could stand so she wasn't

she lost interest um and we went out one day and we got the toys out and Barbie was basically hairless bald-headed right yeah and what we realized was a bird had been stealing strands of hair and making a nest in a tree up and I looked online all day to see whether or not that is a real thing because that's my memory of it is that we went out and we made that connection and I saw there was one image of a Barbie doll in its hole as part of a bird's nest.

So the bird had grabbed the hair and incorporated it into the nest.

But do you think that's

wow?

And it does happen in owls as well.

So the burrowing owl will try and put loads of really impressive stuff in his burrow.

One to impress the females, but another one to say, I'm so great, I managed to get all this stuff.

And so they'll get like corn stalks, corn cobs, moss, handy.

Lovely.

Yeah, lovely.

The vertebrae of deer, sometimes they'll put on the outside.

This is like decorating their nests, but they will take like lots of things that humans have put, like bits of cloth and stuff like that.

Bits of concrete.

And the idea, and always the idea is, that the more difficult it is for an owl to get it, the more

impressive it is to the female and also to the other males that he doesn't want in his area.

It's like, if I got all these bits of concrete, you do not want to fuck with me.

I need to move us on, guys, to our next fact.

I have a fact, but it's a bit sad.

Oh, okay.

Can I say it anyway?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm really sorry about this.

Famous owl owners.

Uh-huh.

Are you asking for them?

Yeah, why not?

Florence Nightingale.

Yep.

Oh.

Well, that was the one.

Florence Nightingale.

I said it's a sad fact, but I feel pretty happy.

I was wondering if anyone might go anywhere else, but no, yeah, Florence Nightingale.

Yeah, everyone in Harry Potter's got an owl.

Sting.

Sting.

It's a sting.

I'm taking a punt.

Florence Nightingale, Nightingale, she had an owl called Athena, which she took from some little boys were kind of playing with this owl and maybe mistreating it.

And she looked after it.

She looked after it her whole, or its whole life.

Because when war broke out in Crimea, she had to go to the war.

She couldn't take the owl with her.

And so she put her owl in the attic.

And she thought they would be able to just kill all the mice that lived there and stuff like that.

It would be fine.

But it was domesticated so much, it didn't know how to catch.

It's a sad fact.

I should never have ended on this.

And unfortunately, yeah.

Medical owl fat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

As a topper for that.

So, lots of medieval recipes last year were digitized by Cambridge University.

And a cure for gout is salting an owl, baking it until it be ground into a powder, mixing it with ball's grease to make a salve, and rubbing it on the sufferer's body to cure the gout.

That's another sad fact.

Oh, here's the no, here's a good, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, every three seconds, another owl dies.

Okay, stop.

In 2005, an owl who lived at Warwick Castle was given L-plates because he was so bad at flying.

That's a bit of a double-blood.

Unfortunately, they were so heavy, he crashed into the ground and died.

All right, we need to move on.

It's time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the poet William Blake's boss once visited him and his wife, only to find them completely naked.

It turns out they like to cosplay as Adam and Eve.

Oh.

It's great.

It's awesome.

It's brilliant.

It's brilliant.

He was a big fan of

Milton, wasn't he, Blake?

Milton, yeah.

So actually what they were doing, so just to say Milton, Paradise Lost, they were reading some John Milton and they

possibly William Blake, as well as being a poet, he was not an artist and he might have wanted to illustrate Milton.

And they thought that maybe he persuaded his wife that they would both read it and pretend to be Adam and Eve so that maybe he'd be able to see the postures that they got into and he'd be able to do some good accurate drawings in his illustration of Milton.

Very convoluted, isn't it?

A way to get your wife pregnant.

Naked, yes.

Same thing.

But yeah, this is Blake's patron who is called Thomas Butts.

Thomas Seymour Butts.

One day he went to visit Blake because he was his patron.

He was going to give him some money, maybe.

And he turned up, knocked on the door.

Someone let him in.

And it turned out that Blake and his wife were in the garden.

And Blake said, Come on in, it's only Adam and Eve, you know.

And they were trying out naked postures.

And this story comes from the first biography of William Bake by a guy called Alexander Gilchrist.

It's what made Blake famous because he is a very famous poet now.

He did, what did he do?

Tiger Tiger, Tiger Burning Trump.

All that kind of stuff.

But before this, he wasn't famous at all.

This very, very well-researched biography has this story.

Some of Blake's friends or, you know, relatives of their friends said that it might not have been true.

but most modern biographers, I think, pretty much believe it.

The ONDB says that it does not seem out of character that this happened.

That they would be naked.

Yeah, well, he was a

very visionary, imaginative, unusual guy.

So, in fact, and he was constantly seeing angels and having visions, and he was just

like a full-on inner life, basically.

And in fact, there's a thing about him that's connected to something one of us has.

Oh, yeah, what Blake?

Yeah, daddy issues,

mummy issues aren't like

No, it's...

So James has aphantasia.

I do.

And that's where you can't visualize things in your mind.

Yeah, so if I close my eyes, I can't imagine what things look like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Blake, we reckon, or historians reckon, might have had hyper-phantasia, which is where you see lots and lots and lots of things that often aren't there.

So it's sort of an opposite-y thing there.

But a lot of people think.

It is really interesting, that, because like if I close my eyes, I can just see nothing.

It's just dark.

I can't imagine things.

can't imagine what a square looks like can't imagine what my wife looks like just can't imagine anything can't imagine what Dan's mum looks like

obviously I can imagine that yeah

but um it goes through different sort of phases so there are some people who can just kind of make out slight images there are some people who can almost see an entire movie that goes on in their head like they can imagine their first day at school and they'll see it happening in their head.

And then there are some people like Blake, who is a hyper-fantasic, who can just imagine almost anything and things almost come into him, and he's not sure if they're real or not real.

Yeah, it sounds like a mad life he had.

Yeah, well, I mean, there's lots of people who are like, he was just quite mentally ill, but thought he was seeing visions.

But it started for when he was really, really young.

So when he was four years old, he first saw God's head in a window.

And they described it as the first of many visions he would recount in the ordinary, unempathetic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.

So he was just kind of completely on it.

It was just like, God's head's in the window.

That's yeah, because they came so much to him.

It wasn't just angels and gods, it was the past people of the world, so kings and famous artists and stuff like that, to the point where he would be sitting there, saying, have a conversation with William Wallace.

You know, he's just having a chat in his head.

And then he'd get pissed off because King Edward I would suddenly just blunder in and he'd be like, Edward, we're trying to have a chat here.

What are you doing?

Like, he would get pissed off with the visions as well, because there were too many going on,

yeah, interrupting.

Incredible.

That's weird, because he painted the body body of Edward I, the embalmed body of Edward I, who died, what, 400, 500 years before.

They opened up the tomb and he got to have a golden body.

That is so weird, isn't it?

What?

The idea that they would just open up the tomb of a dead monarch and just say, oh, you can paint them for an hour and then we'll close it again.

It was one hour.

It was like a supermarket sweep thing, and you had one hour to paint Edward I.

And it was literally the king.

It was the king.

It was the Edward I.

It was so weird.

Has it ever been done since?

1774.

I was old he was when he did that.

He would have been quite.

No, he was young.

He was young.

Is he still around then?

As in, like, is he his embalmed body?

All these people are dead.

Wait, wait, wait, no.

If he was embalmed, will he still be there?

Yes, I mean, they sealed up the tomb again.

We could, you know, bring Edward I up.

Damien Hearst has him this year, you know, kind of thing.

Oh, don't give him to Hearst.

If you were going to open up the tomb of Edward, you should just slip into his arms a little mummified sex doll.

Speaking of sex dolls, no, speaking of Catherine, Eve in this cosplay scenario, this role play, sexy role play they were having.

Apparently, Catherine was great crack.

She was like jokes.

She was like a great cook.

And one of the things that she used to do, despite being a great cook, was to serve up Blake empty plates as a reminder that he needed to start bringing some money home.

Oh, wow.

Pointless when you're serving it to someone who has constant visions.

He's like, whoa.

Hamburgers again.

Apparently,

apparently, Blake really loved to eat cold mutton and drink pints of porter from the local pub, but he didn't like wine glasses, which he considered an absurd affectation, said from someone who cosplays as Adam and Eve.

And once he accepted a gift from Admira, which was a whole bottle of walnut oil.

He didn't know what to do with it, so he drank it all among her.

Oh my God.

He and his wife seem to have had a very nice relationship

almost all the time.

There was no evidence he was unfaithful to her ever.

There was a bit of gossip, but they loved talking, they loved walking.

They ran their whole business together because he was a printer, basically, and she and he together worked out the printing process.

And they designed, they engraved, they printed, they made their own ink.

Like, they had this idea that if we can control every element of the production process, everything except printing their own paper, then we'll control all of it, we'll make a load of money.

And they did not do that.

It's tragic because he was obviously seen as one of the greatest geniuses ever produced.

And yet, his poems sold, I think Songs of Innocence and Experience sold something like 20 copies in 30 years yeah it was really bad jerusalem sold nothing did no business yeah just just just absolutely nothing at all so why was he allowed to paint a king like what was the lead between that i think he was really quite young at that time so i think he might have been yeah studying or whatever but he also i'm very envious of his death because he is someone who did not think death was scary.

I'm someone who does get scared of death and the idea of no more consciousness.

And I know a lot of people aren't, but he particularly believed in the afterlife so much that on his deathbed, he was literally singing with excitement on the day he died, going, you know, I'm going to the next place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever the song was.

Those kind of sound like the words he would have used, right, as an amazing poet.

And so his wife was upset, but also at the same time, she was like, cool,

I'll catch you soon.

And on her death day, she was calling to him as if he was in the next room, going, I'll be with you in a minute, William.

I'm on my way.

That's nice.

What a a great way out.

Yeah.

He was a good husband, I think.

He once wrote that the female Vulva is a little model of a chapel of God that husbands must daily worship.

Okay.

Wow.

Yeah, that's nice.

It is nice, isn't it?

I think

it's like an eternal chamber, you might say.

And he's popular culture-wise, you can see his footprint everywhere in ways you might not recognize.

Like your sister's Barbie.

So, okay, the band The Doors, The Doors of Perception, that was a Blake poem.

That's where Jim Morrison and the band got that line from.

So that's down to Blake.

Alan Ginsburg, one of the great American beat poets, read a poem of his and he felt the presence of God.

And he said immediately afterwards, oh my God, I've just experienced

something I've never experienced before.

This poem.

And the LSD I took.

I don't know if there was LSD, but he, yeah.

So presence of God stuff.

Do people sort of of know what Jerusalem is about?

Because it's this series of weird interlinked questions.

I thought it was like that Jerusalem comes to England or something.

Like maybe Joseph of Arimathea is going to come to England or something.

That's it.

And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green?

It's about the myth that Jesus went to Glastonbury.

That's literally what really was a myth that Jesus

attended Glastonbury and went to England.

No, it's like there's this idea that, so Jesus had a great uncle who was Joseph of Arimathea, like James says, and he was a sailor, and maybe he came to Cornwall to buy some tin, and then maybe they walked around Glastonbury for a bit, and this is when Jesus was tiny.

And that was the idea behind, that was the idea that Blake was writing about.

In fact, it turns out Jesus didn't go to Glastonbury, obviously.

The story was made up by monks in the 12th century to boost the tourism industry of the area.

It's such a good scam.

Okay, great.

1184, you're a monk.

Your abbey's burned down.

Nightmare.

You need to rebuild it.

You need to raise some cash.

So all you do is you just say, King Arthur came from here, you know.

And no one can prove you wrong because it's the 12th century.

They don't have fact checkers.

And then King Arthur, you just add Jesus into that.

Say, oh, Jesus came here too, actually.

And the monks, this was the great bit of the con.

They built a wooden church in a style that would have been built centuries before to make it look like their monastery was way older and might have hosted King Arthur and Jesus at the same time

I don't know if there was a kind of supergroup element to it but it was kind of

like it was just like oh this is a very very old place that was their their claim and it was it was nonsense from start to finish but it worked because Glastonbury became the second richest abbey in the entire country

partly because of this myth of oh yeah Jesus he was here I've always said it you can't trust bugs no

well they got their comeuppance you'll be glad to hear Sophie just just 400 years later.

And what was the comeuppance?

They had to say 12 Hail Marys.

That was the dissolution of the monasteries.

Monasteries.

I admit, that's a pretty neat reference to make.

Sorry.

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

My fact this week is that ladybird orgasms last for 30 minutes.

Pretty astonishing, 30 minutes.

Yeah.

So their sex can last up to nine hours.

So hence, that's proportional orgasm, possibly, to the amount of sex time that they're having.

Well, yeah, what's that?

Half an hour?

What is it?

Half an hour.

That's one eighteenth of the total time having sex.

So that's a full-second orgasm, two minutes.

Yep.

Checks out.

Carry on.

Wait, did you say two minutes?

No, my numbers are all up then.

So, yeah, so they, yeah, nine hours.

Nine hours, and actually, during that time, the female might often get a bit bored and go around looking for food while the male is attached to the back of her.

Well, that's the weird thing.

There's been, they've seen sometimes, this is how clueless the male ladybird is during the sex.

That sometimes they'll get four hours into the sex and they'll be like, oh, she's dead.

They don't

even know that for four hours they were sleeping with a dead ladybird.

Isn't that incredible?

Males are very.

What's the word I'm looking for?

Necrophilic?

No, they're just sort of.

They're very inattentive, male ladybirds.

They're very...

Are you being an apologist for necrophilic male ladybirds?

I cannot stress enough that I don't think our puny human judgments apply in this universe.

No, so if a male ladybird meets another ladybird, he will climb on top of it no matter what.

Oh, regardless.

Regardless, and it might not be a female.

So Warwick University wrote an amazing study about the love lives of ladybirds, and they reported that if a male meets another, he will immediately make a full-hearted attempt to climb on top of the other one.

If he discovers that he has mounted another male, he will retreat immediately.

But if he was lucky to have met a female, he will try to sleep with her.

So they don't notice anything, really.

They just bump into another ladybird and start climbing up it.

Yeah.

Because they can only see two centimeters ahead of them.

So if there's something that looks a little bit like a ladybird there, you might as well have a go.

Gosh.

Really?

And sometimes female ladybirds get mounted by male ladybirds, which are not even the same species of ladybird.

Yeah.

And they say, what are you doing?

We're not even the same.

We're not even the same thing.

I think this, I mean, it's hard to tell the gender of a ladybird from two centimeters of sight.

But if you're a ladybird, but

you're all ladybirds.

It's not ladybirds and laddiebirds.

It's all ladybirds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's all like they were all ladybirds.

You all look basically the same, even though you can have different colours of ladybird.

You can have red ladybirds.

Orange ladybirds.

Black ladybirds.

blue ladybirds.

Wait, maybe I made that one up.

Orange, black, brown, and red.

Those are the main types.

There have been reports of purple ladybirds, but those are unreliable.

One thing that I really liked in my ladybird research is that there are not a lot of ladybirds in popular culture, but there is one ladybird who is possibly Pixar's first transgender character, which is Francis from a Bug's Life.

Oh.

Francis from a Bug's Life is constantly being misgendered as a lady, which which he gets very upset about, but in the Pixar forums, people have

supposed that maybe Francis is a delusion to a transparency.

You want to take that very seriously.

Pixar did not do that.

But it is a constantly misgendered

ladybird in a bug's life.

It's hard to tell the species of ladybird because in the UK we have a seven-spot ladybird, which is the most common, but you might get a 22-spot ladybird, a 13-spot ladybird, 10-spot ladybird, 2-spot ladybird, 18-spot ladybird.

These are all different species.

And you know how you can tell which is which?

Oh, number of spots.

Nope.

This is the amazing thing.

Some seven spot ladybirds can have anywhere between about five and nine spots.

And 11 spot ladybirds can have something like nine to maybe 15, something like that.

What's the point of anything then?

What's the point of science?

It's most of them do have the number of spots that their name says.

But the problem is that some of them don't.

And like some of the spots sort of merge into each other so you can have a seven spot but actually five of the spots are all molded into one spot so it's like just three spots I'm coming around to the point of view of the male ladybird here

if you don't even have the decency to have the number of spots that your literal name is

it's crazy you know that's another crazy thing is that when they're if they're mating because obviously as I said it can it can go up to nine hours yeah if they're mating and it gets to sundown and the temperature drops, they become immobilized and they're just kind of stuck there.

Yeah.

Oh Oh my god.

So if you're going to do nine hours, you pretty much have to start quite early in the morning.

Yeah.

Don't you?

But also.

There's no point starting at midday because it's going to be.

Yeah, you've got to time it right.

But you know, another argument in my favor for the solar-powered arms to give you nighttime energy.

Six arms.

Six arms.

Six arms.

I've got quite a cute ladybird fact.

Do you know who the ladybirds are named after?

A German cool girl.

No, she's named after

she.

They, the ladybirds, are named after, people think in lots of languages our lady the virgin mary who's often depicted wearing a red cloak like lots of

lots of things but the word ladybird in other languages in irish it's i can't say it it's boide de

okay it means god's little cow

god's little cow

in russian i think that's so so i feel like the virgin mary in heaven is like what yeah yeah well so the the german word for ladybird is

marienkaffer which is merry beetles it's using

the surname of Virgin Mary in that instance.

Her first name was Virgin!

Mum, Dad, why did you name me that?

Can we talk a bit about the ladybird explosion of 1976?

Yes, sir.

Please, right.

Okay.

So Dan's mum was just...

This is a thing that happened in 1976.

The weather conditions for some reason were right.

So 1975 was quite a good summer.

Then the winter was mild, then the spring was warm, right?

So what you had, you had this, you had all the preconditions for this amazing number of ladybirds.

Apparently, during the summer of 1976,

400 miles of tideline on the south and east coasts of England were nothing but ladybirds.

Really?

They were just solid ladybirds.

What?

They think there might have been something like 23...

billion ladybirds in the tideline at any one time, which is more than double the number of humans.

Well, it's more than double the number of humans.

This has ever been.

This is 1976.

This is 1976.

This is for one particular day in 1976, that 23 billion number.

Someone here must have been of age in 1976.

Does anyone remember that?

There were a lot of ladybirds.

There were a lot of ladybirds.

It's getting

corroboration.

Corroboration.

There were a lot of ladybirds.

You weren't wrong.

There were a lot of ladybirds.

That's the best.

That's the happiest thing.

That's how we do our fact checking it.

The author who was writing about this, who was saying it was Majerus, said, I was walking in Brighton in late July.

I tried a little experiment, walking along the almost deserted beach with a cone of yellowish vanilla ice cream held inside my jacket.

I then held it out and timed how long it took to become completely submerged in ladybirds.

Oh my god, like hundreds and thousands.

Yeah.

Well, probably only 40 or 50, but no, the point is

28 seconds.

28 seconds after he got the the ice cream out of his coat, it was covered in ladybirds.

That's how many there were.

Just around.

Wow.

It was huge.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

They fly so fast as well.

They fly as fast as a fast horse runs.

That's how fast.

And that is food for thought.

That's fast.

Yeah.

That's what.

Yeah.

And yet the plans for the Ladybird Grand National seem never, ever to get going.

What's that?

40 miles an hour?

They can't go 40 miles an hour.

They go really.

It's windy.

There is a Norse legend that

the ladybird came to Earth on a bolt of lightning.

So it's probably someone watching a

whole damn thing.

That's cool.

You're like, that's like a fast horse.

That's amazing.

They get pubic lice as well.

Ladybirds.

Do they?

Yeah.

It's the equivalent, so it's pubic lice.

I'm doing air quotes here.

Ectoparasitic mites is what they get.

So ladybirds are just absolutely riddled with STDs because they shag so much and they spread it.

So the mites hide underneath the shell so you would never see you in the mites.

Although I've seen photos of

STD riddled ladybirds and it's

those spots are natural done.

Well I started off as a seven spot but I don't know what's going on here.

But it's hard it's hard to hide when you see like a really riddled so like because they get like fungi and stuff like that so they come in and they look like they're wearing greenery on them.

The fungi one's interesting because it that has become a real problem over the last few years.

Yeah.

Pretty much most of the ladybirds you get in this country and around the world are starting to get this fungi.

But we don't know for sure that it's harmful.

So we know that they're all getting it and they all seem to get it from sex or actually in a nice way, sometimes they like to cuddle together and they can catch the fungus that way.

So it's not always an STD.

But we don't know for sure that it's harmful.

It could be just like getting athlete's foot.

So it could be just like we all have a a big cuddle we all get athlete's foot and we're kind of fine might be a little bit uncomfortable but no it's fine we were we were cuddling and then i came home and that was it yeah

they're just pubic lice in air quotes it's fine

i feel like we've got quite personal with the ladybirds well can i say something about orgasms then very quickly yeah yes clean it up

So psychologists at Madrid University collected a load of images of the faces of people when they orgasmed.

And they noted that 92% had their eyes closed, 79% had a dropping of the jaw, and 64% were frowning.

So if you're having sex and your partner is eyes shut, slack jawed, and with a frown on their face, then it means you're doing it right.

I've never been more conscious of the muscles of my face.

Not wanting to do anything with them.

Oh, that's so interesting, James.

Thank you.

It's just science, Dad.

I know, I know, I love science.

I've got got a gals in fat.

Oh, yeah, go for it.

So, if we imagine, if we've got the fantasy of the two ladybirds having sex, they reach climax, the sun goes down, and they're frozen like that forever, you think, what an amazing way to go.

Yes.

And so, I was like, have there any people who have famously or allegedly died during sex?

Yeah, that's good.

And there is a list of people who have allegedly died at the point of climax.

Oh, wow.

And it's got one president and four popes.

Four popes.

Four popes.

Wow.

Pope

Leo VII, Pope John the 12th, Pope John XIII, Pope Paul II.

They all apparently died while shagging.

Oh my god.

Funny fact, they all died on the same day.

Same day.

There was a lot of white smoke.

What's the thing?

I don't know.

Well, that's it.

That's 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 be found on our Twitter account, Simon at Shriverland, James, at James Harkin, Andy,

and Sophie.

At Sophie Dukebox.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as offish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

You can check them out.

Thank you so much, everyone, for being here at this very late hour here in Soho Theater.

Thank you so much, Sophie, for being with us on stage.

We'll see you all again next time.

Thank you so much.

Goodbye.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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