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Hi everyone, happy new year.

We have a little favor to ask you before we start with the 2013 episodes of No Such Thing as a Fish.

2013 episodes?

Is that not, oh, what year is it?

James, oh my god, this is so sad.

You've just woken up from a coma and you haven't realised that 10 years have passed.

No.

You mean this isn't episode two of No Such Thing as a Fish?

I'm so sorry, but you're going to be delighted with how far we've come in the interim.

Wow.

Well, what have we done while I've been in a coma?

Have we told the world?

Have we made some books?

Have we won any National Comedy Awards?

Well, do you know, it's funny you should mention that.

That's the one thing we haven't quite done yet.

And we're delighted to have you back.

We've had to simulate your presence for the last decade.

Delighted to have you back to help us win them.

Because that is what we're supposed to be talking about right now.

It is the National Comedy Awards.

And we are on the long list.

No such thing as a fish for best comedy podcasts.

we would absolutely love to get to the short list if by any chance you like this show and you're here so maybe you do if you could go to qi.com slash vote and vote for us we'd be hugely grateful that's right we would love to get on that short list so please please do vote it'll take no time at all you can click through all the other bits like we're quite near the end so if you don't know who was the best supporting actor in a foreign sitcom this year then it doesn't matter you can just click past it get to the podcast bit click on no such thing as a fish put your email in bish bash bosh job done and we might get nominated for an award i'm going back to sleep enjoy the show on with the podcast on with the podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from the Bloomsbury Theatre in London.

My name is Dan Schneiber.

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

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 my fact.

My fact this week is that originally Popeye, the Sailor Man, got his powers not from eating spinach, but by rubbing a lucky magic hen.

I love the fact that you need to specify Popeye the Sailor Man.

Oh, Popeye, Popeye.

Yeah, yeah.

So this is Popeye.

We obviously know the great

guy.

I think that was the chicken.

That was a chicken.

Was that the chicken?

So, Popeye, the Sailor Man, and he was a cartoon back in the early 1900s.

And when he originally and also beyond, if you're remembering Popeye and thinking, shit, am I that old?

He lasted even beyond the early 1900s.

I don't know if he's still on TV.

He might be, but we all still know him.

He's such an iconic character.

And obviously, he derived all of his powers from spinach.

But when the comic strip that he first appeared in was happening, he wasn't a main character.

He was this sort of peripheral character who was introduced to the series.

And there's an episode where he finds himself hired by Olive Oil, who becomes his girlfriend and eventual wife, by her brother, who's called Castor Oil,

who sails a ship to Dice Island where he intends to make a lot of money in a casino by rubbing the head of a lucky hen.

And when he gets there, Popeye gets shot by someone.

So the first time we ever see him getting supernatural strength is when after he's shot, this little wiffle hen comes by and he goes, well,

wiffle hen.

I don't know how he talks, actually, I can't remember.

Something like that.

Yeah.

And he rubs the hen's head, and then he gets the supernatural power, and he takes out the shooter with some punches.

And that's the very first word.

It was a comic strip, right?

Yeah.

So we wouldn't have known how he spoke, I guess.

It's just whatever's in your head is how he spoke.

That's a very nice thought.

Isn't there an American restaurant called Popeye's?

Yeah, yeah.

Isn't it a chicken restaurant?

Oh, yeah.

I go in there rubbing their chickens every week.

You've been told.

Spinach didn't come in until quite a lot later, did it?

It was a few years later, yeah.

I think it was 1932.

Yeah, yeah.

And Popeye, like you say, I think this comic book series started in the teen, the mid-teens, 15 or 16, but I think Popeye became the main character in the early 20s.

So until then, I think he was just relying on normal strength.

Well, he's very strong.

I mean, he is very strong normally, but when he has a spinach, he gets extra strong.

That's the whole point of those forearms, you know.

Yes.

Well, wait a minute, because your biceps are what make you strong.

This has always been the bewildering thing about Popeye.

So he's got massive forearms, and the muscles in your forearms are the ones that control your fingers.

So he's just a brilliant pianist.

Whoa, don't do a thumb war with Popeye is what you're saying.

I did not know that Popeye is Jewish.

Is he?

Popeye is Jewish.

Popeye is Jewish.

So Elze Seagal was the original cartoonist who drew Popeye.

He was Jewish and there was a lot of...

There were a lot of sort of very, very subtle Jewish references and sort of jokes in the strip.

Yeah, and to such an extent that in Fascist Italy, because the cartoon was popular across the world.

It was so, so popular.

When it appeared in Fascist Italy, the creator's name, Seagal, was taken off it because they were anti-Semitic, and so, you know, so that, yeah, yeah, but they still had to have the Popeye.

Are you saying Popeye the Sailor was Jewish or that Seagal was Jewish?

Well, Seagal was Jewish, and there are lots of references.

It's a very sort of Jewish-inflected and

influenced cartoon.

There's no actual scene of Popeye, you know, having Jom Kippur or whatever.

That's amazing.

Because weirdly, later on in the Popeye run, there was a thing where the original animators were no longer animating it, and it was outsourced and it was outsourced to Prague in order for them to make the cartoon.

So there was a whole series where Tom and Jerry was made in Prague and so on and none of the animators out there had seen it and this was because there was no money to do it.

So there was a run of 13 episodes which are often called the worst 13 episodes because no one of Tom and Jerry because no one had really seen it.

But Popeye was done there as well.

But the thing was all of the people, this is a credits thing, who animated in Prague had to have their names changed to American names because they didn't want audiences thinking a communist country at the time was infiltrating communist ideas into their Popeye and Tommy Jerry cross.

Also, isn't it landlocked, Czech Republic?

So, like, how would you have a sailor man there?

Oh, I guess in, I guess, inland waterways, canal.

Danube.

Yeah, a canal-based

Danube man.

Well, Mongolia has a navy, doesn't it, as well?

Despite being landlocked, it does, yeah.

And Bolivia is Bolivia, yes.

Captain von Trapp is a, uh, in the sound of music.

He's a, is he an admiral or something, or a captain in the navy of the landlocked Austria.

It makes more sense if you're going to have a sailor man to have him on a coast.

Completely.

It's weird.

You know how we normally try and blow shit wide open?

We seem to have closed shit wide shut there.

Yeah.

That's what we should do.

Close shit wide shut.

Just on

chicken rubbing specifically, there is an Orthodox Jewish ritual called Kapparot, where you wave a rooster over someone's head and you say a particular prayer, and then you slaughter the rooster and you give the slaughtered rooster to charity.

And it's an atonement ritual for whoever's having the chicken wave over them.

Do you rub it on their heads?

I don't think you rub it specifically, you just sort of waft it around above them.

But maybe, maybe, the wiffle hen is a very subtle reference to the traditional Jewish Kapparot ritual.

Yeah, it could be.

It's almost certainly not.

There's also, there was an old English bit of folklore where if you wanted to stop your baby from getting chicken pox, you would rub it with a chicken.

So it could have been that.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm so glad we're on chicken rubbing stuff because I actually did quite a lot of sort of chicken rubber.

Can I feel a personal anecdote coming up?

So chickens will sometimes flirt with each other by rubbing themselves on the ground.

Okay.

So like yeah yeah, so there's this thing called preening oil which comes out of a kind of gland above the beak and it contains lots of information about the bird's genes and about it, you know, how suitable it is as a mate and things like that.

And so sometimes a cockerel will wipe itself on the the ground, for example, to just show, you know, to leave its scent for a prospective.

Like a genome sequencing act.

It leaves its genome sequence on the ground for the male to look at and say, oh, you're not prone to sickle cell anemia.

Thank God.

Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

The Etruscans used to rub chickens.

So glad we're doing all this chicken-running stuff, this is great.

Go on, go on.

So the Etruscans, and then the Romans after them, but they used chickens for divination.

They thought they were kind of quite holy.

And for good luck, you would get a chicken.

It was always a dead chicken that you would rub, but you would rub it for good luck.

And that's probably where we get the idea of the wishbone from these guys as well.

You know, like

you cook a chicken, you get the bone out.

People used to rub those little bones for luck as well.

And that's why we do that.

And now we just snap them.

Now we just snap them.

Rub it too hard.

You don't want that to happen in most rubbing situations.

But it gets snapped.

The hen in Popeye.

Sorry to stop us from talking about.

I've just got one more chicken rubbing paste.

No, no, please get it out.

I'd hate for the listener to miss out on your

Appalachian chicken rubbing rituals, and I just thought that would be a nice thing.

There are lots of Kentucky wart superstitions.

You know, when you have a wart?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know what a Kentucky wart is, though.

It's deep-fried, isn't it?

There are so many traditions or superstitions about what you do with your wart to make it disappear in Kentucky specifically.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's mostly rub something on it.

So, you know, it might be a chicken gizzard or a chicken intestine, but also bacon rind or beefsteak or one bean

or three beans.

Just don't accidentally rub two beans on it, whatever.

Oh, no, no.

Then you come out and wart.

You get double warts, yeah, yeah.

Kill a cat.

Bad start.

Take it to a graveyard at midnight, then rub the cat on the wart.

Also, it gets rid of the wart.

It feels like you go with the one bean out of the last.

It's a sort of step change process.

You know, you try one bean, three beans, then you kill a cat and take it to a graveyard.

Anyway.

You were going to say on Popeye's.

Sorry, Popeye, yeah.

I wanted to drag it back to Popeye, apparently.

No, no, no, that's fine.

Let's do more rubbing chickens.

What else are you going?

Oh, sure.

Thank you, Dad.

No, okay, it's back.

Back, back, back.

Sorry, my mistake.

No, so in the cartoon, we've got this mystical chicken, but it's not the only.

In the comic strip.

Sorry, in the comic strip, and it's not the only animal in the comic strip that had these sort of paranormal mystical powers.

There was also a dog called Eugene the Jeep.

And this was in a 1936 Thimble Theater comic strip and that's what Popeye was part of there.

I don't think he was a dog per se.

He looked like a dog.

We don't fully know what he was and it led to one of the most existential brilliant comic strips that I think the creator ever wrote.

The headline of it was what's a jeep?

Eugene the Jeep, what's a jeep?

And this is what the comic strip for kids said.

A jeep is an animal living in a three-dimensional world, in this case our world, but really belongs to a fourth-dimensional world.

Here's what happened.

A number of G life cells were somehow forced through a dimensional barrier into our world.

They combined at a favorable time with the life cells of the African hooey hound.

The electrical vibrations of that hooey hound cell and the foreign cell were the same.

They are a kind of kindred cell.

In fact, all things are to some extent relative.

Whether they be this or some other world, now you see.

For what?

For six-year-olds, that is.

He was based on a Polish person, wasn't he?

Which again, I imagine Popeye was, which I imagine they'd have had to cover up when they wanted there to be none of these communist influences.

But this guy sounds like a bit of a legend.

Frank Rocky Fiegel, who was from Seagar's hometown.

So he lived in Chester, Illinois, which is where Seagar came from.

But his parents were Polish immigrants.

And there's one remaining photo of him, and he does look like Popeye, but it's very hard to tell because he's basically got a pipe and he's bald.

And

he definitely looks like Popeye.

he looks like popeye and he was constantly getting into fights and uh which basically is what popeye does right he smokes he gets into fights well he was a boxer wasn't he i think he was a boxer and a nice guy though constantly starting fights but a nice guy and always protected the children we're talking about the sailor now right we're talking about viegal the sailor um and apparently see according to his biographies sorry that popeye is a sailor as well oh sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

he did actually say at the very start popeye the sailor

quite specifically, you see why I added it now, Andy.

And actually, this guy wasn't a sailor.

The Polish.

What?

No, he wasn't a sailor.

He was just a down and a little guy.

A guy who liked getting into fights is the inspiration.

Maybe if you didn't spend so much time checking out rubbing chicken back, you know.

But he used to get sent money, apparently.

His assistant, Seagar's assistant, said they used to send him a little bit of money to say thanks for inspiring the character of Popeye.

Wow.

Yeah.

Seegar said this to the Randolph County Herald newspaper that it was based on this guy.

And there was another person in the town called John William Shushet,

who was supposedly what Wimpy was based on.

Oh, yeah.

So you know Wimpy, the character who's I gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today and all that.

He's always in debt and he's always eating hamburgers.

And according to this historian, John William Shushett also liked hamburgers.

Interesting.

Open a truck case.

We've shut this shit wide closed.

His name means joke, sweetly, figal or figial.

His name is Prank or Joke.

Oh, yeah.

Which is kind of what Popeye is.

It's pretty funny.

A comic strike.

Well,

no, but there is a serious point behind Popeye.

Yeah.

So this was a psychoanalytic piece done about him in an American paper in 1932.

This is a paper called The Post-Dispatch.

It was a really, really famous paper at the time.

You may not realise it, but Popeye is a suppressed desire.

He personifies the desire most of us have both to be strong and to sock some of the unpleasant people we encounter.

A desire suppressed because we lack Popeye's muscles.

Although Popeye himself says he would never hit anyone as hard as he could because it's wrong to kill people.

There's actually quite a sweet.

Wait, this is the cartoon character now.

Yeah, yeah, the cartoon character.

Okay, okay.

The cartoon character wrote a letter to a paper in the 1930s saying, and I suppose Seagull probably helped him write it, saying he'd never hit anyone as hard as he could because it's wrong to kill people.

And he said he's been shot 120 times, but when bullets go through him, it doesn't bother him at all, except that he always has to block up the hole with a cork because he doesn't like drafts blowing through him.

Beautiful.

Yeah,

people complained about the fighting because it was teaching kids to fight.

And so after that, he carried on fighting, but only for the honor of old ladies and children in

later strips.

Do children have honor?

Yeah.

I guess so.

Original honor.

All right, yeah.

All babies have.

But he was really positive for spinach eating at the time.

Yeah.

There were reports, and I don't know how accurate they were, but during the Great Depression, they said that the uptake in children who were interested in eating food like spinach, well, specifically spinach, was 33%.

And that bumped it up to sort of like the third most...

requested food or favorite food of a child during that time.

Yeah, the insane claim is that there was a survey done which asked children what they liked to eat.

Their first thing was turkey and their second thing was ice cream and then they claimed spinach.

Yeah.

Which all seems very impossible.

And then Popeye, later on in the cartoons, he stopped eating the spinach directly out of the can.

So, you know, he would like to squeeze the can, and the, but apparently, they were worried that children might copy this and might get a can of spinach and eat directly from it and cut their mouths.

So, he stopped doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I would have done, actually.

I need to move us on to our next movie.

Can we mention very quickly the madness of the film, Popeye?

Oh, yeah, Robin Williams movie.

One thing about it.

So, there's the Robin Williams film, 1980, and it's not very good, apparently.

I haven't seen it.

It's absolutely brilliant.

I've seen it five times.

It's really good.

It's a classic.

Robin Williams' first film, it's amazing.

Yeah, agreed.

It's great.

It's mad.

It's all right, it's two against Robin.

That's insane.

But I have better taste.

No, I haven't seen it, so it might be great.

But anyway, the crazy thing about it is what it was like to film it.

So the producer was a guy called Robert Evans.

Everyone who worked on it admits that they were basically rolling in cocaine the entire time.

And at one point, and they were all bringing cocaine on set, they'd open up like camera packs, and just cocaine would fall out of cameras.

I haven't seen this film either, but is that what he does instead of spinach?

Yes, it is, yeah.

And Robert Evans had some luggage that was full of cocaine that he was bringing with him to the set, and it went missing at the airport, as bags sometimes do.

And he thought, oh shit, A, we're not going to get our Coke, and B, if someone finds that luggage, I'm in trouble.

And so, what he did was he basically convinced the Maltese prime minister at the time, a guy called Dominic Mintoff, to do an exhaustive search of basically the country to try and find his bags.

And so Mintoff said, why on earth would I do that?

And he said, ah, well, I'm very good friends with Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger's written you a personal note, which is inside that luggage.

And I'd really love to give it to you.

So it's really important that we track it down so you can read his lovely letter.

So he did.

His ego was flattered enough.

He tracked it down for him.

And then immediately, as soon as he'd done it, Robert Evans had to fly back to the US, meet up with Henry Kissinger, and say, look, Henry, I'm so sorry, but you have to write a fake letter to the leader of Malta saying what a great guy he is.

Long story short, cocaine luggage situation.

Do you mind?

And Kissinger was very reluctant because Mintoff was an ally of Gaddafi.

It would have been very weird for him to write an affectionate letter.

But he capitulated.

To save the shit slash good film, he wrote a fake letter.

Did he really?

Well, it sounds like he just wrote a letter.

He wrote a letter.

If you're Henry Kissinger and you are writing a letter, that's a letter.

I guess it's fake.

He backdated it.

Okay, that is fake.

It's mad.

I've just got a few more facts about chicken rubbing.

We don't have time, Andy.

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It is time for fact number two and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that Marcel Proust once woke up the members of a famous string quartet at midnight and made them all come back to his house to play a specific piece for him.

That's so cool.

It's such a cool thing to be able to do.

And this is before he was even really famous.

Yeah, I mean,

how did he do it?

He just, I guess people were more

willing to do shit back in the day.

It was sort of pre-telephones, right?

This period.

Yeah,

where not everyone's got a telephone.

Well, no one's calling them.

Yeah, he's going around to their house.

Yeah, so four individual houses in the middle of the night to wake them up.

It's 11 p.m.

He loved chamber music.

It's crazier than the Kissinger letter, I think.

I don't know how you would organise that.

Basically, he, at 11 p.m., he thought,

I'd love to listen to César Franck's string quartet in D major.

And nothing will stop me.

And so he knocked on the door of the leading French violinist in Paris at the time, Gaston Poulet, who was in his pajamas, and answered the door.

And Prue said, I've got a taxi waiting downstairs.

We're going to pick up your three mates and you're going to play me this piece.

And so, yeah, he went round all their houses.

One of them, the Violis, was skeptical, apparently, because Proust was wrapped in a big blanket and he was eating mashed potato the whole time in this cab.

But they all got in.

Proust had a very weird life.

Should we just say Proust was a very good person?

Let's say who he is, yeah.

So author of

one of the greatest, certainly one of the longest, novels ever written.

Ala Roche de Tompé du, In Search of Lost Time.

And,

you know, that's about.

it.

I think that was his main thing because he spent a long time writing it and then he died.

He was a huge eccentric in that he his eccentricities were sort of half born out of the illnesses that he had in his life, but he famously wrote all these books in bed.

He rarely went to sleep.

He was allergic to dust.

He was allergic to so many things.

He had cork walls on his room at home because he tried to keep out any allergies from getting to him.

He had really bad asthma, didn't he?

Yeah.

Which he took cigarettes for.

Yeah.

Classic.

it i already had up to 10 asthma attacks a day each one lasting up to an hour yeah wow it's unbelievable that he wrote one of the longest books ever written considering how much time you just spent having asthma basically um but that was the thing back then you would be you would get these cigarettes and they would have like opium in them and stuff so they you know they they weren't that bad but they were going into your lungs um but yeah and you said about telephones down so it was they did have telephones then they weren't obviously super popular but it was the time do you remember we talked about this music that um used to play through the telephone telephone?

Yeah, that's right.

In America,

it's like the throw Spotify in a way.

Exactly.

They had this in France, and Proust had it because he was in bed the whole time.

Wow.

So he had this kind of wires set up to an earpiece, and he would listen to music.

So hang on.

When he woke up the members of the string quartet, he literally had functioning opera coming into his room.

It wasn't that functioning, to be honest.

Like, there was one time when there was a really loud crowd, and he thought that that was the song because you couldn't really tell what was happening.

So everyone was cheering he was oh that was beautiful and they were like no no that wasn't the song

but this was called the theatrophone and it was very popular in France at the time also very popular in Budapest

and there was Harper's Weekly said that this system in Budapest had made it the city that was full of illiterate blind bedridden and incurably lazy people

because they were all at home just listening to this music.

That feels like quite a personal, that's a bit of a sub-tweet on Proust himself, isn't it?

I mean, that's what he was.

Well, it was a a little bit, yeah.

I think they were more slugging off the entire city of Budapest.

So Proust's sort of habits when he was writing, so he went to bed in 1909, and he basically stayed there until 19, I think, 22.

22, I think he died.

And he wrote for 13 years, and one of his,

and also he couldn't get a publisher.

He wrote the first volume, really struggled to get it published.

No publishers were interested.

He had to self-publish it,

you know, at his own expense.

I think he'd inherited quite a lot of money, so he was quite well-heeled.

And there was one person who believed in him and championed the work and wrote a lot of brilliant

reviews saying, you have to read this author.

He is changing the face of literature.

And that person was Marcel Proust

under an assumed name.

Really?

He paid for his own early reviews in lots of newspapers.

And yeah, he wrote them in longhand and then he secretly had them typed up by his publisher so there was no paper trail.

And he described his own work as a little masterpiece.

He said what monsieur proust sees and feels is completely original i always think of it as um the french trying to get one up on the british and irish because I feel like we have James Joyce and there's this impenetrable, you know, thousand-plus page tome that we all attempt to get through at some point and then mostly fail.

And then they have Proust where they just did that and then he wrote six more volumes exactly the same on top of it.

Well, I think Proust came first or certainly his first book was published before Joyce.

Because, like Candy says, it was self-published.

But he went to a publisher to try and get it published, this guy called Gaston Gallimard.

And Gallimard passed it on to a reader.

And the reader just, it was really long, so he just opened it up on a random page, page 62, and what he found was a boring and overwritten description of a cup of herbal tea.

So he declined it, and then Proust had to do the self-publishing thing.

But then, ten years later, Gallimard got another novel.

It was a very long Irish novel, and it was James Joyce's Ulysses.

Because I already regretted it for years, like the guy who turned down the Beatles.

He apologised, yeah.

He did apologise afterwards, yeah.

They did meet once, Proust and James Joyce.

Yeah, 1922, which was the year that he died.

But it was one of the few times he actually went out, I think, and he went to a dinner party.

And James Joyce was there.

And then all I know is I think James Joyce got quite pissed and tried to invite himself back to Proust's house, and Proust had to sneak away.

But do you have more detail?

Well, all I read about the encounter is that they hadn't actually read each other's books.

One of the encounter of two of the greatest minds ever.

They had nothing to say.

That's so funny.

It was a guy before he wrote his mega series of books, he translated a couple of books.

And Ruskin, he was a huge fan of Ruskin, right?

And when Ruskin passed away, Pruce decided that he wanted to make French translations of two of the books, except he didn't speak any English.

So he had to ask his mum to translate it for him, and then he did a proper better translation of his mum's translation of the book.

Oh my god,

he bloody loved his mum.

My god, if anyone's a mummy's boy, yeah, because he lived with his parents until they both died, which is fine.

And he used to write letters to his mum from bed when he couldn't sleep, saying, You know, mother, I'm so sorry, I won't be able to get up and spend breakfast with you, and nothing would make me happier.

2,000 pages later, she had to get some point.

But his dad was quite strange and subjected him to this quite strange experience when he was about 16, which was that he was very worried about his son, Marcel's masturbation.

And

I just didn't think he was doing it.

Doing it weird.

I thought you'd have this fact.

Love the rubbing cock fact.

There were no chickens involved, but

he was a doctor, Dr.

Adrian Proust.

And it was a time when people thought masturbation was bad.

And

Dr.

Proust, thought that it could lead to homosexuality, because Proust was gay, in fact.

And so I think that his parents might have thought, oh, God, we think he might be gay.

And so they said to cure him, when he was 16, his dad gave him 10 francs, sent him to a brothel, and said, Here you go, have sex with a prostitute at female please.

And that

will stop this awful masturbation happening.

10 francs?

Yes.

It's not as much that, is it?

Well, back in the day, you're not going to splash out on the first experience because it's not disgusting.

Well, speaking of which, he didn't.

It was a failure.

This is why we know about it, because Bruce, Marcel Proust, wrote a letter to his grandfather the next day saying, I'm really sorry, I need to borrow 13 francs off you.

Papa gave me 10 francs so I can get rid of this dreadful masturbation habit.

But what I did was I turned up, I broke the prostitute's three-franc chamber pot, embarrassing.

And then I was so embarrassed that I couldn't perform.

And so now I need to go back and try again, but I also need to pay her for her chamber pot.

So

poor guy.

We have this impression of him as very sort of ill and you know, constantly retiring to his bed.

He did once fight a duel in his life.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and it was over something.

Clearly, it was over something that mattered to him a lot.

He fought a duel when someone accused him of being gay, of having had a gay affair.

And his accuser was a literary critic who was called Jean Lorraine, who was also gay.

So, to be clear, this is two gay guys having a duel because one of them said to the other, you are gay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They both survived, didn't they?

They both survived.

They both shot and

they both missed.

Marcel shot first, so he went hit in the sort of region of his feet, but didn't get him, and the other guy missed outright.

But you kind of, I guess, have to think about the times.

Of course,

he was outing him for something that might have got him killed anyway for being a homosexual.

Maybe his dad, having written what he wrote, was a...

Yeah,

it was a tough.

He had a tough life, didn't he, Marcel?

Oh, Marcel.

Yeah, yeah.

He once diagnosed himself with a brain disorder and said that the only way to cure it was by drilling loads of holes into his skull.

Compounding.

And

he begged a doctor to do it.

And the doctor, quite responsible for doctors at the time, said, I'm not going to do that.

Yeah.

Well, in fairness, that's around 1910.

That was standard.

That was, yeah, they were trepanning around that time.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Someone won a Nobel Prize for.

That's right, they did, yeah.

The

main character in Ala Roche Tom Perdue is going to be the Madeleine.

So, the whole point of it is, or not the whole point, but at the very start, he's kind of got this Madeleine cake and he has a bite of it, and suddenly he remembers all the history and things that happened because this evoked such a memory from him.

So, I thought I'd look into Madeleine's.

Oh, yeah.

Apparently, invented by a young girl called Madeleine, who stood in for the chef to the Duke of Lorraine.

We're not quite sure why, but the chef wasn't there, and they were like, like, you, in.

And she only knew one recipe, and that was her grandmother's recipe for cakes.

And so that's all she made.

And so she just made loads and loads and loads of these, and they were named after her, apparently.

And in 2006, there was a thing called Café Europa.

It was an EU thing

where every country in Europe had to give their best cake or their best sweet thing.

And then they would sort of celebrate them all.

And France gave the Medal End.

Really?

Because they're quite crap.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they're just...

Do you guys know what they are?

They're like a little sponge cake.

I've never had one.

You will have had one.

They're just so boring.

You idiot, Dan.

Of course you've had one.

Ironically, they're very easy to forget.

They're like a tiny little sponge cake.

They're shaped like a scallop.

Yeah.

Scallop.

A shell, you know, a seashell.

Yeah, yeah.

They're shaped like that.

Yeah, yeah.

But in the original book, it was a bit of toast originally.

I thought this needs a rewrite.

Yeah.

I just wanted if you wanted to guess some other countries and what they did for their sweet.

Oh, God, yeah.

I mean, because France has so much.

France is the land of cakes.

The Eclair.

I would have submitted the Eclair.

Well, you didn't.

And they didn't.

Yeah.

Did they win?

Did they win with the medal anyway?

It wasn't a competition.

It was just like...

What's the point of it then?

What is it?

What's the point of anything if it isn't a competition?

This isn't a competition, Andy.

No one wins this out of the four of us.

Don't be ridiculous.

We've been scoring for the last 450 episodes.

I'm definitely confident.

I actually can imagine Andy going home and having a little whiteboard when he puts that on.

Another great win, Andy.

Well done.

The sole metric is a number of chicken rubbing references made throughout the show.

Okay, so what did other countries say?

Yeah, just they're all relatively easy to guess.

Belgium.

It has to be a sweet thing.

Croissant?

Croissants in Belgium.

Sweet chips.

Sweet sweet chips.

Honey fruit.

Waffles.

Waffles, waffles, waffles, waffles.

Portugal pastel donata for a while.

Don't give it all away.

Don't give it all away.

Well, I just thought we'd go straight maybe to the UK.

Can you guess what the UK gave?

Bloody hell.

Oh, that sort of pink Tottenham cake that you get in Greg's.

It's very nice.

So nice.

I don't know what that is.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Greg's.

Okay, okay.

Victoria's punch cake.

No, no.

Fink North.

Fink Bottom.

Those buns.

Further North.

Scottish.

Scottish.

Sausage roll.

A Scotch egg.

They misunderstood the category and they gave a Scotch egg.

And deep-fried Mars bar.

A haggis.

A haggis.

A haggis, a sweet haggis.

Sweet.

What?

And sausage roll was fine?

And you said sausage roll.

That was me?

It was shortbread.

Oh.

Okay.

And Denmark went for the Danish pastry, even though they were invented in Austria.

Ooh.

Sneaky.

And who won?

I think the Madeleine bit is really only famous because it's so near the beginning.

It's the only bit anyone's got to.

Because

I have to say, I have read and intend to, when I have a period of time off next year, read properly Valerie de Tom Perdue, because I think people are really hard on it.

Even at the time, they said it was impenetrable.

And I think it's really fun to read from the 40 pages I read.

But the Madeleine does come up within those 40 pages, and it's not that relevant after that.

But he did, it shows how much he agonized over everything.

That, as you said, Andy, it was a piece of toast for a bit.

It was also a piece of stale bread, which is quite, I don't know why you would eat that.

It was a sausage roll at one stage, wasn't it?

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

My fact is that in the 1920s, a smart young man would have two handkerchiefs, a blower and a shower.

Yeah.

It's disgusting.

It's disgusting.

Was there a difference between them?

Yes, there is a difference.

So I got this from, I was reading an old novel called Green Banks by Dorothy Whipple, which is great.

She's great.

And there's a scene in it where there's a young man waiting for his girlfriend, and he talks about having his blower in his shower.

And I just piqued my interest.

And it's very hard.

I googled it.

I googled it.

And it's hard to Google.

So the shower is the one you have in your top pocket, the sort of pocket square that looks incredibly neat and

jazzy.

And then the blower is the one you keep up your sleeve with all the snots on it.

And that's the

could the shower become a blower

if you needed to.

Absolutely.

But you couldn't make a blower a shower, could you?

No.

No.

You can blow a shower, but you can't show a blower.

Yeah.

As the old saying goes.

I disagree.

It depends on where you're blowing on the blower.

If you blow on the blower and like a top corner and then you fold it down, half of it, it's like an iceberg shower.

There's a lot of it below the surface area.

Well, okay.

Yeah, just don't blow on the show bit of your blower.

But it could start to come through the pocket, you know, like

if you've got enough

fold,

then you don't want it to not seeping out of the bottom of your pocket with the shower proudly seeping out the top.

No, that's true.

Yeah.

I say keep them separate.

I say keep them separate.

Dan's the one who's proposed this Maverick system where you can...

But it's rare, this usage of these phrases, but it did exist at the time.

It crops up in the New York Times in 1927.

And it's a report about the handkerchief being something from ancient China, you know, originally, but that those handkerchiefs were only showers, not blowers.

And it didn't used to be for that, did it?

We only actually started blowing everything into handkerchiefs about 400 years ago, which I know seems like a long time ago.

But we had handkerchiefs long before that, or kerchiefs, which are just, it's just a word for something that wraps around your head in fact a headkerchief well this is what's so weird a kerchief is literally a head covering chief head and then cur was covering and so now we have a hand head covering is the word is a head covering you hold in your hand basically yeah

I always thought that kerchief when people say it as they often do was an abbreviation of handkerchief didn't know it gone the other way anyone else

we know the first person possibly who blew their nose on a handkerchief kidding really well we know the first person who wrote about it.

And this was a guy called Desiderius Erasmus, who we have mentioned once or twice before.

The philosopher.

The philosopher and religious scholar.

But he also, and we have said this before, he wrote a best-selling book on etiquette.

And at one stage, it was a best-selling book in the whole of Europe for...

dozens and dozens if not hundred years after the bible basically the bible and then this uh and in this book it said stuff like um do not be afraid of vomiting It is not vomiting, but holding vomit in your throat that's foul.

Politely disagree.

Okay.

Well, let's see if this bit of a.

Have you been up and down some high streets on an early Sunday morning?

Sometimes you do wish people had held it in their throat a bit.

He also said, if you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn around discreetly and throw it somewhere.

Oh, that is good advice.

That's good.

And finally, do not move back and forth on your chair.

Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.

So, yeah, just a medical.

I think it was him, sorry, who said, because this was just about the time when handkerchiefs were starting to be blown noses on, have noses blown on them.

And so some did and some didn't.

And he said, if you need to blow your nose, you can do it on the floor, not a table.

On the floor?

Yeah.

Blow your nose on the floor.

Oh, right.

Oh, I see.

Put your finger to your nostril and blow it in the direction.

Yeah, sorry.

You don't have to rub your face against the floor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But he said, if it is visible, you do have to keep stepping over it and on it until it's gone away.

Yeah.

But he was basically because people were doing that or wiping it on their clothes.

And he said this was an improvement, which I think even Andy will admit.

Yeah.

But the handkerchief.

Yeah.

Definite improvement.

No, no, it was blowing on the floor compared to blowing on your clothes.

Because I would say blow it, I'd probably do a subtle blow into my cuff rather than onto the floor.

Wouldn't it?

It depends on the scale of the blow.

Yeah, let's just think.

think it's completely.

Sounds like with your leaking handkerchiefs, it's a dangerous maneuver.

There was a thing that I read, which is that there was a period where people weren't carrying two handkerchiefs on them, but 30.

This was actually as part of defense against

bullets.

So what this was is,

in the late 1800s, there was a physician called George E.

Goodfellow.

He lived in Tombsone, Arizona, or certainly was there at the time.

And there was a post-mortem that was done on a man who'd been shot.

And there was a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.

They realized that the silk handkerchief had significantly helped for the bullet to penetrate less.

It was like, wow, that dented the force of which it went.

So he thought, what if we dressed in lots of handkerchiefs?

Then we would never die.

So he invented what was

such a chaotic, premature bulletproof vest whereby you wore 30 layers of handkerchiefs on your body.

Yeah.

And I think it worked.

I think people were shocked.

It did until he got a really heavy cold and he just having to keep pulling off

became less and less safe.

Did people actually wear it or was it just him trying to market his it was him just experimenting with the idea of bulletproof vests didn't need to be metal plating which is what everyone was using at this point the problem is 30 handkerchief vests weighed much more than a little metal plating so but it is impractical it is white no Morris dancer has ever been shot

because they've got the skills to move the hanky into position at the right time

so uh handkerchief yeah

The word hanky panky.

Oh okay.

Does it come, is it related to handkerchiefs?

It has nothing to do

with handkerchiefs.

It's not short for handkerchief pankerchiefs.

No, it's not.

Can it be now?

I just imagine Andy going back home to his wife.

Little bit of handkerchief pankerchief.

I'm only wearing 27 layers of handkerchiefs tonight, darling.

Is there a fact with that?

Not really.

Well,

it's that hanky-panky has nothing to do with sex.

It's just not, it's completely originally meant juggling or trickery.

You know, it's still nothing to do with hankies because you would think.

It's still nothing to do with hankies.

It's maybe related to hocus pocus.

Right.

Hocus pocus, hanky-panky.

He's a very very sleazy magician, sorry.

Hocus pocus, hanky, punky.

Have you guys heard of the Valsalva effect?

No.

The Valsalva effect is something that we've probably all done.

We must have all done this, which is when your ears are blocked or you're on a plane and you're descending, it's the action of holding your nose and holding your mouth

and blowing it.

to get your ears popped.

That's what you do to equalize as well, isn't it?

Yeah.

So it's the opposite of blowing your nose.

You're sucking in.

You're you're basically using the pressure that's shooting inwards.

So that's used for a number of things.

It's for, yeah, for relieving your ears.

It's for people with abnormal heart rhythms.

They use it to relieve chest pain.

They say if you do have abnormal heart problems, that you should always consult a doctor before doing that,

just to make sure that you don't make the situation worse.

But another thing that it's used for is for people who suffer from premature ejaculation.

Oh, really?

Because I have very bad sinuses and have

and literally do that Balsava effect, I would say, about 20 times a day.

Right.

And I don't want to know what personal link you're making to what video.

I want to know what's coming.

Not you.

You manage it.

Yeah, so pretty exciting.

Also, you're supposed to do that mid-sex.

I think I couldn't see where they said if it was before before or during, but I imagine it's during, and I'm not sure how you can disguise that as a sexy thing.

So next time you're having handkerchief, handkerchief at home anyway.

Try it out and let us know if it's before or during that it's required.

They are sexy things though, aren't they?

They were used for sexy purposes back in the day.

In the 19th century, they were another one of these things where there was a whole language behind handkerchiefs that lovers could use to convey messages to each other.

And there's actually a book, because we've talked before, I think, about the language of flowers.

If you sent flowers in a certain arrangement, it meant different things.

Fans, the language of fans, if your fan is three-quarters open, it means I'd like a hand job, but not a blowjob, or whatever.

But as you see, the woman with the fan, so actually, anyway,

you're an absolute menace in the summer, aren't you?

Question: What if you just want to keep cool?

Being pumped on.

There's a book published in 1879 called A Complete Guide to Flirtation, containing handkerchief, glove, fan, and parousel flirtations and a complete language of flowers.

So we have to assume everyone memorised this at the time, so they understood what each other was saying.

But drawing a handkerchief across your forehead, do you know what that means?

Sweaty.

Yeah.

It either means you're sweating profusely or it means we are being watched.

So, you know,

don't jump me.

Across the cheeks was, I love you.

The face cheeks.

The face cheeks, yes.

It's worth knowing.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter.

This is where the problems can come if you don't know.

I didn't actually note down the ass cheeks one, so you'll have to just decide for yourselves.

Through the hands, if someone you're talking to someone, they weave a handkerchief through their hands.

Oh, yeah.

I hate you.

Oh,

really?

Wow.

Horrible.

There was another one later in the 1970s which was in the LGBTQ community.

And you might wear different handkerchiefs or bandanas and the colour might tell you what your fetish was.

So if you're in a club with like-minded people, it would tell them what you're thinking.

Also, cartoon characters tend to wear hankies and bandanas around their necks because necks are quite hard to draw.

Oh, really?

And so,

Fred Flintstone wears a light blue sort of cloth around his neck apparently he's into fellatio

i'll rattle through these food from scooby-doo red fisting and

captain pugwash light cream rimming so

it's just if they happen to be in the club then that's what we're

Let's be real.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1960s, owners of a theme park in Pennsylvania had guards with plastic bats in their tunnel of love ride who were instructed to give an admonishing thwack to any bare bums that they saw.

Cover that with a handkerchief now.

So this is a true thing that happened.

In actual fact, it didn't just happen in Pennsylvania, it happened in a few different places.

And when you're saying plastic bats, I'm thinking of table tennis bats, I'm not thinking of a plastic-winged mammal bats.

I have seen them, they are table tennis bats.

Some of them were actually almost in the shape of a hand, you know, like one of those big sort of foam hands where it was plastic and they would whack the bums like that.

And it's because they didn't want people making out or worse in their tunnels of love.

No handkerchief, handkerchief.

No handkerchief.

So this was an article.

Originally, I read this in Mental Flask, which is an online magazine.

And I followed it up and found an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper.

And this is about a place called Kennywood Theme Park.

And there is a ride there called the Old Mill.

It was constructed in 1901.

It's their oldest roller coaster in the whole place.

And it's one of these, you know, like

a log flume.

where you're going in the water, but there's no up and down bits.

You're just kind of slowly going around in the water, and there's like things to see on the side.

So there might be scary things, there might be skeletons, or there might be sexy things or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

Um, and then I found this YouTuber called Defunct Land, and he's done a video on this.

It's one of the best videos I've ever seen in my entire life on YouTube.

It's all about this place.

And he found an article from 1934 saying that this tunnel of love was a really good place for people to make out.

And he found other tunnels of love where people were whacking bird bums.

And he asked people, Have you or anyone you know ever

kissed or had sex on the tunnel of love in Kennywood?

And he tweeted saying that I have received the most explicit, disgusting and shocking emails I have ever read.

Really?

So this was really, and there are newspaper articles from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, even, all of them saying this is the place to go and make out.

This is where kids make out.

This is so famous for that.

It's only six minutes long, the ride.

Yeah.

Four minutes more than I need, buddy.

Well,

I've got a technique with the nose.

I wonder for how many people who got slapped on the butt by the ping-pong paddle, that turned into a sort of exciting new fetish that they didn't realise.

I think there might have been a bit of that.

There must have been so many Christmases where the partner was going, Yeah, yeah, I bought some ping-pong paddles.

I don't know, I just want to get into the sport, you know.

Just like, no reason.

Can I say something incredibly boring about this theme park, Kennywood?

Yeah.

So it was a trolley park originally, and a few weeks ago on the podcast we mentioned trams.

Yeah.

That episode hasn't gone out yet, but

we will have recently mentioned trams.

And

what's a trolley park?

I'm so glad you asked, Dan.

Oh, Dan!

What are you doing?

A trolley park is a miniature adventure park or a park with rides that's put at the end of a trolley line.

So trolley is just an American word for a tram, basically.

And it was to encourage people to use the trolley car network at weekends.

So you would normally use them to get to work, but at the weekend they were being used, so they put something to attract people.

Exactly.

And so, sorry, I just thought we were all having so much fun, and I just wanted to talk about tram infrastructure.

No, it's a good palette cleanser.

That's a good idea, yeah.

Any more on this?

Oh, no.

Well, just one other ride that there was at Kennywood in the early days, which was...

Sorry, not a ride.

Where there was one thing, an attraction called the House of Mystery, but no one knows what it was.

It's pretty.

Did no one ever come out of it?

It's been lost to history, unfortunately.

And there was one thing called spring water, which was just a water fountain.

It was the stream of water coming from a spring, and there was a tin cup you could use to get a drink.

But they had electrocuted the water

so that you would just get an electric shock every time you found out about it.

That's pretty close.

That was entertainment.

Anyway.

These rise is tunnels of love, which you don't really see much anymore.

In fact, I don't think I've ever seen one myself at a Fairgroom Ride or a theme park or whatever.

There's a few like in the UK.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I mean, they're basically the equivalent of rides that we've all seen at parks where you essentially get on them when you can't be asked to queue for one of the good rides again.

And so you just sit on this really slow, boring boat.

And so they were often haunted rides that were converted into tunnels of love or vice versa, weren't they?

So I think this one at Kennywood went on to become hard-headed Harold's horrendously humorous haunted hideaway.

That's right.

Sounds like a worse ride.

They also branded it as a Panama Canal.

So you would go down here and it was this view going along the Panama Canal.

That's right.

It is, but the Panama Canal is literally just a canal.

There's no fun stuff on either side.

No, you're right.

And then in the end, it was rebranded as Garfield's Nightmare Ride.

All of these.

A cat.

Yeah.

Or President James Garfield.

Who ate everything through his anus for the last three months of his life.

Weird ride.

But

I want to ride.

the guy, this guy, Defunctland, who did this amazing video,

he said that he thinks after getting all these emails that there are at least two people who were conceived on that ride.

Oh, great, really?

Yeah, and Kennywood Theme Park now uses the slogan, welcome to the family.

But that's just a coincidence.

The tunnel of love, really,

I think I've read something saying there used to be hundreds, as in maybe 700 across the USA.

Yeah, USA is big, but that is a lot of tunnels of love.

But that it all sort of sadly came to an end because of the sexual revolution.

Yeah.

But that's the thing.

Society became liberalised.

Yeah.

So basically you could snorkel in public.

You didn't have to go into a tunnel.

And because they were such a shit ride, that was really the only good thing about them.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Another strike against the sexual revolution.

Do you guys know what was the fastest way to travel in the entire world in 1880?

I'm going to say

tunnel of love.

That is a ridiculous thing to say that's not a lot of fun.

I don't know, but everything was slow at the time.

Maybe there was a point in 1880 where all trains broke and all the horses

stage.

I'm just kind of because I know this sneaky man.

Was it an underground train system that was one of the first of its kind underground in Paris that led to the Louvre?

And so it was the tunnel of Louvre.

The Louvre?

He's thinking about the riddler.

Okay, I'm going to have a pun.

What's that?

I'm going to have a pun.

Fastest trains at the time, I'll just say in America they were only about 30 or 40 miles an hour.

In the UK I think we had up to about 60 or 70 miles an hour.

I'm talking about something that was going at 112 miles an hour.

And this is public transport.

1880.

It was something you could travel on.

It wasn't like you jump off, because if you jump off the Eiffel Tower or something,

I wouldn't say jumping off the Eiffel Tower is transport.

And in 1880, definitely not.

Another bad commute, darling?

Yes.

Okay, no, no, no, but I think I was saying, so the Tunnel of Love is a kind of boat ride that you go on.

Is it something like a log flume?

It's exactly a log flume.

So I found an article in the Chicago Herald in 1886 that told of a group of loggers, right?

So they're at the top of a mountain, and they created these flumes.

They were kind of metal flumes, which they would send the logs down.

And they would all go down to the bottom and that's where they would process them.

You cut them at the top, you would send them down.

Really, really steep.

Now, at the end of the day, all of these workers would get on one of these logs and fly down.

Oh my god.

Okay.

There was a quote, and they said, We all looked at our watches.

We had made 16 miles in eight minutes and 40 seconds.

So that is an average speed of 112 miles an hour.

It's so terrifying.

And there was a journalist in 1875, I think, who went to report on the Nevada log flumes.

And they look so cool.

And there is video footage of the logs going down them.

And they could be, you know, like they were built really high on scaffolding into the air, like 70 feet in the air.

And they were these channels which they zoomed down.

And yeah, this journalist said,

does anyone ever go down it?

And they said, yeah, yeah, you can totally do that.

Now, I still don't know if the loggers on this one actually did go down it, or they were pranking the journalists, because the journalist said, okay, I will.

The two owners of the log flume said, all right, well, if you're doing it, I guess we'll do it.

And none of the loggers agreed to get in with them.

And as they pushed him off, one of the loggers shouted, A flume has no element of safety.

You cannot stop.

You cannot lessen your speed.

You have only to sit still, shut your eyes, say your prayers, and wait for eternity.

Bye.

Smile for the camera.

And that's what their log flume rides are based on those, right?

Right, yeah.

Wow.

I think they've all shut down now the log flumes, but I think there was one operating relatively recently in Washington, in the state of Washington, which took an hour to go along.

So it might have been a bit slight.

Yeah, yeah, they weren't all really steep.

Just the ones on mountains were.

Lassie went on that one?

Did she have an episode of Lassie where Lassie

went on a log flume?

Okay, great.

Nice.

Good.

She deserves a break.

It's Lassie, is she?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

Lassie.

Yeah.

Our Lassie.

It's in the name.

It is in the name.

Jane Austen could have gone on a log flume.

That's the exciting.

It's one of my main interests is whether Jane Austen could have done any of the tech we talk about.

So she was alive when, but not the ride, the log flume, the actual log flume.

The tunnelled boat ride.

So this was a ride, actually.

It was in France in 1817, which is the year Austin died, so she wouldn't have had a great time on it.

What a way to go.

What a way to go.

She died on something completely sort of ordinary and sadder.

But if she'd died on a log floor, it would have been perfect.

It was called the Sut Du Niagra,

Niagara Falls, and it was a boat which fell down a slope into a basin of water.

I mean, it's pretty much accessible.

It's a little bit more than a little bit.

Yeah.

Anyway, Jay Austin.

I haven't read Mansfield Park.

Is that about a theme park?

I can't believe you thought of Mansfield Park.

I was going through sense and sensibility.

No, that doesn't work.

Have you guys heard of there's a sex sex theme park in South Korea called Loveland?

Have you seen it?

No.

It's amazing.

I mean, we say it's a theme park.

It's kind of like a sculpture park, and it's just lots of penises and lots of people in positions of sex.

So it's not right, you can't ride them, as it were.

No, I don't think so.

You can just...

It's good looking.

Yeah, you can.

Well, they do say there's a few hands-on exhibits,

such as the masturbation cycle, which is you basically spin a thing and you move their hands for them as part of this little exhibit.

Like it's a statue kind of thing that you're and then there's this really weird thing, and I couldn't find anything more about it.

I searched quite a bit.

It's this giant, it's like a

five-foot-tall see-through penis with sort of like computer workings all inside of it.

And it's just got a little plaque next to it, and it's got a lot of words in Korean, which obviously I can't read.

But then there's only one English word on it, as far as I could see, and the word is terminator.

And that's

I don't know if they're saying that's his particular penis or if if it's a penis of the future coming back to our time.

Would he have donated his penis?

I haven't seen Terminator.

Is that the sort of thing that the character would do?

Yeah, I'll be back until I'm back have this.

Yeah, that's on Jeju Island, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

And originally, Jeju Island was like a honeymoon destination, but it was after the Korean War, there was a lot of arranged marriages.

So a lot of the couples had never seen each other or really met each other before.

And so they would go to this honeymoon destination and they were really inexperienced they didn't really know what to do and so they had all the hotels had professional icebreakers who would kind of sit next to you if you're having dinner at a restaurant and if you're being a bit awkward they kind of start the conversation god that's a great idea

sorry you would be the worst human on earth as an icebreaker.

Did you know there was a trolley system on one of your paddles?

Come back.

Where are you going?

Come back.

I'm saying I need one.

Not that I could be one.

I don't want to talk about tramps any more than you do.

It's all I can think of.

Wow.

This really is a cry for help.

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 be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Trams, Trams, Trams.

James?

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

You can also find the link to Club Fish, which is our very exciting behind-the-scenes membership club.

There's awesome things on there, extra episodes, behind-the-scenes sort of correspondence episodes and quizzes.

There's also access to our Discord where you can discuss all interesting things

like how Andy would make a great icebreaker, whatever it is you wanted to chat about.

And also there's a lot of really fun merch up there.

So do go there.

I want to thank you so much, Bloomsbury, for this great show.

Thank you so much for having us.

And

we'll be back again with another episode next week for everyone at home.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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