454: No Such Thing As A Midsummer Night's Bream

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

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

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that indigenous Bolivian women traditionally wear huge colorful skirts and bowler hats

and I can't believe I'd never really seen this before. It's striking and they all do.
So these are they tend to be known as cholitas which

is basically a term for like the Aymara and the Quechua and other rural Bolivian women. Not Charlie Chaplin, as it sort of sounds like, the Charlitas.

I know you're trying to make the jump to the Charlie Chaplin bowler hat, and I appreciate that. Yeah, so like his fan club, you know, like all these like lady gagas are called Libra.

Yeah, maybe you've blown this wide open and that is why they do it.

So cholitas, it used to be a pejorative term, I think, and it was, it comes from the Spanish cholo for mixed race, but it's like very much reclaimed by them now.

And if you look them up, they always wear these stunning kind of like silky waistcoats with a brooch and these huge dresses with petticoats underneath.

So like really big Elizabethan style dresses and then a bowler hat which doesn't fit. But it does work.

It makes the look awesome. Oh, it works in that way.
Oh, yeah.

It works in like a, you know, it... Because bowler hats were originally invented to stop twigs from hurting your head, weren't they? So I wondered if...

It would probably stop a twig from hurting, is it?

It's not functional. I'm talking fashion.
I'm saying it works. That works.

It does work.

Yes, and we're not quite sure why they do it. They started doing it at the turn of the 20th century.

There's the legend that when British and Irish railway workers were in Bolivia, which they were, because the railway building company was a British company, there was a big shipment of bowler hats that was sent for them to wear because it's like workers' hats and they were too small.

So some clever marketing person flogged flogged them to the indigenous women. I think there was a guy called Domingo Solingo

who did a very good job of popularising them and ran a good PR campaign. Try to get men to wear it first from one of the other stories, versions of the story, and they were just not interested.

So, they just, as a last-minute thing, went, Women? Would you imagine?

Then, when he was walking along with a tray of samples one day, he tripped over and one of the hats fell onto a woman's head, and completely by accident, he discovers.

That's so interesting, because they are, I mean, they are comically small.

They're not like, you know, just a little bit too small to go in your head, are they? They're not like Yamulka, if you're picturing. It's like, yeah, just clearly too small.
They don't sit on top.

They sit on top. I mean, who were they made for? Is my

idea?

We have this in the house all the time where you order something and then a novelty small size version comes in the post. That must be what it was.

You know, like we bought a crown for my son Wilf's birthday and it arrived and it was the size that would fit a Kendall's head by accident because we just hadn't read the measurements.

So we got a washing line.

Need to read the measurements. They clearly didn't hear as well.
One thing I like about the Cholita thing is that

I didn't know anything about this style before or even this cultural grouping before researching this, but they weren't allowed to walk freely in the main square of La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia, or in the wealthy suburbs, in this outfit for many years.

And then it's really been brought back on board to the extent that they're officially a part of the city's cultural heritage now. It's called the Cholita of La Paz.

And also there are Cholita fashion shows, there is a Cholita modelling agency and I'm sure you guys came across the Fighting Cholitas. Oh yeah.
No I did not.

I'd like to hear about the Fighting Cholitas.

It's just a wrestling group but they're female wrestlers who wrestle in traditional

human rights. With the hats.
They do like odd jobs. The odd job kill.

Yeah they do, yeah. They die by the dozen every minute.

Anyway, the fighting cholitas. That's the one where they play golf, isn't it? Oh god.

Yeah, that's the only Bonfilm I've seen, the one where they play golf. Did you Google Bonfilm Golf? I just Googled Golf and it came up.
Right. Do you have...

You know there's an app that can tell you when to go to the toilet at the cinema, like toilet break.

Do you have an app that just tells you when golf scenes are in a movie and you just show up for that bit? I do. I only ever watched Caddyshack and that Bonfilm.

They are a real happy story, which, you know, we're all on the lookout for these days. But I think it was basically since Eva Morales was in charge of Bolivia, right?

Who was their first indigenous president,

who came in in the early 2000s and sort of completely rehabilitated their reputations because they had been kind of ostracized and had all these horrible repressive rules

made against them.

And now they're doing so well. And it's a real great story.
And they're quite well off. They've got all these celebrations about their heritage.

They have, I think they have a few Indigenous people in parliament. They're like lawyers and doctors.

And yeah, it's quite nice because they have, since, like, literally back in the day when the Spanish colonised, and they wanted to distinguish them, the superior colonists, from the indigenous people.

So they said, Okay, well, what do people who are lower class do in Spain? They wear these big peasant dresses, and so they made them all wear these big peasant dresses.

So, yeah, they say they put them in these to say, like, you're beneath us, and the cholitas just went, all right, we're gonna own this.

It's interesting because, like, the big dresses come from the Spanish peasants, and the bowler hats come from British, you know, upper-class people.

Yeah, fusion. Yes, Yes, yeah.
Yeah.

Have you guys ever drunk Coca-Cola? No.

Yes.

What kind of a question is? You might be right. You might be right that you haven't.
So this launched in April 2010 and Coca-Cola, spelt Cola C-O-L-L-A. Coca-Cola.

Yeah, is a local Coca-Cola basically that they've just manufactured on their own. So it has a red label with white writing.

I mean, the packaging is very similar, but it's sold as a legit product there. They've not been in trouble.

And they're all right with this. Or are we now getting them in trouble if someone's

listening to it? Because it's becoming a bigger... Yeah, yeah.
Because it's named after the colour people and the coca nut which is in it. Yeah.

And they say to Coca-Cola or Britvika or whoever owns Coca-Cola, they say, well, you know, there's nothing you can do about it.

And I'm not sure Coca-Cola are particularly happy about it, but there's nothing they can do about it. They're definitely not happy about it, but they can do cocoa.

And they've got coca leaf extracts in it as well. So actually, it's an illegal drink to be sold over here.
So they're quite regional because

it's legal there. But for us, yeah, it's a good thing.
I think we should legalize.

I mean, we should probably legalize all drugs, but coca leaves, I definitely think we should legalize in this country. So we can get this colour drink?

No, because like when I was in the Andes, it's the best thing. It just...
gives you a little bit of a pickup. Yeah.

It's so useful. Honestly, when you've got a hangover or you're tired or anything, just chew a coca leaf and it just makes you feel so much better.

It's just a tiny little buzz. Have you tried cocaine, James? You'll love it.

I think the Pope has tried the coca leaves. Has he? I think he visited them.
Several years ago, and when he went, I think he said, oh, I'll have some of that. So

they're everywhere. Like, if you go to a hotel, you know, if you go to a hotel in the UK, they might have a bowl of Murray Mints.
Oh, a lovely hotel would have that. Yeah, exactly.

Well, all the hotels in Peru and in Bolivia, they have a bowl of these leaves, and you just have to come up and chew on them. It's a bowl of the hat upside down, isn't it? Full of those leaves.

you sure it's not just potpourri you've been munching away

because it leaves your breath really really nice at the end of it

um guys did you know not 25 minutes walk from where we're sitting right now yeah is where the first bowler hats were sold

is that true

invented and sold in st.

James's Street I mean it might have been invented in someone's house you know but it was brought to St James's Street to Locke and Co hatters who've been going since like basically the 17th century when they were founded and the shop is still there today so you can still buy hats from them.

You pass there quite a lot do you? Right so that's where the bowler hat is from. That's very exciting.
That is exciting isn't it? Yeah.

You're going to turn up next week in a bowler hat because I can see it of the four of us. Just a comically small one I think.

No that's already it's a nice shop there. I don't think they make a huge deal out of it on the shop front.

No, they don't and they their legacy is huge because they not only sell bowler hats They sell all kinds of hats. They sold Admiral Lord Nelson his,

what was it called?

The bicorn. The bicorn, sorry.
Yeah, the bicorn that he awarded the

Napoleon was the tricorn. You don't want to confuse them.
They get very offended.

No one with a unicorn hat, which is a shame.

And I think that would have...

That would have made the Battle of Trafalgar really. So it's really cool.
There's an element of surprise, I think, in the unicorn hat.

According to Lux, it was devised by a pair of people called Thomas and William Bowler. Okay, and they, Edward Cook said, Can you make this hat for us to Lox?

And Lock said, Well, we'll get our mates Thomas and William Bowler to make it. Now, according to the OED, the bowler hat gets its name because it's shaped like a bowl,

not because it's named after these guys bowlers. So, I don't want to upset the people at Lock and Co.
because I'm sure their story is completely true.

But there is a suggestion that maybe there's nothing to do with these Thomas and William Bowler people.

And if you do look at the kind of newspaper archives, there was a thing called a bowl hat that existed before the bowler hat, and you can see loads of examples of people having their bowl hats stolen and stuff like that.

So, did the bowlers exist for the Rollers? It feels like they know. In fact, they definitely existed.

Thomas and William Bowler existed, and actually, there was another guy called William Bowler who existed before them, who was a famous hat maker. So, there were bowlers who were making hats for sure.

But whether these guys invented the bowler hat and gave the name to it, I'm not so sure. Yeah, it's tough and really torn.
I'm not going to walk past

Locke's shop in case an odd job hat comes in to me on there.

You know, that's.

Do you know what they have on bowler hats? The curl at the edge, which I'd actually never noticed was a fundamental feature of them. What, on the brim?

Yeah, so there's a brim, and then it curls very sharply inwards at a 40-degree angle,

a little bit, and it's a d'Orsay curl. Okay.

And it's named after Alfred Dorsey. And this is niche, but he was basically, I think he was the Byron of France.
He was apparently extremely attractive. He was the handsomest man of his time.

And he was mates with Byron, in fact. And he, the other time you might have seen him, is he's the model for the New Yorker mascot.
You know, if you...

You know on the New Yorker,

you've got that bloke who's actually not wearing a bald top in it. That's a top hat.

He wore a number of different hats.

Just literally. But that's him.
His face is him, is what you're saying. His silhouette is him.

He has got a magnifying glass, I think, and maybe a moniker. I'm thinking of Monopoly.

Exactly what I'm thinking of. That was actually based on Keats.
Yeah.

Apparently, according to.

Glad we set up that. So, Anna, that's a great

fact about this dorsation.

Let's connect the baller hat to the New Yorker. Sorry, what was the link? He invented the thing on the rim.

It was named after him. The curl.
Because he was such a dandy. I guess he was a curly, curly dandy.
Wow. That's really cool.

Well, it's really cool as a strong term, but it's. It's probably the one thing I'll remember from this podcast.

You'll be so annoyed about that.

Susie Dent wrote an amazing book about how slang is used amongst different tribes of people, so like taxi drivers and dock workers and stuff like that.

And she mentions in that section that hackney taxi cabs, the height of the cab was based on the bowler hat height for when you're getting in.

Yep. It sounds a bit dubious, but I think...
Do you know what you'll say? I didn't say anything. All I did was pull her face, and the listener didn't notice that.

No, but I think that is a rumor that's sort of out there, isn't it?

But how come I thought it was for hackney cabs for sort of for top hats, because baller hats don't really have any height. But the same as a head.

That would only add another centimetre or two to the height of the cab. Absolutely, but maybe a necessary extra centimetre.
It feels like you wouldn't redesign the whole cab.

You've got quite a long torso, Andy, don't you? Or do you have long legs, actually? A short torso. I've got a normal torso.
Sorry.

Long. I've got a normal torso, long legs.
long neck, short head. Okay, that's and that's why the Murray cab it has a lot of legroom, doesn't it? Incredible legroom, and then a very low ceiling.

Sorry.

You know, before we were talking about bicons, tricons, and unicons. Yeah.

There is a, what I suppose would be a quadricon. No.

And the quadricon is about. That's too much surprise, Andy.
Sorry. But that's awesome.
The idea of a four-cornered hat does not ruin that. I think that's incredible.
Okay.

So I'll go with Alfred Dorset. That's the thing I'm going to remember, Anna.

I suppose the reason it's interesting is because it is related to this fact because it's the traditional hat of the Tuanacan people of Bolivia.

And that is like a really old culture, pre-Columbian culture in Bolivia.

And they had these very intricately designed four-cornered hats that sort of the richer people would wear the intricately designed ones and the poorer people wear really plain ones.

But you'd have like birds' heads you would stick on there. Some of them had wings attached to them.

That sounds a bit grim. A decapitated bird's head.

They must have done some kind of, you know, put pickled it or something. It was a different type of thing.
It was popular back in the day to put dead birds and things, wasn't it?

Valentine's cards and so on.

Yeah. Not achieve.
Not just chopping their head off and sticking it on.

Gloddied neck sort of hanging. I think they wiped that away.
The purple.

Is that where we get

like wearing a knotted handkerchief on your head at the beach from? Absolutely not. No.

No, okay.

That would be quite unusual for

this culture to come back to life having, you know, gone out before the

Spanish came along and then traveled to 1950s seaside hotels.

That would be unusual.

One of the greatest test pilots in America for wartime planes was a gorilla wearing a bowler hat smoking a cigar. Okay.
Okay. And what I've done there has tricked you.
Because actually,

because actually it was a man.

Was your guerrilla?

Oh, no, I didn't know. Why did I allow you to say that?

This is a guy called Jack Valentine Willems, and he was one of the greatest test

pilots that were out there. And he used to take out planes that weren't ready, that it was advanced technology.

Why would you do that? Well, you know,

he's a test pilot. He's testing.
No, but it is ready, right? He's not taken away with the wrong wing.

No, no, but you're no, but you're, sorry, as in, we don't know the limits to which we can push this particular plane, so he would push it to places to see if it works.

You just made it sound like he was sneaking into the hangar.

Sorry. No, they were approved flights.

And what he used to do, he's a bit of a practical joker, is he used to bring with him a gorilla mask and he used to bring a polar hat and a cigar.

And he would fly up to other processions of planes that were flying, and he would have that gear on and he would wave at the other pilots and I think from what I've read the idea was is that no one would believe anything about the plane let alone the pilot if they came and said I saw a new plane and it was being flown by a gorilla with a cigar and a bowler hat that sounds a bit pushed for me I think I think actually he was just a practical joker but the idea was he was going to say no one would believe that pilot existed therefore they might not believe the plane existed that was being tested either it was interesting that you tried his practical joke on us didn't you because he was trying to make people think a gorilla was flying the plane and you also kind of made us

believed it.

But it was less dangerous in this context because we're just sitting around a table. Whereas I think making a prank out of putting off pilots flying actual planes is very irresponsible.
Yes.

Were there quite a lot of comical, you know, a pilot gets so distracted they fly into a mountain? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

400 deaths

resulted. A comical flying into the mountain.

Another death in the army today, and man, was it funny. We close our show with this light-hearted story.
I think I was picturing the cartoon version.

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Rocket Money can even try to get you a refund for some of the money you wasted. Plus, you can use the smart savings feature to start putting more money away.

Rocket Money analyzes your accounts to determine the optimal time to stow away cash without going over your budget. Our members report that the Rocket Money app saved more than $700 a year.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there are no animals in the only zoo in Kalamazoo.

What a sad lot of children there must be in Kalamazoo.

What? It sounds great. Does it? Oh

it's the Air Zoo.

It's the Air Zoo and the Air Zoo is a museum about aeroplanes which has lots of planes that are named after animals.

Okay because it does sound like the Air Zoo is what they've called it because all the cages are just full of air.

Yeah. Yeah.
You're right. It does sound like that.
But actually it's a really awesome air museum.

So planes that are named after animals. So I'm thinking immediately, I'm thinking the Sopwith Camel.

I don't know if there is one of those.

All I know is that there's a Warhawk, a Goonie bird, a wildcat, a bear cat, and a hellcat.

These are very American animal plane names. It's very American.
Yeah, Kalamazoo is in the north of the United States of America.

Michigan. In Michigan, yeah.
The hellcat. Yeah, that's a very.

The Sopwith camel is a very British animal plane name.

It's ridiculous. Well, Goonie bird sounds quite British as well.

No, I still think that's a bit of an American plane.

You've got to see the Goonie Bird.

It could be like a goon show. Yeah.

So, yeah, and actually on the Warhawk, sorry, you just mentioned that.

The person who runs this museum, who's called Sue Parrish, she was one of the last 20 members of the Women's Air Force service pilots from World War II who still flew planes.

And she flew a bright pink Warhawk. That's nice.
Is she still alive? She was still alive when I read an article.

It was from a few years ago. I think she knew television.
I think she's not.

Yeah.

The article actually I read was from the early 90s. So

she might have died since then.

She has

an airport which is Battle Creek and Kalamazoo Airport. There's a statue of her.

I believe it's at the airport. If it's not the airport, it's someone in the vicinity.

And you can also see her plane, which is, as you said, pink kind of colour. Do you know why it was pink, this airplane? Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Yes, because she only flew it when it was Red Sky at night, Shepherd's Delight in the evenings, and it was a camouflowers thing.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.
Not far off. Oh, okay.

Just wrong, but not a million miles wrong. Is it?

No, Dan. No, you're wrong.
Damn, please, I've got it. She flew only among flocks of flamingos.
Yeah, and it was

a camouflage thing. We're getting wronger.

Okay.

It was because she's a woman and women like pink thing. Do you know that it wasn't? Damn it.

It was because it was originally flown in Libya, these planes, and the landscape, lots of you know, rocks and sand and quite pink sand and stuff like that.

And so it just helped to blend into the landscape. That's pretty cool.
Okay, so it's not hot pink. No, it's not hot pink.
It's not for us.

It is quite pink. It's pretty pink.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, it looks awesome. And I think that's in the entrance when you go into the Air Museum as opposed to the airport.

Yeah. Yeah.
And after World War II, she wanted to become a commercial pilot, but she got rejection letters saying, With your qualifications, if you were a man, we would have hired you.

Oh, well, that's a nice consolation, though, isn't it? It's awful, nice. That's the highest praise you can give, really.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, basically, I remembered that there was a place called Kalamazoo, and I googled to see if there was a zoo there, and there isn't, but there is this place.

I didn't know anything about Kalamazoo before starting to research it, apart from, of course, the Glenn Miller song, I've Got a Girl in Kalamazoo. Yeah.
1942. Put it on the map.
Internationally.

But it's named as one of those places which has a funny name and no one really knows where it is or if it's real.

And it's kind of, you know, it's lumped in with places like Timbuktu, which have an interesting thing. I wonder why.
It's like

if you're writing songs. Exactly.
But Kalamazoo, get this. I'm only getting in with this fact before you guys all do, because I know you'll all have it too.

It was the first place in the world to install dropped curbs.

Is that a curb where you can get like a buggy down? You mean? Like it goes flat?

It's as it sounds. The curb has been dropped so that you can, yeah, so you can get a buggy down.
That's cool. That's quite amazing, isn't it? I know.
Do they have a blue plaque there, they must have?

Well, there are lots of claims as to what, you know, there are other cities which try and steal Kalabzoo's thunder. Right.
They're all, I think, incorrect.

I think this was the first city where you had to drop down. How deep have you had to dig for this? Was this a full day's work?

There was this veteran from the Second World War called Jack Fisher, who was an advocate for both veterans and disability rights. And he trialed them.
In America, they're called curb cuts,

and they were first tried out here. That's incredible.

What year were we talking? I think it was the late 40s or early 50s. And there are other places which tried them in the early 60s.

There was another thing in the 60s, and I think in America, there were some disability activists who... hacked away at curbs at night and laid concrete to smooth their path.
That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They only did it on a few occasions in a few places.

When you say he tested it, what's interesting about it is it feels it doesn't need testing. testing, it feels just logical, right? It just doesn't.

What do they think might go wrong?

Well, I guess it's it's never been done before, and he's just pointing out: look, this would make it a lot easier for lots of people to get around if you if you install these things.

So they say, Oh, all right, well, we'll install a few, and then obviously you just see how I mean.

Things that can go wrong is it allows dickheads like me to pop your bike up on the pavement while you're cycling and really upset pedestrians. He didn't think of that, did he? No,

didn't think of that, the idiot. And now, same with my car.

Kalamazoo originally was called Bronson, and it was because a guy called Titus Bronson was the first white man basically to arrive there and set up a town there.

And then, yeah, he turned it into a place where the streets were kind of named very obviously for the thing that they were operating as.

So there was Church Street, where you'd have three churches on there.

There was the Academy, which had the college on it. There was Jail Street and Jail Street.
It makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, it makes totally know where everything is.

I think the church one is weird because I know that, so there's a thing in capitalism, right, where if you've got a shop that sells a certain thing, like baby clothes, then you have lots of shops in the same area and they cluster because that works.

Fury mail in Manchester, exactly.

But churches, you rarely are like, well, we've got to fit 10 churches into this county. Shall we just put them all on the same street? Yeah, absolutely true.
Interesting.

The story goes that Bronson was in Detroit and he walked west into the woods and he kept going until he got out of the woods.

And this was where Kalamazoo was.

It's 140 miles walk until he got to any kind of clearing.

We're not quite sure why, but he definitely left town at one stage.

Now, he might have left town because they changed the name to Kalamazoo, or he might have left town because he stole a cherry tree and was run out of town.

But there is a few different stories, and it's not clear what's what, because if you look at contemporary reports, neither of them is mentioned.

But there is a 1909 headline from the detroit free press that says because of the name of the village he founded was changed to kalamazoo titus bronson died of a broken heart

and so when they changed the name apparently it hurt him so much that he died they have gone by a lot of different names they used to be called the celery city what they grew a lot of celery they grew a lot of celery someone came over and grew celery there actually it was a scot i think or george apparently george celery taylor he was known as but you never you know how you never know if people were actually called that at the time?

Like the bowlers from earlier. Like the bowl.
No, that definitely was the

name. Yeah, but that could have been like the trade that then became the name.
No, but they didn't name themselves out of the house. They were.
I'm saying we don't know. I'm saying we do.
Okay.

Well, there we go.

One of the reasons that Kalamazoo is mentioned in a lot of songs. So you mentioned, who do you mention before?

Glenn Miller. So Kalamazoo in other songs by Frank Zappa, Ben Folds, Johnny Cash, the Black Keys, who I know you like, Andy, there's Kalamazoo mentioned in there.

And I think one of the reasons is because Gibson guitars were made in Kalamazoo.

And loads of famous people, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, Cheryl Crowe, Bob Dylan, all people use Gibson guitars. And really interesting thing about the Gibsons is the Gibson girls.

Now, during World War II, the Gibson Guitar Company was still making guitars.

But the thing was, they didn't have anyone. to make the guitars, right? Because all the men had gone to war.

So what they did was they brought in all the local women to make these guitars, but they denied making them.

And the reason being that they thought that one, if we told people we're making guitars during the war, people would think we're being really frivolous and we shouldn't be doing this kind of thing.

But, secondly, they weren't sure whether people would buy guitars if they knew they were made by women. Right.
And so, they sold them as what they called new old stock.

So, they pretended that these were old guitars that they had in stock and they were selling during the war. We're not making them during the war, but actually, all these women were doing all the work.

And they also sometimes said that they were made by seasoned craftsmen who were too old for war. Yeah, right.
Really?

Wow. I'm not brilliant, obviously.
Sorry.

It's a good mark. You can appreciate the marketing.
Yeah, yeah.

Do the women who are making them leave any kind of clues as to the fact they

decide to drop a tampon into the body of the

used tampons

just rattling around in there. Yeah, yeah.

That was the key to that individual sound, actually.

Just a couple more things on Kalamazoo. A notable person from there, William Shakespeare

Jr.

And what I did there was trick you

to make you think. It was actually a gorilla.
It's actually a gorilla.

He's William Shakespeare Jr. He was an inventor, quite a notable inventor there.

So he was around in the 1800s and he invented what's known as the Shakespeare fishing tackle, which is a really big thing that's still used today. Do you know it?

No, I'm just trying to think of a pun.

Me too, me too.

Yeah, so yeah, fishing tackle, lots of innovations of that sort.

He had patents for camera equipment and stuff like that. Cast, casting now.
Oh, yeah.

You can say whatever you want now for the next five minutes. Yeah, I'm trying to debate as I work on.

Okay, no, I've joined now. Anna, you take over.

Anyway, let's go.

Astonishing, you run through his plays. There are almost no fish puns.
It's bad, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Midsummer night spream. Very good.
Nice. There you go.
There we go.

Can we move on? Is that.

Nope. Okay, we're still doing it.

Got that, Andy. Mackerel Beth.
No. No, that's nice.
That's great. That's good.
That's great.

I'll take it.

Yeah.

As you pike it.

Oh, very nice.

Tell me if you guys all got one. Oh, my gosh.

If you have one at home, then why not send it to

Andrew Monterey?

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that some American gravestones feature recipes.

Yummy, yummy. Of how to cook the human below it? Yes.

This is a thing that happens sometimes in the States.

The original wording of the fact was lots of American gravestones contain recipes, and it it was pointed out that there are about 11 so far.

There was a query over whether that's technically lots or not, which is fair.

But there are people who've made it their hobby to track down all gravestones which feature recipes and bake them up. And

it's especially big on places like TikTok. There are lots of grave people on TikTok, and they're nicknamed tapufiles, which is people who love graves and cemeteries.

Is that what? It's on TikTok. Because I haven't been on TikTok.
I didn't realise it was that. I thought it was like dancing and stuff.
It's not all of TikTok. Yeah, there's a lot of it.
There's a lot.

Again, when I say lots of people on TikTok do it, some people on TikTok do it.

It's more effort than filming a dance. But it's really interesting.
TikTok tapper files is a nice alliteration, isn't it? It's worth becoming one. Yeah.
And

these grave recipes,

some of them date back, you know, decades or further than that. I just thought like TikTok, it's like,

what do you call that thing that reminds you of death? pendulum it's like a

memento morimento mori isn't it so whenever you think about tick tock tick tock is it is it very morbid place tick tock is it one big memento mori it's just thinking about the number of seconds you have left yeah the the number of seconds you spent watching this crap

um yeah wow so

yeah so people are doing it on making up the recipes and then showing them on their TikTok videos, right? Yeah,

people are going around doing that. Any examples?

Well,

a lovely fudge recipe, there is blueberry pie, there's yeast cake.

But it doesn't always work. Sometimes there was one gravestone which had a typo in the recipe on it.
Oh no, I know.

And it would have made very runny fudge if you made it according to that. But thanks for that.
What was the typo that I want to know what flavour is that makes runny fudge? It was too much vanilla.

Oh really?

Yeah, so it said tablespoon as opposed to teaspoon, I believe, wasn't it? That's not going to make it that runny, is it? Just that's not much difference. Like, it's not like a kilogam versus a gram.

Because you don't put much vanilla in a fudge recipe, do you? It's just a tiny amount. Well, that's why.
Because if you

do a tablespoon, apparently it turns out vapor.

Anyway, they corrected the entire gravestone off the back of that, which is

a relief. Why would you, yeah?

Trying to work out why you would do it. Do what? Put a recipe on? Yeah.
Well, people like to be creative on their gravestones, right? It's a really fun thing and passing down

your great recipe, I think. I think that's what it is.

I think it's something that matters to you, something that's traditional, something a recipe you might have inherited from the generation above you.

People like to pass on recipes to the next generation, don't they?

I guess there's very little you can pass on. You could pass on, like...

A series of dance moves. I'm trying to think of something else you might pass on to the next generation.
But you're right, recipes are probably it.

Dance moves on your grave is encouraging people to dance on your grave. You could have a set of those footprint outlines.
Like they have in Japan.

Oh no, I was thinking like, you know, those games that you play in Japan where you can dance.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I was just thinking, I'd like mine to be kind of like that molewhacker game. So you put a coin into the grave and then my head pops out from one of the things.

You gotta slam it with a hammer, then my arm comes out another, and then my leg.

It would be so annoying if you're one of those people who wasn't actually dead and tries to escape from your grave and you'd be constantly melting down. Gosh, no.
Seriously.

But I think it's great. I mean, there are so many gravestones around the world where people, as their sort of like last wish, have said, can you make this happen? And people do.
And they're beautiful.

And I'd read a great one. There was a 99-year-old woman who in Mexico, her dying wish was for her gravestone to be made according to what she loved most in life.

And so

she got it. It was a 600-pound five-foot-tall penis.

Just a giant penis. That's what she loved in life.
A five-foot penis. She loved calling people dicks in life, apparently, and that's what she asked for.
And I've seen the video of them unveiling it.

It looks like it's got a giant condom over the top of it, which is then removed. It's a huge pink penis, like five foot five.
But unfortunately, if you're in Libya, you couldn't see it.

The testicles, apparently, they really had a lot of problem with

because the ball sack apparently kept just disfiguring during the melting process of the actual materials, which was, I believe, plastic. And so they had to like build the testicles quite a few times.

And they're big balls when you see it.

So it's sort of standing up. Right.
Anyway, the last thing I've done is

it at a churchyard or a cemetery? Yeah, it's in a cemetery. But surrounded by other.
I can imagine being slightly annoyed if I had the grave next door.

Absolutely by that time. You can't be annoyed.
No, no, it's true.

I know you're an easily annoyed person, Andy, but. I reckon that after death, you're not going to be under there going...

He will. If I can, I will.

That's what it's going to say on his tombstone.

I'm so with you, though. though.
If I was a relative of someone who'd been buried next to that, I could find that sounds

like that. But this is what happens a lot in the UK, certainly.
So many graves are the traditional, whether it's slate or, you know,

normally it's grey stone and it's carved and it's all down to the individual church or individual local authority.

And so there's this mad, you know, if you want something out of the ordinary, you might get it approved, but you really might not. Or like shapewise, like a big penis.

Shapewise and colour-wise, and there are rules about what you can and can't carve, but there's no one authority in the UK which tells me that. It feels like we shouldn't have that.

And it does feel reasonable to say no penises. Yeah, no, no, maybe.

I agree. Yeah, definitely.
Well, on that gravestones, there's an amazing cemetery in Paris, the Père-lachaise Cemetery, and it's got loads of good graves in it.

But one of them's the grave of Victor Noir, who was a 19th century journalist. And he wasn't that famous in his lifetime.
I think he was shot by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew in 1870

and loads of people suddenly went to his funeral because it became this kind of political cause but for some reason we don't know why his effigy so on his gravestone is a big bronze effigy of him lying down it has a bulge in his crotch.

Oh yeah.

He's quite tight trousers, lovely big penis bulge and what's so rank about it is that it's a bit like you know there's Grey Friars Bobby in Edinburgh the famous dog statue and everyone always rubs its nose for luck so that's really shiny And in the same way, everyone keeps rubbing and mounting and writhing against this crotch, so it's incredibly shiny.

And not only that, it's not just the crotch, but his lips and nose. Well, they kiss his lips.
Yeah, they kiss his lips.

What do they do to his nose?

But what? I mean, that's because that's not just rubbing. They've mounted fully.
Yeah, yeah. So it's a fertility thing.
You go and you do that.

People want to say that, but it's not. It's people going for a joke.
And what it's like, they do it for. This is 20th century.
This is people going to France and going. it's for Instagram isn't it?

There is a sign that says any damage caused by graffiti or indecent rubbing will be prosecuted. Oh

it's all indecent rubbing.

It was decent rubbing. Yeah.

That's actually a

better question. Yeah.
But I always think with these they would be the best place for like a zombie apocalypse to start where there's loads of famous people.

Oh yeah.

Or like Westminster Abbey. That's where you want your zombie apocalypse to start, isn't it? Where all the famous people are buried.
I I think Jim Morrison is in the one you were just talking about.

Great,

perfect. I believe.
That's really good. Because that's a good mix.
Westminster Abbey is all a bit like royals and nobles, isn't it?

If you went to this one, you get rock stars, you get authors, you get weirdos. The doors to hell have opened.
Yes, yes,

more like that.

And the you've redeemed yourself. Fishgate is forgotten.

Speaking, as we were earlier, of people doing inappropriate things in graveyards,

do you guys know about the bustuari?

Bustuari? No. They were sex workers in Rome in the first century AD and they plied their trade in cemeteries.
So naughty. Yeah, so in the daytime they were professional mourners.

Okay, but in the night time they were sex workers and they would write on the gravestones what their prices and stuff like that were.

They used them like phone boxes. A little bit, yeah.
And people would go and you know they had very pale skin and severe expressions and they were kind of quite gothic-looking in and of themselves.

There was one called Noctina, who would sleep on the graves and cover her eyes with coins.

And then they were also prostitutes. That feels like she's encouraging some worrying kinks.
I'm afraid that there was some of that.

If you read Marshall, Juvenile, and Catalus all talk about it, and apparently there was some of this

stuff.

The fact that they're professional mourners in the daytime, you know, that's sort of, and then at night time, basically, the morning garb comes off. Yeah.

Saucy. And then in the morning, the morning garb goes back on.
Oh, yeah.

They had this weird thing in Roman tombs which were called libation tubes. Have you heard of this? No.
This is so cool.

These are terracotta tubes that go down into the grave from ground level and they're deliberately so you can give the dead a drink. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. That's so sad.
You go and turn wine into them. Yeah,

it was just a pipeline right down to the mouth of the dead. Was that different to the sausage one? The sausage pipe.

I don't remember the sausage one. We did talk about that.

That rings such a vague bell. Wasn't there a sausage pipe? John Bonderson wrote about it in Buried Alive.
Yeah, there was a.

I think the idea was if you were buried alive, you had a string that you pulled and it would ring a bell and they would come and get you and say, We're coming to get you out, but here, have a sausage until then.

And they would pop a sausage down the sausage pipe so you had some sustenance while they were. A cooked sausage.
It doesn't say I assume a cooked sausage.

You don't want to give them food poisoning while they're down there. Tragedy died of botulism while we were getting the spade.

A fast-acting lethal sausage.

You know,

Peter, the animal rights organisation,

they did a thing a few years ago. They bought a tombstone in a cemetery for one of their colleagues.
It was called Matt Prescott.

But they bought a tombstone in a very specific place. They bought it right near Colonel Sanders.
Oh, his tombstone. Yeah, yeah.

And

it had a message on it. It was a little poem that they'd written for their colleague Matt.
And it was an acrostic. And the first letter of every line spelt out the phrase KFC tortures birds.

I know. My favourite gravestone is an acrostic.

It's awesome.

It's for a guy called John Renee, R-E-N-I-E, Renee or Renee.

And what it says on it is it says, Here lies John Renee.

But then it says it basically 45,760 times in total because it's an acrostic that goes 19 squares across and 15 squares down.

And everywhere you start reading it, you can make here lies John Renee along this box of it.

Cool. And the total that you can add it up to is, yeah, 40,000.
So it's like the second line, it reads, here lies John Renee.

Like that does a lot of things. And then the next one is slightly different, the next one's slightly different.
So you can read it down diagonally. Exactly.

It's like the world's most boring word search.

But just great, such an it's an amazing thing to look at.

Oh, the um, the guy who uh first formulated pie to 35 places was a German mathematician called Ludolf van Sørlin, Soylen, uh, and his gravestone reads 3.141592653589793.

If it isn't a recipe for pie.

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

My fact this week is that doctors used to prepare their patients for surgery by either getting them really drunk or smacking them on the head with a mallet and hoping they didn't kill them.

That's back in the day. So

this is in the 1800s. This was in the top floor of America's oldest surgical amphitheater, as it's known.
This is in the Pennsylvania hospital.

And I guess what's so surprising is how late in the day this was happening. This is in the sort of mid-1800s.

Because mid-1800s was when we had, we, I take a lot of credit, but we had got like some ether chloroform and stuff was starting to happen.

And a lot of them weren't fully accepted, though. So it definitely was around at this time.
But this hospital was like, nah, not into it. We'd rather hit you on the head.

This happened in Britain as well. There was a guy called Henry Hill Hickman who used to try suffocation to get his operations completed.

Yeah, so this was a thing.

And, you know, the drunkenness hopefully would see them through an operation, as would such a massive hit on the head. Some of these operations were very quick, weren't they?

They were amputations and stuff. They would try and do them in a matter of seconds, really.

In fact, that seems to be the most effective method of painkilling up until, you know, they found ether and stuff was just speed. And there was, we talked about

QI.

You'd love it. Just get people incredibly anxious before the operation.

And it was doing it within a short amount of time. And we've mentioned Robert Liston on QI, but he was a famous 19th-century surgeon, and his catchphrase was, time me, gentlemen, time me.

And there was a huge amount of showmanship to his surgical performances. It was a good catchphrase, that.
It was a good catchphrase. And it would kind of reassure you.

If you're having your leg cut off, you want it to be quick. And he used to brag he could amputate a leg in 25 seconds.
Wow.

And his chances of dying, because he gets a lot of stick these days for being all about the show and less about the safety.

But you only had a one in six chance of dying, which was quite good for surgeons then.

And there was one great, the best story about him, which I'm pretty sure we looked at when we did the QI and is probably not true.

But it was reported that he once was so focused on doing something incredibly fast that he's amputating a limb and he accidentally at the same time cut through his associate nurse's finger on the way.

And so, both the person whose limb was amputated and the person whose finger he amputated died pretty quickly afterwards. And also, someone who was watching died of shock.

And it's always recorded as the only operation with a 300% mortality rate. Wow.

Great story. It's a strong story.
Don't check it ever.

That's a comical ending. Like an airplane going into a mountain.
That's comical surgery. That's comedy, you're right.
That's, yeah.

Just on the sort of reputation of surgery back in the day,

this is a fact actually got sent into us from Sarah on Twitter. So thank you, Sarah.
It was about the operating theatre in Aberdeen. Okay.

And there used to be above the door to the operating theatre in Aberdeen the words, prepare to meet thy God.

Which is

such an uncheerful thing to read. Wow.
And it was all about this surgeon called Alexander Oxton who worked there and he discovered Staphylococcus, which is a very big

common bacteria for getting like infections, infections, obsesses and pus and all of that, really dangerous staphylococcus.

And he was so inspired by antiseptic zeal that he returned and he pulled the sign down and burned it on one occasion. Wow.

Wow. Because it was a very, very religious place to have your operation.
I can imagine. So the one that I was talking about in Pennsylvania, the surgery itself had a skyroof, basically.

So there was a dome at the top and it was glass. So they would do all the operations in the day and natural light was what was giving them their light.

But at night the surgeons will take off their robes and

having a good time.

They would write their prices on the patient's spleen.

They did have anesthetics before then, various types throughout the world. A Chinese physician called Huatuo, I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, apologies if I am, but from 140 AD to 208 AD,

this guy would use something called Mafeisan, which is cannabis boil pounder. So he gave it to the patient.
And apparently, it was so good.

There was a guy called General Kuan Yu, and he was wounded by a poisoned arrow. And he was sort of given some surgery to try and bring the arrow out and clean the wound.

And the general played chess while his bone was being scraped clean

because his concoction was so good.

But did he win the game?

He just kept whacking the pieces up because he was in so much pain. No.
Yeah, we still don't know how they work. Yeah, crazy, eh?

I find it there's so much of medicine we don't know how or why it works. It's just we kept trying and this one stuck.

I mean, it's people speculate that this is general anesthetic, so what puts you to sleep.

Speculated that it dissolves some of the fat in your brain cells, so it stops the cells' activity.

There's just been a study that found out that one particular anesthetic maybe weakens the transmission of signal electrical signals between your neurons in the higher functioning parts of your brain.

So that's why it will knock you unconscious, but it won't stop you breathing because the lower functioning parts can still keep going.

But yeah, it's so weird that we don't just accept it works.

But I like before another anesthetic, I don't know how my microwave works, but someone someone does. Yeah.

Sorry, when I say we, I don't just mean we couldn't be asked to research it. I mean, even the scientists can't be asked to find out properly.

But another ancient way of anesthetizing people was electric rays.

Which

fish, yeah, yeah.

So these were used in ancient Rome. It was like torpedo fish, I think we've talked about before, would give you a real electric shock.

And it was treatment for gout, or it was if you wanted to numb an area and you needed to do something to it.

It was recommended that you stand on the shore and you let your legs be washed by the sea as various electric rays wrapped themselves around it and wait for them to electrify you.

If you were just stood in the sea,

you would need to

bring them to you, right? You wouldn't, they wouldn't just naturally. Yeah, how are you attracting them? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, maybe you drop some food for them. No, wait, are you the food? You are kind of.
You could maybe cut your legs so there's a bit of blood in there, wouldn't you? Yeah, nice.

Then awful if the shark comes before the eels and then this whole thing amputates.

It's not convenient, though. So they quickly, they would shock you, you would go numb, they would carry you out, and then...

And then they can do a treatment on you, like cut off. Like cut off your legs or

all that for a bunion.

Jesus.

You know how in the very first episode of this podcast we talked about.

Anyone remember?

Yeah, I took President Garfield. President Garfield's anus.
So I have a related fact to this.

I think you should quickly explain that for anyone who can't remember 460 episodes ago. So this is the fact that for the last, was it a month of his life? Three months, I believe.
Three months.

President Garfield ate everything through his anus, and that's because he'd been shot and he wasn't able to eat through the mouth, and so he was fed through the bum.

So

the American president usually hands over power when...

Yes, he does. But in Donald Trump's case...

you're so right. Donald Trump is the outlier here.

James, it's exactly right. So, okay.
Normally, when the US president, always a man so far, has a colonoscopy, which is a procedure.

As you're a bit older, they put a camera up your bum and they just check what's going on.

Normally, a small camera on a little wire, not like a big long-lensed paparazzi camera.

And it's a very common thing. So, Joe Biden did it in 2021, handed over to Kamala Harris for the, you know, half an an hour, a couple of hours of the anesthetic.

George Bush had it twice and both times handed over briefly to Dick Cheney.

There was a report a year or so ago that Donald Trump underwent this procedure, but he refused to have the anesthetic because he didn't want to hand over to Mike Pence, however briefly, the reins of office.

So he just sort of

barebacked it. One chance.
Oh my God. I know.
One chance they thought they had to silence Donald Trump for a couple of blissful hours.

That's really interesting. I've got another thing about putting stuff up the bum.
Oh, yeah. If you want to hear it.

So this is about the first woman physician to specialise in anesthesia who's called Isabella Herb.

And she was the first person to use ethylene as a general anesthetic.

And there were two main ways that she'd get you out of the anesthesia state. One of them was to give you strychnine, which would apparently help, presumably not that much.

And the other one was the installation of warm saline solutions to the rectum. Installation.

So, if you were under because of this ethylene, then she would squirt some salty water up your bum and it would get you out of the

sounds kind of pleasant. Although, is that another thing that makes you wet yourself? No, that's that's fingering there.
That's putting your hand in a bowl of water, not

I bet if you've got your bum in it, though.

Something happened.

The interesting thing about ethylene, and a problem that she had, was that it does explode quite easily.

And so, what she did was she had her operating theatre, and they had very, very high humidity because apparently that helps you because there's slightly less oxygen in the air, so less likely to explode.

But also, because it was an early time of having electric lights and stuff like that, they grounded everything in the building.

So, the table where the person was being operated on, and in fact, everyone kind of had things attached to them. Do you remember we talked about this big spike that people had on their heads?

Yeah, everyone had electrical conductors to conduct the charge on the bottom. So

basically, everyone was wearing these wires and they attached to the pipes around the room, the water pipes, so that if there was any kind of spark in there, instead of setting off the ethylene, it would go into these grounded things and then go down into the building.

Isn't that amazing? It's really good.

Imagine, you know, when you fill in the forms before you do an operation where you say, I understand that I might blah blah and blah blah.

Imagine just that, well, I understand there's a 30% chance I'll explode.

Just on doctors sort of beating patients around us, this mallet people did, in the fact.

August Beer was the person who came up with the first spinal anesthesia. That was in the 1890s, 1898.
And so that was injecting cocaine into your spinal cord, was the first spinal anesthesia.

And he wanted to work out how much you really needed to inject, because if you injected too much, had bad side effects. And so he thought, okay, well, I'm going to test out on myself.

And so he asked his assistant, also called August, to inject him.

The fun they must have had.

August, having a very non-August time. And so his assistant injected his spine.
Sadly, his spinal fluid started leaking out quite drastically. And so they had to stop.

So he said, Do you mind if we swap? So the August swapped. And his assistant said, okay, well, you try it on me.

So August, the assistant, lies there, and August Beer jabs him with the cocaine and then tests how high his pain threshold is and the account is just incredible. So he starts by tickling his feet.

Quite pleasant, couldn't feel anything.

And then he jabbed a large blunt needle into his thigh and then he got a larger blunter needle and put it in down his femur, apparently.

He then, and he's awake through this process because it's a local anesthetic. So he's chatting away and having a great time.

He got sharp forceps and crushed his skin up.

He burned a cigar out on him. He yanked all his pubic hair off.

And then just

for fun, he was saying that.

He actually, yeah, he'd asked for a wax, and you might as well two birds, one stone.

He actually yanked his pubic hair off and then did the chest hair for comparison. But just to say, see, it would hurt if, you know, if you weren't anaesthetized,

hit his shin with a hammer, squeezed his testicles very hard. And

so look, how impressive is that? I think he compressed his testicles between two plates, didn't he? And then just kept squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

I remember all about this, yeah.

Well, they'd have a big feast afterwards, so maybe they ate off the testicle plates.

Oh my god, and what? So afterwards, was he just broken?

How did that go for you? Oh, it's absolutely broken.

He was a bit bruised as it wore off. But

they wined and dined and cigar together. He was a cigar.
I will let cigars anywhere near me after that.

Some people wake up in the middle of

a general anesthetic. Yeah.
And it sounds awful.

No, no, no. The good thing is you almost always forget afterwards.

So I spoke to someone who carries out anesthesia quite regularly and says sometimes patients get chatty during procedures and you could just tell them to shut up and be really rude to them because they won't remember after the operation.

One patient had been going on and on about their job, I think, at NatWest and how interesting it was. And they just had to say, Look, shut up, sir.

It's so funny because when I last had general anesthesia, I thought, I'll just have a chat because I've not met an anesthesia expert before. And I just started chatting to him and then went under.

And now I'm realizing that as soon as I went under, he's like, you boring bastard.

And you woke up with no pews, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. But so normally you don't remember it, but sometimes you do remember it and you can't move because the drugs are paralyzed.

I mean it sounds that sounds like the worst thing in the world because you wake up,

you know what's going on and you can't do anything about it. And all you can hear is Yanisa just going, oh, I shagged your mum.
Yeah.

Fenella woke up after she had surgery where she went under janital anesthetic and she woke up and was quite tired and they didn't realize that she was awake. This is post-surgery.

They were moving her away. And all she heard was a conversation about how much the doctors enjoyed no such thing as a fish.

What the worst possible look made. She was like, oh, Christ.
I would put you back under.

Okay, that's 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 Andrew Hunter M. James, at James Harkin.
And Anna. You can email podcasts.qi.com.
Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Check out all the previous episodes from No Such Thingasa Fish. They're all up there.
You can also find your way into Club Fish. There's lots of bonus content up there.
Check it out.

It's really awesome. And otherwise, just come back here to our free podcast that comes out every week.
We'll be back again next week with another one. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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