449: No Such Thing As the Blancmange Olympics

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Coverant Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that one traditional Irish recipe for Blancange involves moss.

Here we go.

So this is

a cool fact about an old Irish pudding.

And it's

like if you have to say it's cool to tell the listener.

It's interesting and it's cool.

And it's actually from Hakkeye magazine, which I know you read.

That's Anna's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'm on your turf already.

But basically, there is this pudding, and it's made from a thing called dried carrageen.

Okay.

Now, it's called moss.

It's called Irish moss.

It's not actually moss.

It's a kind of algae.

And it's brown and crusty stuff when you take it out of the water.

You dry it.

That's delicious.

And then you have to boil it in milk for 20 minutes.

Okay.

But the weird thing is, when you boil it in milk, it vomits out out this huge huge stuff.

Sounds absolutely delicious.

You think you're having your own cookery show?

Well, next Nigella.

It sort of vomits out this jelly stuff.

Yeah.

And you then, you know, add the sugar and vanilla to make it slightly sweet, and you whisk it all up and then you let it chill.

I just love, just going off the Nigella analogy, the way that you really, when you said vomiting up, you said it a few times and you really stressed it.

And then when you got to the nice bit of adding some vanilla and sugar, you're like, oh yeah, we'll just toss over that.

That's fine.

Yeah.

And then you've got your moss blanche.

And apparently,

it's quite crap, isn't it?

What's bad about it?

I just think it's extremely bland, but I think it's good if you add flavour to it.

It doesn't really taste of anything.

Some people say it tastes of the sea.

Yes.

But actually, I think it just tastes really bland.

And they used to give it to sick people, didn't they?

If you were ill and infirm, you might get some of this pudding.

It's in a 19th-century handbook of invalid cooking by Murray Boland.

That's one of the early recipes.

And other recipes in that book, oatmeal mush,

delicious.

Scraped beef.

Scraped beef.

Milk lemonade, which just sounds disgusting to me.

Apart from it, it contains sherry, milk, lemonade.

Okay.

And restorative jelly.

And the restorative part of that is it has port in it.

Oh, okay.

Like alcohol jelly kind of thing.

I wish we were doing HelloFresh ads in this period where these were the recipes that we were advertising.

This algae, this seaweed, how do you pronounce it again, Andy?

I said carrageen.

Carrageen, yeah.

This is one of those stealth things that's in our life in so many different ways that we don't quite recognize.

So if you look at the back of the ingredients list on many of the things in your house, you're going to find this as one of the elements.

So it's in things like toothpaste,

it's in shampoo and cosmetics.

Firefighters use it to get a better foam when they're fighting fires.

It's part of that process.

Yeah, it's used in that.

It's used in personal lubricants.

Check your ingredients at home.

But it's everywhere.

Shoe polish, everywhere.

It's

laxatives, yeah.

Helps those slide out.

It seems to be...

It's good for helping things slide out.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But it is very controversial.

Did you guys read about the rabid controversy surrounding caradine?

Ooh.

Well.

Is this athletes?

Oh, it's not.

Maybe there are two.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Let's compare controversies.

This is just that it could be very bad for you and cause deadly diseases.

It doesn't.

But.

What?

Yeah.

There's one roller coaster.

It was very much a one-dip roller coaster.

This is a rumor that goes around in health circles about carrageenan, which is like the extract from the seaweed.

From concentrated ultra-concentrated.

Exactly.

Yes.

And that is used, as we've said, in lots of thickeners.

It's also in like ice cream, cottage cheese, soy milk, things like that.

And there was an academic called Joanne Tobachman, who I think is still going campaigning against it, who said a few years ago that it caused all sorts of cancers, Parkinson's, heart disease, things like that.

She was actually looking at a different thing.

So it turned out someone looked into the study and she was looking at something that was called like

gamma radiation.

A slightly different kind of seaweed.

But it's spread.

And if you go on any like health website, it's like avoid carrageen.

It will give you cancer.

It'll give you heart attacks.

It'll give you...

So don't believe it.

It's almost carcinogen.

Like the word is very similar, isn't it?

Maybe that's what she studied.

She looked at carcinogens and said, well, these all cause cancer.

Next to each other in the dictionary.

Yeah.

His Latin name is really fun.

It's called Chondus Crispus.

Ah, it's just a nice

Crispus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'd like to hear about the sporting controversy.

And I'd like to have a guess of what it might be because it's like a slippery thing, right?

So maybe they attach it to toboggans when you do bobsled and it makes you fly down the bobsled.

That's correct.

That's absolutely right.

Is that it?

Yeah, there we go.

Oh, here's another version.

They put a load of it in the swimming swimming pool and it thickens up the water.

And it means that you can just run across the water in a swimming race.

That would help everyone though.

You'd have to put it in one lane.

The swimming pool's going to be one lane, someone doing the 50 metres.

Yeah, okay.

Or you could do it in your opponent's lane.

And so it slows them down that way.

That's going to get caught in the swimming pool.

You'd have a lot of carroting to turn water into a solid thing.

Imagine the Olympic swimming pool.

You've got one beautiful clear lane of water and all the others are Blan Mange, basically.

So it's neither of those things.

It's neither of those.

No, the Australian cricket team have been using it for years.

It's bad that I believe that.

What it is, is actually, I don't think it's a controversial.

I jumped the gun a bit.

I think it's also been used by athletes and bodybuilders, although I'm not completely sure in what capacity.

Maybe to make them smoother.

To make them look smoother.

That might be it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I said I jumped the gun on it.

I really.

But there is.

Okay.

there is a thing it's an aphrodisiac which is good news but for rats so okay good news if you fancy rats fancy rats it really I mean it really and I think it's a fertility aid actually it ramps up your testicles is the phrase I've ramped up

you don't want to put ramps up your testicles

hard not to imagine tiny little putians now climbing up wheelchair friendly testicles

fun

what does it do sorry to your testicles it ramps them up what does that mean like the outer coating or like the inner,

it makes it gives the sperm a lot more motility.

I think it makes the balls bigger, maybe, as well.

Kerrigan is responsible for My Fair Lady,

the musical.

Really?

Well, we'll see.

Wow.

So

it was used in medical stuff.

It's terrible headlines.

Even like those websites, they're like, did you know that?

And it's just not there.

The controversy.

I'll seaweed.

Well, it's used medicinally, Irish moss.

It's good for like your throat.

It's supposed to be good for your throat.

In fact, there's some evidence that it might stunt the replication of COVID as well, although that's not certain yet.

But anyway, the person who introduced it into medical use was a guy called Mr.

Todd Hunter.

And Mr.

Toddhunter is more famous as a playwright.

Okay, and he did a play called The Land of Hearts Desire

in Dublin.

And it was so bad, so, so bad, that everyone just booed him off.

They kept booing him.

Every time he put it on, they booed him off, they booed him off.

Was taken off the rotor of the playhouse and it was replaced by Arms of the Man, which was the first success of George Bernard Shaw, who went on to write Pygmalion, which My Fair Lady was based on.

Yes.

I was going to guess that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's flawless.

I think that does.

Actually, I think that does check out.

That's great.

I've got in my notes here.

I don't know who wrote these.

That Irish Moss saved America

because

there was a lot of it grown in the USA.

And there, in fact,

there's a town

near Boston.

It's called Skituate.

Skituate, very near Boston, brilliant.

Which is

supposedly, it calls itself the most Irish town in the whole of the USA.

About 50% of the population there are.

are Irish.

And from the 1840s onwards, it was a big site for Irish moss farming.

As in,

they farmed it.

Yeah, you get it.

It kind of comes onto

the shore in North America and in Europe, doesn't it?

Exactly, yeah, yeah.

And he saw some in the water and he thought, wait, I know that, I recognise that from when I was in Ireland.

And so he set up the industry, basically, this guy who's called Daniel Ward.

Anyway, so it became big, big, big industry for this town.

During the Second World War, suddenly

there was a thing called agar, as in agar jelly, you know,

that was no longer available because that was grown in the Far East.

And you need agar to grow bacteria and stuff?

Well, it's a thickening agent, it's in all sorts of foods, and basically it was no longer available because it was largely grown in Japan and places like that, which were obviously no longer trading with the USA.

Irish moss, Kerra-Enen, basically rocketed in production.

In Canada, they made £261,000 in 1941.

The next year, they made over £2 million of this stuff for use in foods.

Yeah, it was a huge deal.

And why did it save America?

Well, otherwise they would have starved to death because they would have had it, they wouldn't have had pleasant sauces during the war.

Oh, wow, yeah.

Exactly on morale.

Yeah, yeah.

Is it called The Man in the High Castle, where they imagined that the Germans had won the Second World War?

Yeah, I think we should make a prequel of it where we actually look at the reason they lost the war.

And it was because of this lack of agar.

Probably.

That's right.

Probably.

That's right.

So, are you buying that?

Nope.

You know how we were saying that carrageen wasn't health food.

Always has been.

Many thousands of years have been around.

And I came across an article in the New York Times in, I think it was like 1904 or something.

And it was, I just found it really amusing how little the police obviously had to do at this time.

So it was a story about how a Romanian gypsy woman had been arrested in Jamaica for charging over $7,000, which was a lot then for basically Irish moss.

It's a lot now for Irish moss.

It's kids don't pay for it.

But how much Irish moss are we talking about?

It was a very small tincture dropped in a glass of water.

What?

$7?

Yeah, it's too much, isn't it?

Who's the buyer?

Well, it was this lady who had a hunchback that she wanted cured.

So she employed a healer, this woman who said she was Romanian.

Anyway, the healer said she boiled some water, she covered it with cloth, and she said, look at that water, don't touch it, don't move, don't tell anyone for 24 hours what I've done, and then you'll be cured.

And the woman, idiot, ruined the cure by telling her mates.

She was like, look, I've employed this doctor, but I'm a bit suspicious about the cure because she's just told me to like not touch this glass for the moment.

For 24 hours while she goes to the coast and gets the nearest ship with her new $7,000.

Well, no, because she'd only charge like $100 at that point.

So the woman reported it to the police.

Two detectives came to her house, hid behind the curtains, and the Romanian lady came back to say, you know, okay, that was the first step.

Now the next step comes.

And the detective saw her slip some Irish moss into the water and then say, okay, now I'm going to charge you $7,000.

And then as she was going to hand over the money and the details, two detectives jumped out of my mouth.

Do you get police doing that much these days?

Sort of, we'll come into your house, hide behind your curtains.

We don't.

I think think it's a disgrace.

Yeah, I'm worrying for my taxes.

I want policemen hiding behind my curtains every day of the week.

Did she have an exact time she was coming back?

How long were the police hiding behind the curtains?

She said Wednesday,

passing another cup of tea behind the curtains.

Sure.

She had to knock so they could just hang out in the kitchen, I suppose.

Like a surprise party.

Everyone, everyone going for good.

Exactly, exactly.

Pass align, it's an Amazon delivery.

Did you guys hear about Mim Flynn?

Mim Flynn.

The Irish mossing queen?

No.

No.

She wasn't a beauty queen or anything.

She was the queen of the Irish moss industry because

she was a great mosser.

And she started at the age of nine.

Is a mosser someone who eats it or

harvested it?

I think she was in Skituate.

Skituate.

I thought you said she was Irish.

No, Irish moss.

Oh, I see.

She was she?

America.

Okay.

She was the American

Irish mossing.

Did we not pay attention?

Remember his hilarious pan earlier?

It's just outside Boston.

I blanked them out too, but Skituated, just outside Boston.

Did you not hear that?

I must not have been here at the time.

I don't think I was there.

I didn't think there was any evidence of audio.

Imagine if I added out your original thing.

So, but yeah, give us more about her.

How's she doing?

I think she's passed away now.

Right.

But Skituate these days, it does have a mossing museum.

Cool.

Yeah.

That's it.

Yeah.

There's no longer much of of an industry.

It's moved overseas.

Well, if you're in Skituate and you're wondering what to do.

Yeah.

Also, I've probably said Skituate wrong the other way through.

That's why.

So look on the map.

Don't ask a local.

Yeah, yeah.

Get a pair of compasses, put the middle point in Boston, and

the other arm to 30 miles, and it'll be on that line.

Just follow that circumference.

Which way?

Well, it'll be coastal.

I only know it's 30 miles outside Boston.

Okay, cool.

Just go 30 miles south of Boston along the coast, and if it's not there, go 60 miles north.

So, just on blancmange, we should talk about the fact that it was only quite recently that it stopped containing meat.

Yeah,

really?

Yeah, weird.

So, blancange has been around since, I think the earliest recipe maybe comes from Baghdad in the 10th century, a long time.

And it was only in the 18th century they thought, let's stop putting chicken in this.

Yeah.

It just sounds so rough.

They just use chicken as basically

in the same way that they use this seaweed, as kind of to make it more gelatinous, to make it stringy.

It had a pleasant stringiness, I think.

Lovely.

And you shredded and really pounded up the chicken, so it lost all of its flavour, I believe, and mixed it up with some almond milk and some sugar and some rice and yum.

And they still eat it in turkey.

Almost the same thing, it seems like.

Actually, with the chicken in it still.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's called tavuk gogsu.

And it literally means, and I really want English people to have gone and ordered it, having done the Google translate, because it literally means chicken breast.

But you order it, and what you get is a blancmange.

You look at everything on the menu, like, oh, I can't, I don't want that.

I don't.

Oh, chicken breast.

That's safe.

What kind of weird-ass chickens do they have in Turkey?

Have you guys heard of Bompass and Pa?

No.

They're a jelly innovation firm, and they basically do absolutely mad things with jelly all the time.

They're constantly coming up with incredible innovations and, you know, weird flavours.

And anyway, I just looked through a list of all the things they've done over the years.

One year for Valentine's Day, they created a jelly which was called Throbber.

Oh, wow.

T-H-R-O-B-R.

Which sounds like an app, doesn't it?

It does sound like an app.

It's amazing what this jelly does.

It locks onto your heart rate.

Right.

And

it pulses in time with your heart rate as you're eating it.

Wow.

I don't know.

So if you get very excited as you're eating the jelly, the jelly itself will start reflecting that a little bit more.

It does feel like that, because it's called Throbber, that perhaps if you you got an erection,

the stiffer your erection, the stiffer the jelly would get.

I need a steak knife for this one.

Oh no.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that when communism fell in Czechoslovakia, the U.S.

ambassador in the country was Shirley Temple.

Really weird.

I think this is amazing.

Some people might know this already.

I've spoken to one or two people who have, but to me, Shirley Temple is a child movie star who basically retired when she was 10 years old.

Exactly.

But actually, when she got a bit older, when she was 44, she became a diplomat and she did loads of stuff for the US.

She was the first woman to serve as US ambassador to Ghana, but she was also the ambassador in Czechoslovakia in 1989 when the Velvet Revolution happened and the communist regime fell in what is now Czechia and Slovakia.

Amazing.

It is amazing.

Weirdly, she was sort of there towards the start as well, wasn't she?

She thinks one maybe one of the things that helped her get that gig was the fact that in the 60s she'd been in Czechoslovakia and I think she was working for a multiple sclerosis foundation which is where she got her taste for like international diplomacy and stuff.

So her brother had MS and so she founded this organization.

She was doing some international work in Czechoslovakia and she happened to be there at the time that the Russians basically invaded to crush the uprising, to crush the Prague Spring.

And yeah, she remembers watching from her balcony as a woman got gunned down.

And that made her think, yeah, I'll take a career in diplomacy.

The other thing was that she married her second husband in, I think, in her 30s, and he was an aquaculture engineer and oceanographer.

So that also got her to go into the environmental side of the floor.

So that was part of it.

She's really, I mean, so she did have political ambitions outside of being an ambassador.

She was a Republican candidate.

She wanted to run for the House of Representatives in 1967, and she lost out to a guy called Congressman Pete McCloskey.

But she obviously had close relationships with the leading Republicans at the time because it was under Gerald Ford that she was the ambassador to Ghana.

She was under Ronald Reagan when she did another of her posts.

And then the Czechoslovakia one was George H.W.

Bush, Bush Sr.

She must have been really good mates with with them.

And you can see that this child star, because Shirley Temple really is, even to my generation, I used to watch her movies in black and white as a kid.

Like, I know.

When were you born?

Danny, you're 100 years old.

Right, okay.

No, no, but no, like, she's still a name that most of us know.

I mean, largely, it might be because of the drink, the non-alcoholic mocktail that you can get.

But before this, I thought Shirley Temple, old, child, sort of like, curly hair, child actor, like hugely famous child star, and also non-alcoholic drink.

I only thought Good Ship Lollipop, which was that song that she sang.

But it's basically all I know.

But in a lot of her early films, she preaches fiscal responsibility and the importance of a low-tax, small state.

So it's kind of unsurprising that her...

That's true.

We should have seen it, actually.

She was an independent Republican candidate, I think, for the 1967 election to be part of the U.S.

House of Representatives.

What does that mean, Indian?

I believe that it means she was Republican, but she wasn't officially on the ticket, I think.

I'm not sure about that.

But she said during the election, I think men are fine and here to stay, but I have a hunch that it wouldn't hurt to have a woman's viewpoint expressed in that delegation of 38 men.

Too much too soon, Shelley.

She started, okay, so she's a child actor, as we know, and sort of like age six, she was already winning like special Oscars that were being given to her.

Like she was a big deal.

I did not know this.

There's something quite seedy about her intro into the world of acting.

Nothing against her.

It's her parents who obviously signed her up.

She was three at the time, you know.

And it was part of this thing called Baby Burlesques.

Yes,

it's incredibly weird.

Yeah, did you watch it?

Because I didn't.

I did not watch it.

I like staying.

But the bad news is we've all had our laptops taken away.

Is it online?

I assume it's online.

It must be somewhere, right?

It must be historical.

Because it's quite obscure.

It's like early 30s.

I think it's hard.

I couldn't find an online version.

There's one film which I reckon you can get on YouTube if you tried.

Oh, it's on the dark web.

So what, yeah, sorry, Dan, you should say what it was.

Yeah, okay.

So it's described by the New York Times as a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts in which children played all the roles.

Yeah, so what it was is basically they were parodies of films of grown-ups.

Yeah.

So at the time, all the grown-up stars were people like Marlena Dietrich and May West, and they were obviously, you know, very sexy women with very flirtatious dialogue.

And these baby burlesques, they kind of did parody versions of these films films where there are children playing the roles and sort of Bugsyam Alone, I guess, right?

It's like a close.

Yeah, but not with like saucy dialogue.

I'm a three-year-old.

So weird.

In defense of the olden days,

I think it was probably okay.

It was a comedy, and they wore,

so they'd wear sexy outfits on the top half, and then they'd have their nappies on on the bottom half, like they're doing kind of a Zoom meeting from home.

I don't think it would get made today.

No.

And there's stories that Shirley Temple Temple would tell about it later in her autobiography where she'd say that if they got in trouble, the kids that were part of this production would be sent off to a sound booth where they'd have to sit on a block of ice.

Apparently, every night, Shirley Temple's mother would curl her hair into 56 perfect curls.

So she would have to sit there and do her hair every single night.

And then she would be read a bedtime story, but the bedtime story was the next day's script that she had to learn.

And so the mother would read the lines from the script and she'd have have to parrot them back and she'd keep doing that until she fell asleep so Shirley Temple's mum Gertrude she does sound like a

proper classic good old-fashioned Hollywood insane pushy mum as in yeah she

she ensured that other child actors who might threaten her daughter's roles had their had their parts cut which parts

body parts fingers yeah yeah

and so she she was very protective very very forceful in getting getting shirley you know to fame also one thing she stole from shirley temple herself was a year of her life.

She knocked a year off Shirley Temple's age.

So Shirley was at that time.

But that's actually giving someone an extra year.

Oh, my God.

She's the perfect mum.

I mean, if my mum could suddenly turn around and say that I'm 35, that'd be great.

Well, no, but she wouldn't be.

She'd be telling you you're a year.

As in, so Shirley Temple.

She was a year older than her.

She was at her 12th birthday party, and her mum said, oh, by the way, you're 13.

Ah, well, but when she was nine, they said that she was eight.

But that's why.

So her, that's because it's all part of the same story.

story.

So basically, when she was three or four, her mum thought, oh no, she's getting a bit too old for this whole baby game.

Like, she's about to be, no, I think she was about to turn five and a half or something.

So her mum was like, right, we're going to make her four and a half again.

And then Shirley, from the age of four and a half, thought that she was four and a half, five and a half, six and a half.

And then it was when she was 12 that her mum went, actually, surprise, welcome to teenagerhood.

It's just like turning the clock back in the autumn and turning it forward again in the spring.

Exactly.

So your mum could do this for you, James, but you'd be on borrowed time.

I'm happy borrowing time.

At this stage of my life, I'm up for borrowing any time I can borrow.

And on the ninth, on her eighth birthday, so she was actually nine, but she was, I thought she was eight, she got 135,000 gifts.

Yeah, gosh.

That's amazing, isn't it?

That's pretty amazing.

And it was sent to her by fans around the world, right?

No, it wasn't just her parents.

Yeah, her mum was.

She got a kangaroo from Australia.

That's a burden, kind of thing.

Is it?

Well, you can keep other presents in the pouch.

Good point.

It's a suitcase.

Yeah, it sounds very her life just sounds insane.

She was the biggest box office star of the year in 1936, 37 and 38, which I think were the years where she was eight, nine and ten.

I mean, she was she's the biggest child star that's ever been.

There's been no contest ever since, really.

Carlie Culkin is the only other one I can think of.

I think, in terms of like the amount she earned at the time, the fact that she was the only person anyone wanted in any films, in between the ages of three and ten, she was in 29 films.

In 1935, her salary was $2,500 a week.

This is when she was seven, six or seven.

That was a lot of money in those days.

It wasn't just like a third of a tincture of Irish moss.

God, her house was stuffed with Irish moss then.

Wow.

She was also responsible for quite a random bit of cultural input, possibly, and that is the novel The Power and the Glory.

Okay.

By Graham Greene.

And this is because she had sort of a feud with Graham Greene at the age of sort of nine, eight or nine.

It's so funny that I'm in the celebrity box.

I want to see.

Do you remember in the

90s or the early 2000s they used to have celebrity boxing and like Ricky Gervais fought with, I don't know, some random person.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't remember.

Like Patrick Kilty or something like that.

I just want to see Graham Greene and Shirley Temple blocking Shirley Temple.

That is a pay-per-view I would pay for.

I think I'd back Shirley.

She was pretty tough under those ringlets.

He was quite mean mean about her.

He wrote a review of her films saying, sort of suggesting that she was trained to deliberately be a bit coquettish,

saying she symbolized dimpled depravity, she had a well-developed rump, and suggesting that her films were targeting sleazy middle-aged men.

And it's a lot unclear how humorous he was being.

Having read it, I don't think he was being that humorous.

I think it was just a pretty nasty review.

And then her mum and Fox decided to sue him for slander for saying that, for suggesting that.

And he according to a friend who wrote a biography of him years later

he realized that he was about to be sued and so he might go to prison so he fled from England where he was to Mexico which didn't have any extradition rules and in Mexico that was where he was inspired to write maybe his greatest magnum opus Para and the Glories set in Mexico

about oppression of Catholics wow as an adult she broke the ice whatever she she sent him she was been sissing on all that time she sent him a copy of her autobiography and she invited him to tea.

So clearly, there weren't very many hard feelings on her part.

Yeah, well, she was a diplomat, wasn't she?

Oh, yeah.

There you go.

Well, she had got £3,500 from Graham Green in the settlement.

I wonder how much she saw of that, though.

I haven't got this written down, but I do, in the course of reading, remember that a lot of the money was taken by the parents and wasn't seen by Shirley.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I've got the figures.

Yeah, what are they?

Right, she earned $3,200,000 in her acting career.

Quite a lot of money at the time.

By the time she was 22 years old, there was $44,000 left.

And was that because it was depleted by her parents?

It was her dad, right?

So her dad was a banker, and so he was in charge of all of her money.

Obviously, her parents, they would be.

But she never blamed him.

She reckons that he got duped.

So basically, he made a load of bad investments because people could see he was making a load of money.

And he didn't really, you know, he wasn't the greatest.

He left school when he was in seventh grade.

He wasn't the greatest banker of all time.

He was a monopoly banker, basically.

I'll be the banker.

Yeah, great.

They should have looked underneath the bars.

That's where the money would have been.

But yeah, she said that she didn't blame him one little bit, and it was the people that counseled him who were the baddies.

Just quite a nice link between her past and her future.

If you're placing yourself in 1940, it goes back to this fact, James' fact at the start of the show.

So when communism fell.

So basically, she never liked references to her history as a child star.

You know, she would say, it's not fair.

Everyone was a child.

How come I'm the only one who, as a very high-achieving diplomat and politician, you know, gets labeled as former child star?

Not everyone.

Like, Platt Cloud Havel wasn't there in the movies.

We don't know.

There might have been some obscure Czech films undiscovered with him spouting philosophy age nine.

But she did give them a treat just once.

So it was when communism did fall in Czechoslovakia, a big day, very exciting.

She called all of her senior staff together, shut the doors, very private room, and apparently looked them very sternly in the eye and said, I'm only going to do this once.

And then she started prancing around the room and singing on the good chip lock.

That's amazing.

That's awesome.

I've just got one thing on child stars and how to become a child star.

A bit late for us?

A bit late for us, but you know, I've got a kid on the way, so I could actually get going on this,

which is there's a company called Jam 2000, and they're the agency that basically, when you see a baby in the UK on TV and like call the midwife, you know, even the crown of Sherlock, if there's a baby in it, it's a good chance that Jam 2000 gave them.

So when the baby is born, the baby can get an acting license within a few hours of being born.

In America, it takes about 15 days.

You've got to be 15 days old to get a worker's permit.

How do you do you need to audition?

Like when you're coming out of the birth canal, you're going, Merry, come loud.

Exactly.

So that's the issue.

They say that often people complain, like, this baby's crying all the time.

And they say, well, you just happen to have been given a crying baby.

Unfortunately, that's the case.

But they do have specifications that they like.

So triplets or twins are particularly liked because twins most likely are going to be born three weeks early.

Triplets, in some cases, seven weeks early, right?

Is that good?

Because they'll be extra small because they can get older and they can look newborn.

Ideally, I actually thought it would be that they would only have to work for 20 minutes at a time because you can't be swapping them in the middle.

That's the other reason.

So when they're looking for tiny babies, twins are fantastic.

They're tiny, but you can do double time because you've got two babies see.

Paints look almost identical anyway.

So you would think so, right?

But sometimes it's to do with hair, and sometimes to do.

But yeah, so the youngest at this company said that they've ever handed over as a four-day-year-old baby in order to be used.

Amazing.

And so it's a great article, it just tells you about different types babies have been used.

And just a little nugget for any Star Wars fans out there: in Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, we get to see Luke and Leia, who are twins that are born.

Wait, that was episode three.

Three.

Yeah.

So you get to see them as babies, and that's where you learn that they're brother and sister in the series.

And the babies that were used for that

were actually one, which was a guy called Aiden Barton.

He plays both Luke and Matt.

He's like Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Yeah, he's Eddie Murphy and then meets.

What a reference for you to make, James.

From someone who hasn't seen any films made before about 1987.

For you to make a Kind Hearts and Coronets reference.

What have you done with James?

That's just someone who does a lot of quizzes.

Sorry, yeah, I've not seen Star Wars.

What are you talking about?

Twin points.

Also, can I quick.

Sorry, no, no, I know what you're going to say, and don't say it, because we're going to...

You're going to find out in the series that Luke and Leia are siblings.

Yeah.

If you start at episode one, like a psychopath.

James, where would you start?

One.

There we go.

When's the first one?

Come on, you've asked James, the only person who doesn't know when to start watching Star Wars, and I think that's an unfair sample.

It's the first episode, there's a second episode, and you find out.

Presumably, they wouldn't have called them episode one, two, and three if they didn't want you to have watched them first, would they?

that's true.

No, no, no.

That's absolutely correct.

Yep.

Jabber the Hut was actually played by a six-week old baby.

There he is in there.

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

My fact this week is that there used to be a cinema in Melbourne, Australia, that had a cloakroom to keep your babies in.

What?

So this was called the Sun Theatre, and this was a place where when you were arriving at the cinema, you would have a cloakroom, but rather than leaving your coat in there, you would push your baby in its pram into the cloakroom, be given a ticket, and then go watch the movie.

Now, obviously, you don't want to completely abandon your baby.

So while you're watching the movie, if your baby in the cloakroom kicks off and starts crying inconsolably, the ticket number that you hold will flash up on the screen of the movie to let you know that you're desperately needed in the cloakroom so you can get out and look after your baby.

It's very clever.

Brilliant.

Hang on.

Would it flash up for all the other members of the audience?

Is it going to replace the image that was on the screen or is it a little thing in the corner that's settled?

Just a quick, I think, just a quick superimpose the number 29, whatever.

Really, I think it would be mid-film.

I think that would be alright.

It would be mid-film.

I don't know if it would be directly over the whole thing.

It might be in the corner.

I couldn't actually find that out.

It's a must-by corner.

That would be so annoying because babies cry constantly.

And if you've got 50 babies at a big blockbuster film in the cloakroom, you're just going to be watching a series of numbers flashing up to the National Otter.

Exactly.

So this.

It's ingenious.

It was a very clever idea in this.

Why do we not have it today?

Exactly.

Why don't we?

It seems like

people don't think they should just leave their babies.

Yeah, I don't think I'd leave my baby now that I say that out loud.

Well, your baby's probably in the movie.

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, you do have baby cinema now, which we take my son to go to.

I go to that.

Yeah.

You really shouldn't take your travel around.

I know.

The first movie that we took Wilf to see, Fenella, my wife took Wilf to see, was the movie that was on the biopic of Churchill that came out about four years ago.

All the babies look like Churchill.

Like Wilf was really into it because he was like, wow, it's me in a suit when I'm older.

This is amazing.

So this the Sun Theater had opened up in Melbourne in 1938 and it was a single screen theater.

It had 1,050 seats and it was really massive.

It was a big deal.

And then over time, people stopped going as much and they had to sell and new owners turned it into smaller screens.

So they stopped doing it.

It's no longer a pram, you don't bring your pram in there anymore, which is a shame.

And I can't find any other cinema that did this.

No, I think it was just this one.

Yeah.

There are people who've left their children in cloakrooms before.

I won't go so far as to say this is a thing because it's not.

But in 1999, Tony Blair's chief of staff was a guy called Jonathan Powell.

Oh, I remember Powell?

Oh, those were the good old days, weren't they?

Friend of Anna's.

Anyway, he went to the Grouch Show Club and left his eight-week-old daughter with a cloakroom attendant.

And that was

a brief comment about about it, and then the family complained, saying the child has a right to a private life.

And I think the newspaper said, Well, don't leave the child in the cloakroom there.

Anyway, but the observer sent a reporter called Saskia Sessons, who took a colleague of hers, five-month-old baby, to various cloakrooms all over London.

It's a great feature.

So, King's Cross left luggage office?

Absolutely not.

The Ivy Restaurant?

Yes, please leave the baby with us.

We'll stash him on a ledge.

National Gallery were incredibly rude to Saskia and her young friend.

One of the cloakroom attendants said, out of the question, the second said, you need your head examined, and the third said, that's very, very irresponsible.

Wow, I know.

So, wait a minute, that was all in the same

cloakroom.

I want a second opinion.

I want a third opinion.

But restaurants seem to be much more willing.

The Oxo Tower Brassery, which is a restaurant in London, said, Yes, of course, please leave the baby with us.

I guess restaurants are smaller, so you know, you can go to the parent if there's an issue.

Whereas the National Gallery, you feel like you could lose the parent forever.

That's true.

One famous person left in a cloakroom is a character from importance of being earnest

left in a handbag in the station okay um so i thought i'd look into that play by oscar wilde um yeah so oscar wilde famously

can you tell i can't find anything else about cloakrooms so he was famously um brought up with charges of immorality wasn't he because he was homosexual and in 1952 there was a movie the first movie made of the importance of being earnest and it it was directed by a guy called Anthony Asquith.

And Anthony Asquith was the son of Herbert Henry Asquith, who was home secretary.

And he was the one who brought the charges of immorality against Oscar Wilde, which got him imprisoned in Reading Jail.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

And so he was the one who got him in prison, and then his son was the director of the movie.

That's really good.

What a great full circle.

I found some famous people who worked in Cloak Rooms.

Oh yeah, cool.

Mark Almond.

Dude, from Soft Cell

of Tainted Love fame.

Can I just ask, is that the most famous?

And you're going to Less and Less?

Because I haven't heard of him.

I'm going to switch off the rest.

Don't worry.

I actually started with my weakest one.

Okay, all right.

Where did he work in the cloakroom?

Sorry, did you say?

Oh, mate.

Probably at the front bit where you take your stuff.

So he was high up in the role.

I didn't write it down.

I'm sorry.

Scylla Black.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Cloakroom attendant at the Cavern Club.

Who else is on your list?

Boy George.

Boy George.

Nice.

At the Culture Club, wasn't it?

He's the band that Boy George was in.

Thank you.

Did you get it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Boy George is a singer in the band.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't want to ruin every joke by asking, so if someone's on to stay quiet,

Karma Chameleon was their big hit.

That didn't help the choke.

No, I'm just helping Anna understand who this is.

Good to be an idea.

He was interviewed about it later and he said, I was always riffling through pockets and handbags.

Most people were too pissed to notice.

Oh.

Any babies in the handbags?

He didn't find any.

Riffling, eh?

In my notes, I've got riffing, but that can't possibly be true.

No, I just would always say it rifling.

That's better.

That is correct.

Yep.

Sorry.

On cloakrooms.

Oh, yeah.

I read, so I think we've talked before about how popcorn wasn't really allowed in cinemas until the third.

It was sort of post-depression, I think, when everyone was so depressed.

They were like, let us have the popcorn.

And also,

yeah,

they thought people would tread it into the nice carpets.

Well, before that, exactly.

They thought we would tread it into the carpets.

It was too noisy.

And so you used to have to leave your popcorn in the cloakroom.

Because people set up popcorn stands all outside cinemas.

That's they sell it to you.

Leave it in the cloakroom.

You just hand it in like a gun or something, and then you get it back afterwards.

Yeah.

You take a gun to the cinema?

No, sorry.

I'm thinking of the thing in Old West.

Every time someone looks at their phone in the middle of a movie.

You got in a lot of trouble in your tour of sort of National Gallery cloakrooms, didn't you?

Keep my AK-47.

Wasn't there a thing where you had to hand in your gun when you went to a Wild West bar?

Towns, like most of the Wild West towns wouldn't allow guns inside, so they would have a way to sort of stop.

That's what I think that was.

Often you had them taken at the periphery of the...

Yeah, we've talked about that.

In fact, I think we said that in the OK Corral, the problem was the reason it happened is because they hadn't put their guns in the cloakroom before they arrived.

Exactly.

That's what I'm thinking of.

That's my incredibly convoluted pass to that.

Actually, speaking of weapons and cloakrooms, tell me something famous about the Houses of Parliament.

Oh, yeah, the swords in the cloakroom.

You've got a place for your swords in there.

There are hooks in the cloakroom so you can hang up your sword.

Yep, absolutely.

If you go into the houses of parliament cloakrooms, all the coat hangers have a loop of pink ribbon around them, and that is for holding your sword.

So you're not allowed a sword in the chamber.

And I read a good expose

of the fact that this, there's no evidence this is true.

So various reasons.

So

in the massive fire in the 1830s, when everything was destroyed, that was way after anyone would ever bring swords in and so it's weird that they would have the sword hooks um but even if they were for swords the first mention that they were was 1928 and it was like an mp saying hey they've got ribbons there and that's from the olden days because of the sword thing and actually all the mentions before that say they were for a much more sensible item umbrellas umbrellas

there you go i've got a bit of Australian cinema news just while we were talking about Aussie cinemas.

Australia's longest running pornographic cinema is finally going to shut down.

And according to the article, it's called the Crazy Horse Cinema.

And according to the article, dozens of 90-year-old pensioners are going to be absolutely distraught because it's their meeting place.

There's a big group of...

What?

What did she say?

What?

What's she doing?

She's going to get a cold.

He's not a real plumber.

Sorry, what?

Yeah, this is, you know, this place has been open for many years.

And supposedly it's a really good meeting ground for a lot of these 90-year-old pensioners.

So they all meet up there at 10 a.m.

That's it.

Very early to start.

Very early.

This comes from a quote from the lady.

They come and they do their thing in the morning.

Disgusting.

They come and then they have the meeting.

Yeah, they could come and do their thing in the morning, whatever that is they do.

And then they go and maybe do some shopping for the wife and maybe have some lunch and then come back if they like.

What they get is.

It's all male pensioners.

It's male pensioners and they get a $10 pensioner all-day ticket to the porno cinema.

So, sorry, when they're having this meeting, is it in the cinema world?

It's not really a meeting, is it?

It's sort of like a gathering.

I even think as a teenager, I would be able to get my money's worth from an old day ticket on a pornographic cinema.

I was a pensioner.

I thought I agreed that

it's so funny.

Yeah, so these guys, these 90-year-olds, have been going for 20 years.

So, you know, they were

fruity, fresh 70-year-olds at the time.

And, yeah, and then obviously...

These lads are going to be thrilled when they find out about the internet.

Yeah, that's...

You know, so they're distraught at the moment.

And it's closing this year.

This is from this year, this article.

Good.

The crazy lockers.

Knock it down.

So the ground with salt.

I don't know.

It keeps them out for the full day, which, judging by the sounds of these men, sounds like some of the wise.

It's popcorn allowed.

It's better the carpet's got bigger concerns, actually.

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

My fact this week is that the original vapes were Pez Dispensers.

So, you know,

for people in the UK who maybe don't, Pez dispensers are like those sweet holders.

They're a huge deal in America, right?

They're kind of tubes that hold sweets and they have a funny head on top.

Well, yeah, so you've got a little funny head and you tip the head back and it's like an elevator system where the latest sweet that's sitting on top arrives at the top.

Bing!

And you get to pull it out and it's a little rectangular sweetie.

Like a brick, but much smaller.

Exactly, like a tiny brick.

Yeah, if you're building a house.

It's building a house right now.

Imagine if you were building a house, but you have an elevator, and every time you needed to put a brick on, the brick had to come up in an elevator.

Yeah.

And then it would come out on there.

Well, this is a classically helpful.

No such thing as a fish explainer.

The lucky thing is, everyone knows what a Fez.

That was a waste of your time and ours.

Yeah, it's, yeah.

It's a little.

And you do, you look.

Are you going to?

So you're going to try as well.

I think of them as kind of confectionery staplers because you have to load in a cartridge with sweets, don't you?

And you like some staples.

That's actually the best simile that we've had so far.

That was actually really good, yeah.

We'll allow it.

Anyway, Pez Sweets were created in 1927 in Vienna.

And people smoked them.

And people loaded them into their cigarettes.

No, but they were created by a guy called Edward Haas III, and he was an anti-smoking campaigner, thought it was bad for your health.

Well done, very forward-thinking of him.

And he wanted to create a tablet that helped people to cut down on smoking or overeating.

And so they were these mint tablets, and that was what they were explicitly for.

Early adverts said no smoking, pezzing allowed.

Like vaping.

And then when the dispensers came about in the 50s, they are sort of, well, the first ones were shaped so like really like cigarette lighters.

And

they were for adults, marketed very much for adults.

Very, and they used to send women in sort of like quite cleavage-heavy dresses around in vans.

Low cuts, we call them.

Cleavage-heavy, not a word.

Okay, wearing a very cleavage-heavy sock tonight.

Your saucy fashion show, the descriptions are not good.

We said they do look a bit like lighters, but according to Sean Peterson, who is the historian at Pez Candy Incorporated, they were only designed that way to fit into pockets.

And it's just a coincidence that they look like lighters, because lighters are also designed to go into pockets.

Yeah.

I did hear that Pez Candy Incorporated does have an official historian.

Sean Peterson.

It's a very light historian gig, as in it's a very, very small area of history.

I reckon he does other stuff.

You'd have to.

I think usually the historians in these kind of companies are actually someone who does another job, but in their spare time they kind of...

I'm sure you're right.

Because otherwise you'd feel like a fool turning up at a historians' conference.

And you're like, what do you study?

Oh, the 19th century, mostly.

What about you?

You sat next to Mary Beard on one side and Dan Snow on the other side.

But yeah, they were.

It was until they came to America that they still, even when the dispensers were added, you know, this was a way to give up smoking.

And apparently, it was only when they went to America in the 50s and tried to market them there and they were targeting adults, kids had to quit smoking.

America didn't have the the same appetite to quit smoking.

I think maybe there wasn't such a campaign back then as there was in Austria

saying this is bad.

And so they thought, let's start putting fun, turning them into fun kid shapes and marketing them to children.

Yeah, and then changing the taste, obviously, of the thing from a sort of anti-smoking nicotine.

Well, they had told me.

It wasn't too peppermint.

It wasn't nicotine.

No, no, but as in, they changed it to sweeties.

They made it smooth.

But they were always menti.

They were always mentier.

Because that's where the name comes from.

It comes from the German for peppermint.

Oh, yeah.

Wittily, one of the first flavours they had was chlorophyll.

Yeah.

What?

What is that?

It's the green stuff you get in leaves.

It's hard to know what it tastes like.

Exactly.

I've never thought of it.

It tastes like grass, I reckon.

I would imagine so too, but it's such a weird flavour.

Can we talk about Edward Haas III?

Yes,

it's a really interesting family because

his father, Edward Haas II, was a baked goods merchant.

Okay, so sold baking powder.

And his father, Edward Haas.

It's not actually a baked good, is it?

It's a good full baking.

What a good point.

It's a baking goods.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, I stank corrected.

Okay.

But basically,

Edward III seems to have invented the first ready-made cake mixture.

It's a huge deal.

So wait a minute.

Was this the one who did Pez or is the first one?

The one who did Pez, the third, yeah, Edward III is the guy who did Hassan for the baking of health sponge cakes.

Edward's grandfather, Edward Haas I,

okay,

I've read one reference to this.

I cannot find any more detail anywhere, but there's a source online which claims that he died as a result of medical experiments he did on himself.

There's no further evidence

that I've found.

So if you know, please write in and enlighten us because it's

not clear what he was doing to himself.

They're in the baking industry.

What could he have done?

He was baking too much bicarbonate of soda for himself.

He wanted to know how hot to bake things, so he tested the temperature himself.

Sat in the oven.

He had cut a hole in his neck so he could dispense loaves of bread when he picked his head back.

It's so unclear what he did.

There's no further detail.

So mystery.

So the evolution of the Pez dispenser itself is very exciting.

Poor

Haas III didn't get to see the feet that were added to the bottom of a Pez dispenser to allow it to stand.

That was a big innovation.

It's the Pez we know and love.

That was 1987, I believe.

That was in 87.

And they had weird designs before.

So before they added the feet, there was one in 1956.

They invented invented a sort of space gun.

And also, from what I've seen, regular looking guns.

So the idea is that the gun would shoot out, it's like a pistol would shoot out the PES at the end into your mouth.

Do you have to put the gun in your mouth?

The guy who set up the Pez Dispenser, as we know it, is a guy, well, the guy who was in charge of the decision, basically, was a man called Curtis Alina,

who

was

European.

He was born in Prague in 1922.

He was Jewish and that was not a good time to be born Jewish in Central Europe in Prague.

His family were all sent to concentration camps.

He was the only surviving member of his family in Europe after the war.

He went to the USA

and he started working for PES.

But the the US and the European PES were kind of two different camps.

They were quite

remote from each other.

They weren't really tied together.

And he had to persuade the Viennese outfit.

They wanted serious, sober, grown-up mints, you know, adult mint,

that this dispenser thing was a good idea.

But I just, I mentioned all of this because there's a weird link to Sigmund Freud, who was from Vienna.

Okay, so I'm trying to copy the old James Hagen Freud circle here.

But the link is not just that they're both in Vienna.

Well, he lived across the street from Sigmund Freud when he was a boy, supposedly.

And there was this brilliant website I found, which is called Freudsbutcher.com, which is about the history of Sigmund Freud by an author called Edie Jaralim.

She's great.

It's a blog about genealogy, psychology, and meat.

Okay.

And there's a theory that she posits that

Eduard Haas III might have been considering Freud's theory of oral fixation when he came up with the idea of substituting peppermint sweets for cigarettes.

Oh, I see.

Not that the Pez dispenser looks a bit like a penis.

No, no, that's not.

Although that's an excellent evolution of the theory.

Maybe he was only thinking about it subconsciously.

But wouldn't that be appropriate, given that it's a Freud?

What a load of absolute bulls.

Oh, you happen to live opposite Freud.

What weird, convoluted thing can we attribute to that?

You're right.

She says it's a huge stretch.

She says that as well.

She also says that.

There we go.

No, I disagree.

So have you guys come across Steve Glue?

Oh,

the Pez Outlaw.

The Pez Outlaw.

Self-style.

I can't believe you genuinely got like a tingle of goosebumps and you both got excited by that.

Who's Steve Glue?

He is basically the king of collecting Pezzers.

So he would go to Europe and he would get all of these really, really rare Pezzers, sometimes digging through garbage to try and get ones which had been thrown out.

And then he would take them back to America and he would sell them to Pez enthusiasts.

And he said at one stage he was making $4.5 million, or he made that much in total, selling Pez candy dispensers that he'd taken from Eastern Europe.

and sold in America.

And it seemed to be there was some kind of loophole in terms of importing them or well he just sort of snuck through customs quite a lot with them and it was it honestly so this is where I first was he hiding them

I think often they didn't check it's just the right shape

that's why they're shaped like that

it wasn't one per trip I think that would be

profitable just a little Mickey Mouse head sticking out of his rectum

help yourself to one more Yana

yeah this is how I came across this fact initially I was reading a review of the Pez Outlaw, which is coming out this year, I think.

Cool.

And it's the film based on his adventures.

And it sounds proper, exciting stuff.

It was him and his son, who's an equally avid collector, and he was real down and out, like, wasn't making any money until he came across this big scam where he'd fly to Eastern Europe, go into factories, and basically bribe factory workers to give him a bunch of pears he knew would be incredibly valuable.

But they'd, you know, they'd drive around in this truck.

Apparently, his son said he'd drive 24 hours straight.

He'd be so tired that he often crashed the truck

but just just kept plugging away wow and um had he had this amazing rival called patek who was another pez

uh guy who sort of got also got first dibs in the factories and flogged pez wow and apparently at one point glue pursued patek across austria in a car chase and said that they like drove on on uh pavements they were on the wrong side of the road they had to bribe police with pez dispensers full of cash he claimed

it could only be tiny little son teams exactly they went with notes apparently i don't know how many notes you can fit in a couple of hundred dollar bills maybe yeah but then of course big pez got involved right big pez and so this guy decided he sort of did a little bit of a deal with a guy in hungary and said that this guy would make extras for him and they were discontinued ones as well sometimes so they'd be really really good expensive you know rare pezzas this guy in hungary would make them for him and he would buy loads of them and then take them back to America and sell them.

But one day he logged into the Pez website and he found a new section called Misfit Dispensers.

And it was all the ones that he'd bought from this guy in Hungary, but Pez was selling them for like a dollar each.

And they basically just flooded the market with other ones.

And he reckons that it left him $250,000 in debt, this one trick.

And when he rang up this broker in Hungary and said, what's happened?

why are they doing this the broker said the right hand knows what the left is doing so basically it was all a sc they just basically fitted him up that's extraordinary amazing so the dispenser was made by someone called oscar uxa or ucha

and his patent actually said that it would be helpful for people who have only one hand So it was a way of dispensing sweets from a box, but you only need one hand to do it.

And that's what it says in the patent.

It's useful for people with that's why that's why it's so useful actually for the pensioners at dan's blue movie cinema who want to have a hand free and enjoy the cinema snacks blue movie cinema as it is otherwise known as it will be known because they're selling it aren't they

in my bed

because in the patent it says it's important not only for persons who have only one hand but also persons who often have only one hand free right

or whose occupation causes their hands to become smeared with dirt well this is all brilliant news Dan.

Yeah.

Get in touch with your trumpet.

Freud's penis dispenser in one hand and your actual penis in the other.

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 have 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 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.

Check out all of our previous episodes up there.

Make sure to check out Club Fish.

We have exciting things hidden in a secret club, like extra compilation episodes, and drop us a line where we go through the mailbag and share our favorite stories and facts that you've sent in.

Otherwise, just come back here next week where we will be here waiting for you with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.