430: No Such Thing As The Assistant Honcho

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Your ring, your way.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the US.

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

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

Visit our Union Street Showroom or explore the range at cullinjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

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 Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

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 there's hardly any fresh water on Easter Island so the indigenous people drank straight from the sea.

That's why they're dead.

They all immediately died.

They landed there a thousand years ago, all died.

No, they didn't die.

This is the amazing thing about it.

So Europeans first got there in the 1700s, 1722.

They noticed that the indigenous people there, the Pacific Islanders who travelled over there hundreds of years earlier, seemed to be drinking straight from the sea.

Very confusing.

Haven't thought about it again for 400 years.

And then scientists looked into it and they realized that actually fresh water kind of emerges on the shore.

What?

So it's the fact that there's no fresh water or very little fresh water because the soil is super porous.

So it rains and the soil just sucks it in straight away.

No streams or anything.

But the rainwater goes down into the earth and then travels out to the beach underground.

And then it re-emerges like just at the shoreline.

So when the tide's out, you can kind of go and scoop up some of that, you know, water, which is in the very shallows of the sea.

And it's still salty.

Don't get me wrong.

I think it would taste like shit.

Yeah, but.

It won't taste like salt.

It all tastes like salt, but it's not salty enough that it dehydrates you to death.

So it's like a river, but it's underground.

Kind of, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

How did they survive long enough to experiment with that to not be wiped out?

Like, that's extraordinary, right?

I thought initially that it would just be a body of water that was consistently there.

You're telling me a tide has to go out and then they find the water?

Yeah, although the tide does go out most days.

Yeah, true, but

it's annoying.

It's annoying having to wait 12 hours.

And it's annoying.

Like this morning, I had to wait for Starbucks to open.

That's annoying as well.

That's the same way.

It's the same, isn't it?

We can empathize in a lot of ways.

I guess you, you know, if you're thirsty and you're really dying of thirst and the only water that you can see is the water on the shore of the sea, maybe you give it a try.

And also, it's a 1200s, they didn't know anything.

It's very far away from Everglades.

Can we just say how far away from stuff Easter Island is?

The nearest inhabited island is 2,000 kilometers away.

South America is 3,500 kilometers away.

So it's in the very, very...

It's in the South Pacific, isn't it?

And it's just so far from Everstein.

It's kind of halfway between Chile and Australia.

Yeah.

Isn't it really?

Because when I went to South America, I thought, oh, we'll just pop over to Easter Island for maybe a couple of days.

That'd be really cool.

And then I looked about how long the flight was going to be.

Oh, I'm not going to get there.

And that's the amazing thing, isn't it?

How did people get there?

Yeah.

How did people end up there?

Well, we know it's the Polynesians, right?

But, like, how did they discover the island?

What were they doing?

There's a lot of origin stories.

There's a lot of archaeological ideas.

Like, everyone has a different idea that they bring to the table.

But no one can decide.

Your idea would be the aliens one, I suppose, Dan.

Is there an aliens one?

Of course, there's an aliens one.

I haven't read that one.

Your mate, Dan, Eric von Danikin.

Is this the one you're talking about, James?

Well, it's just the that's the famous one, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Wow, he thinks that a race of superior, intelligent creatures got shipwrecked effectively on Easter Island, taught the locals how to make the statues, started making a load of them for their own amusement, then got picked up before they'd finished all of them, which is why some of the statues are not finished, and then just left again.

His basically theory is that if there were ever any really amazing structures made where white people weren't there, then it must be aliens.

And so you can be pretty sure that he would think that he's not my mate, by the way.

I just quickly know he's asked specifically specifically not to be associated with me.

But yeah, Andy, you've got the statues.

That's the famous thing, right?

Isn't it?

The statues, the big heads on Easter Island.

And there's a thing about the big heads that they tend to be clustered near the areas where you can get this water.

And so some people think that maybe they were kind of a marker to tell you where the best places to get a little bit of drinking water were.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

They've recently realised that the positioning of the statues coincides with particularly these areas of freshwater springs.

And even inland, it coincides with places where you'd be able to get a well and get some fresh water.

It makes sense.

If you're going to signpost anything as a bunch of rural islanders, you probably signpost water, don't you?

But they have such big signposts, that's the thing.

It's an amazingly, it's so much effort to go to to flag there is water here.

But it was kind of their thing, though, wasn't it?

Like, there's a thousand of them on the island, you know.

They'd make it up in this hill bit where they used volcanic rock and ash that was called tough, and they would carve and then they would drag down and slide down with an amazing sort of hit rate of not damaging them as well, which is pretty extraordinary given their size.

You know, there's people who've gone and visited and seen broken ones, but on average, it was said that they could just bring them down, these giant structures, and walk them to where they needed to be.

And some of them would be, as you say, would be facing water, some would be facing inland to protect the land.

Some, there's seven in particular, which were meant to represent seven different Polynesian tribes that had come over.

So that a group of people facing the direction of which they all originated from.

We don't know if that's true.

That's just a

theory on the island, yeah.

The big question is, when they were transporting them down, did they slide from the top of the hill on the moai like they were sledges?

On the moai?

They're called moai, the statues.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you meant did the statues slide on

no, no.

But they might have been the statues might have sledged.

That's one theory.

Or they might have been put on log rollers.

Well, Dan said walked, didn't he?

And the other theory is that they walked into position, that you put a big rope around them and just stroll them.

You know, like when you're trying to move a heavy bit of furniture.

Like a fridge.

Yeah, you lift one corner and move that and then you put that down.

And the aliens are going, pivot!

Yeah.

The other thing about them, which I think you found out recently, James, I mean, you weren't the original person to find it out,

is that there's as much of them underground as above ground.

It's unbelievable.

They're not heads.

They're just statues of entire bodies.

But apparently, over hundreds of years, soil accumulation and various bits of erosion and stuff buried the bodies.

Isn't that incredible though that they didn't bury the bodies themselves so it's not like they hid it.

Enough erosion has happened that all of them just seem to have a head left.

It's like a kid been buried in the sand and his parents have left him there.

We haven't talked about the most interesting structures on Easter Island I would say

which is their chicken houses.

Do you guys read about these?

No.

No.

So they've got great chicken houses.

They're called Hare Moa.

And they were almost impregnable to robbers because obviously there was a time of long decline on the island.

You needed needed to protect your protein wherever you could.

So chickens is kind of vital.

They should have really pivoted completely to chickens, I think, but I'm not going to give them advice.

Look, they've clearly been through a lot.

Anyway, these chicken houses were really good.

They were two meters high, up to 20 meters long, made completely of stone, like this huge cairn of stones, basically.

And they are quite mysterious because the other thing about them is that human skulls have been found inside the chicken houses.

Whoa, are we thinking the chickens actually were eating the humans?

That's what I'm thinking.

Do you think the chickens made the massive heads?

Because they thought human heads are so delicious.

If we make some massive ones, then that will bring us.

Bring more.

I think that's it, yeah.

I think theory, and again, it's so much theorizing.

I think it's that they were chiefs' skulls and that they were believed to have a fertilizing power, these skulls, to increase the egg yields.

So pretty goth.

So it just have some skulls in your hen house.

I knew you'd like those hen houses because they're like dry stone walls, aren't they, Andy?

They're very, very similar.

And you said how they're impregnable.

The interesting thing about that is they're made like dry stone walls.

So they're made of loads and loads of stones going all the way around.

But one of the stones you can pull out and use it as a door.

But unless you're the one who built it, you don't know which stone it is.

And so

you can get in and get your chickens out, but no robber can get the chickens out.

That's faster.

I'd love to go to East Rolland and only photograph the chicken houses.

I would really

come back with a slideshow for my family.

There are 1,233 of those chicken houses and only 887 stone heads.

So

I think we're concentrating on the wrong thing.

I couldn't agree more.

And do you think they should have pivoted to chickens because of the other thing that formed the basis of their protein diet, which was rats?

Oh, another good reason to pivot to chickens.

So many reasons to pivot to chickens.

They've done some studies recently, some analysis of the teeth of skeletons, and it shows that their source of protein was rats, and they ate loads of rats.

Although apparently, Pacific Island rats are slightly tastier than European rats.

Who's studied those?

You can actually just register new scientists or something.

So I don't know how much all the researchers have gone to compare this.

I'm still not going to Kentucky Fried Rat.

That's what I'm saying.

But as you say, Andy and Dan, the theorising is out of control.

We know almost nothing.

So pretty much everything we've said so far is just, you know, based on a few bits of evidence and we piece stuff together.

The stuff we know for sure is stuff that's told from living memory.

And so the stuff we know for sure is actually about the cult that followed the big head cult, which is the Birdman cult.

And we do actually have have information about that.

And this is another theory about who knocked down the heads.

So basically, Westerners arrived and sometime after Cook went there in the late 1700s, then the head cult was replaced with this birdman cult.

So they just tore down the heads because they were like, we're the guys in charge now.

But the cool thing about the birdman cult was how they elected their head poncho.

Did you read this?

Did you say poncho?

Poncho.

Honcho.

I said honcho.

Oh, good.

Oh, I heard poncho as well.

It's weird because head honcho is a phrase, but head poncho isn't a phrase.

That's why we were surprised to hear it.

It's almost a better phrase.

It is.

I'm the head poncho here.

Especially if you got a really awesome poncho whenever you come head.

I think it would need that.

Yeah.

Is it just for your head?

Are you wearing a poncho for your body and then you've got a head poncho on top?

Yeah, double poncho.

This is what they wore on the islands.

Because I know what a poncho is, and that's why I like the phrase, but I don't know what a honcho is really.

Part of

some guy.

You never hear about honcho when not preceded by head, do you?

You never hear about the second honcho and

vice honcho.

Oh, yes, I'm the assistant honcho.

Well, look, the head honcho competition in the bird man cult was to elect the Tangata Manu, who was the bird man of the year.

It happened every year.

And essentially, it was the first person to find the first egg that was laid by the sooty tern every year.

And the way they did it was...

It's not.

Did they go like just whisper in his ear like a little bear?

What's that, Sooty Tern?

You were the honcho hole last year, Sooty.

It's Sweep's turn now.

Maybe all the statues are hollow inside.

Matthew Corbett.

It's a massive Matthew Carbet who comes along with incredibly strong arms.

And singer puppets of the gods.

That's what they are.

That is a Von Danikin book I absolutely would devour.

Sorry, they're trying to find the egg.

Yeah, it does feel like we have wandered off course.

They're trying to find the egg of the Sooty Turn.

And the way they do it is the main competitors would either compete themselves or they'd elect a Hopu, which was someone who competed on their behalf.

And what they had to do was they had to climb down this cliff, they'd have to swim a mile out to sea, very rough seas,

mile out to sea, and land on this island.

And it was the island where all the birds came and laid their eggs every spring.

They'd wait there for a few weeks on this island, and then eventually the birds would arrive.

The first one to spot the first egg would signal back to the main island and say, I've got the egg, you win, master.

And then the reward, here's where it gets really exciting if you're the first one to get the egg is you get to shave off your eyebrows and eyelashes and your head, your hair, not your head,

and you took a new name that was adopted as the name of the year, and then you danced and sang your way to the royal residence where you had to live in total seclusion for a year.

And that's what I sound quite good, actually.

Living in social seclusion for a year, yeah, and people brought you food, actually.

Did they?

Yeah, it's a dream.

But the food was rats.

Talk rats.

But, but nice rats.

Yeah, nice hidden rats.

All of the statues were knocked over.

Yeah.

At some point after first Western contact, when the first sailors arrived, which was 1722, there was a Dutchman called Jacob Roggeveen.

He visited on Easter Day in 1722, which is why he gave it the name Easter Island.

They were all standing.

They were all fine.

There are no descriptions of any that had fallen over.

And then a couple hundred years later, they're all knocked over.

And it would have taken a huge amount of effort to knock them over.

The people clearly decided, we don't want these anymore.

Yeah, I think they felt, well, this is one of the many theories.

Let's get some of the theories about it.

But this is the theory, I think, on the side of the kind of more mythological side is that they were idols to the gods and because the island had been so ravaged in terms of the deforestation that they'd done and so on, because that's the main thing, isn't it?

There's hardly any trees there left anymore.

And so they couldn't make canoes to go and fish.

And so they ran out of food.

And so it was anger and they knocked down the statues to say, fuck you, God.

Wow, that's quite angry.

Because I can imagine being angry and having a pen in your hand and throwing it to the ground and stuff.

But actually, to be so angry that you knock over a massive statue and then another and then another and then like hundreds and hundreds of them.

Wait, were they lined up like dominoes?

Yeah, possible.

You only need to get one over originally.

That would be amazing.

Maybe that's it.

It was a mistake.

It was a mistake.

It was already at the moment.

Some dude was just leaning on and chatting at the girl.

Mr.

Bean went to Easter Island.

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

My fact this week is that last year, Dublin Airport received 13,569 noise complaints.

12,272 of those were made by one person.

Oh, no.

One single person.

10,000 in a year.

Yeah, it was averaging basically 34 a day, roughly.

That's basically presumably every time a plane takes off.

I think so, yeah.

We don't know who this person is, by the way.

They've They've kept them anonymous.

I don't know why.

But it's something that they've done before many times.

They've doubled their amount of complaints that they previously had done.

So this isn't like they just popped out of nowhere.

Right.

They've been complaining for years.

Weirdly, obviously, due to the pandemic, you know, flights have been down, but the complaints have been going up.

Yeah.

They did kind of pop out of nowhere because they came along, I think, in 2018.

In 2018, there were 628 complaints.

In 2019, 3,147 in the first six months of the year.

And then not that many since then, but some.

And then, like you say, this last couple of years, they've really picked up again.

Is it someone who's erected a tent on the runway?

Just how...

That's what I was wondering.

Or someone who someone set up an automatic system that every time the noise goes over a certain volume.

So

that is possible.

Now, this did happen in Heathrow.

In 2015, Heathrow found that some people had automated software that could generate complaints and they found out because when the clocks changed, they didn't change the clocks on their system.

So they started complaining about flights that hadn't taken off yet.

Wait, that's amazing.

They would find out when a plane was taking off and automatically their computer would just send an email.

I think that is cheeky because I think it's got to be...

you've got to have the noise.

You've got to have experience.

I think that's what Heathrow thought as well.

Do we know if they bothered to make each email different?

Like, did they write a thousand different words?

Dear madam.

Hello.

Further to my previous email.

Or this one, were they all clones of each other?

This person?

They haven't said.

Yeah, I imagine it's pretty much the same email that would come through.

Well, this person doesn't actually live that close to the airport either.

That's the word they know.

We know where they live.

We know where they live.

I do know where they are.

Rongar, which is about 20 miles away from the airport.

And the interesting thing about that is Dublin Airport are actually quite good neighbours if you look into it.

As far as I'm concerned, they seem to be.

And they'll offer to buy your house, for instance, if it's too much on a regular basis, especially since they got their new runway.

But this person is outside of that distance.

They can't be helped by any of these systems.

So that could be why they're complaining.

Yeah, and flight paths can be, you know, devils.

If you like, if you're like West London, so much of it's under the Heathrow flight path that you get so many planes a day.

It also does seem that you do get these individuals, like these singular individuals that make it their mission to do it.

Heroes, I call them.

Heroes, exactly.

So the same thing happened for Reagan Airport in Washington.

In 2015, they had 8,670 noise complaints, and 6,500 of those were from a single person as well.

Yeah.

It's just some heroes, as Andy says.

There's a secret society.

There's a Masons for complainers somewhere that we don't know about.

Do you think that these people have time to go to a secret society?

Because to me, I don't think they do.

noise complaints are just ridiculous sometimes in terms of when you read the headline you think how's that possible my favorite one that i've read recently a canadian city made a noise complaint against an american city oh yeah yeah wow so this was windsor ontario and they were making a complaint against detroit and it was because

yeah so the detroit river is a there's a one kilometer waterway that between windsor and detroit and they were having a festival on the riverbank with they said on windsor side the sound system facing directly towards them.

And so they received all these complaints from about 1.30 to 2.30 in the morning when the music was still playing.

Wow.

And all the complaints directed on the Windsor side to their council to say, we want you to write to Detroit's council and officially log this as a noise complaint.

And they did.

Yeah.

They got an official, a city got an official noise complaint from another city.

That's great.

Yeah.

And imagine if this was the Franz Ferdinand moment for the civil war between Canada.

Ironically, that's the music they were playing.

I was looking a bit at the history of filing sound complaints.

I think the earliest I could find the earliest official sound complaint, which resulted in action being taken, was in 1302.

This was in the UK, and it was a petition by a bunch of friars.

And it's just so fun because it's just exactly the same as we would say today, exactly the same kind of complaint.

So they requested that this courthouse, the courthouse of Catishole, should not be rebuilt to the damage and nuisance of the friars.

Their complaint was that when it rains, people who are going to the courthouse seek refuge for themselves and their horses in the church of the friars while the friars are saying mass, which actually does sound quite annoying.

It does sound annoying.

Yeah, and so it's quite hard to shout mass over the noise and the press of the people.

Especially if they've taken a vow of silence or something.

That would be really annoying.

Yeah, they can't shout them down.

Just sitting there swearing at them.

I read another study by Manchester Met, and this is going back to the airports.

This was complaint data at Manchester Airport from between 1998 and 2000.

They found what we found, which is that there is a subgroup of serial complainers out of all the complaints.

So they described as- That's like cornflakes, not crushing enough.

Exactly.

Gosh.

Where can I address my complaint about that joke?

I think if people are complaining about our jokes, then they would be serial complainers.

Because a serial complainer is someone who makes more than 50 complaints a year versus a normal complainer who is someone who does less than that.

But they profiled profiled serial complainers.

And they found, really interestingly, that a serial complainer would tend to send all of their emails between 10 p.m.

and 1 a.m.

And then again in the morning from 7 a.m.

to about 8 a.m.

So they do it just before they went to bed or just before they got up.

Whereas a normal complainer would do it at any time of the night.

So they might do it at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m.

4 a.m.

So what that suggests is that the normal complainers are actually being woken up by the planes and gone off for God's sake and sending an email.

whereas the serial complainers are doing it just before they go to bed, maybe after a few drinks, I don't know.

And then, first thing in the morning, when they remember, oh, that was really annoying last night, kind of thing.

You sort of understand the late evening one where people are, oh, they're stewing.

You know, they're like, I've got to complain about this.

I'm so annoyed.

Whereas early morning, I don't get at all.

I wonder sometimes it's like you want to send an email at night time, and you're like, if I send it now, people will think I'm drunk sending it.

So I'm going to wait till the morning and I'm going to send it then.

But they'll send.

They've scheduled a send.

Well, let me reread the draft That was horrible.

Furiously

I'll write an angry email in there but I normally end up not sending that email or instead sending an apology.

What's sending an apology instead of

all the noise, thanks Andy.

Keep it up.

Turn it up.

I can take it.

This fight was about Dublin Airport.

Yeah.

Most famous Irish airline.

Erlingus.

Come on, Andy.

Ryanair.

Yeah, Ryanair.

It's got to be Ryanair.

I know Erlingus is a very famous one.

I only named the national carrier.

I'm afraid I say that against privately.

Sorry, Ryanair, Ryanair.

The really interesting thing is that Ryanair is founded by a guy called Tony Ryan, right?

He's really famous.

He leased, he owned a leasing company first.

And even today, Ireland leases about 40% of all the airplanes in the sky at any time.

So most of the smaller airlines don't own the aeroplanes that they own.

They're leased from someone else.

And a lot of that's from Ireland.

And this all goes back to this guy called Tony Ryan.

He decided he wanted to set up an airline, and it's called Ryanair, but it's not named after him.

Isn't that amazing?

He wanted to call it Trans-Tipperary Airlines.

But his friend and someone who he set up the business with called Christy Ryan decided he wanted to name it after him.

And so Christy Ryan said, I know, I want to name it after me and call it Ryanair.

And Tony Ryan said, you can't name it after you.

And he said, well, I'm going to do it anyway.

And in the end, they decided and called it Ryanair.

But Tony Ryan is the really famous guy who everyone.

But it's not the Ryan.

That's so interesting.

Because online, it always claims.

I thought it wasn't named after Christopher and it was named after Tony.

Because, yeah, it always says it's named after Tony Ryan.

But secretly, it's the Christopher.

That's very funny.

That's mine.

Oh my gosh.

I was reading a very tiny bit about noise on planes.

So, because obviously we're talking about noise when you're on the ground from an airplane, but it's huge when you're inside, and they do a lot to try and fix it, make it better, make it more manageable.

One of the the things that affects is your food on a plane.

They found in research when you're eating food, the noise

can mess with your taste buds.

And so British Airways in 2014 released a little thing called sound bites.

So the idea would be that the food that you ordered on the plane, you could go into the system, your little entertainment system, and you could find a track that plays a curated bit of noise

to listen to while you're eating that meal to match the taste and help you out.

That would work.

I've been to the Fat Duck, you know, Heston Blumenthal's place, and he plays music sometimes to you when you eat a certain thing.

You'll have to wear headphones and listen to the sound of the sea while you eat some seafood and stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

So it'd be like Verdi would be playing, you know, while you're eating on the airplane.

Sa pasta.

Exactly.

It is that.

It is that.

If you're on your way to Easter Island, just the sound of rats screaming.

I've got a case study for you.

Arguan.

Okay, you live in a seaside flat, right?

Yes.

In Italy.

Oh, lovely.

Lovely.

So it's a book of flats.

And then your neighbours.

It's a flat.

It's one of the South Coast.

Oh, it's in the Bay of Poets, I think it's called.

Ooh.

Oh, yeah.

Remote.

So

there are four brothers who own the flat next door.

Right.

They install a lavatory in one of their rooms.

Yeah, it's fine.

But it's right next to the headboard of your bed.

And it's so loud.

Yeah.

Whose side are you on?

But I'm the person who's in the floor.

Well, you live at the flat.

You live at the other flat.

So someone's taking a shit next to your head every day?

Pretty much.

Or every night.

I think I might consider moving, flipping my bed around so that my headbot isn't right there.

This is the thing.

The couple said, our home is so small, we can't rearrange the furniture.

Okay.

So this, get this.

This happened in 2003.

The couple who owned the flat, which I've put you all in, said the noise is intolerable.

They took it to a judge, got thrown out.

They went to an appeal court.

The appeal court judge said, actually, that is bad for your quality of life.

Okay.

The brothers fought back and took it to the Supreme Court.

Wow.

This year in 2022, 19 years after the original complaint.

Oh my God.

And they've been holding a shit in all that time.

It's been settled.

On whose side?

In favour of the couple who owned the flat.

The brothers have had to pay 10,000 euros almost.

So, what do they do now?

The brothers?

Outdoor WC?

I don't think they could sound.

I don't know if they could sound.

Maybe they have to use their loo.

Move the loo?

I don't know.

Anyway.

Put lots of loo roll down before you do a number two.

I think it was the flush, wasn't it?

The flocks.

The flogs weren't the problem.

But the Jonaleb newspaper said, in far less time than this case took, Albert Einstein wrote the theory of relativity explaining the whole universe.

It's hard, though, isn't it?

I mean, that you can see both sides.

Yeah.

I think.

You've got to have a place to have.

You've got to have a title.

But also, you've got to be able to sleep somewhere, and these are small places.

Yeah.

Is it four brothers?

Yeah.

That's a bit of the story that no one's picked up on.

What?

That there are four brothers living together for 19 years?

I think that's a a bit odd.

I don't know if they're words like I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're ready to wife.

Move out.

Why hasn't one of them got married?

What is happening with that family?

I think they're doing deliberately.

Is that what you're saying?

They've clubbed together and deliberately said they'll devote their lives to torturing this couple.

I don't know.

I just think when it comes to court, when it's four brothers living together for 19 years, I would think something weird's going on there.

Yeah.

I'm going to leave you guys alone.

I'm with you.

No further questions, Jerome.

The prosecution rests.

Four brothers.

Do me a favor.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson was better known as a baker than as a poet.

Was she thought it was a really good baker or a really bad poet?

Probably

an unknown poet.

People didn't really know that she did poetry, and people did know that she did baking.

If you don't know who Emily Dickinson is, she is probably one of the most famous American poets.

In her lifetime, didn't really sell or publish anything, just one or two little things.

People didn't really know about her.

She didn't want anything to be published.

But what she was famous for in her area was making loads of cakes, loads of delicious things that she used to give to all the children all the time.

And so there's a new book that's come out called The Emily Dickinson Cookbook by Alian Osborne.

And in that, she says she was better known as a baker than a poet.

Although there is another book that I've seen, which is about Emily Dickinson's gardening, and in that book, it says she was better known as a gardener than a poet.

So it kind of feels like whatever you're writing the book about, you can say that.

She basically wasn't known as a poet.

That's what I was saying.

But what's amazing, though, is like she's known for the gardening, she's known for the bakery, but actually she was kind of a recluse for most of her life, wasn't she?

Kind of kind of is a weak way of referring to to was extreme recluse Bill.

So, how do we know about her gardening in her bakery?

Hang on, guys.

Hang on, she had some pretty public experiences in the baking sphere, and I'd refer you to the 1856 Amherst Cattle Show, where her round loaf of Indian and rye bread won second prize.

So, before we say she was a recluse, just think about that.

She was living in the public sphere, in the blaze of publicity.

To be fair, her sister Vinnie was one of the judges for that competition.

So, slightly

makes me think she actually wasn't a very good bacon.

Your sister's in the competition, you still can't buy first prize.

Poor mate.

She used to make gingerbread, really good gingerbread, and she used to lower it down for neighbourhood children.

So she loved children, Emily Dickinson, and

the people in the area, in the neighborhood, kind of knew about her.

She was a recluse, as you say, later on in life, post-this great competition triumph thing.

But the children knew about her and they'd run to her window and then she erected a kind of basket which she lowered down on a string and one of the people, one of the boys, remembered her later on doing it and she'd do it and make it like a game so she'd do it very, very gradually and gingerly.

Gingerly.

Brilliant.

So as not to let the domestic servant know, because otherwise domestic servant Maggie would be very angry.

And then the kids would have to creep through the grass and then grab the gingerbread and leave her.

It sounds like Maggie is getting ideas above her station if she's stopping the Lady of the House from giving out free gingerbread.

Well, you know, that's good to know what side you're on.

children gingerbread?

I just think Lady of the House is a little bit...

She was Lady of the House.

Maggie hasn't made gingerbread for the children.

She's made it for, you know.

Was she giving away gingerbread that Maggie had made?

Yes.

So why is Emily Dickinson getting the credit for all this baking when she's giving away someone else's gingerbread?

Sorry, you're right.

This boy said I don't know if Emily Dickinson had made the gingerbread or if Maggie had made the gingerbread, but she seemed to be afraid of Maggie telling her not to.

So you're right, I think Maggie is getting ideas above her station.

Stopping Emily from giving out her gingerbread.

Actually, if Maggie had made it, I'm now come back around to her point of view, and I think she's getting ideas at her station.

Like, she's correct to be irritated about this.

It was actually

quite a good spot for literary figures, this Amherst place, because you had not only Emily Dickinson, who obviously found out that she was amazing after her death, but you had people like Melville Dewey was there.

Was he from the Dewey Decimal System?

Yeah, he was, yeah.

Where did he live?

He lived number one to number 121.04.

So he came up with the system while he was an assistant librarian at the Amherst College in 1876.

Looked into him a bit.

Terrible human.

Yeah, I think he's been terrible human.

We're not supposed to use the system anymore, I don't think, are we?

Wow, rightly.

I believe he's been cancelled.

He's been cancelled, but we've cancelled the system.

It's a hell of a system to cancel.

Robert Frost, the poet, was from there as well.

Noah Webster was from there as well.

Webster's dictionary.

Yeah, he lived there and he started writing it there.

So not all these people were born there, but they did live there.

He was in Amherst and and then he went to Baltimore, and then he went to Chicago.

And then he went on.

I wanted to see how long

after we were steering away.

What was your next one?

Denver?

Yeah.

Go on, what would be next?

I didn't have one after that.

An American place beginning with E.

East Virginia.

Yeah, that's not a place.

No.

There's Virginia and there's West Virginia.

I meant the East of Virginia, obviously.

She was such an interesting character.

So, I mean, first of all, she was really funny and fun.

I think that people, because they know of Emily Dickinson as this person who only ever wore white, which she did, and she never.

She's picturing a few other things.

In fact, I think in the only picture we've got of her, she's not wearing white.

Again, sorry, when I say only ever, it's weird because she's pictured in black and white, so she's wearing black, presumably.

She's grey.

This is after she became a recluse.

About the last 20 years of her life, wasn't it?

She became a recluse.

But she was very funny.

If you read her poems, they are kind of witty or dry or piss-takey.

I always thought, like, one of the best opening lines to a poem was one of her most famous poems, which opens, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me, which I just love as a bit of, I don't know, it's a humorous, it's dark, and it's an excellent poem.

But I think she, she did think about publishing a lot.

She knew she was great.

It wasn't like she had no idea she was great.

She wrote to all these famous writers and publishers who said, please let me publish your poems.

And she would say, oh no, it'd be dreadful being published.

I'm not nearly egotistical enough for that.

How dreary to be somebody, how public, like a frog, to tell your name, the live-long June, to an admiring bog.

So she had it in her mind.

She was quite like Lady Death Protest too much about it, I think.

Wow.

Just as a quick reminder, Andy's new novel will be out.

By the time you listened, I'm regretting it.

For you.

The admiring bog, for the listeners.

She wrote to a guy called Thomas Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking if she could possibly...

Or if her poems were good enough to be published, I should say.

And he actually thought that her poems were too eccentric to be published at the time, but he told her to avoid sloppy dashes, which if you've read any Emily Dickinson, it's just dashes.

It's almost all dash.

It's just dash.

It's like half of Morse code, her poetry.

Right.

I would say go back and ignore the dashes because that, I remember when I was younger, that really put me off because it seems so jerky.

But then if you ignore them and pretend they're normal punctuation.

Just quickly on the Higginson man who reviewed, sort of looked over her poetry.

So he said her writing was, I'm quoting it, so peculiar, it seems as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird tracks in the museum.

Okay, this is interesting.

Amherst, again, like great literary womb, all of this, had these bird tracks in stone, which were the first dinosaur tracks ever found.

And they were found by a 12-year-old plowboy called Pliny.

Really?

Weird.

And so he was called Pliny Moody, amazing name.

And this was 40 years before the word dinosaur was coined, really.

Oh, yeah.

But they were known, they were nicknamed these tracks as the marks of Noah's Raven.

That was what they were called, this lovely sort of evocative phrase for dinosaur footsteps, Noah's Raven.

And Emily Dickinson wrote The Thing with Feathers, and dinosaurs have feathers.

Oh, my God.

Is that where we're going?

What I'm saying is it's all connected.

Oh, my God.

Is that your favourite one of her poems?

I don't really have one.

I didn't know very much about her at all before this.

I think there's one that you would like if you ever heard it.

All overgrown by cunning moss.

There we go.

I'm in.

I'm in.

She's a genius.

What was her hit rate in terms of we now know that she wrote about 1,800, that's what she left behind, poems.

How many of those have been published?

Yeah, wow.

But there's an incredibly weird story.

So the ones that you're talking about have all been published, and we can see all of them.

And I would say everyone I've read, I've enjoyed.

So, okay, her sister found them all after she died, Lavinia, Vinny.

And she destroyed a lot of paperwork, but correspondence and stuff like that.

So there was this mad argument between two sides of the family.

It's all a bit complicated because her brother was called Austin Dickinson.

And her brother had a mistress called Mabel Loomis.

Todd, right?

So some of the poems went there, some of the poems went to the family of her brother.

And basically, the two halves of Dickinson's literary estate were in different hands.

Neither family owned all the manuscripts and neither could produce a complete Dickinson.

One side sold them to Harvard for about half a million dollars in modern money.

So then Harvard have claimed ownership of Dickinson in general.

And for, you know, for a while, people have asked permission to Harvard to quote lines of Dickinson.

So basically, it's vexed.

It feels like Amherst could be a good setting for a soap opera.

Yeah.

They shagged on Emily Dickinson's dining room table for the first time.

Sorry, who?

Who's that?

Sorry, yeah,

that should have been clear.

Austin and Mabel, who he was having their fare with.

Okay.

With an Emily and Lavinia new, it seemed like a business was open.

It was a concert for me.

I know.

On the dining table.

Ooh.

Hey, we've got it in writing firsthand.

So it's Austin and Mabel.

Yes.

Okay.

And it's so weird because Emily never met Mabel, but they were having an affair for 13 years.

And Mabel would come round to Emily's house, which was next door, and they'd have sex on the dining room table.

And Mabel actually played piano for Emily once, and Emily listened from behind a corner in the house and sort of delivered her a glass of sherry at the end to say, well done, lovely playing.

Just very quickly on the recluse and all wearing white and all that kind of stuff martha nell smith who's like one of the main scholars of dickinson um she works at the university of maryland and she says that actually a lot of the image that we know now of dickinson is kind of victorian propaganda uh and that i'll kind of say paraphrase what she says she says you know how right now if you have a rock star you kind of have this idea of sex drugs rock and roll wearing black all that kind of stuff well in the late 19th century the idea of a woman poet would be someone who had a a secret sorrow, someone who was reclusive, someone who dressed in white.

And she reckons that a lot of the stories that we hear now are quite exaggerated.

I mean, obviously she did stay in the house a lot, but a lot of them are exaggerated because that was our idea of a poet at the time.

That is really interesting.

And the sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

I mean, to be fair, people used to accuse her, not accuse her, but say it was all about a lost love or she was spurned in love.

And immediately after she died, like the 1890s, people are saying, well, she must have been cheated on by some bloke.

And actually, actually, I think she might have shagged someone in her house.

So we see

over which table, Anna.

We think that I can't remember what he was called, but someone came to visit who was a great admirer and have a little dalliance, maybe.

She was actually, she was quite sociable for a recluse.

She was like, You know, how hermits we always talked about hermits before, and they'd have people visit them constantly every day.

And she did sort of think it was Webster, and he was like, Nice ass, nice boobs, nice anyway

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

My fact is that, as well as a caterpillar which avoids predators by pretending to be a bird, there is a bird which avoids predators by pretending to be a caterpillar.

You could pretend to be a caterpillar who's pretending to be a bird.

Yeah, then you don't have to do any disguise.

You just

say, I'm a caterpillar.

Is it because that does sound like it's it's come up with this and it's walked into the room full of birds and thought I've fucked up.

How is that helping?

These are two separate species.

One of them, actually, we have mentioned before, I should fess up.

It's called the North American Walnut Sphinx Caterpillar.

It's not a walnut, it's not a Sphinx, but it screams like a bird, which is the way it avoids predators.

It's a weird Nellie Fertado version of that side.

Yeah, it's like it makes the alarm call that a bird would make if it had seen a bird of prey.

And so the other birds that would be eating the the caterpillar think, oh god, there's a bird of prey in there.

And just one extra detail on it, the report on Audubon.org, great bird website, says that the insect can be, I'm quoting here, as loud as a freight train from fifty feet away.

Slightly have my doubts about that.

It depends how close you move the caterpillar to your ear.

So you know, if you put the caterpillar right, right down, like shove it into your ear, right next to your eardrum, it'll be the same as a train, all that distance.

I see what you're saying.

I thought what they were saying here was that if you have a freight train fifty feet away and you have the caterpillar fifty feet away,

it feels like that's a pointless use of the phrase 50 feet.

Yeah.

Okay, so anyway, the bird, just quickly, is called the Cenereus Mourner bird, and it lives in the Amazon, so it's probably not going to come across this caterpillar anytime soon.

And the chicks imitate poisonous caterpillars, specifically the chicks.

They have these spiky orange feathers, and it moves.

When its parents are away, it moves in this weird, slinky way, and it looks genuinely exactly like a poisonous caterpillar local to the region.

You've seen the first, it's insane.

Yeah, it's absolutely insane.

And it does this right at the beginning, so it's only the first 20 days that it mimics this caterpillar.

And it's, yeah, when you see pictures of it, it just looks exactly like this caterpillar.

And when even the mother comes back to feed them, so it's because the mother has to go away, do all the foraging that they're open to predators.

It's only when the mother comes back and makes the actual like bird call, like

that they go, oh, okay, now we can give it up.

Because if she comes back and doesn't do that, they still pretend to be the caterpillars.

It's absolutely incredible.

I would bring, if I was a predator, I would bring back one of those caterpillars and I would make the caterpillar do a bird call and then trick the chicks into thinking that it was their parents.

Yes, exactly.

But they sort of like, it's not even just the look, they're the same size as the caterpillars as well.

They're 12 centimeters long.

I mean, it's

that feels important when it comes to camouflage.

You know, if they make themselves look like an elephant, but they're 12 centimeters long, no one's going to get tricked by that.

The caterpillar, it looks like is from the family Megalopigidae.

And you might have seen this caterpillar or a related caterpillar on the internet because it's got very bushy, sort of blondish hair.

They're actually pointy, kind of venomous bristles that they have.

But they have been known as the Trumper pillar because it looks like Donald Trump's hair has fallen off.

Yeah, yeah.

That's so cool.

I didn't realize they were in that.

They're related, yeah.

And have they evolved to disguise themselves as Donald Trump to escape

They do look like the ones that they disguise themselves look a bit like that Donald Trump hair one, right?

They're quite kind of bushy and

yeah, it's just the colour difference.

These ones are orange, but they both look a bit quiffy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's a thing called Batesian mimicry, isn't it?

The bird is definitely doing this because it's where a harmonic species looks like a noxious species, so predators avoid them.

I think that and a type of owl are the only two that do the Batesian mimicry.

There's an owl that burrows underneath the ground and when it feels like a predator is coming in, it hisses like a rattlesnake.

It's got like a ths kind of

thing.

There's a caterpillar called the Biston Robustum caterpillar and it can make itself look like a twig.

Okay.

That's good.

It's a standard camouflage.

But it can also make itself smell exactly like a twig.

Isn't that cool?

That is so cool.

So not only will like a bird going past will see a twig and not go and eat it, if there's an ant that goes past it, it'll walk along the twig and then it'll just walk along the caterpillar and think that it's on a twig.

And the reason that we know that works is if you put the caterpillar on another twig that smells different, the ants will notice it.

So it'll only hide it on this very specific thing and they hunt by pheromones or they, you know, they detect things through pheromones and through smell.

So it does it have to smell like the twig of a particular plant?

The one that it's on, yeah.

So it needs that plant identification app, presumably, to work out which tree to go up onto.

I just got that app.

It's changed my life.

Really?

Plus, I find it's not very reliable in my garden, I must say.

I've uprooted everything.

You bought yourself a horse chestnut scent, and you lie on branches.

That is so cool.

That is amazing.

That's incredible.

And they get their smell probably by eating bits of that plant.

So that's

okay, right.

Have you guys seen the great potu?

No.

Such a good bird.

It's basically big animals that are camouflaged are kind of cool to us in a way, right?

And the great potu is a 60-centimetre-tall bird that disguises itself as a tree branch.

And it's such a great life because it just stands on a tree.

It has exactly the right colourings to look like sort of broken up bark.

And it has to stand at a bit of an angle because, you know, a branch will branch off the main trunk at an angle.

So it leans forward a little bit, points its beak right upwards so that it just goes up in a straight line.

The only problem is it has these giant eyes which glow.

So it's really, really beautiful.

So

what do people think that is?

It just closes its eyes.

It has to close its eyes the whole time.

But then that's not very useful for catching.

But it can't tell also if someone's approaching it.

Exactly.

Because

if someone's approaching it or someone's nearby and it closes its eyes,

well, that's the problem.

But how does it tell if the coast is clear?

So when it closes its eyes, its eyes open.

If God closes one eye, it opens another.

It's got a tiny slit on its eyelid.

And it's actually able to move this slit around depending on where it wants to look.

So it can just peer through.

That's amazing.

60 centimetres.

Yes.

I would describe myself as two rulers.

Why are you going to make yourself transparent?

Well, a wooden ruler.

Oh, yeah.

But you want to, if you're camouflaging, you want to be a transparent ruler, don't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would just grow the word shatterproof on my chest.

Shout boing all the time.

And then just eat unsuspecting school teachers.

Humans camouflage, don't we?

Yeah.

From time to time.

In war?

In war.

In World War II, in fact, there was at least one American soldier who would put lace doilies on his helmet to camouflage himself whenever it was snowing.

That's a piece of furniture.

That's white.

Or a teapot.

That kind of stuff pretends what you put a doily on, isn't it?

You put it over

the back of an armchair, I think.

Yeah, a little doily.

He's not

mimicking anything.

He's just trying to hide himself.

There's a German disguised as a teapot sitting in some of the Brits

barracks.

Closer, closer.

Sorge, that chair's moving.

That'd be ridiculous.

That's incredible.

Yeah,

I saw a picture on Reddit and I thought it couldn't possibly be true, but I found it in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1945.

So it definitely happened.

It's just to look blended with the snow, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

It definitely did happen.

We don't know that definitely did work, do we?

No, we don't.

And this picture was in 1945, so we certainly got towards the end of the war.

That was good.

That's amazing.

I was reading about a trend in parent stuff, parent clobber, a trend of, you know, baby carriers, of slings that you put the baby.

Like a pusse kind of thing.

Like a papoose, yeah, yeah.

But there's a growing trend for ones aimed at men to have them in camo colouration

so that men feel less uncomfortable carrying their baby around.

Right.

Like full camo gear.

So you feel like like you're in jungle warfare, but actually, you're just taking your baby to the shop.

So no one's going, what baby?

It's the men who still want to play the field a bit, maybe chat some people up, disguise the baby.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're in bars, camo, shouting up women.

Yeah, pretty single, preenisy at the moment.

What's that?

Oh, it's my Pedra.

Pedra.

And he's chatting up as quite a long time ago.

Last time you were chatting anyone up.

I think we've established his man a pretty old school.

He's a doctor.

That's it.

He's a doctor.

Yeah.

It's quite Piers Morgany, isn't it?

Was he the one who kind of said, oh, I can't believe this celebrity man is carrying a baby?

It was Daniel Craig, I think.

Literally James Bond himself carrying a baby and Piers Morgan was going, oh.

He's actually doing it in every Bond movie.

You just can't see it.

Very irresponsible.

Do you remember a few years back when Trump set up the Space Force?

Oh, yeah.

They did the official uniform of the Space Force.

It wasn't his idea, was it?

There was a caterpillar on his head who was whispering the idea to him.

That would explain.

An awful lot.

But yeah, when they released it, they got mocked a lot for it because it was camouflage gear.

Oh, like jungle camouflage gear.

Yeah, jungle camouflage with Space Forces.

Whereas what you should wear in space, I guess, is one of those kind of kids' pajama sets that has a black sky

constellation.

Who attacked you?

Well, I don't know.

Look like Orion, maybe.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we 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, you you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

Also, check out our upcoming tour dates.

They're happening later this year.

We'd love to see you there.

Otherwise, do come back next week.

We'll be here with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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