411: No Such Thing As Cristiano Ronaldo Eating Pistachios

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Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

This week, coming to you live from Manchester.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that theories for the origin of life on earth include primordial soup, primordial sandwich,

primordial soup and sandwich,

primordial pizza, and primordial mayonnaise.

Is there a primordial salad option, please?

For a primordial vegan.

No, so this is, I was reading about the origin of life, and I think a few people might know about primordial soup.

That is the idea where you might get a puddle or something and there's loads of molecules in there and somehow they self-arrange and then those self-arranged molecules manage to replicate and they make life.

Now, there's a lot of problems with primordial soup, so people have come up with other theories.

So how do these molecules get in the right place?

Primordial sandwich is you've got two rocks and they kind of squish the molecules together.

Primordial soup and sandwich, you've got the soup and you've got the rocks and that's all kind of all together.

Primordial pizza, you just have a rock and the molecules are on top.

Okay.

Nice and nice.

Primordial mayonnaise is like a load of fat bubbles and kind of the molecules grow in the fat bubbles.

And for all I know, none of them's true.

Yeah.

Because we all know God made us.

So thank you.

Is this one person just kind of just tossing all this shit out?

Yes, it's me.

Lots of scientists have talked about all these different things, but I'm the one who's kind of put them together in a jovial little sentence.

Have they called them those things?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're real names.

Right, okay.

Yeah, yeah, they're real names.

I didn't think you had the imagination to call it primordial pizza.

Okay.

Is there one that's most likely?

You know, what are we getting?

I think at the moment, yeah, kind of the soup and sandwich is quite liked by people.

So it's not soup and sandwich per se, it's a soup sandwich.

It is a bit, isn't it?

That doesn't sound quite as appetizing as a soup sandwich.

So it sounds like it's a sandwich floating on some soup.

A primordial crouton, if you will.

Yes, very nice.

I thought it was a soup in between two bits of bread.

That's what it is, unfortunately.

Oh, that is...

That's fucking out there for a theory.

So the idea of primordial soup, which was the first one of these theories, it was thought of first of all by two people actually independently, a British guy called JBS Haldane and a Russian scientist called Alexander Operin.

And the interesting thing about him, he came up with primordial soup, but then later in life, he edited a book that contains at least 113 different recipes for actual soup.

It makes you suspicious about the primordial soup theory, because it sounds like he's just really into soup.

Yeah,

he's just pushing his next career.

Yeah, it's such a weird switcheroo to go from proper organic chemistry stuff to editing a cookbook.

Yes, it would be weird, apart from it was in the Soviet Union and all sorts of weird stuff was happening.

Basically, they had this kind of propaganda cookbook that they would give to all, well, all married couples would get one basically.

You know, it was the right kind of Soviet food that you should be eating.

And at the time, they'd just done Sputnik and they were kind of pushing themselves as scientists in the Soviet Union, as the best scientists in the world.

And they thought, well, our cookbook should also be really scientific.

So we're going to get our best scientist, who's this guy, Operin, and we're going to say, you're going to edit it.

That makes

that's like that michelin bloke who makes foam shit you've been just written yeah exactly blumenthal master blumenthal yeah is it like him yeah he basically does chemistry doesn't he's like it's like if professor stephen hawkins um did a cookbook right okay yeah i thought you meant the actual michelin man when you said that

it really threw me for a second a lot of marshmallow stuff that book that cookbook by the way that it was called the book of tasty and healthy food yeah that was its name and it was published in 1939 and as you said james it's all kind of like 400 different recipes, all good Soviet fare.

But unfortunately, because it was the Soviet Union, the book kept on being purged.

And so there were all these strongly

radical changes in direction.

So it used to be a very internationalist book.

And then that went out of fashion.

And so they just cut all the international stuff.

Borsched, every page borsched.

It was kind of.

Yeah, and then there were lots of quotes from Stalin all the way through the book.

And then Stalin died, 1953.

Cut all Stalin quotes gone.

Yeah, I must say, say, I know that there's at least 113 different recipes for soup because I read through the book and just searched for the word soup or Borsch or Buion or whatever, and that's as many as I found.

There might be more for all I know.

But yeah.

Wow.

And yeah, this was a really important book.

Like you say, it was the book of tasty and healthy food, but sometimes just known as Kniger, just the book.

That's how famous it was, this book.

It was just called the book.

And everyone knew what you were talking about.

Oh, that's awesome.

Wow.

Hey, there's that old thing,

it's a sort of a thing that Einstein said, which was he said that his second best idea that he ever had was to boil his eggs in soup, because then you're saving up on some washing up.

You're using one less thing.

And, you know, that's a thing that I think.

Isn't that good, though?

It feels like you get like an eggs come out of a chicken's bum, right?

Yeah.

Well, well, not technically, actually, interestingly.

Okay.

We're close.

I'll tell you later.

It's come out of the same place as the feces come, right?

That's a good point.

And so do do you really want that in your soup?

That's a very good point.

When you boil stuff, it gets rid of all the stuff in it.

Yeah, but you're not going to do a shit in your hinds, are you?

It's like.

Good.

That could take off as a saying, though.

You've really shat the hinds today.

Actually, there is a thing called yellow soup, which is basically

Pu'in soup, which was a delicacy in China back a long time ago.

So I think it was in the fourth century.

There was a Chinese recipe for yellow soup, very popular.

It was put forward by a doctor, and he said this guy called Gui Hong gave this recipe for broth that involved drying and fermenting some healthy person's poo and stirring it into a broth, and then you give it to a sick person and it makes them better.

And of course, the good thing about that is

it bloody works.

Yeah, we've discovered now with fecal transplants these days.

I mean, sorry, can we just roll back at the whole it works thing?

This doesn't sound like that would have worked.

It probably didn't work.

He had the right idea though.

I think he was on the right track.

Yeah.

Yellow soup?

Worth a try, I would say.

Fair enough.

Don't boil it too much, otherwise you might lose the microorganisms for the transplant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you should have called it brown windsor.

But that was already a soup.

Is it?

1500 years later.

Brown soup was a really weird soup.

It was this sort of mythical soup.

It wasn't mythical, it was real, but it wasn't in many places.

It was just sort of a horrible cheap soup that was in lots of restaurants around the turn of the 20th century.

And it kind of had a posh name, so it sounded classy.

But it was basically leftover meat.

And the ingredients were...

Sorry, what was it called brown soup?

Brown Windsor.

Brown Windsor, sorry, posh name.

Because brown is not a posh thing, but once you put it next to Windsor.

Isn't that gruel?

That sounds like gruel.

It's not gruel.

It's definitely soup.

Hmm, yeah.

Why do you think?

What a spectrum we're on now between gruel, soup, broth, stew, you know.

Well, I had gruel.

Have you had gruel?

It's just like porridge, isn't it?

Just like crap porridge.

What do you mean by having gruel?

What do you mean talking about?

It's not a thing.

Oh, you were in the when you were living with Mr.

Bumble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, God, that sounded so rough.

I can't believe how badly you bullied Oliver.

That was harsh.

Did you ever get that second helping that you wanted?

I had gruel, and I don't, I'm not sure that many people have gruel.

When did you have it, and what was it?

Oh, I went to this party where the table, you had to play a game, and on one side of the table was really good food, and on the other side was gruel.

And so it was like the worst kind of food and if you lost the game you moved down a seat and you went all the way down and I had a partner who desperately wanted to go to the good food yeah as everyone else did but I'd never had gruel before so I was like

surely we got to head that way and we and I kept making us go that way and she threw an entire glass of red wine all over my shirt.

Whoa.

Yeah, you know, like in the movies.

That's an overreaction.

Did you get to eat and taste it though?

I did.

And you enjoyed it?

It was horrific.

It was the worst thing I've ever tasted.

It sounds like Brown Windsor.

I thought you you were going to say that you kissed a gruel and you liked it.

The room's been divided.

Um

soup could maybe cure malaria,

which is a big deal because it's a big old killer.

And this was discovered by some schoolchildren.

So, and this was in a study that was authored by school children.

It's the only study I've ever found authored by schoolchildren.

And it was a really short time ago.

There's a parent at a local school in London called Jake Baum.

And he also happened to be a professor of cell biology.

And he decided it would be fun to suggest a class project where all the kids brought in a vial of the soup that their mum made them or their dad made them whenever they were sick, whenever they were ill.

And then he'd like suggested that in their science class, the science teacher must have hated this parent.

He suggested they spin out all the soups in this centrifuge, which I guess the school then had to invest in.

in and then test them on a malaria parasite and see because you know soup traditionally chicken soup is supposed to make you feel better.

There must be something in it.

It's this old wives thing.

And they did indeed find that five of the soups reduced the growth or the sexual development of the parasites by over 50%, which is exactly the same as malaria drugs.

Wow.

Isn't that incredible?

So do we have to inject ourselves with this soup?

We would, but the problem is, so this was published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood in 2019, but none of the parents had written down the ingredients of any of the soups they they sent in.

Oh no.

So we have no idea.

Just inject any soup into yourself, just in case.

My soup has got paracetamol in it.

That's hilarious.

Do you know in 1782, if you were in Haymarket in London, you could pay your very own money to go and have a bath in some soup?

Oh, wow.

Yeah, this was a thing in the

17th and 18th century in the whole of Europe, not just in the UK, that people just seemed to bathe in soups.

Wow.

Really?

And it was supposed to be good for you.

It was supposed to, like, you know, there's very healthy, instead of just normal water, you were getting some of the vitamins into your body.

What flavor?

Any particular

veal or other broths.

So that could be literally anything.

James, would you rather a bowl of soup that had a chicken's pooey egg sitting inside it,

or a bowl of soup with Andy sitting inside it?

What flavour is the soup?

Wow,

tomato, let's say.

Oh, no, I don't really like tomato soup.

Okay.

It goes great with Andy, though.

I get your point.

Yeah, definitely.

That's weird because I've never, you know, you read novels written in the 19th century, 18th century, and never once have any of the characters been described as bathing in a tomato soup.

That's because it's so catidian.

It's like everyone was doing it all the time.

It's like, why even write it in the novels?

Got it.

It's like writing cleaning your teeth.

But the other thing is that at the moment, in the Yonesan spa resort in Hakone in Japan, you can go into a ramen bath.

So it's still happening in Japan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Apparently, the collagen in the pork broth is supposed to give you healthier skin.

You would not eat in that spa restaurant afterwards, though, would you?

You'd be suspicious.

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We do need to move on though to our second fact.

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

My fact this week is that the world's oldest postcard was sent by a writer called Theodore Hook.

He sent it to himself.

Wow.

Theodore.

What did it say, Wish I Was Here?

So it was sent in 1840 and it was sent in London, in Fulham.

And it was a postcard where you could see people who were working at the post office around a big inkwell.

And the idea was that that was satirizing the post system.

So he sent it to himself.

So that means the only other person who's seen it would have been the postman, right?

Yes.

And he'll see this and he'd think, you bastard.

Yeah.

Is that the idea?

Yeah, exactly.

And it was, you know,

there wasn't a big laugh here, but back in the day, that was huge satire.

I would have had people on the floor.

floor.

So yeah, and so there was other postcards thought to be the the oldest, and then this came up in an auction, and it sold for, including commission and VAT, £31,000, $750,000.

So it's, yeah, a really expensive item.

And I think partially as well because Theodore Hook was quite an amazing prankster of the 1800s.

He achieved what is known as the Berner Street hoax, which was one of the greatest hoaxes that London ever had.

It was a hoax where he said to his friend, I bet you I can make one single house, the most famous house in London.

And they bet some money on it.

And he said, go for it.

And he managed to do it.

So what he did was he sent out thousands of letters to people, workmen all over the country, and said, can you arrive on the morning of this day, August 27th, in order to do something to the house?

So this one woman opened up her door on the morning of August 27th to a chimney sweep.

And she said, I didn't order a chimney sweep.

And she turned it away.

Then another chimney sweep came and she turned him away.

Ten more chimney sweeps came, turned him away.

Then carts carrying large deliveries of coal came, turned them away.

Then cake makers delivering large wedding cakes.

Then doctors and lawyers came.

There were vicars, there were fishmongers.

It was just getting bigger and bigger.

And eventually, the Duke of York came along.

There was the governor of the Bank of England.

The Archbishop of Canterbury came along.

Oh, yes.

And you know, there's a lot of like what's real and not real in this story through the passage of time.

Imagine opening your door and seeing the Duke of York outside.

I think we can all agree.

It's bad news.

But this was 18.

Maybe he was just delivering some Pizza Express.

This just sounds like when you're at home in the middle of a Wednesday and all of your neighbours are out and then the postman knocks on the door and he goes, can you take number 10s?

Can you take number 12s?

79 pounds.

He was a crazy person.

And the thing was that he just, they randomly chose that house, didn't they?

It was like literally, they just went through a phone book if there was one in the day or whatever the equivalent was and went, oh, let's just choose that house.

So she had nothing to do with it.

Oh, she had no idea.

Yeah, she was absolutely befuddled.

And so this was 1809.

So this was a number of years before the postcard was sent.

And so by this time, when the postcard went out and it saw that it had Theodore Hooke's name on it, it was assumed he must have been sending it to himself as part of the prank.

We don't actually know that he sent it to himself.

That's the assumption.

But it is correct because it would be weird to receive the first ever postcard because you wouldn't know what it was, really.

It would be a baffling thing to experience.

You're right, yeah.

But you'd figure it out.

It's not like

this is 1840, you'd go insane.

I know what you're saying, but this is just a one-off.

He sent it to himself.

So someone else must have been the first person to get a postcard, right?

Oh, yeah.

They all ended up in asylums back in the day.

They were populated by postcard recipients.

Postcard.

History of the postcard is amazing because they were invented in the late 19th century and they sort of, you know, there were various stages of innovation.

The biggest innovation came in in the divided back period.

Oh, sorry, it was known as the divided back period, which is where finally, for the first time ever, you get a picture on one side, and then the back of the card is divided into address and message, right?

Before that, one whole side had to be for the address and the stamp.

It was serious, and then the message had to go on the other side next to the picture.

Nightmare.

Once you got nice picture postcards, it took off like nothing had ever done before.

It was incredible.

In 1910, in the UK, 800 million postcards were sent.

And the population was a lot lower than it is now.

That is a lot of people postcards per person being sent to the business.

I think it was 25 postcards per person per year around about that time.

I think a lot of people were doing a lot of postcarding as well.

It wasn't everyone was doing that, was it?

It was like some people were sending three a day, four a day, stuff like that.

Because they had like loads of posts.

You had like four or five posts every day, didn't you?

Yeah.

So you could send, I could send you a postcard, and he's saying, What the fuck are you doing in my soup?

And then the same day, you could send one back, like saying, I'm just having a nice time, thanks.

Or whatever.

So it was, we know the exact date.

March 1st, 1907 was the official birth of the modern postcard when they put that singular line down the middle that separated message from a ghost.

I would go anywhere in time.

I would go there.

The reason that they did that, of course, is because what they thought was if you put the message and the address on the same side, then in the post office, they would just get distracted by reading all of the messages.

Or there might be some sexy messages in there and they'd get embarrassed.

Yeah, they're a bit scandalous.

People objected to postcards back in the day because of this idea that the postman or woman could read all of your dirty secrets.

And in fact, aside from that, there was lots of other controversy.

So they were thought of as killing the art of writing because, you know, they're short form.

They were basically the text messages of their day.

There was an article written in 1884, so quite soon after postcards had taken off, saying, Who nowadays writes letters?

We all dash off hasty notes or hurriedly scribble a postcard.

The epistolary art so dear to our grandmothers is becoming extinct.

And that's 150 years ago they were whinging about that and they haven't shut up.

Well,

it was true.

Winky face.

You know,

you could get postcards made of moss back in the day.

Alpha,

sorry, just a little

moss fact here.

Some were made of wood, but birch bark.

Canada had leather ones, and Ireland had cards made of peat moss.

Wow.

How did he write on that?

They processed the peat moss in some way to make it that you could write on it.

That makes sense.

How?

I don't know.

But nonetheless.

They banned those in America, I think.

I'm not sure about the moss ones, but definitely the wood ones they banned in America.

You could only send paper or cardboard ones.

That's because they jammed the post machines.

So they had leather ones, they had wood ones, like you said.

And the thing is about the wood ones, they tended to have really terrible jokes on them.

So like you might go to an exposition about wood or something and get a wooden postcard, and it would say the exposition is more than oak A.

Right.

It's astonishing.

I would spruce up and come.

You will not regret it.

Is that you, Walnut?

You know what it wasn't?

They missed that one.

Lazy.

No trick missed.

Well, that's what you get for going to a wood symposium, I've got to say.

We do need to talk about the Saucy Seaside Postcard.

I'm sorry, we have to.

What is it?

The saucy seaside postcard is a great institution of the 20th century, which is just a slightly rude postcard with a slightly funny little saucy

saucy.

You recognize them.

They're always like buxom women bursting out of red swimming costumes, a very 50s style with a raunchy, rude comment underneath.

Okay, cool.

Thank you.

Yeah, exactly.

So kind of.

Saucy.

Saucy.

I've never said the word saucy so many times in my life, but I love it.

And basically,

one artist in particular, Donald

McGill, was one of the great artists of this.

He did about sort of nine a week until he died.

It was incredible.

But there was trouble because there were seaside censorship boards which assessed the sauciness of the postcards and banned them if they were too rude.

So there was a Blackpool board that you had to submit all your postcards to before they could go on sale.

There was another on the Isle of Wight.

And the members were things like there was a solicitor, a vicar, a bank manager, and Mrs.

Gloria Swanson of the Blackpool Hotel and Boarding House Association.

And they would sit in judgment over the postcards.

And if you had one, for example, there's one of a girl talking to a bookie at a race course, and she's saying, I want to back the favourite, please.

My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways.

Okay?

That's.

I think that's a good joke.

But Mrs.

Gloria Swanson, absolutely not.

Banned.

And these kept going until the Isle of Man Committee lasted until 1989.

Wow.

Did he know then he got cancelled, basically, didn't he?

Yeah, he did.

In the 50s, really, wasn't it?

When they properly just clamped down,

he was found guilty of breaking the Obscene Publications Act and, you know, fined and

just reputation destroyed.

Very sad.

And then went bankrupt.

And also, the other weird thing that we should mention about him is that he only had one foot.

Okay.

And he lost his foot, his other foot, in a rugby accident.

Oh, true.

Which I didn't know was even possible.

But yeah.

Just on the sort of censorship thing, that was a thing not just for postcards.

I'm sure I must have mentioned it on the podcast a long time ago, but the lead singer of Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant, I think his name is, he used to work for Marvel, and his job was whenever comic books came in, he would have to cover up the cleavage line on women that were acceptable in America, but not here.

I mean, that was, you know, in the 70s and 80s.

It was good work if you could get it.

He wouldn't say no to that job.

As a 15-year-old intern, you'd be loving that.

Do you know, the other amazing thing about postcards is that back in the day, it was the source of sometimes allowing you to see.

Oh, that's very nice.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Allowing you to see an image that you would otherwise have never seen.

So, newspapers back in the day, say in American newspapers, largely completely text-based.

So, if it said something like, an accident, train crashes, or something where you might rubber neck it, you know, it's like I'm curious to see a disaster, a photo would be taken and it would be printed onto these postcards.

And people would send each other these postcards just to show them a news event as opposed to having anything to say.

So it became a huge source of being able to just source, being able to see

everything that was happening in the world prior to newspapers allowing us to watch it.

It was basically Twitter, wasn't it?

Yeah, or text message, that kind of thing, WhatsApp, that kind of thing.

It was just like people sharing information.

It was quite weird though, when people used to send postcards of burning buildings and screaming car crash victims, and then they wrote on the back, wish you were here.

It was an odd time.

But there was like political stuff as well, wasn't there?

Like the suffrage movement, there was a big battle of postcards of that.

So there were a lot of anti-suffrage postcards where they would like mock the suffragettes and say, you know, if you're a suffragette, you'll never get married, all that kind of thing.

And then there were pro-suffragette postcards where you would have like really iconic women on them and try and push people in that direction.

And often both types were made by the same company.

Right.

Both ways.

We're going to have to move on in a second, guys, to our next I don't think the suffragettes would have approved of that joke, having

it.

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

My fact is that the first man to kill people by guillotine was briefly so fashionable that French people would dress up as him.

It's called Charles Henri Senson, and he was the chief executioner to Louis XVI, and then he was the executioner of Louis XVII in a very weird job, Switzerland.

He was like, undercover boss.

Well, that went wrong.

Yeah, and the French Revolution, obviously, that was a time of great social change, to put it mildly.

And

he was very famous during the period known as the Terror.

And he had this uniform.

It was stripy trousers, tricord hat, green coat, quite dashing.

And he was just so fashionable in Paris at the time that he became someone people dressed up up as.

And fashionable because of his awesome stripy trousers and tricord hat or because of what he was doing?

I think because of the guillotine.

I actually am not so sure actually because he was really really fashionable like you say he wore blue trousers to start off with but they were so worried about him being so fashionable that they banned him from wearing blue trousers and from then on he was only allowed to wear green trousers.

And they said the blue is the colour of the nobility, you're not allowed to wear them.

Right.

I think if the French Revolutionary Committee were telling you off for dressing as the nobility, pre-revolution.

Oh, you're kidding.

Oh, okay, that's fair enough, right, right.

I see.

That's not fair enough, it's bad.

I don't approve of Louis XVII or the French Revolution.

We know what side you're on now.

But the early days of it, there did seem to be a bit of colour coordination going on, and the colour being red.

So the account that I read was you had the

person who was about to be killed had a red t-shirt on.

T-shirt.

Yep.

Cool.

They have some converse, didn't they?

Is it in Star Trek where all the red people die?

Or am I...

Ah, yes, exactly.

I'm so far out of my comfort zone here.

Yeah, so he had a red t-shirt on.

He had a lot of fun.

Can we just give it some time-appropriate names?

So, what did they wear back then?

Just no tea, I think.

Ah.

Okay, so, wow, that's very pannickety to pick that up.

The t-shirt was invented in the 20th century.

It's a very anachronistic thing to hear t-shirts in the French Revolution.

People are going to think they're having some sort of a strange thing.

Or did I just bust a time traveller?

Okay.

What colour were his jeans?

So he had a red shirt on and

the and Charles,

is that the name?

Charles?

He had a cape on which was red and the guillotine itself was red.

So red was very much the dominant theme here.

What I guess

it doesn't show the stains.

Was the guillotine definitely red pre-execution?

It wasn't just.

I think this was for the very first execution.

I guess maybe they were just trying to hide the gore.

And unfortunately, when they did it, it was because this was new and they had huge crowds that came to see it because everyone was so fascinated by all of these public deaths.

The crowds were really disappointed because it was really efficient and quick and over like that.

And they were like, ah, we were, you know, we brought sandwiches.

We're going to be here a while.

And it was just like, ah, it was too efficient who got

rioted.

People rioted.

Three people died in the riots about how efficient the new guillotine was.

Really?

Yeah.

The worst thing about that one, so that guy who was killed in the first guillotine, he was called Pelletier.

They decided, okay,

we're going to stop hanging people because we think everyone should be killed exactly the same way.

Because, you know, with the French Revolution, it shouldn't be that the nobility get a good way of dying and the other people don't.

So everyone's going to be killed with a sword, with an axe.

And then this guy, Sansong, decided, well, actually,

my axe isn't good enough for that.

I won't be able to get through enough people, so we need a new way of doing it.

And so they came up with this idea of the guillotine, but this guy had already been found guilty and was already sentenced to death.

And he had to sit there and watch it be built

because he couldn't be executed until it was built.

Did he have to go through the kind of like brainstorming meetings with them saying, what about this?

I feel like he'd like steal a screw or something with you.

But Sanson, the executioner, he was part of this um extraordinary dynasty of executioners um so six generations of his family performed this role great-grandfather grandfather father uh all six of his brothers all six of his brothers were also executioners in different bits of france wow yeah mad it's really bizarre and they called them just by the name of the town they were the executioner so they didn't even call them by their first name they would call them rim or orleon or étent yeah it's it's just it's bizarre and he when you read about his life he mostly had a series of protracted workplace disputes with his bosses, who were either the royalty or the revolutionary committee.

So

he was saying, look, I'm broke.

There are so many people to be executed.

My working conditions are bad.

I need a budget increase.

He was asking for a budget increase from the Minister of Justice, which was days after he had executed the previous Minister of Justice.

I think that's when you've got leverage.

Absolutely.

Yeah, he just had all of these disputes, like running irritating disputes.

He once sued someone for libel for saying that he was boorish or brutish.

Wow.

He's an executioner.

It's also a weird thing, which is, I don't know if this is the original moment where this idea came about, but there's a lot of question about at what point, once the head is removed from the body, does the person actually pass away?

And there were all these experiments of like...

trying to get people to blink posts.

So, you know, talking to the dismembered person.

There was a theory, I think, like, I remember reading when I was a kid even, that they stay alive for like seven or eight seconds or something.

So there was this thing with Charles Henri, which is when he had executed a woman who was called Charlotte Cordet.

Someone, a carpenter, jumped up and grabbed her head and he picked it up and he slapped her on the face.

So a horrible thing to do,

post-a beheading.

I mean, you don't mind, I don't think, at that stage.

Well, this is the thing.

Apparently she did.

Because apparently witnesses reported an expression of unequivocal indignation on her face after she was slapped.

And

everyone thought, oh, maybe you actually last a bit longer.

You last long enough to be annoyed by something.

But yeah, for a while afterwards, there were a lot of studies into if that's the case because of Charlotte's

behaviour.

The original guillotine invented in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Yeah.

So

good.

Well done.

Well, are we saying that that's good?

Because I would say because it's in Yorkshire it's bad

debate debate

to chop off the heads of people in Lancashire wasn't it?

It was called the Halifax gibbet but it was a mechanism for doing the same kind of thing and Daniel Defoe wrote about it and he said there was this rule right that if you could pull your head so there was a pin that got pulled and that

dropped the chopper.

But if

the order was given to pull the pin and you managed to pull your head out of the block in time, you were then free to run

as far as you could.

The executioner was entitled to chase you under the rules of this system.

But if you got across the river, you were home, not home dry, home very wet, but you were free.

You were not going to be executed anymore.

And so that apparently was a rule they had in place.

It seems like a bad rule.

You can spot people who've done it because they'd always have a bold patch on the top of their head.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

My fact this week is that in Sicily, the pistachios are guarded by the military police.

Not a very stressful occupation, I would guess.

Well,

they're a very dangerous industry, turns out, sort of.

They are very valuable, pistachios in Sicily.

They're called green gold there.

They're different to all pistachios in the rest of the world.

They're farmed in a place called Bronte.

And

they're mu thought of as much better and richer and deeper flavor than any other pistachios.

They only constitute about 1% of the world's supply, less, but they're the best.

And so people keep stealing them.

And loads of pistachio farmers were complaining, saying literally people are rocking up with guns and holdings at gunpoint and stealing all our pistachios.

There was one person who said they'd heard a story of someone like repelling down from the air and scooping pistachios off trees.

There would have had to be, yeah, like a big blimp above or something.

It is, I think, from the helicopter.

And I don't know if you've had to pay for the helicopter, you're going to have to pick a lot of pistachios from your ash sale.

It's kind of insane.

It's incredible that there is a version of pistachios, which apparently is even nicer than pistachios.

One of the nicest things in the world.

Yeah.

I can't imagine how good.

Because I'm sure I've never had one of these Bronte pistachios.

Yeah.

I'm sure that I'm one of the 99% in the pistachio world.

I think that's the 1%.

That's why we rioted all those years ago.

Because the people who tasted those pistachios.

How good must they be?

They must be incredible.

I actually don't, I don't think pistachios are that great, so I'm not as excited as you but I still would wouldn't mind tasting them but they're worth a lot aren't they like a one single bag could be worth up to thirty three thousand American dollars and that is a very cold bag called a supermarket bag what's like a hundred grams like a Santa sack

okay yeah I don't normally buy them in Santa sac but yeah okay

a bit a big old bag yeah that's a that's a lot how much did you sell

33 000 american dollars i believe that's incredible yeah there's uh bronte so this place uh Admiral Nelson, Lord Nelson, was the Duke of Bronte.

Yes.

And he was granted the title by the King of Naples and Sicily because he helped to put down a revolution against the King Ferdinand I.

So he never visited, but he was the Duke of Bronte.

He was very proud of that.

He always signed his name, once he was given that, Nelson and Bronte.

Or just Bronte.

And Bronte, did you say?

Not and Bronte.

But there's a connection.

Is there?

Because 10 years after Nelson died, there was a clergyman called Patrick Bronte who thought, I want to posher up my name a bit, and he changed his name to Bronte and then fathered the Bronte girls.

Yeah.

Did he get it from the pistachio place then?

Via Nelson, yeah.

He wanted to make the name posh and cool.

That's amazing.

Did not know that.

If it weren't for pistachios, we wouldn't have Mothering Heights.

Yeah, yeah, yes.

Yeah.

Very good.

And if we didn't have Manchester, we wouldn't have Jane Eyre because that's where Charlotte Bronte started writing Jane Eyre in Manchester.

So thank you all here.

I thought I'd win more of you over with that one, but

that's cool.

They're all from Yorkshire in this room.

Actually, pistachio thefts is a problem all over the world

where they make pistachios anyway.

So in America, they have a nut theft task force,

which stops nut theft in the California area.

In Turkey, apparently, they have nut vigilantes who try to stop people from stealing their pistachios.

And in Turkey, they don't repel from blimps or anything or from helicopters.

You just ram a tree with your car and knock all of the pistachios out and then just gather them up and show them in your car.

That's clever.

That's really clever.

That's really cool.

And in Sicily, it's the Carabinieri police force who guard them and they do helicopter patrols as well.

Do they ever have to fire shells at the thieves?

But I find the Carabinieri so weird that, so you know, if you go to Italy, there are two police forces and they just accept this.

So there's like the normal police.

Oh, we've got about 40, haven't we?

Okay, sure.

Sorry, there are two types of police.

So if you want to call, if you've got an emergency, you can either call the Polizia or you can call the Carabinieri.

And I can't really work out.

And one's 112 and one's 113, I think.

And this journalist was asking Italian, the Sicilians, and they didn't really know which was which.

They were like, you just pick one.

It's just...

And it's just a hangover.

It's from pre-unification even, and the Carabinieri were like the Royal Guards, and now they're just a hangover.

But they've got these really weird rules.

So they didn't used to be allowed to have facial hair for quite a long time, I think.

And now you can have quite strict facial hair.

They had to ask permission to marry if you're in the military police force.

And then once you ask permission to marry from your boss, then they do a full-on background check of your potential spouse to make sure they're appropriate.

I think that's the best one to ring, isn't it?

If they're that strict.

No?

Yeah, you don't have to ask.

I want you to send a police officer, but can you tell me about your spouse a bit first?

Yeah, that's very good.

I don't think people are calling them the day before their wedding, just to say, I've heard you're really good at it, and I've got some doubts, actually.

Wow, yeah, pistachio theft is a big, a huge deal.

So, this year, in June, I think this was in California, there was a guy, a trucker, who was arrested for allegedly stealing 42,000 pounds of pistachios.

Wait, what?

One and a half bags?

Yeah, and it's a problem because you turn up

dressed as a truck driver, looking like a truck driver.

Dressed as a truck driver.

Yeah, what if you haven't bought that Halloween costume yet?

You sort of look plausibly like a.

Wearing a t-shirt, wearing a t-shirt, yeah.

And so now drivers have to have thumbprints, photo ID, the whole deal.

And some people have hacked into trucking companies' computer systems to place fake orders for pistachios.

And then someone turns up on the day and says, I'm here for the pistachios that have been ordered.

Right.

And they drive off with all the nuts.

That's a perfect crime.

And the idea is basically that there's no kind of barcodes on these things, right?

There's just tons of nuts, and people eat the pistachios, and so that's kind of destroying all the evidence.

Perfect crime.

It's the perfect crime.

Because you get to eat pistachio nuts throughout.

It's, yeah.

Just back to Bronte for a second.

Oh, yeah.

Not the sisters, the

area with the pistachios.

There's an amazing thing when you're looking at photos of it that you suddenly notice this giant mountain that is sitting in

the background of the pistachio area, and it's Mount Etna.

And Mount Etna is given a lot of credit for the reason that the pistachios are so good, because

basically the trees are growing out of the kind of volcanic slabs that have been laid down over the passage of time.

Which is genuinely really good for soil.

Lava has all these minerals in it, which over time make it much more fertile.

So it's true.

Yeah, but it's still an active volcano.

And up until very recently, I think

it was either this year or last year, it had these huge explosions, lava explosions.

It grew in height by 100 feet.

What?

Yeah, because of all of it,

it was literally like when you put a mentos in a Diet Coke.

It was shooting a column.

You know what a volcano is.

Right.

Hang on, Daves.

I need to hear a bit more about this Mentos Curtis situation before I can visualize it.

Sorry, do you mean it grew 100 feet just temporarily while it was shooting it out?

No, no,

that column, like a mentos in a diet coke, shoots like meters upright, and this is what this did.

This was like hundreds of meters into the air, this column of stuff.

So it grew, and all the ash kind of sat on top and lava and dried up and it grew.

But it does an amazing thing, Mount Etna, which I didn't realize

volcanoes do.

It blows smoke rings occasionally,

like a really skilled smoker doing those.

You can see these beautiful plumes of perfect rings coming out the top of Mount Adner.

That's great.

So it's, yeah, there's not just the pistachios that are cool.

I'm still not going until it can do that Gandalf ship.

Then I'll visit Sicily.

Okay, I've got an economics quiz for you all.

Oh, great.

Yay!

Which is better value?

Shelled or unshelled pistachios?

Well, I would say probably it's more fun to open the shells.

And actually, it means you don't shove millions of them in your face so you kind of eat a bit less.

But presumably the shells aren't worth as much so it would be better to get unshelled.

Okay.

Good theory.

I'm going to say shelled as well purely because I think it's yeah it's the pure form right and all sorts of.

Pure form yeah.

I guess.

Okay.

I'm going to say it's impossible to answer that because you haven't told us what they cost respectively.

I can't tell you what's better value unless you tell me how much it is.

I'm sorry, I just want to

allow myself to that theory well okay let's say shell on pistachios with the shell half the price per ounce right but you only get half as many because half the space in the bag is shells and empty space so this is by a website called wonk blog which is very good by the way on these sort of nut related questions

the problem is the price is roughly equivalent per weight but it's labor it's how much work you're doing to take the shells off the pistachios and so it depends what you earn so if you're on you know 10 pounds an hour, the cost of shell on pistachios is about four pounds in labor to remove the shells if you're doing it for a certain time.

But if you earn, you know, 40 quid an hour, that's way more per bag of shell pistachios because you are having to do that.

Okay, so there's that thing about is it Cristiano Ronaldo?

It's not what if he drops a tenor on the floor, it's not worth him picking it up because it would take him longer than he's earned that amount of money.

Exactly.

Also, someone else might kick the ball away from you in the time that you went down to.

It's not a good strategy on the pitch.

I mean what's he doing on the pitch anyway Cristiano Ronaldo these days Ronaldo would be the worst person in the world to buy shell on pistachios because it's just not worth his time it's assuming that shell removal is labor and some people will call that a hobby so

and there's a place in America called pistachio land

sounds really cool according to their website they offer a motorized farm tour around the orchards a candy kitchen where they produce produce their own pistachio treats, a geocache location, and a polka stop for playing Pokemon Go.

Those are the four things.

The website's really good.

It tells you why pistachios are so good for you.

Some maybe slightly dubious claims.

They say that they're cholesterol-free, which I think they are, so that's good.

They have antioxidants, so that's good for you,

very fashionable.

It also says that the colour green is associated with health, hope, renewal, and alleviates anxiety.

Which feels like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does, unless you're seeing it on the executioner's trousers heading towards you.

It will cause stress.

Did you know that pistachios are good for penises?

In what sense?

Well, they were originally called the penis dachio, weren't they?

Yeah, yeah.

In what way?

In what way?

Okay, so there was a study where they gave a bunch of men 100 grams of pistachio nuts as a diet.

So like you would eat them in one go for three weeks, and they found that their penises got better.

Now here's the interesting thing about this.

Yes.

I've not written down what that means.

So

presumably the scientific paper didn't say the penises got better.

So you've already

written good for your penis and and then I've kind of just not written anything else.

So it's going to remain a bit of a mystery.

I have a lot of acronyms.

Apparently your IIEF score is better and your PCDU parameters are better as well.

But there are side effects in patients with ED, so watch out for that.

That's a rectal dysfunction, I suppose, the last one.

Oh, yes.

So it's good for your penis, good for your nuts.

No?

Yeah.

So, you know, like, it's a mystery what that means, but

it's good news.

It's good news.

If you want a good penis.

I don't know if it means morally.

I don't know if it means in action.

I don't know if it's like at quizzes, I don't know what it is

well-behaved penises.

Good at quizzes.

I remember when we took you to the pub and you were playing the quiz machine.

Never again.

Extraordinary.

They had to clean the buttons so much, after this.

Anyway, look, we need to wrap up in a second.

Do we have anything else before we do?

Well, they're dangerous, aren't they, pistachios?

They can explode.

Wow.

And they can suffocate you.

But not

like as a sort of mercy killing that kind of thing.

You know,

rather cushion than no, no, they don't do that.

How can they do either of these things?

Not under their own steam, either of these things, surely.

Well, kind of, I suppose.

So, yeah, they're basically they're taking out oxygen from an area and releasing carbon dioxide.

So, if you are in like a big truck full of pistachios and they have, you know, it's hermetically sealed and you're there long enough, then you'll suffocate.

So, that's kind of them by themselves, isn't it?

Definitely.

I think so.

Yeah, and they have this kind of fat in there and they have this chemical reaction.

And that chemical reaction gives out heat.

And if it gives out enough heat, if they're enough there, they can explode.

Yeah.

So they're dangerous.

It would be an elaborate plot.

It would be an amazing sort of thing.

You need a lot of them.

If you have them in your pocket, they're not going to explode.

Although you might end up with a bad penis if they don't come in.

Is this not just like saying that flowers?

Is it like every time your wife receives some flowers, you say, you know, they can suffocate you if you're shut in a room with a million of them?

To be honest, the problem is the florists never have enough space on the little cart to write.

Can I tell you one more thing?

Yeah, go for it.

So, this is pistachios used to be red in America, which I didn't know.

They were dyed because they were bought from Iran.

And then there was the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.

Big deal.

There were trade embargoes.

So, no more imports from Iran.

And America started its own pistachio industry.

And this was all in the time of President Jimmy Carter who set up this pistachio embargo.

Very exciting.

But he, of course, is a peanut farmer, if anyone remembers that.

Jimmy Carter is a peanut farmer and was and is.

And there is a statue of Jimmy Carter in Georgia, which is of a four-meter-tall peanut, but it has the teeth of Jimmy Carter.

It's the second tallest peanut statue in the world.

And

second tallest.

Second tallest.

Yep, not the best, but but it's nearly there.

And this is my favourite detail about this.

It's just a tall peanut with Jimmy Carter's teeth.

It's really weird.

But it has a large hole in its rear end, and that allegedly was cut by the Secret Service to ensure that there were no explosives or assassins inside it.

But why would you cut the hole?

to work out if there were no explosives or assassins inside it.

If there's no hole, there are probably no assassins inside.

The peanuts bump.

Also, if you were gonna put a feature of Jimmy Carter on a peanut to make sure people knew it was him, is the teeth the

if you see it and you're like, oh, Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter.

Oh wait, hang on, no, it's a big peanut.

I don't know which body part you'd put.

I don't know any specific body part of Jimmy Carter very well.

I just know him as a whole.

The largest pistachio in the world is advertised as being at pistachio land in America.

But I found that there is a pistachio-shaped museum in Turkey which has a larger pistachio.

And so I wrote to pistachio land to tell them that their pistachio isn't the biggest pistachio in the world.

No reply.

Jesus Christ.

And I was so hoping to go on a trip there on their marbles now.

Yeah, your face is just there with a cross over it.

No, you out.

No, it's just a big knot for James's teeth.

Okay, listen, we need to wrap up.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schweiberland, Andy,

James,

and Anna.

You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, no such thing as a

No, or you can go to our group account,

at no such thing, or you can go to our group account, what's happening?

Dan, 405 times you've said this.

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

No such thing as a fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

All of our future tour dates are up there.

Do check it out.

Thank you, Manchester, so much for this.

It's been so much fun.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

See you then.

Goodbye!

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