410: No Such Thing As A Cheesus Christ

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

This week, coming to you live from Newcastle.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinski, Andrew Hunton-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 my fact.

My fact this week is that Harry Houdini's dog was a professional escape artist.

They call him Harry Haldini.

Brilliant.

Very nice.

They should have known.

They called him Bobby.

And Bobby was Harry Houdini's dog, aka the only handcuff king dog in the world.

And Bobby headlined the 14th annual Society of American Magicians dinner.

This is an annual thing that they had.

Harry Houdini was the president at the time.

And he taught Bobby to be an escape artist.

So he made him little tiny handcuffs that would go around his room.

I'm just as if you were the second on the bill to that, darling.

If you've been invited to the Society of American Magicians.

This is your big chance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you have to warm up for a fucking dog.

Yeah, exactly.

So funny.

But he could do, I mean, it wasn't just the handcuffs.

He also had a little tiny straitjacket that was made for him that he could escape from.

It sounds like an incredible act.

Apparently, I mean, according to Houdini, he said he was a dog-gone hit from

the evening.

Yeah, he wasn't known for his jokes.

Come on, take him.

Don't give him a shit for that.

And he didn't go for Houndini?

Oh, my goodness.

But yeah, so he loved pets generally.

He had a lot of pets.

He had a talking parrot called Laura.

He had a pet turtle called Petey.

He had an American eagle called Abraham Lincoln.

And my favorite one is that

he had a lot of parrots.

He had one called Pat Houdini, and he taught this parrot how to pick locks.

And Pat, after Houdini died, according to the story, Bess, his wife, was living in the house with Pat.

Pat picked his own lock, got out of the cage, and flew away.

Wasn't it because of Bess that Bobby came to them in the first place?

She bought Bobby from a butcher when the butcher, it was a butcher's pet and the butcher wouldn't let her give it a bone.

And so I guess she thought, I really want to give this dog a bone.

Desperately, I'm going to buy it so I can.

Is that true?

That's the story.

It's a slightly confusing story, but yeah.

Magical dogs, just while we're on them, there are so many magical dogs.

Have you heard of Oscar the Hypno Dog?

No.

No.

Oscar the Hypno Dog was a recent performing dog.

He played from 1989 to 2001, and then he had to retire for health reasons.

Apparently, his owner said he could no longer hold the penetrating stare necessary for stage hypnosis.

Basically, he had these, I think it was a chocolate Labrador, and he had these incredibly melting brown eyes, beautiful.

And the story was that anyone who looked at Oscar the Hypno Dog's eyes will fall into a deep trance.

And he went missing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1995.

And they put up posters all over the place saying, Oscar is missing, be very careful.

Do not look into his eyes.

That was the Edinburgh Fringe that they put that up.

Oscar performed all over.

Can you imagine a worse time in the world to put up missing posters than at the Edinburgh Fringe?

City Cliff.

Can you take one of these?

No, thank you.

All right.

But he was just allowed to wander around the audience, Oscar.

And there is.

His owner was the hypnotist, obviously.

His owner was called Hugh Lennon and was a brilliant hypnotist.

But there is an account that Oscar was just free to walk around the aisles of the theater in the interval and things like that and he saw a man eating some crisps and being a dog obviously he wants some crisps so he just sat and stared at the man hoping for some crisps and then the man crumpled over in his chair in a deep catatonic hypnotic trance

crumpled like his very crisp packet

yeah sort of dogs doing cool tricks goes back such a long way seems like as soon as we decided man decided to befriend the dog we started making them do weird stuff was we like the 14th century, the Middle East in the 14th century, in the marketplace there'd be merchants who trained their dogs to put on proper plays and stuff, dramatic performances and they'd dress them up and they'd act out parts.

I read a thing that in the sixth century, so you know, 1500 years ago, there was a Byzantine chronicler who said there was a showman who his show was bringing his dog to the marketplace and the dog would collect rings from audience members.

I guess you handed over your wedding ring or whatever and cross your fingers and then he'd bury them and then he'd have the dog dig up all the rings and return them to the correct person.

Oh, wow.

Impressive.

In 1670, Philip the Duke of Orleans in Paris, he possessed a dog who knew how to sort books alphabetically by author.

Cool.

Apparently.

So what do you think there is to the level of truth that these dogs were, I don't think psychically, but were learning.

Here's a famous one that we do know how they did it.

So there was a famous dog genius in the 1820s called Monito.

And they basically, they could spell, they could play cards, they could play dominoes, they could do maths.

Like with the maths, it would be what's two plus three?

Is it one?

Is it two?

Is it three?

Is it four?

Is it five?

And when you said five, he would go

like that.

And the way that we know that he was doing it is his instructor would have in his pocket a tiny little toothpick, and he would just pring, pling the little toothpick, go bling, bling, bling.

No one in the audience could hear it, but the dog could hear it.

and as soon as he heard it he knew he would have to bark that's very clever yeah there is another thing where people think that dogs are doing this and they're actually not but the dogs are picking up on signals that the humans don't realize they're giving off so there was a thing the hundred splechschule azra which is also known as the nazi talking dog program um

which john boberson uh you know friend of the show

has written about before he wrote a book called amazing dogs and they were convinced that dogs could be taught to to count or talk quite well.

And what were the Nazis going to do with this information?

I don't know.

It's such a good question.

Well, because, like, the British, supposedly, you know, lovers of dogs, you know, famously, maybe they were going to turn them against their owners.

That's absolutely true.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, there were lots of headlines, things like Heel Hitler or

the Third Reich.

Yes!

Anyway, they didn't have a...

John Waterson clarified that the Nazis did not have a legion of talking machine gun toting hounds.

So the programme was a little bit more than a moment.

There is famously, I can't remember all of this, but there's famously a Nazi monument in London.

I think there's one.

Right.

And it was a Nazi dog.

And the dog died in London.

It was like the German ambassador's dog.

And they give a proper Nazi funeral and they put a little kind of thing up.

And that's the only Nazi memorial in the whole of London.

Wow.

It's still there.

It's still there, yeah.

That's a bit weird.

Cool, I suppose the dog.

Are you proposing we tear it down?

Maybe you're proposing we get a few more.

I'm just surprised in the big moment of all the statues going down that no one went, can we just lob this one?

Fair enough.

The dog didn't know what it was doing in its defense.

And Cecil Rhodes did, is all I'm saying.

Fair enough.

Do you know the movie Air Bud?

It's a movie about a dog that becomes a basketball sensation

because it can play basketball.

It's a kids' film.

True story?

Based on, yeah.

Based on, kind of, because it turned out that Bud, the dog that was hired for the movie,

it wasn't CGI.

Bud could play basketball.

This was a stray golden retriever that in 1989 was found roaming the mountains of Yosemite.

And the person who found him, and I called him Buddy, he trained him in a lot of different sports.

So he trained him how to catch a baseball pitch.

I don't know how that's possible.

He then set up a hockey net and he showed him how to block shots coming into the net.

But then he taught him how to shoot basketball and he went on the David Letterman show and he displayed it and how he did it.

He became quite a nationalist.

I'd like to have seen him do Paul Vault.

Yeah?

He might have done.

But there was no CGI use.

He was playing real basketball.

He was shooting hoops.

And was it, you know, was LeBron James frightened for his career?

Or how could we talk about it?

LeBron James, Marlaik.

Guys, you're going to have to get on board.

You knew what you were coming to.

You bought the tickets.

I've just got one more thing on sort of the risk to performing dogs now.

Yes.

Because now people are, you know, motion capture is really good.

So there is a film called The Call of the Wild, based on a book by Jack London, out last year or the year before, stars Harrison Ford, and it's about this man and his dog best friend.

And they didn't use a dog for it.

They used a guy called Terry, who just wore a motion capture suit.

Terry Notary is his name.

and he just would go around on all fours for the whole film pretending to be a dog and then they CGI'd the whole thing.

Oh wow.

And

there's a scene where they're lying together, you know, like the dog is in Harrison Ford's lap and it's very moving and it's just a guy called Terry and

the production photos are unbelievable.

And Terry, he's like, he's a serious motion capture dude, like he's an Andy Circus style guy.

So he said it was about trying to be present for Ford and let him forget, really forget that I was a human and be a dog and dissolve into it.

Harrison Ford said, Terry Notary does a great tennis ball.

Wow.

Is there a scene in the movie and I really hope there is where the dog takes a poo on the grass because

then Harrison Ford has to pick up Terry's paper.

You can see in his face that he's not happy in that scene.

He's putting the bag around.

Oh fuck, Terry.

Listen, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact this week is that in the First World War, MI5 employed 90 girl guides.

They tried Boy Scouts at first, but found they couldn't be trusted.

So what did they employ them to do?

Well, lots of stuff.

So this was

girl guides, aged 14 to 16, and it was very shortly after the girl guides had been founded.

And they were paid 10 shillings a week.

They worked nine hour days and they were asked to sort of carry messages between floors, to carry messages across town.

And they had to swear an oath that they would never open the messages and read what was inside them.

And yeah, they tried it with boys first, with the Boy Scouts, and they'd found they were too boisterous and too mischievous.

Not what you want in a spy.

It's really cool.

There were just newly formed girl guides going around the MI5 HQ.

They were a company, you know, because you get companies of girl guides.

They were the special MI5 Guide Company, and they got quite seriously involved with the war, you know, like back of house capacity, but they worked in the

to begin with, but then it was quite sad at the end, wasn't it?

The front lines.

Over the top now.

Do I get a punch for this?

Just throwing brownies at the enemy.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Point taken.

But they worked in the postal censorship office, and that was also where they dislodged Boy Scouts from the role that the Boy Scouts had there.

The poor Boy Scouts, I mean, they clearly had really muffed it.

But they also, this is the most amazing thing, the girl guys, they acted as messengers for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

16 of them were invited to witness the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

The leaders of Europe and 16 girl guys were there.

I just think that's incredible.

But yeah,

they were very cool.

But I think they were a little bit goody-too shoes-y, shockingly enough, girl guys as they were.

There was an MI5 employee who said they used to sort of be always lurking in corners, but being useful, but you know, just always there.

You can imagine, what's this 14-year-old girl doing in my office?

Well, they had to always wear their outfits, didn't they?

Like they had to wear their hats and they had to wear their

skirt was not allowed to be more than eight inches off the ground.

And so they dressed in that you wouldn't just see a random 14-year-old girl.

You would know they were.

But apparently, in their breaks, this MI5 employee said, The girl guide retires to her attractive little sitting room where she converses on high topics with her friends.

Oh,

no, so sweet.

So So sweet.

They were quite controversial when they first came about.

Girl guides, Girl Scouts.

Were they?

Yeah, they were.

So initially it was just thought to be a boys thing and Baden Powell had set up the Boy Scouts and there were a few moments where, particularly in Crystal Palace in London, where a bunch of Boy Scouts got together, thousands, in order to just do a big display and say we're here.

And completely unsanctioned, these girls came along, dressed up in the beautiful.

You're a Boy Scout costume at the time.

Sorry, no Girl Scouts.

and declared themselves to be Girl Scouts.

And Baden-Powell suddenly was like, hang on a second, this might be a thing.

He just assumed, because any time that they were trying to do it, the reviews, they got reviews, were bad.

They were saying, there were complaints saying that there were mannish girls and girls not being peaceful if they were in a uniform.

They were worried that it was going to start this whole new different thing.

And so they were really against it.

And the girls said, no, screw you.

Yeah, they were very plucky.

It was led by a team of, I think, six or seven girls.

And this was a huge march.

It was the first Boy Scouts march 1909 the Boy Scouts had just been founded 11,000 boys and these apparently 2,000 girls also turned up and led by these six or seven girls who just decided we want to get involved with this and pretty much went up to Baden Powell he went up to them and said we want it and to his credit Baden Powell was always really pro he wrote a lot of stuff even before this saying how you know girls can be just as brave as boys over and again they've proved it it's just not part of their education and within about a week 6,000 girl guides had registered, hadn't they?

Well, he thought at first he might just let the girls into the Boy Scouts and it would just be the scouts.

But then in the end, he decided they would do the girl guides instead.

One of the reasons that they did that is because he was always worried about something that he called girlitis.

And that was whenever his Boy Scouts got to a certain age, they started not being very interested in setting fires.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's a legitimate concern, let's face it.

Wow.

Gosh.

Yeah.

So

Manister Breeze.

Okay.

All right.

Why are you trolling?

Stop trolling.

Cut that wobble away.

Can I tell you one more thing about Girl Guides War?

First World War, specifically this one.

They were very helpful in both World Wars, actually, the Girl Guides.

And one of the things they did, along with the Boys Brigade, Scottish organisation, and the boy scouts the girl guides did a lot of collecting of sphagnum moss during the first world war

and it's very interesting

it was used for wound dressing as I think we may have mentioned once or twice on this podcast before and they were the ones out there in the peat box picking up the moss collecting it so it could be used to dress wounds and there was even a poem about it what good news

we don't have time for that

we do and we will

mrs a m smith of the edinburgh war dressing supply organization wrote this this very brief poem, alright?

The doctors and the nurses look north with eager eyes and call on us to send them the dressing that they prize.

No other is its equal.

In modest bulk it goes until it meets the gaping wound where the red lifeblood flows.

Then, spreading, swelling in its might, it checks the fatal loss and kills the germ and heals the hurt, the kindly Sphagnum moss.

What a poem!

What a poem!

Oh,

There was a concern, so that it was controversial when they were formed, and you know, lots of pushback.

And one of the reasons, other reasons that they were separated is because it was thought that Boy Scouts wouldn't like the idea that girls were joining in their games, and it made them kind of effeminate and silly.

And someone wrote to Baden-Powell very shortly after they were formed saying they thought it was ridiculous, this idea that you could have Girl Scouts, given that girls aren't even allowed to run, hurry, swim, ride a bike, or raise their arms above their head.

Very strict parenting that that man was involved in.

Hurry, you're not allowed to hurry?

You weren't allowed to hurry as a girl, apparently, in 1909.

Yeah.

Raise your arms, you couldn't put your hand up in class.

That's something they didn't do as well in education.

Couldn't do the YMCA?

No.

Nightmare.

Couldn't do the mobot.

Although that wouldn't become a problem for another hundred years, so it was probably fine.

Don't think the YMCA dance is much of an issue in 1909 either.

Well, another dance actually got them into trouble.

They always seem to like when you read in the news it always seems like Girl Scouts are somehow involved in some weird controversy.

So 1996 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers threatened to sue them over royalties for songs that members would sing during campfires.

So they said to them, you're not allowed to sing our songs unless you're paying a royalty.

And the idea was, yeah, groups would have to pay $250 for public performances for the rights to songs that they wanted to sing.

What were were they?

They must have been singing pop songs then, right?

Yeah, it was pop songs and so on.

So, what did it was it the Rolling Stones who were complaining?

Is it Paul McCartney?

It was the publishing companies.

And so, there were cautions, there were copyright infringement penalties that they said.

They said, Well, we'll charge you $100,000 or you will get a year in prison.

Like, they were really strict things.

And it was a dance that stopped all of this nonsense happening because footage was shown of them on TV dancing the macarena with no music.

And there was such a backlash from the public going, Don't make Girl Scouts dance the macarena without the fucking song.

At least with the macarena, you never have to put your hands above your head, do you?

Exactly.

Ears only, yeah, ears only.

One thing that neither boy scouts nor girl guides were allowed to do in official literature was masturbate.

They were given officials.

They're not allowed to do it in literature.

Sorry.

Full stop, in or out of literature.

The Girl Guides guidebook said, don't masturbate, it can lead to blindness, paralysis and loss of memory

sorry did it they it said in the guidebook that

really

I don't think it said I don't think it said the word masturbate but I think it was clear what the implication because it was a lot of it was taken from the Boy Scouts guidebook it was pretty much copied directly over and

yeah I know I don't recall ever seeing a no masturbation badge on a scout

no

you're not trying hard enough to earn it then

there was advice actually like the girl guides guidebook is is funny reading it now, you know, so here's a great bit of advice from it.

It is said that you can tell a man's character from the way he wears his hat.

If it is slightly on one side, the wearer is good-natured.

If it is worn very much on one side, he is a swagger.

If on the back of the head, he is bad at paying his debts.

If worn straight on top, he is probably honest, but very dull.

We need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact is that there is a fictional Victorian detective who was created to be the opposite of Sherlock Holmes.

In the only recent adaptation of the stories, the detective in question was played by Benedict Gumberbatch.

This is the fictional detective Thorpe Hazel, and these are the Thorpe Hazel mysteries by an author called Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch.

And basically, he is a railway-based detective.

He only solves crimes that involve the railways, and he only solves them through the medium of railway timetables.

He's incredible.

That's awesome.

He's awesome.

He's a vegetarian railway detector.

That's very important in the description.

Yeah, and I'm very proud to say I have a copy here of Stories of the Railway by Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch.

The Thorpe Hazel Mysteries are in here.

Wow.

And I just want to read you a brief poem about Moss from

that book.

No, it's basically he's a book collector and a railway enthusiast, and it's always his knowledge of train timetables that saves the day.

So if you want to get away with something, just don't commit the crime on the railway.

Just drag the victim 100 yards from the train track.

Well, that's the problem.

That's where Sherlock Holmes gets you, right?

If you do something on the railway, this guy gets you.

Everywhere else is Sherlock Holmes.

Isn't they divided up on turf?

Is it like having your own spots of the city, you know, with like drug dealers?

Like, this guy's fucked off when Poirot has the Orient Express crime going on.

Yeah, it's really charming.

And the author was also a railway nut, obviously, Victor Whitechurch.

And he was a vicar and basically loved railways as well.

And so there were loads of vicars who were very productive around this time, maybe because they had cut down the requirement to deliver a two-hour sermon on Sundays.

Suddenly all these vicar had time on their hands.

Well, the other thing about this guy, Victor Whitechurch, is he was a vicar in charge of the mission church at Willisdon Junction railway station.

So he was well into his trains.

But I really liked the way that he wrote his stories.

So like most people would kind of like think of the end of the story and then work backwards.

He would get his characters, come up with a murder, describe the whole murder, and then go, right, from here, I'm going to work out what happens.

And he would solve the made-up murder in his head as he went along.

Great.

That was really cool.

You're sort of reading the murder mystery as well as writing it.

Exactly.

Great.

Were they big at the time?

As in, were they.

These stories?

Yeah, to the level of Conan Dawes.

They were not as big as others.

We would have heard more about Thorpe Hazel's railway detective.

The book was originally.

The book I've got is called Stories of the Railway.

It was originally called Thrilling Stories of the Railway and at some point some editor just decided we can't sell these as Thrilling Stories of the Railway.

So just don't back it up.

It's false advertising.

I'm sorry.

He was the veggie thing.

It was interesting that he made him vegetarian.

And not only vegetarian, but very fatty.

So we've talked before a bit about how the turn of the 20th century, vegetarianism started to be a bit of a thing.

In one of the stories, he asked for directions to a vegetarian restaurant, which is like the proper early days of vegetarian restaurants.

And then he goes there and he lunches on rice pudding and prunes.

So they weren't quite up to the standards that we have today.

But he was really into this weird physical fad that came with it.

So in one book, Whitechurch writes, he carried vegetarianism to an extreme and was continually practicing various exercises of the strangest description, much to the bewilderment of those around.

And so I was reading, there's one scene where a friend comes upon him and describes the sort of crime on the railway to him.

And as the friend starts talking, Thorpe begins some exercises.

And as you know, he's being spoken to, it's like Hazel Thorpe smiled and went on whirling his arms around his head.

I've just read that story.

Have you?

It is the story of Peter Crane's cigars.

And it's not very thrilling,

but it is a story.

It is a story of the railway.

Yeah.

And then what happens, Hannah?

Well, all I know is that

he mentions a timetable, and suddenly Hazel Thorpe goes, You begin to interest me, said Hazel, stopping his whirly gigs and beginning to eat his plasmon.

It's nicely written in a foreign language.

Plasmon was a kind of biscuit.

It's what it is, is there's a there's a cigar smuggling operation.

We don't have time for this.

I really liked sort of fictional detectives all this time because lots of people were following Arthur Cohen Doyle and trying to come up with like a detective with a gimmick.

So there is there was a fictional detective called Max Carados.

I don't know if you guys came across.

No.

So he is blind, but despite that, he is so talented that he can read fine print by touch alone.

He can also fire a pistol at targets accurately because his senses are so good.

In one of the books, he can smell when someone is wearing a false moustache.

It's so cool.

It's weird because the person wearing a false moustache doesn't need to be doing it in the first place if the detective's blind.

It's absolutely true.

There were lots of rip-offs of Sherlock Holmes at the very start.

In the first 10 years or so, there was a detective called Sherwood Hoax, another Shylock Ohms, Hurlock Sholmes, Sheerluck Gnomes,

Curlock Combs, and Shamrock Jones.

So good.

I think I was heard of the Detection Club.

No.

Oh, yeah, so cool.

Oh, man.

It's a British club for detective writers.

So Victor Whitechurch of Thorpe Hazel fame was a member himself.

Lots of people remembers.

Agatha Christie was the president for many years.

And it has these sacred rituals that it enacts.

It's really exciting.

So, a procession will enter if you're joining the club for the first time.

Procession will enter, led by a figure wearing a scarlet cloak and carrying Eric the Skull.

Okay,

and you have to swear an oath to join.

And then, once you join, the president says to you, If you fail to remember your promises and break even one of our unwritten laws, may other writers anticipate your plots, may total strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints, and may your sales continually diminish.

Yeah, Well, and the rules are strict.

You know, the rules written down in the 20s, I think, early 30s, were: your detectives shall detect crimes using their wits and not placing reliance on divine revelation, feminine intuition, a mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence, or act of God.

And also, you can't conceal clues from the reader.

But you know, the skull that you put your hand on, it's not Eric.

They sexed it recently, and it's Erica.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

There's a guy called Ronald Knox, who I love.

He was another clerical detective author, actually.

And he wrote these Ten Commandments of detective fiction, which are quite fun.

So one of them is: not more than one secret room or passage is allowed per detective story.

And also, twin brothers and doubles generally must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

And anyway, he did this really cool thing, Ronald Knox, as well as being the detective author.

1926, he interrupted all broadcasts on the one radio channel on the BBC, basically to announce that there was a riot in London.

It was a spoof.

People didn't realize it was a spoof.

And it was bloody terrifying.

So it contained, he said things like, the crowd has now passed along Whitehall and, at the suggestion of Mr.

Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Qs, is preparing to demolish the houses of parliament with trench mortars.

The clock tower has just fallen to the ground along with Big Ben.

The noise you just heard was the Savoy being blown up.

So Theophilus Gooch has been intercepted by the remnants of the crowd and is being roasted alive in Trafalgar Square as I speak.

And then it was snowing, so no one could get the news for days.

So BBC just received thousands of letters saying, what's going on?

Oh my God.

That's so bad.

That's so good.

We're going to have to move on very soon.

I just want to quickly mention, there's a thing that we wrote about in the book of the year, which was, do you remember there's that story that Benedict Cumberbatch, he was in an Uber with his wife, and suddenly he saw a robbery that was happening outside on the road.

It was a deliveroo driver who was being attacked by some four muggers who were trying to get to him.

So he hopped out and he went and sort of tried to stop it and it worked.

And they got shot.

But so he successfully scared away these muggers and helped this Deliveroo person.

But the thing is, is that this robbery was happening on Marlebone High Street, which is just down the road from Baker Street in London.

Can you imagine the robbers as they turned around to see Sherlock Holmes

right next to where he should be, looking around at them?

You feel honoured.

You'd say.

Thank you.

That's true.

I was just trying to mug a Deliveroo driver.

I'm not sure this is a Holmes-level crime.

I was just thinking that, like, you know, this guy was all about his railway timetables.

Like, an Uber driver who would solve crimes would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

Yeah, that would be really cool.

But is it based on the star rating that you have?

Yeah,

it could be.

No, it could be like three stars.

He drove a bit too fast, but he did solve the murder of my wife.

Just to speak, one tiny thing, which P.

D.

James, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant crime author, died only a few years ago.

She was once doing a signing, and an Australian woman came to the front of the queue, said her name was Emma Chizett, right?

P.

D.

James signed the book to Emma Chizett, only to realise this Australian Australian woman had been asking how much the book cost.

Emma Chizett.

Emma Chizetti.

Emma Chizett.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Himalayan chewing gum is made out of cheese.

And there it is.

Yep.

It looks like sausages, a little bit.

Or like ladies' fingers, maybe.

Like baguettes.

So in what sense is it chewing gum?

it's chewing gum in the sense that it's called himalayan chewing gum and that you chew it a lot it's the world's hardest cheese that we know of it's called chirupi and because it's so so hard you put it in your mouth and if you're like a yak farmer or something you're just having your daily yak farm then you put it in your mouth and you just chew it and chew it and chew it and the saliva slowly makes it softer and softer and softer and it's hours and hours that you chew this um stuff and eventually you can eat it and so that's why they call it chewing gum.

It sounds nice, but it does sound unbelievably tough.

As in, there was a BBC journalist who tried it.

He chewed his piece for seven minutes.

Seven minutes, didn't leave a scratch on it.

Yeah, it's really hard.

I have had it, but I've not had the hard version.

I've had the soft version.

So they want to ease you in on that.

Basically, this stuff, they've kind of dried it out for ages and ages and ages.

I think they put it in like an animal skin or something and dry it out for ages.

But if you have it early on before they do all that, it's more like cottage cheese, like Georgian cheese.

And it's the national dish of Bhutan, it's called emadatsi.

And that's the type that I had.

And it's basically really, really, really, really hot chilies inside a bowl of this cheese.

And it is delicious.

It's one of the best things I've ever had.

And they don't usually let foreigners eat it because it's too spicy.

That's what they say.

Oh, yeah, that's how they flatter every foreigner who walks in.

Oh, yeah, those British people can't handle this one.

I'm very impressive.

It was in Bhutan's Nando's and they put a very nice little flag on the top of it.

Did it have a lemon and a herb on it is what I want to know.

But chirpy as well is sometimes used these days as a dog treat because it's so chewy.

I think even in America, I don't know if you can buy it here, but in America you can buy this cheesy dog treat that they can just keep chewing on.

Right.

I read a very spurious sentence about it, I thought, in one of the articles, which said, since it's rich in in protein and fat, it makes a great substitute for vegetables.

I don't know.

That's why we're eating our greens.

Can I tell you about the Fight Club for Cheese?

No, you can't tell us about the Fight Club for Cheese.

That's the whole point.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, shit.

Damn it.

Yeah, it's the Cheesemonger International, which happens in the USA.

And this was a description of the FT.

It involves 50 young cheesemongers pitting their skills against each other in a frenetic battle of curd nurdery.

Happens in San Francisco.

It does sound fun, yeah.

The charismatic founder, Adam Moscovitz, is called Mr.

Moo and compares in a cow onesie.

Wow.

Okay, a bit less cool now.

That's cool.

I wonder who's called him the charismatic founder.

Sounds like something on his own website.

Him and his onesie at the top.

You You know, Burrata, the more delicious version of mozzarella?

Yeah.

I didn't really know what that was, but so it came about as a way of using up leftovers.

And the way they did it, this is in the 1930s.

It's in Apulia.

It's the only place you can make it.

Cream would be scraped off the top of milk and it was usually chucked away.

And instead, they mixed it with stretched mozzarella curds to make that really creamy, soupy inside.

And then they blew mozzarella into a bubble.

So they got mozzarella and they blew like a bubble gum bubble.

And then they stuffed this cream inside.

And this was just to preserve it.

So this meant that when you had like a day's journey to get to market, then this apparently insulated it from the heat of the sun and meant that the cream and cheese didn't go off inside.

So when you prod that open, but I just love that they blew into it like a little, you know.

That was incredible.

Yeah.

Bubble.

Like a bubble.

Liquid soupy stuff from cheese.

This is an interesting new innovation that's happening around the world.

And I wonder if it's going to take off.

In Wisconsin They've been doing this so they make a lot of cheese there and they have a lot of master cheese makers there as well So as a result of having a lot of the cheese they have a lot of excess brine that they need to get rid of what they do is they liquefy it and they pour it on the side of the roads during winter in place of salt and it works way better than salt does it's great for them because they're getting rid of a lot of waste and they're using it really efficiently make the entire state smell of cheese stinks like shit yeah

i think a lot of Wisconsin smells of cheese already.

Yeah.

I put some.

Okay.

But what's really interesting is: A, it's just a great way of just recycling the materials in a good way, but also this typical salt they would use on roads that would freeze at six below zero.

Whereas cheese doesn't freeze until 21 below zero.

So it's actually even just useful in the sense that the colder it gets, it's still useful.

But that's why you never get cheese ice cream, tragically.

Oh, really?

No.

So there was a big story, a big story in Germany last year.

And that was that someone was living above a cheese shop.

And she was very, very upset because her house smelled of cheese all the time.

She said the smell of cheese was coming through her electrical sockets

and it went to court.

Because she said that they should just stop selling cheese all the time.

Basically, she was like putting signs up saying this place stinks of cheese.

I was a cheese, a fucking cheese shop, but she was putting that.

He said that she had been hiding cheese behind a fuse box to frame him

anyway.

So they found in favor of the cheese seller, but he's decided, okay, I want to be a good neighbor, so I'm going to move away anyway.

But because of this story, no one will let him move into their shop anymore.

And he's stuck in the place, and she's stuck living above him.

Oh no, my god, isn't that bad?

Will you re-home, Mr.

Stinky Cheese Della?

We've got to wrap up in a sec, guys.

Anything before we do?

Saint Hildegard of Bingen,

who was a friend of the podcast,

mystic from the 12th century, she always thought that all cheese should be dried and she really liked her cheese.

But she also thought that cheese was, like cheese making, was how children was made.

So she wrote that at first the semen inside the woman is milky, then it coagulates, then it becomes flesh, and then it becomes the body.

So is cheese just halfway to becoming a human?

Is that what she's saying?

I guess it's what she's saying.

Wow, she was a wise woman, but she did get some things wrong, didn't she?

Her restaurant was a disaster.

But there was a guy called Tertuon who was a father from the second and third century.

He was like a priest, and he thought that the birth of Jesus was a bit like this.

So Jesus had been born in a kind of cheesy way.

So, like, away, yeah.

So, like, the Kurds.

Away, away in the major.

Away in the manger.

So, the Kurds like cheese.

The Kurds liked a cheese.

Jesus had grown.

Jesus had

grown into his shape.

And then he kind of got kicked out of the church because of this crazy stockade.

But, well, he went to another sect called the Montanists, and he kind of became really big in the Montanists.

And they decided that, as well as bread and wine and Holy Communion, you could also have a little bit of cheese with your wafer.

Look, we need to wrap up, I'm afraid.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcasts at qi.com.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Thank you so much, Newcastle, for being here tonight.

That was absolutely awesome.

We're in the region.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodbye.