406: No Such Thing As Batman And Thrush

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Burning Man

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones, this time for our Christmas special.

Yeah!

Ho ho ho!

And once again, we have gathered round 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 the song When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob Bob Bobbing Along is actually about a thrush.

But thrush didn't rhyme with bobbing?

It could be rushing along, couldn't he?

It is an American song, The Red, Red Robin Goes Bob, Bob, Bobbing Along.

I don't know if you guys know it.

When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob, bob, bobbing along.

It was written about the American robin, whose Latin name is Turdus Migratorius.

And as every childish person knows, the Latin word turdus means thrush.

And it's called a robin, that bird, because when the early migrants got to America, it has a red breast and it reminded them of the European robin.

Right.

So a lot of American songs, like Rockin' Robin, for instance, is the same.

All these songs are actually about thrushes.

So technically, it should also be Batman and Thrush.

Well, that's an own story of Batman's medical problems.

That is actually true because Robin was, in some versions of the early Batman and Robin comics, he is named Robin because he was born on the first day of spring.

And the American Robin is associated with spring.

So these songs, the red, red robin, these are springtime songs, they're not Christmas songs.

Yeah, okay.

Wow.

It's better looking than the thrush, than our thrush, isn't it?

I mean, the red breast does make a big difference.

Yeah, it's a nice bird, nice-looking bird.

It's like, it looks like, you know, if you think about your classic European robin, it's quite fat and round and it's got a red breast.

The American one is a bit more proud looking.

It's a bit bigger.

It's got a slightly longer neck, but it still has the red colour in it.

Yeah.

And it's the most abundant bird in North America, apparently.

It's like one of us, yeah.

It's all over the bloody place.

Although they're much shyer than our robins.

The robin that we know is the European robin, but in Britain, it's way more cocky and confident than all over the rest of Europe.

Really?

Yeah.

And this is just because we actually like robins so much.

So in Europe, it's much more common to hunt robins and or has been historically and they're not kind of treasured as much as this kind of Christmas symbol.

So they're way shyer.

And similarly in America, these guys, they hide in the woods, whereas our robins, you know, they chase you around the garden when you're digging out worms.

Yeah, of course.

Do you know why they do that?

To get the worms you're digging out worms.

Well, yes, but it's because basically they think you're a pig.

So

what?

Spectranna said all that nice stuff about robins.

Sorry, Anna.

It's not reciprocated.

Robins basically evolved to follow a wild boar around forests.

Well,

they truffle up food, don't they?

They dig for their food and they will overturn a lot of earth and they'll reveal lots of earthworms.

So, you know, it thinks you're a pig and a boar.

Yeah.

I've got to say,

is it really bad at telling the difference between species, though?

I'm exaggerating a little for comic effect.

I don't know about its eyesight.

It has got good eyesight, hasn't it?

Or sort of something special about its eyes that can navigate?

A magnetite in there, perhaps, I reckon.

Yeah, because they do.

I think that's probably the American ones because they migrate quite a lot, don't they?

The American ones.

They do.

You almost never see them here.

But did you read about the...

I think one of the last times an American Robin was seen in the UK was in 2004.

And it was one of these, it was blown over the Atlantic, so it got lost on a migration.

That's a hell of a puff, isn't it?

Getting over the Atlantic.

It was a gusty day.

And

so it turned up in Grimsby, and there was huge excitement.

Oh, God, I mean, your taste's bad enough, isn't it, Kelly?

You end up in Grimsby.

That was a bad hangover.

What did I do last night?

Um, and the Twitchers, as they do, got very excited and all communicated with each other to say, Come on, come on, see this American Robin, it's so rare to see them here.

And they all arrived just in time to see it get eaten by a sparrow hawk.

I love that, I didn't know it was called Turd Migratus.

Turdus, yeah.

Not turd migratus.

Turdus migratus.

It still works nicely.

It's a very, very lazy Harry Potter spell, basically.

If you're a bit constipated, as I need.

Oh, if you hear that in the stall, yeah, next to you.

Turtles migratus!

Yeah, so rabbits.

I would have thought Expellianus would have been the better one.

okay so on the word turdus the word sturdy that supposedly comes from the Latin for thrush that's supposed to

come from turdus as well

and the idea was if a thrush would eat lots of berries it might get drunk and it would kind of sway around and sway around and so turdy meant swaying and then sturdy came from non-drunk thrushes yeah according that's according to the oxford english dictionary who I must say I don't believe, but

there is a French saying which is as drunk as a thrush, which gives a little bit of credence to it.

They are the most prone to get drunk on fermented berries, I think, aren't they?

The American rubbies.

Rubbies?

That's what I called them.

We're close.

And

it happens, so it tends to happen in spring, but it can actually happen in autumn.

So basically, it'll happen when the berries have frozen.

And so when frost hits them, then they'll start converting their starch to sugars.

And then I think when they thaw, then that starts fermenting, and then they get eaten, and then they do funny things like crash into each other or fall off branches.

But in Minnesota, in October, a couple of years ago, there was an early frost that caused a big outbreak of this, and the police were called so many times that they actually had to report, like putting a report out saying there's no need to report drunk robins to the police, they will sober up within a short period of time and get on with their lives.

I read a really lovely story.

In India, there was a species, a type of robin,

that had made its way into the electrical box of a very tiny town.

So there's about 150 people that live in this town.

And this box would be turned on every night at 6 p.m.

by one guy.

And so he noticed that a robin, this species, a robin, had laid eggs and was using this electrical circuit board as its nest.

So he wrote on a WhatsApp group to all of the people in the village saying, is it cool if we don't turn on the street lights at time until they've hatched and the birds have flown away and the whole village all agreed and so for over 35 days they had no lights at night just to make sure that these little birds were born properly and then they flew away and then he started turning them on again that is a double start did they have lots of traffic incidents and there was yeah 90 fatalities

Robins live really short lives most of the time so they live for about 13 months at very very high mortality rate in their first year but if they're through that they stand a very good chance at surviving for a lot longer so the oldest ever robin known was recorded uh as being it was ringed you know with a ring around its foot or whatever uh it was 19 years and four months oh my god imagine if there were people just walking around who were a thousand years old and they just got lucky oh my god that's what it's like for robins when he said ringed i thought he meant we cut it in half every year and count the rings it was amazingly amazingly hardy, yeah.

This fact is about the fact that a robin is actually a thrush, a misnamed bird, and it's a Christmas bird that we're talking about.

And so I started looking into other Christmas birds, and it turns out a lot of them are misnamed as well.

So

one of the great songs that we have, the first day of Christmas, my true, we have a bunch of birds in that song, don't we?

Right.

So, okay, turtle doves.

Turtle doves are given a thing.

So we think that they're called turtle doves because they make a ter-tur sound.

So that's the turtle.

So as the article points out, and this is according to a biologist called Pamela Ramerson, no relation to turtles.

So they're just...

This is your butt?

The doves are not related to turtles?

Turtle doves?

Zero relation to turtles.

Myth busted.

Myth busted.

French hens.

There's three French hens in it.

Oh, my God.

They're probably from France, but they're not actually a species called French hen.

That doesn't exist.

Myth busted.

Second one down.

Calling birds.

That sounds interesting.

Doesn't exist.

We don't have calling birds.

What they're probably talking about is for collie birds.

And we've just misunderstood that.

We've called them calling birds.

Andy?

A collie bird is like a blackbird, right?

Is it an old word for black?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Partridge and a pear tree.

They're groundbirds.

They're never seen in trees.

That is good, actually.

You say the best of lust.

myth busted.

You do see the odd partridge in a tree, to be fair.

But they don't nest in trees.

Are they drunk?

Only when they're pissed.

They're like the opposite of all other boats.

They fall up trees when they're drunk.

The song When the Red Red Rubbing Goes Bob Mob Bobbing Along, really quickly on that, it was written in 1926 or 1925.

By 1926, it was a hit for Whispering Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards, Paul Whiteman, the Ipanama Troubadours, and Al Jolson.

In the same year, it was a hit for all those people.

Wow!

It's not like one of those, you know, when you get a rap song and you've got 20 different rappers on it.

They all did their own version of it.

Wasn't the first one called?

It was Whispering Jack Smith.

That sounds terrifying.

It was most famous by vaudeville star Lillian Roth.

She's the most famous one who sang it.

And she, she sang it when she was really young, when she was about 14 or 15, and then late she became not famous anymore.

And then later on, she went on This Is Your Life and she kind of was really honest about her alcoholism.

And she got more than 40,000 letters when she went on This Is Your Life.

She wrote an autobiography and then it got turned into a movie starring Susan Hayward and that was nominated for an Academy Award.

So because her life was so amazing.

And then when she kind of went on This Is Your Life, she became famous again and she had a huge sort of revival.

She went on Broadway and did her own song and the highlight of her act was singing when the red red robin came bob bob bobbing along, but she sang it in the style of the person who played her in the movie doing an impression of her.

Jesus.

Isn't that amazing?

That's you probably know the song most because I know you go to Chelsea Athletic every now and then and that's what they sing.

Is that what they're trying to sing?

Jesus Christ.

Really?

Are they doing it in the style of this woman doing it in the style of her own dog who's doing it in the style of some other bird?

Wow.

Did you guys read that there's a type of thrush that gets its prey to come to the top of the surface by farting on the ground?

What, and it lures worms towards it.

Yeah, so it just gets down and it just starts farting on.

What do the worms think?

I think you know that thing where it's kind of like it feels like it's rain and it's coming up and they hear vibrations and they come up.

It turns out, anyway, it's not true.

Don't come through the authors.

Myth busted.

Thank you, Andy.

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

My fact is that nobody knows where Caravaggio's most Christmassy painting is, but the main theory is that it was eaten by pigs in the 1970s.

Yes.

It's a painting.

So Caravaggio is an extremely famous 16th century artist, 16th, 16th, early 17th, and he painted a painting called The Nativity with St.

Francis and St.

Lawrence, and it was stolen.

It was in a church in Palermo, in Italy, and it had been there for nearly 400 years.

It was incredibly well established there.

And in 1969, it was nicked by persons unknown.

It's worth, obviously, millions and millions.

There are not that many Caravaggios.

And

no one knows where it is to this day.

It was cut from its frame.

And there are rumors about where it is.

So some people say it's in Switzerland, some people say there's no way it ever left Italy.

There was no international gossip about where it might have ended up.

But one mafia informer claimed that it had been damaged in an earthquake and then just left alone for a bit and then gnawed on by rats and pigs until it was completely worthless.

And then they burned it.

Wow.

Weird.

We don't know, but yeah.

It seems very odd this habit that all these mafia members, it's the cosinostra, isn't it?

Members have of admitting to stealing the painting and then telling the story of the painting.

and you never know if they're telling the truth.

And I think so these are like pentitos who go to the police and say, oh, I've been in the mafia, I'm really sorry about it and I'll tell you where this nativity painting is.

And I think the latest person is Gaetano Grado, who said he helped to steal the painting and then it somehow got into the hands of a mafia boss who took it to a Swiss art dealer.

And I just like the scene.

The dealer wept when he saw it because it's such a beautiful, unbelievable painting.

It's a Caravaggio.

So the dealer burst into tears, sobbed, and then immediately said, We need to cut this into pieces so we can sell them discreetly.

Otherwise, people will know what it is.

Right.

So, what do you do?

Do you buy all the pieces and put them together like a jigsaw?

Yeah, it's funny.

I don't realize how fucking dangerous pigs are.

Top tip, don't die next to a pig.

It will eat you.

Yeah, but once you're dead, it doesn't really matter.

I know, but like, if you're even in the process of dying and you happen to fall next to a pig, you're a goner.

And the robin will watch watch from the side and laugh.

Well to him it's like a pig's eaten a pig.

Cannibalism.

Cannibalism it'll look like.

No seriously, last few years, just the headlines, 2020, missing Polish farmer eaten by his own pigs, officials say.

2019, woman eaten by her pig after she collapses while feeding.

Basically, if you fall near a pig and you're asleep, it will end.

It's easy to five famous that, I think.

It's crazy.

Is it in

Hannibal book?

Yeah, yeah, you've got to watch Hannibal.

It's great.

Most things of that scene where you're eaten by by pigs.

It's a documentary about how it's very easy to get eaten by pigs if you're not careful.

It's funny because pigs do have a reputation for being very intelligent and quite friendly.

They do, they do, don't they?

Like babe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like babe.

Have you got watched?

Bake three?

Yeah.

Big three, where babe eats the farmer.

Yeah.

That's a dope pig.

Do you guys know Pig Casso?

Pig's amazing.

Just speaking of art and pigs, he's the first non-human to hold his own exhibition.

Art exhibition.

Yeah.

Born in 2016.

I mean, when we say hold his own art exhibition, did he book the venue?

Yes.

Did he the catering?

God, I'm not for the catering, actually.

He did all the admin.

He finds it difficult to hold the phone, but he's overcome it.

No, he was born in 2016.

He was one of these people who was rescued and taken to a sanctuary that was set up by this woman called Joanne Lefson in South Africa.

And she said the reason that he became a famous painter, as he is now, is that she put him in a pen with loads and loads loads of stuff and he ate or destroyed everything in the stool except the paintbrushes and so she deduced from that that he must love art

he's since become a painter he designed swatches 2019 swatch design which

is called flying pig and it's lots of purple and pink swatches

did they not find like a work of art and then maybe the shoes of an artist that he'd just eaten the rest of the artist

it could be that Does he draw with a pig pen?

Don't boo that.

Anthony, it's Christmas.

It's Christmas.

I started ruining Christmas.

Shall we talk about Caramaggio?

I think we better.

Caravaggio, he was a bit of a badden, wasn't he?

He was a rabbin.

He was a bit of a badden.

In 1604, the year, variously, he was arrested for assaulting a waiter who had served him with a plate of artichokes dressed in butter rather than oil,

for throwing stones in the street next to a perfume maker and some prostitutes, and for telling a policeman who was attempting to release him quietly, even though he was carrying a sod, which he wasn't supposed to, you can stick it up your ass.

Right.

You've given a very one-sided story there.

I'm quite a fan of Carrie Badgio, and the artichoke story, for example, was sort of justifiable.

It was a test.

So it was, he ordered eight artichokes for lunch, and he ordered four to be fried in oil and four to to be fried in butter.

The artichokes arrived and then he asked the waiter, well, which of the four fried in oil?

And the waiter couldn't tell.

And then he picked up his sword and attacked the waiter and then got a plate and smashed him in the face.

There's no excuse for bad service, James.

Customer is always right.

Speaking of bad service, he killed a man after a game of tennis.

Didn't he?

Did he really?

Yeah, that's one of the most famous things about him.

So he had to leave Rome when he killed his opponent in a game game of tennis.

Now we think possibly it wasn't because of the tennis that he did this murder.

And we think possibly he might not have been deliberately trying to kill the man.

He might have only been trying to cut off his testicles.

Ronnie.

Your Honor, my client was merely trying to cut off this man's testicles with his sword.

New balls, please.

Very strong.

Yeah, it's very unclear because they were having an argument about a woman who was maybe one of Caravaggio's models, but was also a prostitute, but was also working for the opponent, this man Tomasini, was it?

Yeah, so Tomasini was the pimp of this woman.

Yes.

But also, when you're an artist, it was illegal for someone to sit for you, especially naked, unless they were a prostitute, unless you were paying them.

And so, basically, most of the artists around that time were employing prostitutes or sex workers, I should say, to sit for them.

And so, there was obviously something happening here, we weren't quite sure.

The woman was called Philide Melendroni,

and there's not much else about her.

She was once called a scandalous courtesan by the vicariate of Rome, no less, for refusing the sacrament.

And later that year, she was arrested for possessing a weapon.

So she was a bit of a bad un as well.

If that's the most scandalous thing you're doing as a prostitute, refusing the sacrament, then I think you've got to up your game.

It's not.

He was a very, very naughty boy, Caravaggio.

He was.

No, we shouldn't be glamorising it because he he was a wrong.

He was a rogue.

There was a film.

There's a film made about his life in 1986 in which

Sean Bean is one of Sean Bean's very earliest films.

He plays the guy Caravaggio had a deal with, Ranuccio Tommasoni.

And that is also notable because it's the first time that Sean Bean died on screen.

Oh, no way!

Yes!

Really?

Sean Bean has had a lot of screen deaths, if you don't know.

Sean Bean has been impaled on an anchor.

He's been stabbed.

He's fallen off an antenna.

He's been buried alive and then died.

He's been hanged.

He's been shot through the neck with a grappling hook and then hanged.

He's been torn into quarters by horses, decapitated, and shot 10 times.

Well, he's hard.

He's a hard man.

He came back from all those things.

He's still swinging.

But he's not the actor who's died most in films.

This is diversion now, but

Danny, is it Trejo?

Trejo?

Machete.

Machete, yeah.

Yeah.

He's died 65 times in different films.

Has he?

Yeah, he has been killed by topless prostitutes in two separate films.

Wow.

That's typecasting starting to exert its baleful influence, I'm afraid.

You know, he invented really incredible lighting for paintings, and two people have been massively influenced by it.

David Hockney talks about it, saying he basically invented Hollywood lighting.

It was just,

it was in one direction, and he believes that.

It was in one direction?

Yeah.

He was multi-talented.

He was, yeah,

he was a very influential character.

Supposedly, he would use mirrors to sort of bend light towards.

And Martin Scorsese, when he would see his paintings, was a lot of Scorsese's movies, he says, were influenced by the lighting that he saw in Caravaggio's paintings, and is convinced that if he was in modern times, he would have been one of our great directors, purely for that, purely for his understanding of light and composure.

Yeah, but it was particularly dark.

I've always thought they're too dark.

It always looks like it's not very well lit in galleries, I think.

I agree.

It's basically because it's all kind of black except one shaft of light.

Yeah, it's like a blade runner.

Yeah, but he did get in trouble once with his landlord.

In fact, he was evicted because he cut, he was renting a room and he cut a hole in the ceiling to get that single shaft of light.

Correct.

And a lot of landlords hate that.

Was it in the ceiling, so rain could get in?

In the roof.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

I suppose that's going to ruin the painting, isn't it?

Well, also, he was in a ground floor flat, so he had to do everything wrong.

Can we move on to the next fact?

Yes, please.

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

My fact this week is that Merry Christmas Park in Miami isn't named after the holiday, but after a girl named Mary, who is the daughter of the city's former mayor, Randy Christmas.

I love that song.

Have yourself a rumpy little Christmas.

We would be a randy Christmas.

So Randy Christmas was the mayor of Miami from 1955 to 1957, and he had a little daughter who he named Mary, spelled M-E-R-R-I-E.

And Mary, unfortunately, was quite sick when she was born.

She was born with only one kidney, which she was basically correctly diagnosed with when she was about three years old.

And they thought that she wasn't going to make it, unfortunately.

And one of the things that Miami wanted to do to sort of talk about, you know, what an amazing and brave girl she was going through, what she was going through, is to name this park after her.

So it's a very tiny little park.

And she was just, she was an amazing person.

She continued, she had 12 operations.

They thought she was only going to live for a few months, but she had survived 12 more years.

She used to go to the park once a year.

She loved visiting it.

She would sometimes go to it during Christmas as well to visit Merry Christmas Park, her park, she used to say.

She sadly passed away, but she did get to experience this park for a long time.

Really cool.

And how many disappointed people would show up at the park every day throughout December, going,

where the hell is Santa Claus?

Why is there a 12-year-old girl here instead?

It's good to look at the story that way as well.

She's letting a lot of people down.

Yeah, is this your fault, you little dick?

What is this?

Get out of your wheelchair and look me in the eye.

Come on, Anna.

So the Christmas family, they said it took them three children for them to get up the nerve to call one of them Merry.

Oh, really?

Although Merry Christmas did have her sister called Holly,

who actually is still around.

She was posting on the internet in June this year, so she's definitely still alive.

Some of the other children in the school would tease Merry Christmas and call her Happy New Year.

But when she died, she did die very young, but she was so popular that they had to put on buses to get people to the funeral.

It was an absolutely massive funeral.

And Randy Christmas's mother was called Leonora Pauline Pope Christmas.

Her surname was Pope, so Pope married Christmas and had Randy.

It seems like he's kind of degrading the family of names there.

And thank God it wasn't double bound because he could have been Randy Pope Christmas as the mayor of Miami.

Gosh.

There was a competition to find the most Christmassy name in the UK in 2017, and it was held by the British Christmas Tree Growers Association.

And there were various great entries.

The eventual winner was a woman called Donna Rudolph, which is good because that's two of the reindeer, which is very impressive.

But other winners included people like Val Spruce, Holly Berry, which I think is really good.

Chris Tingley.

This is the thing.

The prize was a Christmas tree, right?

A real Christmas tree, not an artificial one.

And in her winning speech, Donna Rudolph said she was really happy to win because she'd never had in her whole life a real Christmas tree.

And she would be having a real one from now on.

This is, let's not forget, promoted by the British Christmas Tree Tree Growers Association, who I think may have fed her some copy in what she was going to say.

And it was the whole thing was to promote real trees.

But I looked into this a bit further, guys.

Donna Rudolph lived in

Wizbeach, right?

Which was fewer than 10 miles from the place which actually had the farm where she collected her Christmas tree from.

Well, wait a minute.

How old was she?

I think in her 30s.

So it's not going to be 30 years ago they decided this scam that they were going to name her a weird Christmassy name.

I'm not suggesting her parents named her to get her a free tree in 30 years.

I'm saying the Christmas tree growers may have picked her because they wanted someone to turn up in person and collect their tree from the farm.

It's not the biggest thing ever.

It's not the biggest thing to bust ever.

It's not Dan Brown, is it?

I'm just saying, I think Chris Tingley might have been a bit wrong.

I think Holly Berry, I think Holly Berry's really good, isn't it?

Anyway, so that's my niche and legally quite actionable.

That's your panorama documentary style expose there.

I looked the other way.

I looked at people who were called Randy because I thought, that's a fun first name if you pair it up with a surname.

Sure.

So Wikipedia has just a really big list of different people called Randy.

So there's a Randy Baker.

There's a Randy Farmer.

There's a Randy Gardner.

There's Randy Love.

There's Randy Rogers.

Randy Messenger, which sounds like someone who would slip into your DMs.

I like that one.

And in my favourite one of all, Randy Murray.

Do you know anything about Randy Murray?

He's a Canadian guitarist.

He's amazing.

He used to be in a band with a guy called Ronald MacDonald.

That's as far as I got into his channel.

Let's get him on.

Adequate replacement, do we think?

We don't even have to tweet one letter on the posters.

There was a guy called Alistair Christmas who was born on Christmas Day, which is very exciting.

He was interviewed by the Daily Mirror, and he said that on at least one occasion in his life, someone had refused to hand over a parcel that was for him because they just couldn't possibly believe that his name was Alistair Christmas, which I have to say is quite not especially unbelievable.

But he said of his name, when people find out it's called Alistair Christmas, people just see you and look at you as if you were magic.

You can see it in their eyes.

To them, it is like they have just met Santa.

Can I say, the delivery guy, right, he turns up with a parcel for Mr.

A.

Christmas.

And then the guy comes out and says, I'm Mr.

A.

Christmas.

And he says, I don't believe you.

What was he expecting the poet to say?

Who's this box for then?

Exactly.

Does he just take it home?

I don't know.

The surname Christmas, quite common in Essex and Sussex.

And the theory is that it was probably, you know, people got their surnames in the olden days.

It was probably someone who was born on Christmas Day.

That's what we think.

However, there is a guy called Henry Christmas who is a retired engineer who has spent decades delving into the history of the name and he said in 2005 that the Christmas Day Christmas connection is too easy.

But I rather think that he spent decades doing it and realized that it's actually the obvious thing that everyone thinks.

Yeah.

He's got to justify a lifetime wasted.

Yeah.

Sorry, Henry.

Do you guys know about Merry Christmas Clause and Santa Claus, the Nebraska couple?

No, no.

These are these are two people who legally changed their names in 2017.

They're so sweet.

So they won't give their real names to journalists who interview them.

So they are now the wife is Merry Christmas Clause, the husband is Santa Claus.

And they go and they dress up.

They wear their dress reds at Christmas, which is the term for the Santa outfits.

And for the rest of the year, Santa's a taxi driver.

And yeah, they just decided they loved being in the mall so much, having kids swarming around them, sitting on their laps and everything, that they've changed their names and it's so sweet they met in december 2009 and she merry christmas clauses said she knew he was the one when he offered to make me dinner there aren't many men willing to cook a woman dinner i knew i'd found a keeper which just

imply a low bar

She then says, but the bar gets even lower.

She said, what I love about Santa, my husband, is that he's so great at the kid-friendly jokes at Christmas.

So,

could someone explain this to me?

She says, when the kids ask for iPods, he says, Why an iPod?

Wouldn't he rather have a three-pod?

There's three P's in a pod, but there's only one I in an iPod.

The parents roar with laughter over that.

Does that make sense?

I think that's quite a slight move.

I've got, look, I made a pig ped joke earlier.

I'm not going to slag off this guy.

He was doing his best.

He's doing his best.

Wow.

We're ignoring one very famous Christmas.

It was a fictional Christmas.

Christmas Jones Bond character.

Yes.

Oh, he was.

In the world.

Pierce Brosnam flick, wasn't it?

That was one of the Pierce Brosnam ones.

It was Denise Richards, who's a nuclear physicist character.

And it's basically: so there are a load of really sort of cheap, tacky gags.

You know, James Bond says, oh, I thought Christmas only came once a year.

So all of this.

Really, like,

it's aged poorly, and it was quite recent.

So just off the back of this, and this is a tangent, I apologize, I thought I'd try and find

the worst

role Denise Richards has ever had to play, and I think I found it.

Her first starring role was in a film called Tammy and the T-Rex, okay?

Which is a comedy about a girl whose boyfriend, his brain, is put into a T-Rex, right?

Yeah, I got it.

So it's a bit niche and a bit more.

What do you mean it's put into a T-Rex?

Like, his consciousness goes into the T-Rex.

What T-Rex?

There is a T-Rex in the film, okay?

Well, I'm getting to that.

I'm getting to that.

A math scientist has created a T-Rex, okay?

So this is the thing.

I was reading about this film on IMDb.

I cannot believe it.

Basically, listen to this.

The writer slash director, Stuart Raffle, has said in an interview, the idea for the film only happened because they had access to a full-size T-Rex animatronic.

Someone phoned him up and said, hey, we have this T-Rex for a month.

What should we do?

Shall we make a film?

They said, I'll start writing immediately.

The whole reason for the film is because they had access to this thing for a a month he was constantly writing scenes and then saying to his colleagues and the cast and crew do you have any better ideas for the next scene

all the locations were within 25 minutes of his house it's incredible sounds amazing it's such a good film wow yeah Dan will be watching that when he gets home to live that's why I'm so sad about this

anyway tangent over sorry hey Lisa I need to move us on to our final fact of the show it is time for our final fact and that is Anna my fact this week is that the edible advent calendar came before the printed picture advent calendar.

This is um this is this is my interpretation of what the first advent calendar was which was uh Gerhard Lang who was the first person to print and sell advent calendars.

He did it in 1908 and he got his inspiration from his mum who when he was young she had like a little kind of cardboard box thing to which she fixed a baked meringue pastry for each day of Advent, and she allowed him to eat one per day.

Oh,

yes, it's so charming.

Yeah, in fact, it was a it's something called uh wieble,

uh, which I think is a specific German dish.

It's a sweet-like meringue, which has a figure of eight shape.

And yeah, he was inspired by that, and he's the father of the Advent calendar.

And then his later Advent calendars were called Munich calendars, weren't they?

Yeah.

And then something in the 30s happened, and he just wasn't very popular anymore outside of Germany.

Yeah.

It's really tragic.

Karl was rationed in the 30s and they shut his company down.

The German government in the 30s.

The Nazi government shut sorry, no one sort of, you know, concealing that.

But the Nazis made their own advent calendars as well.

Yeah, well, there was one company, wasn't there, that they accepted that they could make them and they were the accepted company.

And basically, yeah, if you got an advent calendar in Nazi Germany, it was just Nazi symbolism.

Yeah, it was another swatzika, basically, right?

Like a tank.

No, no, no, there were tanks.

There was Wotan, who was a Nordic god.

It didn't mention Jesus at all, and there was advice on how to keep your children entertained over Christmas.

Swastika biscuits for the SS.

Put the swastika at the top of the tree.

Yeah, they're actually looking at it now.

There are a lot of swastikas involved.

Because they kind of, I think, the Nazis tried to do away with, they kept Christmas, but they made it like a celebration of Nazism, didn't they?

Because obviously Jesus was Jewish and that didn't fit in with their ideas.

Yeah.

But

they couldn't be asked to come up with their own pictures or stories.

They so they printed in 1943 a full calendar, full color calendar, where I think each I think this is around Christmas, and each image was like a Christmassy-type image, but with a different story attached.

So, there was Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger, with I think the three kings going up to them, and it had text underneath explaining that's just a story about a woodcutter, a soldier, and a king who get lost in the woods and encounter a woman with a baby.

Come on, guys, be a bit imaginative.

And so, before this guy,

was it called Gerhard Lang?

We think there were some kind of advent calendars, but they weren't mass-produced.

They weren't a proper thing.

They were just a thing that people did in villages and towns and stuff, right?

So, in the 19th century, before that, so in the early 19th century, you would have a load of chalk marks on the road, and every day you would rub one off.

Don't be disgusting.

Timmy, what have we been doing over there?

Sorry,

Too crude.

Too crude.

There was another one.

There's a book by Elise Averdaj called Roland und Elizabeth, which came out in 1851.

And in that, they say that every evening a new picture is added to the wallpaper.

This is before Christmas.

And the children know them when, oh, 24 pictures are hanging on the wallpaper.

Then Christmas is here.

So that was a thing in this book from 1850s.

And quite like Elise Everdyke, she basically was a deaconess.

And she started this group of women who would organise all the charity and stuff in the area.

She was really awesome.

And she had a motto, which was, Every person, whether man or woman, should learn as much and for as long as he or she can.

One can never learn too much.

Okay.

I think it's our kind of thing, this isn't it?

Yeah, definitely.

What's her name again?

She's called Elise Everdyke.

Elise Everdyke.

I don't know if it's because we're doing a Christmas show, but every time you say that, in my head, I'm going, Elise Everdyke.

Elise Everdyke.

which is the Spanish Christmas Eliza

just scans in my head

cannabis I've gone it's really stratospheric in the last few years I think there have been all I mean extreme novelty ones but this year you can get a Sriracha advent calendar

which is marketed as the 12 days of Sriracha but then surely everything is just the same flavour of Sriracha every time though James I'm here to tell you you're wrong wrong wrong because it has 12 200 millilitre bottles of sriracha, which apparently you're getting through one of these things a day.

Original, mayo, yellow chili, green chili, wasabi, blackout, super hot, extra garlic, smoky, black pepper, tikka, and yuzu srirachas are available.

And if you drink one of those every day, you will die.

Wow.

I just wanted to counteract the product placement we were doing there.

Okay, well, are you hoping that you might get some free sriracha?

I actually don't really uh don't especially like sriracha i don't know why i brought it up well i was going to tell you about the 2017 porscha advent calendar

that cost one million dollars each wow there was only one allowed on each continent on earth but it was 1.75 meters in height it was made from aluminium it contained a um a gold watch designed by Porsche.

It supposedly contained a kitchen, but it's definitely not big enough, enough, so maybe a voucher for a kitchen.

I'm not really sure.

It had a voucher, possibly as well, for a yacht in there.

Also, some sunglasses made from gold and some cufflinks.

Hang on, who are you handing this yacht voucher to?

I love the idea of just like being at Tesco.

Do you have any vouchers to redeem against your transaction today?

Yes, I've got this for one yacht, please.

So funny.

I know, absolutely.

And you get all that stuff.

But how big is it, did you say?

It was 1.75 meters.

At least two of the seven things you named were vouchers and one was a wristwatch.

So, yeah.

Where's the size coming in here?

Um, the sunglasses, the cufflinks?

No.

Was there a Porsche?

Did you get a Porsche?

It didn't seem that way from what I saw.

That's a bit fucking disappointing.

Like, you don't!

You're not getting a fucking yacht.

You pay a million pounds for this, and you're not getting the thing that it's named after?

Do you know how much

yachts cost a lot more than a million pounds to use?

When you use a yacht, when do you use a yacht?

You use cars every day.

A yacht?

You can't drive your kid to school in a yacht.

It depends where you live.

If you live on an archipelago, you absolutely can drive your kid to school in a yacht.

I've been to some floating islands where people live, and the school is a floating island, and they definitely don't use a yacht, I must admit.

Well, they use more of a wicker boat.

Well, imagine how impressive a yacht would look next to that.

Anyway if Pasha wants to send me one of those then I will accept it.

It's estimated that there are twice as many Advent calendars for pets than there are with pictures of Jesus on them.

God's good.

Really?

No.

Well this is an estimate that has been made by a man who is the founder of one of Britain's explicitly Christian Advent calendars.

He reckons there are 400,000 Jesus ones sold each year and over a million pet Advent calendars.

I did read a story about a lady who bought her daughter a Garfield Advent calendar, and 11 days in, after she was complaining every day that the chocolate taste a bit funky,

realized that it was an advent calendar for her cat.

For 11 days, her child is like,

and she even looked at it, I think, and was like, oh, it's green.

It must be mint flavored.

Okay, 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 the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, and James.

At James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Or you can reach us on our group account, which is at no such thing.

Or you can find us on the website, no such thingasofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are there, so do check them out.

Also, in January, we are going to be doing the final leg of our nerd immunity tour.

Do come and see us live.

It's going to be awesome shows.

There's eight more of them to go, so do come along.

And before we wrap up tonight, just to let you know here, Birmingham, it's quite a sad night for us because the effectively fifth fish member of our tour is leaving us.

This is his final show tonight.

This is Ash Gardner.

Ash, you will know in the background of no such thing as a fish.

He is the singer and writer of our theme tune, which is called Wasps.

When you hear that, go check it out on Spotify.

There's a full album by Empry Yes, and that's where we got our theme tune from.

When we started as a podcast, he was the person who gave us the gear in order to record it and taught us how to press play and how to do it all.

Genuinely, we used his stuff.

When we first decided to do a live show, he was the guy who came and mic'd up the whole room and worked out how we could do it so that could get out there.

He's fed us facts the whole way through.

He's been on every single tour with us.

He's been the person that's basically been our emotional.

crutch for the tour, always making us happy.

Just such an awesome guy.

This is his last night.

So we're going to close the show tonight by having him come on stage and sing the theme tune for you as we move out.

Yeah.

We're going to miss him so much.

He's really the beating heart of our tour.

It's going to be horrible to live without him.

But fuck him.

He's moving to Australia.

So tough luck.

Anyway, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you.

Thank you so much, Birmingham.

That was awesome.

The catch is going soon.

Here's the goes.

Ash Gardner, get the music up.

Crank it.

Oh, we're going with the little chorus.

There's no escape.

That'll move from height to height

Leaving nothing alive

So it's time to get together

Show what we can do

You hold on to me

and I'll hold on to you

It's time to get together

Show what we can do

You hold on to me

and I'll hold on to you

Thank you guys.

Take care, see you next time.