403: No Such Thing As The Buckingham Palace All-Day Breakfast

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

This week coming to you live from Oxford.

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 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 the longest professional baseball match on record only lasted so long because the umpire's rulebook was missing the bit that explained when a match should be stopped.

That's amazing.

I kind of think that an umpire should already know the rules by the time he's starting to umpire the game.

Yeah, you would think halfway through, he shouldn't be going, I'm just going to check.

Well, this was unprecedented times in the baseball world.

So, this was a match that was on April 18th, 1981.

It was the Paw Tuckett Red Sox, and they were playing the Rochester Red Wings.

And so, these are smaller teams in a different league, professional baseball players, though.

And Poor Tuckett, it was played there, which is in Rhode Island.

Big deal for Poor Tuckett because the newspaper the next day said not since the time that they had to shoot the drunken camel at the city zoo

has there been this much excitement in poor tucket

so yeah but it was 1981 1981 so it sounds like a weird match from ages ago but quite recently really at the start of the match there were 1700 fans watching by the time the game eventually ended which was 407 in the morning,

there were 20 people left still watching the match, 20, which I feel is quite a lot.

I read that some of them were asleep.

Oh, okay.

Well, they all got given a season ticket, so it's paid.

I think some of them got lifetime passes.

Yeah, they did.

That's true.

So this is the longest baseball match in the world, which is eight hours and 25 minutes.

It really isn't that long.

I think what makes it long.

I'm a combination of cricket.

That's

eight hours.

Exactly.

Because all the writing up, like there was a player called Wade Bogues, who was 22 years old when the match started.

And by the time it ended, he was 23.

Wade Bogs is quite famous.

He became quite a famous player later.

Did he?

But this didn't happen to like land on the, you know, when it went past midnight.

He turned 23.

The thing about this match was it was eventually stopped.

And they then resumed the match a few months later.

You're kidding.

Oh, that's so, I thought it was just a midnight thing, the birthday.

No, no.

Oh, okay.

But when they've carried on afterwards, it took like about 18 minutes or something for them to just go.

Didn't they just have to score once, basically?

And they did.

And then that's over.

And sort of thousands of people flocked because by then it was almost as big news as the drunken camel thing.

So the entirety of the nation practically was there for 18 minutes.

But Dan, what's the deal with the missing page?

Who's ripped out the crucial page?

Yeah, we got the rule book.

We don't know if it was missing.

We don't know if they couldn't find it.

And just no one knew what to do.

And so there was actually someone that they were trying to call on a landline who was higher up, who just wasn't near their phone.

Also, it was, you know, 12 a.m.

heading into 4 a.m.

eventually.

So they eventually got through to him and they were like, What do we do?

And he was like, Stop the fucking match.

What are you doing?

Why did they, why was it lasting so long?

Do we have to do that?

So, what happens in baseball is you have an innings and an innings, and you keep going with inningses until someone scores more in that innings than the other team.

You get, you know, you do a certain number that you're supposed to do.

And then if it's a tie, you just keep going until one team gets like sudden death.

And they just kept going nil-nil, nil-nil, nil-nil, nil-nil, nil-nil.

And then there was a a one, right?

And then the other team got a one.

And that was

Wade Boggs.

He kind of got a home run to tie that game.

And he said, I didn't know if the guys on my team wanted to hug me or slug me.

That's a great thing for me.

But Wade Boggs, by the way, I just want to say, because he is famous, but the most thing I know about him is he once consumed 107 beers in one day.

Whoa.

For like charity?

Or

he he was.

Sometimes people don't need an incentive, Dan, to drink their hundred pence.

He was famous as Big Drinker, but then this is the record that his friend said and he's confirmed.

Wow.

But so the match itself, again, I wish we hadn't told you it was just eight hours because when you hear the details of the match, it does sound like it just went on for like a week.

So the accounts of the baseball players, a very cold night, the baseball players getting so cold that they were ripping up furniture from the dugout and burning it, snapping used baseball bats in half and putting it in this bin of fire to stay warm, to keep you going.

You can just snap a baseball bat in half.

I don't think you'd need a fire.

I think you're fine.

Put a jumper on.

These people are pathetic.

I know.

It was cold.

It was really cold.

And that was one of the problems.

It was a really windy day as well.

And so the problem was it kept being nil, nil, nil, nil because no one could get any home runs.

And the reason was they kept whacking it for miles and miles and the wind would just blow it back into the stadium.

They blow it with a a boomerang, it turns out.

Yeah, extraordinary game.

It is quite pathetic.

If you look at sports matches of yore, where they basically, before all these rules were codified for all the sports in sort of mid to late 19th century, they just went on for days and days and days, didn't they?

You get football matches and rugby matches with hundreds of participants.

You'd have one village playing another village, and they play from dawn until dusk for like four days straight.

It was great.

I think the first recorded football match ever in Sheffield in 1794 was three days long.

And the match report said three days long, a very good match.

And it felt necessary to note that although there were quite a lot of injuries, no one was killed.

But that's amazing because that team before that game, they were called Sheffield Monday, weren't they?

Very strong.

But on the flip side, you do get short baseball games as well.

And there is a record for the shortest baseball game ever, which was in 1916.

And the match lasted for 31 minutes.

And yeah, and that's really quick for baseball.

And the reason is both teams beforehand spoke to each other and realized they both hadn't trained to catch, which was going quite early.

No way.

But the problem was for the fans who came to the match is that the game started 30 minutes early.

So the game ended before it was meant to start.

So fans rocked up and they're like, this is going to be great.

And then they saw like the final batter or whatever.

And then they all went off.

That's bullshit.

I'm outraged for these people 105 years ago.

Do you know that the first ever baseball rule that was written down was that all players must be punctual?

Really?

This is the oldest set of rules we have.

They're called the Knickerbocker rules.

They were written in New York.

But the thing was, the teams were from New York, but there wasn't much room to play in New York, so they always played in New Jersey.

And so if you have to schlep all the way over the river to New Jersey, obviously you don't want people turning up half an hour late or an hour late or whatever.

So that's why that was the first rule.

Interesting.

Interestingly, a new jersey is what these poor cold guys in the match we previously referred to needed.

And also, in those set of rules, hitting the ball out of the stadium was a foul.

So, you know, in baseball now, really, what you're trying to do is whack it all the way out.

In those days, if you did that, you would be out.

And that's because the stadium was right next to the Hudson River.

And they couldn't afford to lose all the balls.

So did the phrase, you knocked it out of the park, have a negative connotation of those things.

Idiot, you knocked it out of the park.

Now we've got to go and get it in the boat.

There was one controversial rule book incident which I read about, and this was a guy called Earl Weaver, who was manager of the Baltimore Orioles, and he had a real issue with umpires.

So, I think he was manager in the late 70s.

He hated umpires, he thought none of them knew the rules, they didn't know what they were doing.

He got told off loads of times for once he pulled up third base and just walked off the pitch with it.

He once

the description was he was told off for pecking at an umpire's chin with the beak of his baseball cap.

So they had a tense relationship.

Anyway, in 1979, he got in such a big fight with one of the umpires who basically hadn't called out what this guy thought was an illegal move of the opposition's that he went to the dugout, he got the rule book, he marched back onto the field and he opened the rule book and started reading from it, saying, Look, you obviously don't know the rules, you idiot.

And the umpire got annoyed, understandably.

And so then he started tearing the rule book to shreds and throwing it all over the field in front of them.

One of the other things, things, early baseball, they never, so baseball players all have that cool glove that we get as kids when we're playing.

Yeah, that's what it's called.

You don't mean the giant gladiator phone thing.

No, I don't mean it's the audio.

No, so those gloves.

But in the early days of baseball, that was seen as a very wimpy thing to have any kind of handwear.

So you would just have to use your hands.

But that was really damaging all the players because those balls, as we know, very hard and they're being walloped.

So that was a real risk when you were a baseball player.

And so it was a player, as far as one historian was looking in, found this player called Charles C.

Waite, who was the first person who wore a glove.

But because he was so scared of being made fun for it, he wore his skin tone color as the glove.

So he thought at that distance, they might just think in the crowd, oh, he's got slightly big hands.

Just one big hand.

Yeah.

Just on the gloves and the catching and throwing.

Yeah.

So the world record for throwing and catching eggs was set by a couple of baseball players from New Zealand.

I guess they're very practised at it.

Called Nick Hornstein and Ricky Pyway in 2018.

So is that like I throw an egg to you and you have to catch it and you have to be as far away from me as possible?

Exactly.

Does it matter how the egg is cooked?

It does.

Come on, that would be very true.

Frisbee a fried egg?

Come on, that's a challenge.

It's 93.6 meters.

Sounds boiled.

Which is pretty.

It was not.

It was a raw egg.

And it was very impressive.

And this is at the World Egg Egg Throwing Federation, which is based in Swatton, in England.

We know where it's based.

Sorry.

Anyway, it sounds like an incredible party, the World Egg Throwing Championship.

So I was reading an account of it, and I'm just going to read you what happened on the day.

Former champ Norm Fowler of Peterborough won the Russian egg roulette.

No explanation in this article of what that is.

Then the target accuracy contest, throwing at male model Joel Hicks, was won by Tina from Cambridge with two shots to the groin.

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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 when acorn woodpeckers fight each other, the rumor spreads through the community and other acorn woodpeckers turn up to watch.

This is so cool.

So they're really social.

They're the most social woodpeckers because a lot of woodpeckers are solitary.

I'm sure you know.

And they love this spectator sport and they have these amazing battles over their territory, their trees, their granary trees, which are where they stockpile all their acorns.

And basically, the trees are guarded by a group of males who are all brothers, and then a group of females who are all sisters.

And they're all shagging each other as well as guarding the tree.

But they're not brothers and sisters with each other, so there's no incest going on.

Anyway, when one gender dies out, when one sex dies out, then there's a vacancy.

And so, you know, a bunch of female acorn woodpeckers will want to swoop in to claim that tree.

And these massive fights break out between the different claimants to the tree.

And, yeah, people come from miles around.

Not when I say people, I mean woodpeckers.

I think you've identified too closely with your research area this week, Anna.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

And they'll travel for a couple of miles and they'll spend like an hour a day just watching this big fight.

And then they'll go back home.

And I think it's useful, they think, because you can pick up social information,

spy out potential mates.

But they leave their bit of tree that they're protecting in order to see this this fight.

And it feels like that's the next little trick of evolution that you need to fake a fight and then send in your troops around the place.

It's like one Acon woodpecker who kind of goes around when everyone else is at the fight just stealing their acons.

Exactly.

Or claiming the trees, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

You've broken the system.

The fights, they last for a long time.

They last for about a day sometimes.

I know the woodpecker, the audience.

The cricket matches last for five days.

No, it's true.

Pathetic.

Yeah, this family strategy they have is pretty interesting, the sort of of incest avoidance thing they have, because you get a breeding pair, and then you get a load of babysitter, let's say a load of babysitter males, okay, who are the offspring of the breeding pair.

Got it.

Then the breeding female will die, okay?

But that means that there has to be a new female.

However, the previous, the helper males, the babysitter males, previously couldn't breed because the breeding female was their mother.

Okay?

Uh-huh.

So, but now they're on equal terms with their dad because there's going to be a new breeding female.

Yeah.

So now there is just a parity so they're all going to breed with the new female.

So finally and this is good for obviously for the babysitter males who now can breed but it's also very interesting because it means these birds have an awareness of the relations of other birds to each other.

It's called triadic awareness and it's it's not in Woody Woodpecker though is it

Does it make do we know if it makes it an awkward father-son dynamic?

It's like if your parents divorce and then your dad marries a step-mum, then you sh also shag the step-mum.

And that often creates tension.

I think it does.

That's just why I wonder if it's the same.

Yeah.

But it's so, yeah, like that family dynamic is so weird.

It's also the case that a few mums will also live in the same nest, right?

And when that happens and they're having eggs, they try and synchronize eggs so that they don't have one child arriving before the other.

And what they'll do is if one of the mothers has an egg, they'll knock the egg out just to make sure that that's no longer.

They might eat it.

Yeah, yeah, and they'll

get the youngins.

As if there are two breeding females.

Exactly.

They haven't synchronized when they're having their eggs.

The other one will push out or eat the egg of the first one until they get it right.

Until they get it on time.

Or, sadistically, feed it to the mother often.

You know, you've laid an egg and then your rival female pushes it out and then comes and feeds it back to you.

But it's all because of this bizarre setup where they have up to seven males and up to three females in every crew, isn't it?

So you've got these three rival females at all times constantly laying and killing each other's kids and laying and killing each other's kids.

And it can be weeks.

Cannibalism for weeks, and then you time it right and then happy families again.

Yeah.

It's like when your periods are synchronizing when women live together, it takes a few months to get in sync.

Yes.

And you kill each other's periods until they all arrive at the same time.

Apart from, of course, that's a myth.

It's a myth.

Women's periods don't synchronize.

Is it?

Oh, yeah, you keep claiming it's a myth, but I.

What am I let's revive?

No, don't.

Come on, Dan.

Please see.

Well, my research has shown in the houses that I live in that there's something to it.

Hundreds of thousands of houses, I'm sure.

They move a lot of times to different houses, particularly when they found out of my period experiment I was conducting.

The fights are pretty violent, though, because I read one place that said the birds basically have spears for mouths.

And you'll see after the fights that the birds will have eyes gouged out, blood all over them.

They'll fall to the floor, holding each other's legs so they can't fly, and they'll kind of crash to the ground.

So they're pretty violent.

Wow.

You can see why people go to what?

Yes.

And why people, again.

They make a sound that goes like whacka whacker.

Ah, like Fuzzy Bear.

Fuzzy Bear or Shakira were the only two I could pick up.

When will they duet?

What did Woody Woodpecker?

His was like who?

Yeah, exactly.

Is that in the middle?

That was quite good, actually.

Not bad.

So the voice of Woody Woodpecker was a woman called Grace Lance.

She's also known by her stage name, Grace Stafford.

And what happened was they had another person who did the voice.

I think it might have been Mel Blanc, but it was someone famous like.

That was the original, I think, yeah.

And then he decided he didn't want to do it anymore.

And she said, well, I'll do it.

I do a really good impression.

Not as good as Dan Schreiber, but it's quite good.

And her husband, who was producing it, said, nah, I don't think so.

I think we're going to tender for it.

And so she then did an anonymous audition tape and sent it in with all the other audition tapes.

And he still chose her Woody Woodpecker.

And for the first something like 10 years or so, eight years in fact, that she did it, she didn't have her name on the credits.

And that was because she thought people would be disillusioned if they knew Woody was voiced by a woman.

Right.

Wow.

As opposed to a woodpecker.

Because I would be devastated as a child.

The trees are incredible, aren't they?

You've got to look up the granary trees of acorn woodpeckers, which they mostly keep in the California, Oregon area, basically look like a tree that surface is covered in crumpets.

They look incredible.

They look like, you know, people who are scared of like little holes.

Yeah.

Is it called tripophobia or something like that?

They would hate these because it's just loads of loads of little holes and each one has shoved an acorn into it.

And they test them, they'll shove an acorn in and then they'll practice trying to get it out.

And if it's too easy to extract the acorn from the little hole they've made, they abandon the hole.

So that's going to be too easy to steal.

But it keeps changing because the holes always change size.

Because trees change size.

Trees are always growing and shifting a bit.

And acorns dry out, so they will change size when they do.

So it's a nightmare.

So they spend all of their bloody time moving.

It's not funny.

There are up to 50,000 holes in a tree, guys.

Guys, come on.

Please take it seriously.

50,000 acorns in a tree.

It's just you and your brothers and your three weird wives.

And you have to.

It takes 20 minutes to make one hole.

There are 50,000 holes in the tree, and you're constantly moving the acorns to a better-fitting hole.

It's awful.

I would want to die in a fight.

Okay, look, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the world's largest carpet museum is shaped like a giant roll of carpet

For people at home, we've just put a picture of it on the screen and I think that undeniably looks like a giant roll of carpet.

It's awesome.

It's really amazing.

Where is it?

This is in Baku in Azerbaijan and this is something that I noticed when I was reading about a carpet war between Azerbaijan and Armenia on top of the actual war they're having.

But the carpet war.

They're not the most lethal weapons, are they?

Well you can carpet bombs somewhere I suppose.

Yeah.

You've got confused.

So these are carpets that come from an area called Nagano-Karabakh, which is a disputed territory between the two places.

Armenian weavers are claiming that the Azerbaijan government is appropriating their culture.

Because basically, most people, most historians, not all of them, but most historians think that these are Armenian-based carpets.

But Azerbaijan has built a massive museum and most of it says, no, they're ours.

Oh,

I didn't know that this was so political a museum.

It's quite political.

It's a quite a museum.

Yeah apparently there's some Azerbaijani officials who say there is no such thing as Armenian carpets.

No such thing.

That's pretty ballsy to say Armenia doesn't even make carpets.

I know well they they claim that the Armenians stole the Azeri like tactics and you know stuff like that.

And the UNESCO has said that Azerbaijani carpets are a masterpiece of intangible heritage.

But a lot of people pointed to the large donation that the government made to UNESCO just before they made that.

So this is very controversial.

And I know from me saying that, it sounds like I'm on the Armenian side.

You know, you can make your own decision.

But don't decide wrong.

James, you've just absolutely torched our Azerbaijan tour next year, so thanks a lot for that.

Wow.

And this museum, yeah, it's quite new.

If you look in Baku, I think a few of you will know this because they've had football tournaments and stuff there, but they've built a whole load of new stuff in Baku quite recently.

But one thing about I noticed when looking in the interior of this is that all the floors are paved with marble.

Doesn't seem to be a single carpet that's not behind the perspex.

If you don't want to ruin them, that's a sign that you're treasuring your carpets.

Yeah, I guess.

Because they're really, I mean, there are as much wall hangings as for floors until pretty recently, aren't they?

I've always thought we should bring back the wall carpet.

I like it, yeah.

It's gone out and went out of fashion a long time ago, like probably turn in the 20th century, maybe before.

I've got a carpet on a wall.

It went out of fashion maybe 200 years ago, actually.

Have you really, Annie?

Yeah, why?

It's actually

soundproofing.

Yeah.

Maybe that's what they were doing, recording all their podcasts back in the day.

Maybe.

I like, I was reading, there's Turkish carpets, rather than having a new Turkish carpet that feels like it's just really bold in its colours and really bright, getting a more antique-y feel to one is something that people chase more.

And the way to make that happen that they do in Turkey is that they actually take the carpets out for months at a time and just lay them out in fields.

So if you go on Google Earth and you zoom in on Turkey, there is whole fields, yeah, of thousands of carpets that are just laid out in the open because it's very dry.

And they just sit there and it's these carpet layers who understand fading so well that someone can say, I want it faded to like this kind of degree, and they're like, Leave it to me.

And they go and get the carpet when they know the time is right,

when it's faded.

Yeah, and it looks really antique, and they dust it off, and that's when you get your carpet.

How interesting.

Oh, that's really cool.

Is it faded?

No, I do believe you.

It's just that when you say weird shit like that, it's often fun.

I know.

And the way you looked at me, it was like, is that true, James?

Is it true?

Prove me wrong.

So, did you hear that in 2012, scientists at the University of Manchester made a magic carpet, which is very exciting.

Yeah.

Not a classic mag mag carp.

They made one which

it basically can tell you when you're going to fall over, which is very useful.

Ah, yeah.

So it doesn't fly either.

It's not flying.

It doesn't fly.

No, no, no.

They're working on that, but this is very useful.

They're working on that.

They're not working on that.

Obviously, they're not fucking working on that.

It's the next obvious step, isn't it?

Yeah.

How does it do that?

Does it just have those horrible rolls in it that trip you up?

And then a sign on the other side that goes, ha ha, I told you you'd fall over.

Quite the reverse.

No, quite the reverse.

It's stuffed stuffed with clever fiber optic cable and that kind of thing.

And basically it builds up a profile of your movement as you're walking around.

So it's not like, can you get amazing internet if you're sitting on that carpet?

It basically monitors you and if your movement deteriorates even slightly, it's full people.

It can tell your gait, I guess.

Yeah, it can tell your gait.

So it can't tell you you're about to fall over now, but it can say you're about to fall over soon.

So look out for that.

You can imagine an alarm that went off when you were about to fall over would actually make you more likely to fall over.

Do you know that there's people at the Harvard University that are working on a magic carpet?

Same question.

A flying one.

This is an actual flying one.

Oh, wow, cool.

And they have made it, but it's the size of a banknote and it's only 0.1 millimeters thick.

Okay.

But who's flying on it?

Is it that ants?

Like a cool.

Yeah, that'd be so exciting.

That would be awesome, right?

They think that they could possibly make it bigger in the future, but you'd need so much energy and you'd need to make it ripple.

So So, what it is, it's like a really tiny bit of almost like paper.

It ripples and ripples and ripples, and then the force that these ripples cause can make it kind of just go up off the ground, but they can also make it go forward.

So, it kind of is quite cool, but it's, I suppose, we're a few years away from a

long way to go.

That's very cool.

Can we go back to the countries that lead the world in carpet making?

Because I don't think we've covered them all.

There are a lot.

Okay.

So, Turkmenistan is a big one, has the Guinness World Record for the the biggest carpet in the world which by the way is really beatable if anyone wants to it's 14 meters wide and 21.5 meters long which feels shit and it wasn't even made by that many people daily sabah which is a turkish news site said it was made by a total of 40 people including one man

it is like historically it's um like the women's role to make these carpets isn't it yeah pretty much everywhere that seems to be the unifying thing across all of these carpet countries it's always the women who do it smash through the carpet floor.

It's great, well done, Henbert.

But Turkmenistan's national flag has carpet on it.

Does it?

Which I don't think any of the others do, so I think that's winning.

But yeah, in 1992, when I think they became independent from the Soviets, they started designing their national flag.

And if you look at it, it's a really nice flag.

It's green with a red stripe and it has five carpet-like motifs on it.

They're called gulls, and they're just little carpet patterns.

Oh, it's patterned.

The flag's not made of carpet material Does it have does it have tassels because if not I'm not interested

It doesn't have tassels and if it was made of carpet It would need a fucking strong wind to fly it

Can we talk about weatherspoons carpets, please briefly please

Okay Every weather spoon so about what 900 in the UK has its own special carpet and this wasn't known about until about 2015 Known about in public, I mean must have been known about Tim Marson the boss, he probably knew he probably was laughing up his sleeve at all Everyone's always so pissed when they leave.

They never remember the carpets.

That's the trick.

There was a guy called Kit Kelless who started a blog about the floor coverings of every single weatherspoon in the country.

And he assumed they'd be identical when he started.

So I'm not sure why he was blogging about it.

But,

all right, he found out and then he started the blog.

It doesn't matter.

Each one has their own and they're often themed to the local area.

It's really exciting.

So there's a Britannia pub in Plymouth, which is slightly cruise ship-based, you know.

He wrote, Kit Kelless, he wrote an entire book about Weatherspoons pub carpets, and the sun covered it with the headline, The Rug Prat.

Is this Britain's saddest hobby?

Is that a pun on the rugrats?

It's a pun on the rugrat, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Well, he was the person, the original people that made those carpets were the people that...

Waxminster.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, I've gone a bit deep on this one, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So

they're the ones who have the royal decree

warrant in order to make carpets for the royal family.

So yeah, weatherspoons and them.

And then they stopped making it because people started coffee.

But Buckingham Palace, if you've ever been inside, it's all weatherspoons.

Yeah.

That's what's taking up all the space.

The ground floor is just a really big weather spoon.

I tell you what, the Buckingham Palace all-day breakfast is...

Do you know, one very famous red carpet that we all are aware of is the Hollywood red carpet that we see at the Oscars every single year.

And I didn't realize that there's so much mystery around the red carpet at Hollywood.

So

when they make it, they make it in a mill in Dalton, in America, and they don't tell you which mill it's being made in.

That's all we know.

We don't know, it's got its own special colour, Academy Red.

Okay, they bring it there in a truck, it's very mysterious, they lay it down, they have people in tuxedos with little portable vacuums just to vacuum at every spot and make sure that the carpet's doing fine.

And then, when the when the ceremony is done, they pick it up and they burn it, and it's only ever used once.

It's just a big mystery, and they make a whole new carpet the next time.

Why don't they burn it?

Because they don't want the material.

So, a few people have stolen bits of material from it, and they've gone on eBay, and they're really worried that it's kind of like the Coca-Cola recipe.

They're going to discover the recipe for the Hollywood recipe.

It's a red carpet.

What do you want?

It's not a red, it's a magic carpet.

It's kind of slightly off red.

It's red.

Yeah, it's actually burgundy.

Yeah, it's burgundy.

They let people film the ceremony.

You can see what colour it is.

You can see the colour, but you can't see what it's made of.

It's made carpet.

It doesn't matter.

I think, although I like the the conspiracy theory reasoning, I think it's more likely that you can't reuse it because the next Hollywood year it's going to look like crap.

And it's 152 meters long, so there's very little other use you can put it to.

There's hardly anyone who's got use for 152 meter long carpet.

I think it might be.

Maybe it's just made of something really awesome, like Bill Murray's back hair or something.

Yeah, exactly, yes.

You know, people used to cover their carpets with other carpets to protect them.

Called druggetts.

Oh, yeah, I've got one on my wall.

Yeah.

Your wall is seven carpets carpets thick.

Yeah, until the 19th century, druggetts, which are just cheaper carpets that you put on top of your carpet for everyday use.

And then if a guest came, you whipped the carpet off, and then you had the proper one underneath.

That's the sad thing.

Andy has a druggett dealer, don't you?

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

My fact is that the world's first ever hot air balloon wedding was meant to happen in 1865, but the officiating priest refused to go up.

So the couple had the first ever hot air balloon honeymoon instead.

Oh,

nice.

It's just a nice story about a couple called Mary West Jenkins and John F.

Boynton.

They wanted to marry in a balloon.

They thought it'd be fun.

And the Reverend said no.

He said it was too unholy,

not appropriate enough.

So

they just went up after the wedding instead.

But it was a very exciting ceremony, this wedding.

There were 6,000 people there.

They were mostly there for the balloon.

They They were there for the balloon.

Yeah, they were in Central Park.

So they did get married in the end, but they got married on the ground.

And how much do you suspect that the Reverend was just too much of a pussy to go up in the balloon?

It's possible, isn't it?

There was the Baltimore Daily Commercial of the 10th of November 1865.

This was a couple of days later.

They said that the official story was that the priest had to get the last train to Philadelphia.

Okay, but then they did say the actual reason probably was that the reverend gentleman accustomed to operate solely in mundane matrimony had backed out at the 11th hour.

Right.

I wonder how much a history, like speaking of the shortest baseball match before, has been influenced by people needing to get trains.

Quite a lot.

What time is it now?

And the Reverend, by the way, was a guy called Thomas DeWitt Talmadge.

And one reason why I'm not sure whether he was scared of going up is he was a massive publicity stunt guy.

And they said that he was the most famous clergyman in the world, including Pope Leo XIII.

He was really, really famous.

He thought thought that no one should be able to read novels.

And he also.

When was this?

This was in the 1860s.

People frowned on novels back then, didn't they?

You're supposed to be reading Greek.

He said that anyone who read novels shouldn't be allowed to work in an office, a store, a home, a shop, or a factory.

And he also thought.

Where are you going to work?

In a field?

In a field.

Yeah, you get one of Dan's magic jobs, drying carpets out for a living.

It's not, it's not.

It's real.

Yes, yes.

But this guy, the two people who got married, it was, like you say, Mary Wes Jenkins and Dr.

John F.

Boynton, and his doctorate was in geology, and he decided that as well as doing his wedding up in the hot air balloon, he also was going to make several electrical experiments while he was up there.

Cool.

So he was like mixing business with pleasure a lot.

Yeah, she must have been slightly annoyed as he

set up the cathode.

The balloon was an interesting one.

Well, the owner of the balloon was an interesting man.

He was called Thaddeus Lowe, and he had been a spy in the Civil War, but a balloon spy.

Right.

Yeah.

It's so hard to spy on a balloon.

You'd think it was quite conspicuous.

It's very hard.

Yeah, you're right.

He had proposed balloons for use in the Civil War, which they actually were in the American Civil War.

So what would he do as a spy, though?

You would look around.

Oh, he'd be up there.

He'd be up there.

So he'd come back and be like, they've got carpets everywhere.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He demonstrated it for George Washington,

for George Washington, who had died about 40 years earlier.

Sorry, for the White House.

He'd gone up in Washington with a telegraph key, which linked him to the White House, so he was able to radio down to the White House.

You mentioned George Washington by mistake.

For no reason.

For no reason.

Oh, thank you for picking me up on that.

The first actual marriage that did happen eventually in a balloon was in 1874.

It was Mary Elizabeth Walsh and Charles M.

Colton, and it was on top of the P.T.

Barnum Manhattan hypnodrome that they had.

There was always a balloon on the top of there, and it it used to go up all the time.

And so they got married on there.

And one of the people who was on there, who was basically Barnum's balloon guy, was called Washington Harrison Donaldson.

And he was named Washington after George Washington, hence the connection.

And he was a daredevil, and he was amazing.

So he used to do high wire acts and so on.

And then when balloons became a thing, he did a thing whereby he would go up in a balloon, but he got rid of the basket and he would have a bar, just a bar, where he would put his legs over and go up.

And he would start doing basically trapeze-style acts where he was flipping around and so on.

And when he got very high, he would let the gas go down of the fire, and he would come back down.

And as he was coming back down, he would drop a human dummy from it,

which everyone would see suddenly a plummeting human, and it would land on the ground.

And inside were business cards and flyers for his act.

That's amazing.

And so, yeah, and so he used to go around doing this act, and eventually P.T.

Barnum saw him and employed him.

And what he used to do in the middle of Manhattan would go up in this balloon before shows, and when he was up there, he would just throw Barnum business cards and so on.

So New York constantly littered with advertising.

The balloon was called P.T.

Barnum as well.

Yeah, it was, yeah.

Well, I think these guys are pretty brave, actually, because the wedding was postponed by one day because the balloon burst the day before.

It's a good way to get your wedding paid for.

It was the idea of the couple first wedding, and it was basically a way to get P.T.

Barnum to fund their whole wedding and pay their dowry because it was such good publicity.

And also, because these became really popular, if you look through news searches of like the late 19th century, balloon weddings were the thing.

And it was such a good way to get guests to your wedding if you didn't have mates.

Because thousands of people would come.

And sure, they're there for the balloon.

But the photos just say, I'm a seriously popular dude.

And there was one, actually, I read about one in 1884.

This is in Pennsylvania, where the couple failed to arrive.

They freaked out and realized they were too scared to do it.

And all the promoters were going to have to refund the crowd because you'd be a paying customer as well as a guest.

And they decided they weren't going to do this.

So instead, the balloon's owner and his assistant staged a marriage.

They posed as the couple.

They got married to each other in this balloon, went up in the air under assumed names, but they only found out four years later it was actually legally binding.

Did they stay, did they fall in love?

I don't really want to tell you the answer to that, Andy, because I think it'll ruin your night.

Okay, don't tell me.

Don't say anything.

Okay, we'll leave it there.

There was one in 1888.

This was a wedding between Margaret Buckley and Edward T.

Davis.

40,000 people came to that wedding to see them go up on the hot air balloon.

Unfortunately, the balloon then landed in a swamp.

But it kept kind of moving along the swamp, so they were dragged for two miles

clinging to the ropes of the balloon, and they finished the rest of the trip by train.

So good.

I have a favorite hot air balloon love story.

This is an account from someone online.

My husband proposed to me on a private hot air balloon ride.

That's not the story.

The pilot told us that one time he had five couples on a larger ride, and one of the guys decided to propose to his girlfriend by having a big sign on the ground where they're landing saying, Will you marry me?

But he didn't put a name on the sign.

All five couples were dating,

and all five of the women thought, This is the best proposal I've ever received in my life.

Four of them were disappointed.

No, would you?

I mean,

wouldn't you?

If it's a third date, it's too you know,

you can't roll with it.

It's got to be someone's.

You can't say, Oh, yeah, that's mine, and have the other bloke next.

You go, No, it's not, it's mine.

Anyway, there is actually, there was a service that offers, it's called DD Ballooning.

I think sadly the company's shut down now, but it exists.

Uh sad you look too excited about that, but no.

Um I think D and D is just people who run the company.

It's in California and it offers mile-high balloon trips.

And basically what it promises is comfort and discretion for a couple.

It says you've got in your basket the privacy of an enclosed dome tent with your own private view as our discreet pilot ascends to one mile.

We provide a C D player, you provide the music, blankets, pillows and imagination.

And it lasts an hour.

An hour.

An hour.

Five minutes in.

Take a second.

Go on, Franken.

Sorry, we haven't actually taken off yet.

Go on.

Oh, my God.

We're going to have to wrap up.

Can I tell you about one balloon hero?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Willie Coppins.

Heard of him?

Willie or won't he?

Go on.

He will.

Willie will.

He will, and he did.

He was a fighter pilot in the First World War, Belgian man, very brilliant at shooting down observation balloons, right?

Which were a major feature of his ballots.

Reasonably large target.

Look, they were very well defended, alright?

He was so good at it.

They were called balloon busters, the pilots who did it.

He shot down nearly 40 balloons during the war, which is really big potatoes, okay?

The German army was so angry about Willie Coppins, they specifically tried to kill him with a booby-trapped balloon.

They put up a balloon with explosives.

But get this.

Once, he was being shot at from a German balloon in his plane, and he coolly just flew up and around and parked on top of the balloon

until it landed and then just gently slid his plane off and flew away.

Listen.

If you're going to give me shit about carpets being laid out in Turkey.

No way, Buster.

I'm a bit skeptical, I have to say.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Dan here.

That's an abrupt break.

That's an emergency break for a plane to land on a balloon.

No, it's a very soft landing.

Surely.

No, really.

The softest landing you could possibly have.

Think about it, you'd need a vertical takeoff and landing plane, right?

Like most planes kind of come into a runway.

It might have been a very long balloon that he was landing on.

They had those long balloons that he was landing on.

That's the runway.

A Zeppelin.

A Zeppelin.

It was a Zeppelin.

Yeah.

Any further questions?

Please don't.

Look, I hate to cut this off, but we've got a train to catch.

So that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we'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 our podcast 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.

We've also got a link to all the rest of the tour dates of this nerd immunity tour.

Oxford, thank you so much.

That was so much fun.

Thank you for coming out, being with us here tonight.

Really appreciate it.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.