401: No Such Thing As Scandalnavia

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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 Ip Switch.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that there's a special piano that only Benny from ABBA can play, and he can only play it if he's six miles away from it.

This is such a cool thing.

There's an ABBA Museum in Stockholm, which is a fascinating place.

And in it is a piano that belongs to Benny.

And what they've done is they've synced up the piano with Benny's studio.

And so anytime Benny's at home and he plays on it, the piano in the museum just starts playing whatever it is that he's playing as well.

So what if I go to Benny's house and I'm not very good at playing the piano and I just play chopsticks?

Will that play on there as well?

I think it'll probably summon an ambulance to Benny's house.

I'm sending out an SOS.

It's worth saying, it's hooked up to an iPad, so it's not everything that plays.

He has to decide when he's allowing the museum to play what he's playing.

They also have a phone where only four people have the number of the phone.

Guess which four?

Is it Usfor?

It's Osford.

No, it's ABBA.

And

if the phone rings in the museum, then you know that it's one of the four members of ABBA phoning that phone.

And they got the idea from Yoko Ono, didn't they?

Did they?

Yeah, so Yoko Ono has got quite a few of these, what she calls telephone pieces, that's been in various different exhibitions around the world over the last few years.

She did one in Argentina, she did one in New York, and her idea is that she will ring it from time to time and someone will answer.

And when they answer, they're completing the piece, the artwork, if you think about it that way.

So the first time someone did that, they were in a Toronto exhibition in 2002, and the phone rang, and the guy said, Hello.

And Yoko Ono said, Are you in China?

And he said, No, I'm in Toronto, Canada, where the exhibition is.

And she said, Oh, I'm not in China either.

And she hung up.

Oh, wow.

Did he then get paid half the money that she'd made from selling this exhibition?

Wouldn't that be amazing?

Wow.

ABBA?

Oh, yeah.

They were pretty pretty unpopular in Sweden.

No, they weren't.

They were very popular.

In Sweden, right at the start of their careers, they were seen as being...

I can't believe this is true, but you know, they became really famous in, what was it, 1974, the Eurovision, when they sang Waterloo?

Yeah.

Apparently, when they became really popular in the world, Sweden was so snotty about them that they cancelled the Swedish top of the pops and abolished the pop charts.

What?

Really?

No way.

Yeah, that's what I read.

Why?

Because they thought that

They've been gone too commercial.

They were a bit commercial, they were a bit poppy.

I mean, they had an incredible and different sound, but they were also very, yeah, commercial.

But they were, weirdly, like a supergroup, because both Benny and Bjorn had very big bands that they were in before ABBA came along.

And then they got married to Agnatha and Annie Fridd, who both were big singers, and it didn't work.

And one theory by one of the people who worked with them is because they had a terrible band name before they came up with ABBA.

So their original band name was Bjorn and Benny, Agnatha and Annie Frid.

That was their name.

And then they became ABBA because that was the shorthand that was used for it.

It was a newspaper competition that got in the name of the name.

Was it?

Yeah.

Yeah, because they'd had other names which included Alibaba and Fab and Baba.

And then the Gothenburg newspaper held a competition to say, we've got to get this band a better name because these all stink.

And ABBA was the winning company.

I read that they borrowed the name from a fish company.

And that was on the website of the fish company.

They said that we agreed to lend lend our name to the pop group as though they're going to give it back at some point.

It does, because it is a big fish company.

Everyone knows about a fish company, and so I can see that it would have been controversial.

So, they did have a weird time.

The two couples, it was made up of the two married couples, got divorced within basically two years of each other, between 1980 and 1982, while writing their best songs.

So, if you listen to The Winner Takes It All, that was written by Bjorn, wasn't it?

And then he got Agnetha to sing it, and they'd been married.

And she says, It's very interesting reading what they say about the divorce because he says, God, it was the friendliest divorce on the face of the earth.

No marriage breakup could have been easier.

Best friends forever.

And then you read her in a separate interview going, Everyone thought it was a really easy time, but it was actually hell.

And particularly being made to sing the lyrics of this song, which are things like, you know,

talking about does she kiss you like I used to kiss you?

And he'd gone off with another girlfriend weeks after they divorced.

She's there on stage singing it.

so yeah, that's all.

And then it was 1981 when the final divorce went through, and so by 1982, they were all single.

Yeah, and their first album of 1982 was called The Singles.

Yes!

That's good, that's so good.

Um, do you know there are ABBA, just on that note, there are ABBA tribute acts which include the Bjorn identity and the Bjorn ultimatum, but not the Bjorn supremacy.

That's very funny.

That was so good.

Annie Fred, not Swedish.

Scandal.

Really?

Norwegian.

Bullshit.

Scandalnavia.

Scandalnavia.

Absolutely.

She's really interesting, though.

Her background is so interesting.

She is what's called a Tiskebarnas or a German child.

And these were people in Norway who, during the war, the 1930s and the Second World War, the Nazis had a policy of interbreeding their men with Norwegian women to create perfect Aryan offspring who would then sort of be given back to the SS and be you know a brilliant Aryan race for the Nazis.

And she was a child of that.

But she was born in 1945.

So her mother was Norwegian, her father was a German soldier who was in Norway.

And then immediately they were completely ostracized and had a hell of a time and they couldn't get jobs and like most of them like have really awful lives as a result.

And I think they got compensation from Europe a few years ago.

Did they get it in the the end?

I remember.

I'm actually not sure.

I know they fought for it, but still, not fucking Swedish.

Just on the sort of mania of when they hit and became absolutely stratospheric, I didn't really appreciate how huge they've been.

So, just for an example, they visited Australia in the mid-70s.

Their TV special in 1976 got more views than the moon landing.

Wow.

Yeah.

They were so popular that in the year 1976.

Oh, in the 1970s, though.

In 1976.

More TVs, right?

Sorry?

More TVs and

more TVs.

And they showed it four times.

Yes, I mean there are factors that mitigate, but still,

it was a big event.

What time of the night was it?

The moon landings in Australia?

No, I don't know.

Look, okay.

They were so popular.

In 1976, they had the number one spot for 39 weeks.

And after 12 weeks of it, their version of Top of the Pops just stopped showing the music video because you've seen it for 12 weeks, guys.

In Australia, that was.

Yes, fans absolutely wrote rioted.

And that was on the Australian version of Top of the Pops, which was called Countdown.

Yeah.

The Australian version of Top of the Pops was called Countdown.

Why are we not talking about this constantly?

Oh, really?

Yeah, you've just been hanging on to this fact in your head for like eight years.

Yeah.

Well, um, when you say why are you moving on from this Top of the Pops Countdown thing?

What?

Absolutely.

Like, is there a letters and numbers show called Top of the Pops in Australia?

No, I don't think so.

Well, what do you call Countdown?

I don't think we have Countdown.

All right.

They can't spell in Australia.

Well, when you say fans rioted.

Did I say rioted?

Yeah.

I meant were furious.

One complaint was registered with the ABC.

No, but genuinely, look, when they toured, one mother ran and she put her baby down on the road so that their tour caravan would stop and she could get an automobile.

There was a hotel which cut up their bed sheets after they'd left and they sold it via newspaper.

Oh, they do that all the time.

Yeah, they did that with the Beatles as well.

I've got a bunch of people.

It's not the baby thing, though.

I just want you to know: we will not succumb to that kind of blackmail.

If there's a baby in front of our tour bus, we're going straight over it.

I think that's.

I think that's fish policy, right?

Yeah.

It's pretty important to get that clear from the outset.

That's good.

Oh, my God.

Who do you think is the biggest band ever from Sweden, according to the Bilbo charts?

The biggest band ever from Sweden.

I'm gonna put my foot on the landmine and say ABBA.

It is not ABBA, it is Roxette.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, Roxette have had four number ones.

ABBA have only had one.

And the interesting thing about that is they were a band in Sweden and there was a high school student who was on exchange in Sweden, heard about Roxette, went home, brought a record home with him and pestered the local radio station in Minneapolis every single day saying, play this, play this, play this.

Eventually they did play it, and within two months, they had a record deal in the US and the number one single.

Wow.

Oh, my God.

Isn't that cool?

That is.

But really, mostly the best, well, we all know what the best band from Sweden really is, and that is Rednecks, the singers of Cotton Eye Joe.

They're from Sweden.

Cool.

Cotton Eyed Joe, the song, do you know what that's about?

I've been there long to somewhere.

He's been somewhere in the world.

Where did he come from?

Where did you go?

Where did you come from?

Cotton Eye Joe.

What's it about?

What's Cotton Eyed mean?

He's a teddy.

He must be a teddy.

No, he's someone with syphilis.

So, we think possibly it's from the 1800s.

It's an African-American folk song about a man who has cotton eyes, and that's either from syphilis or from drinking too much moonshine.

Right.

What do you mean, syphilis turns your eyes to cotton?

It kind of makes them go like milky in colour.

So, the other really interesting thing about rednecks is when Napster came out and everyone started sharing music, the manager who owned all of the rights called Peter Edinberg, he decided there was no point selling records anymore.

What we're going to be is like a band who just goes around performing.

And so he got rid of all the original members and brought in 20 new rednecks.

And that means they can play five different gigs on the same night.

There's a rednecks in Australia, so they can play in Australian gigs.

When are we going to do this?

This is amazing.

There's an online shop where if you pay 11,111 euros, you can get a private show anywhere in the world from rednecks.

And if you pay 2 million euros, you get the entire band.

I was going to say, can you mix and match?

Can you make your fantasy rednecks team kind of thing?

That'd be amazing.

Wow.

Why don't you take Larry over here?

He's got gonorrhea.

One tiny last thing before we move on.

Their Eurovision, just very quickly back to that, because that's the thing that exploded them to the world.

The UK.

Do you know what they gave them point-wise?

Null points.

Did we?

We're famously good in Eurovision at judging and participating.

And you know who the interval act was at that year's Eurovision?

No.

The Wumbles.

Yes.

What a Eurovision.

That's what's that's a big year.

They would have won.

If they'd been formally entertained,

they would have cleaned up.

Let's be real.

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Well, listen, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that by changing the genome of a daddy long legs, scientists have created a daddy short legs.

What did they do to the genome?

Because it sounds like if you want shorter legs, you're going to make shorter jeans, right?

And you'll need shorter jeans once you've got shorter legs.

Yeah, that was the joke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was the joke.

Thank you.

I'm just a hype person for everyone's jokes tonight.

I want to.

I appreciate that.

Really do.

Okay, so just to confirm, what we're talking about here is harvestman spiders, and that is what Americans call daddy long legs.

We would sometimes call those those daddy long legs, but more often we would say crane flies are daddy long legs.

But anyway, they're actually not spiders or arachnids, but they have four pairs of legs.

They walk around, they have two pairs of legs that feel stuff, and their legs have got these things called tarsomeres.

And if you think about your hand, you've got these little knuckle bits here, you've got like two on each finger, and it means you can grip stuff.

They have got loads of these, which means they can really grip around stuff.

And the scientists wanted to learn more about them, and so they did so by turning off some genes.

And in this particular case, they turned off the gene that made all these extra little nubby bits, and they ended up with really, really short-legged spiders.

Why?

It's science, Anna.

Just to see, right?

Because they're confused by the harvestman, the daddy long legs, and they just think, why have you got?

It's like having a hundred knuckles on a finger.

Exactly.

So imagine, Anna, that we work out which gene does this in the harvestman, and we could somehow get that gene sorted in ourselves.

We could have the bendiest fingers like Mr.

Tickle.

That's the dream.

It's the dream come true.

They use them to mate with each other, don't they?

That seems to be the main purpose of the music.

I'm not saying we would do it that way.

I mean,

you must have a vested interest in this somewhere.

No, they seem to sort of mate by lassoing their arms around each other.

So, yeah, they'll extend their arms and they'll wrap it around the feet the male will wrap it around the female's arms dozens of times.

So it's really locked on.

And then they mate throat to throat.

James, I have a question.

Were these daddy shortlegs bad at sex as a result?

Were they

try?

I imagine they would be um I can't tell you for sure it wasn't in the paper whether they were bad at sex but you would think so because the legs um like Alice said they are quite important in the sexual um part thing with the harvestman spiders uh for instance the male will often grab the female's leg and just start nibbling on it because it's really hairy so he's got a really hairy leg and he'll just sort of nibble on the hairs right

we don't really know why they do that though right it's the scientists are like we don't and they sort of jiggle the leg around and stuff yeah

the article i read said presumably for her pleasure, but that's a big presumption to make.

Yeah.

Oh, there is another thing about the actually,

the oldest genitals found in 2003 were, I don't know if it's been superseded by some even older genitals, but was a harvestman, which was 400 million years old, which I find absolutely mind-boggling.

There was another one found a bit later in Myanmar, which was, again, trapped in amber, like in Jurassic Park or whatever, which was 100 million years old, but it was very exciting because it was erect.

And the story about it in Life Science, it started with the words, if you think an erection lasting more than four hours is a problem, try one lasting more than 99 million years.

But it's amazing that we found it because it's very rare to see a harvestman or daddy long legs with an erect penis.

Exactly.

It's a very rare thing.

And it's even rarer to see it in fossils/slash in amber.

We've only ever found, up until the point of this article you're talking about, 38 fossils of harvestmen in history, and one of those has a penis coming out of it and they didn't expect it and it's and they could tell that it was a different species to other ones now alive because of its penis.

It has a sort of heart-shaped top.

Oh, yeah,

it's really sweet, yeah.

And when you look at it, it's genuinely, it's like, oh, it's like a little emoji, like it's very cute.

But that penis, that erection, we think it may have been mating, but we think it may not have been mating as well.

It might have just been watching dinosaur porn or something, whatever it was back then.

We think either it was mating and it got stuck in the amber and then somehow the female got away, for example, or the amber started to roll over it and its blood pressure just went boom!

It went right up and the penis was literally just pushed out of it in a kind of big death erection and then it died.

I'll be honest, when I did this fact, I thought we would be talking about spiders and daddy longlegs and genomes and stuff.

And we seem to have gotten onto the

penis because they are the only arachnids with a penis.

And so I imagine that they would want us to be mentioning that if they knew we were talking about it.

Spiders just have pedipalps that they put their sperm onto and then.

You know Spider-Man.

Yes, I think he has the pedipalps, not the penis.

Wow.

There are so many species.

There are 6,500 species of harvestmen.

And then that's not even including crane flies, obviously.

And they let off a disgusting smell when they're under threat, which apparently you can smell.

So if you see one under threat, which it probably will be if you're approaching it, then try and touch it, and it smells a bit like petrol, apparently.

Yeah, and sometimes you get massive clumps of them, don't you?

There was one in southwestern China that had 300,000 individuals in a clump.

And it just looks like this hairy blob that's kind of going around.

Oh, wow.

What do you mean they kind of roll like a ball together kind of thing?

They don't roll so much as kind of walk at all.

And there are some on top as well, so they're a little bit kind of on top of each other.

it can be hundreds of thousands of them and they think that possibly again we're not sure why they do this but one reason could be that if they're all giving off this farty smell then it might make it even more potent

you can't be you can't be blamed if there are 300,000 of you in the same

they can lose legs but they can't grow them back

so in the same way that we can lose legs they can lose legs but they do it more often so they they'll lose a leg defensively sometimes if if they're being predated on, then they'll kind of rip off one of their legs and leave it behind.

And they can be fine.

They can be basically fine with two legs lost, but their gait changes a little bit.

So it seems like they start to use their body as a replacement leg.

So they do what's called stotting if they're down to seven legs, which seems to be they brush their bellies against the ground with every stride.

And then, if they lose two legs, they turn to bobbing.

which is where they really bounce like a bouncy ball along the ground, up and down.

And sometimes they just bob up and down on on the spot really really fast we don't really know why maybe to like evade birds or something wow it's weird how so I can picture a daddy long legs in my head but the body is not quite in my head so just as a sort of an equivalent if humans had the length of leg that a daddy long legs had it would be as if we had 80 foot long limbs

80 foot 80 foot yeah compared to body size the torso bit that is and that is mr tickle isn't it just to go back to it is that's what he's got basically that's true.

Wow.

The daddy longlegs, harvestman and cranefly, they've only been known that since 1820.

Before that, they were known as father longlegs.

No.

Yeah, in the 1740s, father long legs.

And even 100 years before that, craneflies were known as Harry Longlegs.

I've read that in Ireland they're called skinny Philip.

I don't know why.

That's a cartoon I would watch.

Skinny Philip.

So, yeah, the crane flies, which I think maybe we know a bit better in the UK, just there are so many more of them, especially in autumn.

They live underground for 10 months, and then they come out for a few days, they mate, and then they die.

What we're seeing is

it's almost none of the story of the deadline.

But the rest of the story is quite dull, isn't it?

It's like following Sleeping Beauty's story while she's asleep.

They're not asleep.

They're well alive under the earth.

Are they?

Yeah, of course they are.

They'd laugh.

Well, no, I know they're alive, but like, what are they doing?

They're awake.

Well, they're moving around.

They have expandable arses when they're larvae.

You want me out?

I think we all do.

Um, no, they have uh like inflatable arses that they fill up with like hemolith, like kind of like fluid, and that's how they move through the soil to like push them forward as they inflate their bottoms.

And they're fat worms, they're much fatter than a daddy longlegs' body when they're worms, and then it lodges them in the earth.

So, if they need to eat a bunch of leaf matter, then it roots them in because their bum just you know clogs up the soil around them.

very clever move.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Watch that show.

I take that show.

There you go.

It's the best time of their lives, and we never get to see it.

Yeah.

We're going to have to move on in a second, guys, to our next fact.

In 2016, there was an entomologist called Liz Fowler, and she went to the island of St.

Helena to look for something called the Basilevsky's crane fly.

And people have thought it had been extinct for about 40 or 50 years.

No one has seen one for 45 years.

While she was driving along, one of them flew into her car and landed in her hand.

Oh, wow.

Did you know that was it?

She didn't sort of crush it, toss it out, and then someone found that years later.

Well, listen, we need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact is that Q Gardens has managed to keep the same pot plant alive for 246 years.

Yeah, it's beaten my record by 246 years, pretty much.

Yeah, it's an incredible plant, but it's also an incredible effort.

It's really amazing.

So it's a plant called Encephalatos altensteini, and it's in the palm house at Kew Gardens, which is one of the really, really warm greenhouses.

It weighs a ton, literally, it weighs one ton, and it's four meters high, and it was collected in 1774.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

So that's what, King Louis XVI in France, pre-French Revolution?

I heard someone say that it's older than the founding of the United States of America.

Just about.

Just snuck in there.

Just snuck in there.

Yeah.

Exactly.

My God, maybe that was what made them strike for independence.

Yeah.

Talk us through that.

When the British took it.

It's hard to see the chain of causation, but it could be.

Yeah, that's a song missing from the Hamilton musical.

Lynn was desperate to get in.

I met it recently.

I met the pot plant.

Did you?

Yeah, we did a gig on this tour in Richmond, and before we went there, I went with my family to go see it, and we were in this beautiful, this green house that you go in and it's so hot in there it's very sweaty and you're cutting around the corner and then there's this little post that says oldest pot plant in the world question mark I did a really weird thing which was I handshook its leaf

because I read that Prince you're such a star fucker it's unbelievable

anything for a photo with some celebrity I didn't get a photo I respected its privacy but I because I read somewhere I think we did on the podcast that Prince Charles whenever he plants a new tree before he goes he shakes its branch and says, have a good life.

And so I...

What?

Yeah, just because he talks to trees, right?

I knew he talks to trees, but I didn't think he sort of formally spoke to trees.

Yeah, no, he shakes their branch and he says, good luck.

Hope it goes well.

And so I did the same thing.

I sort of gave it a little shake.

It feels like the ship sailed.

If you're wishing good luck to the already, you know, 246-year-olds.

Well, no, because he's at the other end of the journey, or she is at the other end of the journey now.

I think it's a he, although it was quite hard to work out the sex, because they are one of the few plants that have distinct sexes, so they need a member of the opposite sex in order to be able to germinate and create offspring, which is why they all hang out together.

They're very sociable.

So we might be doing quite a cruel thing by keeping this poor chap on its own.

Oh, yeah.

They did a study.

There's lots of mysteries about cycads.

Given that people are fascinated by them, there's a lot we still don't know, like how exactly they're pollinated.

We thought it was pollinated by the wind, but found out recently that actually they heat themselves up like a radiator and that that vaporizes all these compounds and then that attracts insects.

Wow.

And their seeds are too big for most things to eat.

So we didn't know how they were dispersing their seeds.

And so they did this study to look at how their seeds get dispersed and how they spread.

And it was so cool how they did it.

The scientists who did it, they basically turned up in Queensland in Australia and they super glued a bunch of metal bolts to the exposed bits of seed when they were on the original cycad.

And then they returned a few months later with a metal detector and then just went around the ground seeing where the seeds had gone.

And they'd gone underground, had they?

They'd gone on the ground.

No seed had travelled more than five meters away from the plants.

They're very lazy.

Yeah.

When you shook hands with the plant, Dan, they asked, did you wash your hands afterwards?

Uh-oh.

He's never washed that hand again, has he?

Because they're incredibly poisonous.

Like really, really, really, really poisonous.

Yeah, super poisonous.

They were used to execute criminals in Honduras.

What?

Psychads.

More generally, psychads.

Yeah.

There was a guy called Willem de Vamli.

He was on Rotnest Island, which is near Perth.

And he and his soldiers ate some of these plants.

And they said that it violently affected them both upwards and downwards.

Wow.

That could have been an awkward moment in Kew Gardens.

God, I'm lucky I didn't do that because I genuinely used to.

I was

sucking your fingers.

No, this is really embarrassing.

But when I was a kid, if I met a celebrity, because it was so rare, I had this weird reaction where I'd lick my hand.

Oh, I'd do it.

So after I met Julian Lennon, I licked my hand.

Did you think that some of his DNA was going to get into your life?

What awesomeness would come into me from the son of John Lennon.

Have you given up that habit over the last 18 months, or have you kept that?

Yeah, I was very good.

Yeah, the last thing I did that with was a travelling piece of stone from Tutankhamun's burial chamber.

God, it's gone downhill since the days of Julian Lennon.

You're very lucky to be alive, because Julian Lennon, of course, is extremely poisonous.

But wasn't he used to execute criminals?

Yes, he was, yeah, I think.

This thing, it's one of many amazing plants in Kew.

So there was a collector called Francis Masson who was unbelievable.

I think he's the plant hunter who collected this.

He was the one.

He was the one who collected it.

So he had this incredible life going around collecting plants.

He introduced a thousand different species of plant to Britain.

And he had a bad time.

As in, he got caught in a battle on one occasion, just absent-minded.

He was in a hurricane, which destroyed all of his specimens another time.

He was taken prisoner by the French, attacked by French privateers at different time.

Basically, he was a plant hunter at a time when the world was at war over its seas, and so this created big problem.

And the French just didn't like plant hunters.

They did not.

Well, they didn't like.

He managed to talk his way out of it most times.

So there was a time where he was in South Africa, and he was so interested in the plants he was hunting that he lost all sense of time and space and completely stopped focusing on the world around him.

And he forgot the main thing he'd been warned before his day's work started because he'd been warned there was a party of escaped convicts on the loose.

Look after yourself and keep alert.

And he then heard these clanking chains coming near him.

And he had to just run away as soon as he realised that.

Was he there?

He was there watching them thinking, I know this rings a bell.

I'm supposed to do something now.

Is it approach them?

Shake their hands and lick lick it?

There was this, it was in South Africa that he found this plant, right?

The one that's in Kew Gardens, and he was around there with two other people, one called Thunberg, and another one called Lady Anne Monson.

And Lady Anne Monson is really interesting.

She was the great-granddaughter of Charles II.

She was described as a very superior whist player and a remarkable lady botanist.

There's a flower now called Monsonia, which is named after her.

And it was named by Linnaeus, who didn't really know her, but used to write write to her.

But he really, really, really liked her.

And he wrote to her, saying, This is not the first time that I have been fired with love for one of the fair sex, and your husband may well forgive me so long as I do no injury to his honor.

Who can look at so fair a flower without falling in love with it through all innocence?

Should I be so happy as to find my love for you reciprocated?

Then I ask for one flavour.

I ask for one favour of you.

Strawberry.

Always strawberry.

I asked for one favour of you that I might be permitted to join with with you in the procreation of just one little daughter to bear witness to our love, a little Monsonia flower.

Oh, he really kept that till the end.

She must have red treats.

Fucking hell.

So Francis Masson, he basically brought it back from South Africa to London and they brought it on a boat.

They strapped it to the deck of the boat because they wanted to make sure it got water and sunlight so it didn't die in the process.

And then it was taken on a barge down the Thames.

I mean, it's like an explorer in its own right, this plant, before it lands, you know.

So it's meant to produce cones,

this plant.

And in the whole 240-plus years that it's been in Kew, it's only ever produced one cone, a single cone.

And it was witnessed by Joseph Banks, who was the great explorer botanist as well.

That's when he was, I believe, a director unofficially of Kew Gardens.

So it's

like just before Banks died, actually.

The year before he died.

It says that in the article, it said the year before his death.

As if it was like the next time a cone comes.

Well, maybe he licked it.

Yeah, that's true.

But my favorite thing about this tree, which I didn't notice at the time, this pot plant, is that it's so old now that, like if you were old and you're getting tired, it can't really stand too well.

And so it's leaning on a lot of props, just looking like it's still doing okay.

It's just knackered, just going fucking oh.

Yeah, it's helping being helped up.

Its name means bread in the head, which which is a cool name.

Encephalatus.

Encephalatus ultum steinii is the specific one, isn't it?

And encephalatos means bread in the head.

And that's because you can make bread from it.

So you've got to be careful, obviously, in case you do the whole bit accidentally executing yourself thing.

But apparently, like its stem is full of starch, like a really good quality starch.

So you take the pith out of the stem.

If you bury it for two months, it gets rid of the poisonous toxins.

I actually haven't seen any evidence that this genuinely works.

As in, I'm not sure you'd actually die if you didn't bury it for two months.

It's in Jamie Oliver's 15-minute meals, isn't it?

Yeah, there's a few different ways they do it.

The Kokai people, they tie it up in animal skins and bury it, don't they?

And in Australia, there's quite a few tribes who will put it under running water, like in a river, and they'll leave it there for three months, and then that supposedly makes it better.

Right.

Long time to wait for a breakfast, isn't it?

Yeah.

We need to move on soon, guys, to our next fact.

Can I quickly mention, I was reading just a few things about Kew Gardens generally, and it's a pretty amazing place outside of the plants that they have there.

So, one thing to look out for next time you go, they've got bits of, so in the 19th century, London Bridge was sold to America, right?

All of it was shipped over, except for quite a few chunky granite blocks which were part of the bridge, and that's in Kew Gardens now.

And there's a bit where it's got park benches on top, and so a lot of people are sitting on London Bridge, and they have no idea that they're sitting on

the bottom.

Did you see anyone while you were there sitting on the benches looking at their watch, going, They said they'd meet me at London Bridge.

I don't understand.

I want there to be one person.

They have their own police force in Kew Gardens.

Kew Gardens has its own constabulary, which they have the power to arrest you.

So, Dan, you got very lucky actually with your, you know, can you be arrested for licking your hand after you've touched a plant?

I didn't

think that should be an arrestable offence.

I think that's the old me.

All I did was shake its hand and say, Good on you.

I think it's a bit

too.

Today!

Hey, you're doing it.

Look, we won't accept sarcastic rounds of applause, all right?

It's not on.

Come on, Beggar's Company Choosers.

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Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that red pandas like artificial sweetener.

They're very weight conscious, panda.

Yeah, this was, this is like if we were in a room full of red panda biologists, there would have been such a gasp at that because that is astonishing information, guys.

We did not think mammals could taste artificial sweetener.

It doesn't make sense.

Primates are supposed to be the only things that can taste artificial sweetener.

All other mammals can taste normal sugars, or some of them can't even taste that, like cats have lost their ability to taste sugar.

But then there was this study in 2009 at a Swiss zoo where a bunch of mammals in the zoo were given a choice between plain water and sugar water or plain water and water with sweetener in.

And all the other animals didn't care between the plain water and the sweetener, the mongoose, the meerkats, the lions, the ferrets.

But the red pandas way preferred sweetener.

And in fact, their favourite was aspatame, which is the candarelle one.

Do we know why they in particular seem to like sweeteners?

No, I think we can speculate that maybe it attracts them to bits of their diet, which is all bamboo.

So I don't know why it would.

Interesting.

So, there is a thing about some animals: like, if you eat a lot of plants, then you taste more bitter things, as opposed to, like, cats that eat meat can't really taste bitter things very well.

And that's because a lot of plants have toxins in them, which are bitter.

And possibly, some of the taste receptors that let you taste bitter things are also the ones that let you taste sweet things.

So, it might be that kind of thing.

But yeah, you're right, we don't know, basically.

Yeah, just random.

But they can have a candarelle in their tea and be satisfied.

We should say what a red panda is.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I did not know before.

So pandas are black and white, aren't they?

Pandas are black and white, and these are red.

They are both non-pandas, and they are the original pandas, okay?

So they were, they're these little mammals.

They look a bit like raccoons.

They were thought to be raccoons.

They're not raccoons either.

What the hell are they?

They were put in the bear family.

They're not bears either.

What the hell are red pandas?

That sounds like a kid's book, I reckon.

What the hell are red pandas?

Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

That is a really good idea for a children's book, actually, because they're very sweet as well.

And it's very satisfying when you see one.

They are in the Iluridae family, and they are, I think, the only animals in the family.

The only ones left, certainly.

The only ones left.

They've got no relations.

But they are a panda, then.

They were called panda before pandas were called pandas.

And if anything has the right to be called a panda, it's the red panda.

And pandas, am I right in saying, aren't pandas because they're bear family?

Well, there's no such thing as a panda.

A panda is just a word.

Right.

New name, new name.

They're both pandas because it's in their name.

But yeah, panda bears are bears.

Although there's been this constant debate about whether either of them are bears.

I think we discovered panda bears are bears in the 80s.

We always thought they weren't, and they used to be called giant pandas.

And then in the 80s, someone went, oh, actually, it turns out it is just a bear that's black and white.

We can call it a panda bear.

The weird thing is, before they were called panda bears, they were called party-colored bears.

Yeah.

Cool.

That's a great name, isn't it?

it?

It's like disco pants.

Disco.

If you're trying to picture right now in your head what a red panda looks like, you all know Kung Fu Panda.

Yeah.

Kung Fu Panda.

That's a real giant panda.

Well, but is it a panda?

Because pandas aren't panda bears, so it's a bit weird, right?

But the kung fu master in it is a red panda.

Oh, is he?

Yeah.

So he's the real kung fu panda of the movie.

Yes.

Okay, there's another thing which is really annoying about red pandas and pandas so pandas giant pandas have a pseudo-thumb right they have this weird spur on the side of their hand which helps them i don't know so like it's where a thumb should be but it's not an actual thumb exactly yeah because they don't have thumbs because they're they're not primates whatever so giant pandas have that but red pandas also have that and both of them have evolved it separately for different reasons but they've both got it okay that's weird the the giant panda got it to eat eat bamboo, and we think the red panda got it to climb trees.

But they both got it.

The red panda uses it to eat bamboo.

It's so annoying.

And that's why people thought the giant panda was the same family as the red panda, because they both had this weird thumb thing, but it turns out they're not related at all.

Wow.

But at least there's definitely only one species of red panda, and we know exactly what that is, right?

Wrong.

There are two species of red panda, which no one knew about until about five years ago or whatever, when someone did some DNA analysis and found out there are two separate populations: one is Chinese and one is Himalayan.

They're separate species of red panda.

They are, and we've been accidentally mating them for years, haven't we?

And then it turns out

bizarre.

Have they been having babies?

Yeah, so I think they come.

I think they're just about different species.

You know, the definition of a species gets kind of grey when you look too closely at it, but it seems like the ones on one side of the river are adapted slightly differently to the ones on the other side of the river.

So we might be mating out those adaptations by accidentally making them.

Imagine being one of those red pandas, though.

And it's because it's like being abducted by aliens and then just being put in a room with a bear.

And the aliens in me, you're looking at you like, go on.

But they're compatible.

That's what's weird though, right?

Like, could a red panda mate with a panda bear and have a baby?

I don't think so.

Have we tried?

The first red panda that we know about in history, as in like I'm talking about in the olden, olden, olden days, a fossil.

It was twice as big as the modern red panda.

It was found in Felixstowe.

Oh.

That's down the road from here in terms of quite close geography to the rest of the world listening to this podcast.

It's compared to the rest of the world, it's close.

Yeah,

this is the closest date on the tour to Felixstowe.

And that's because this area of Suffolk used to be where giant red pandas lived and pumas lived and mastodons lived.

Wow.

You know, bisons live and everything used to live around here as like a jungle place.

And then obviously they all died.

But yeah, really good fossils around here and also really good coprolites, right?

And that's why when you guys were doing the sound chick earlier, I went down to Coprolite Street, which is just down the road.

Yeah, Copperlight Street.

James and I spoke about this ages ago.

As far as I can tell, I don't know if you've looked into it more, James, there is only one street in the whole world called Coprolite.

And that's here in Ipswich.

It's amazing they haven't named any other streets after fossilized poop.

But you can figure somewhere else.

And there was a guy, there was a factory which was on Copperlight Street, which was established by a guy called Edward Packard, aka the Copperlight King, or the Golden Muckman of Ipswich.

You're making it up.

No, that's what he was called.

Incredible.

Are there signs on Copperlight Street saying, please do not pick up after your dog?

We're in this for the long haul.

Red pandas not very good at pooing, incidentally, on their own.

Baby ones aren't very good at pooing.

And this is a problem for, well, or a privilege for zookeepers who have to look after them because sometimes their mothers don't seem to be very good at maternal care.

They sort of abandon them.

And so zookeepers have to raise the offspring themselves.

And the mothers, what they do to stimulate the offspring to poo and we, is lick their abdomen and their anuses.

And so, as a zookeeper, I'm afraid that you've got to go up there.

You've got to lick the anus of the.

I think you do the old Dan Schreiber and you lick your hand and you can go for it.

The old Dan Schreiber.

Just old Dan Schreiber.

I'll just shake you by the anus and lick my hand.

Got to remember to lick the hand before, Dan.

Well, this is, I mean, that is a thing that you do with your own kids, not the licking the anus bit, but

Dan, you cannot make us call the social in the middle of of a show.

Well, you certainly don't do it twice.

You learn your lesson after the first go.

But no, but that, like, if my youngest, Ted, at the moment, if he's not had a poo and you need him to have a poo, you do things like rub his tummy or bicycle his legs or sit there going, mm, and then and then he goes, mmm, and then he'll crap himself because his mm has force behind it.

And sometimes you let a little thing out, but that doesn't matter.

But that, I mean, we do we do that with our kids, I think, as well.

Yeah, different tactics with the same end results.

So,

yeah.

Gosh, the world's.

I just feel like we all need a breather, you know.

The world's oldest living red panda died.

Sorry.

Okay.

Last year.

Not the oldest one ever, not the Jean Calmont of red pandas.

That one lived to 24, but this guy lived to 21 years old before dying last year.

And that's amazing because they they normally live to about 12.

So getting to 21, big achievement.

And he's.

Dyslexic, got it the wrong way around.

Sorry?

Easy mistake to make.

Well, it's so sweet.

He spent his time with another panda who was called Zoe, right?

And he lost his eyesight due to his extreme old age.

And she would help him navigate around his enclosure every morning.

Oh, that's sweet.

That's nice.

Also, the other account is that he would wrestle other red pandas every morning at 9:15 a.m.

on the duck.

Come on, figure hard enough.

Was he really angry?

I think it was just a species thing.

At 9.15, did he have a digital watch?

I don't know what happened at 9.15, yeah.

Wow.

In the early 2000s, a red panda won Brummy of the Year.

Big award.

There was a big story about it.

There was a red panda called Babu who escaped from the Birmingham Nature Center in 2005.

Babu escaped and found four days later, but in the interim, it was a big story of like where's he gone and like they called him like the Houdini of red pandas.

I'm sure there wasn't much competition really.

No, they're all

escaping.

Literally look up a red panda in a zoo and you will be looking up a story about them escaping.

I don't know why we keep putting them in zoos because they're desperate to get out.

There was one in Scotland that survived for two months.

It was just found up a tree by a farmer.

Truly fucking bizarre hovering above your cows.

We're going to have to wrap up in a sec, guys.

Some stuff on sweeteners, maybe?

Yeah, like so saccharin, which was the first artificial sweetener, 300 times sweeter than table sugar.

But there's one now that's called neotame, which is 10,000 times sweeter than sugar.

And what's interesting about that is because it's so sweet, you only have to put a tiny bit in anything, which means it's so small, you don't have to put it in the ingredients.

So you can just add this sweetener because it's below a certain number of grams, you don't have to add something to the ingredients.

That's incredible.

Isn't that amazing?

That's really incredible.

Do you know what?

People keep discovering artificial sweeteners by mistake.

Did you guys come across this?

No.

It's going to keep licking plants, isn't it?

You've got to do the downtributes.

All radiuses.

And it is people doing the dancing.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so the first one was discovered by this.

Can we just establish which thing is the dancing?

It's accidentally licking bits of yourself, all right?

If you like that.

Okay.

Okay.

This Russian scientist called Konstantin Falberg, he sat down to dinner in 1878, 1878 and he'd been at the lab all day and he hadn't washed his hands and his bread roll was unbelievably sweet and then his his drink was really sweet and then he found even his napkin was really sweet and it turns out he had invented he'd invented an artificial sweet I don't know why he started eating his napkin but he realized

he realized and he went back and he just started tasting things on his work table and he had created this unbelievably powerful, the first ever artificial sweetener.

But that is not the only time it's happened.

It happened again.

Cyclamate is the next one.

A scientist called Michael Svader accidentally tasted something sweet.

Aspartame, something sweet.

A chemist called James Schlatter, he was working on another, he was working on an ulcer drug and he just tasted something incredibly sweet.

And sucralose is the last one.

Researchers misheard their instructions, apparently, and accidentally tasted the compound instead of testing the compound.

That's fantastic.

Look, guys, I hate to cut this off, but we need to wrap up.

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 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.

And you can go to our group account at no such thing.

And you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

You can check out all of the upcoming tour dates as well.

We're going to be doing more on this nerd immunity tour all the way into January, so do come along.

But that's it for now.

Thank you so much, Ipswitch.

That was so much fun.

We love being here.

We will be back again.

And everyone else, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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