377: No Such Thing As The Mole Street Journal

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Hi everyone, James here.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where myself, Andrew, and Dan Shriver are joined by none other than our very, very, very good friend and colleague, Anne Miller.

Now, you all know Anne, she's been on the podcast many, many times, but the one very important thing to tell you about her today is that she has a brand new book out.

That book is called Mickey and the Trouble with Moles.

It is an amazing children's book all about this secret group of animal spies.

And the amazing thing about this book, well actually two really cool things about this book.

Number one, there are secret codes hidden in the book that you can solve while you're reading it.

And number two, even more excitingly for me, I have a cameo in it.

Page 106.

I'll admit, it's not a huge cameo.

It's just one of the characters alludes to someone called James, but I am assured by Anne that that refers to me, so this is very exciting for me, the first time I have ever been in a work of fiction.

But guys, honestly, I can't tell you enough how great this book is.

It's called Mickey and the Trouble with Moles.

Stephen Fry said of this series of books, they're brilliantly funny, ingenious, and deliciously addictive.

And if that doesn't sell you on them, I don't know what will.

Apart from hearing Anne on this week's episode of Fish.

So with no more ado, it is time for this week's No Such Thing as a Fish.

On with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anne Miller.

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 Anne.

My fact is that Mole's burrows have special kitchens where they keep up to 470 decapitated earthworms to eat later.

Wow.

Wow.

470.

It's It's very specific.

That's the most they found.

There could be more.

We just need to get it.

That's absolutely not.

It's like a giant larder, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Where they can go into for a nighttime snack.

Yeah, they need to eat a lot.

So they eat about 60% of their body weight and worms every day.

And their burrows are really intricate.

So they have special rooms for sleeping, for giving birth, and for storing their food.

So it's kind of like having a kitchen or a larder or a pantry.

But it's, well, it's not to my taste, but it works for them.

Yeah, I think 470 is quite a lot, though.

It's like they're panic-bought earthworms, isn't it?

it?

Yeah, that's pandemic purchasing, isn't it?

They know something's going on.

Hang on.

They've got special rooms for giving birth in.

They can't use those very often.

Well, we have those as well, Andy.

And you wouldn't put earthworms in the same room, Andy.

It's very health and safety problematic.

Look, completely, look, completely, completely.

But all I'm saying is that if you've only got a certain number of rooms in your home.

Oh, but they've got loads.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

To have a specific maternity unit room in your house, I don't have that in my house.

I've got a kitchen and a living room and a bedroom.

But if you were a mole, like, so mole can dig up to 20 meters a tunnel a day.

So if you've got a whole burrow of them and they're all digging, you could probably add an extension on pretty quick.

Whereas if you're adding it to your house, Andy, I imagine it would take you more than a day or two, probably.

Yeah.

Especially if it was just you.

The neighbors would have a few issues, no doubt.

I love the way that they catch the worms.

One of the ways they do it is they dig a tunnel and the worms just fall into it.

That's how they get so many.

Just wait for it.

Of course.

Exactly.

Imagine you're a worm just kind of going around your daily business, sort of burrowing in the soil, and suddenly you just fall into a massive hole of your enemy.

Well, then you get put in a larder with all your dead friends.

You see all your friends there, yeah.

But here's a quick question.

So I was reading that they stored the worms, and there was a suggestion in what I read is that they've immobilized the worms with a bite to the head.

So they're still alive.

They're not dead yet.

They may be brain dead, but they're sort of fresh because they're still living.

So is that right?

They're not actually dead in that larder as well.

Yeah, I think

it's kind of like putting them in a fridge, but it's like a living fridge.

Yes.

So the worms aren't going to go off, so they can eat them later, but they also can't get away.

It's very clever.

They can get paralyzed by, like you say, I think they can get paralysed by being bitten at the back of the head, which kind of stops them being able to wriggle around.

But I think that moles might also be kind of poisonous or venomous as well.

There's stuff in their saliva, I think.

There's so many different types of moles, but yeah, I think their saliva can can do stuff as well.

I think that's right, and I think shrews are the same.

And there's this kind of toxin called blarina toxin, especially in shrews, but I think in moles as well.

And if they bite humans as well, then you can get a little bit of a, a bit like a bee sting or a wasp sting, you might get a bit of swelling around.

So they are quite, you know, they're venomous.

Well, just on being bitten by moles, moles are really, really strong.

And there was a belief in the 18th century that if you held a mole in your hand until it died, your hand would acquire healing power, right?

Okay, so if you just kind of cup it in your hands.

Now, the problem is

they're so strong.

There's a mole expert called Mark Hamer, and I read an interview with him, and he said that moles are stronger than people.

He said that if you picked up a mole and held, yeah, don't shake your hand, James.

It's true.

If you pick up a mole and cup it between your hands, even if you're really strong, like even if you're a manual laborer or something, it will be able to burst open your hands and get it.

I know what you mean, Andy, but I don't want to be one of those 7% of men who think they can beat an elephant in a fight, but I do think that I might be able to beat a mole in a fight.

Well, you'd have a really hard time finding one, though, because we very rarely see moles because they're pretty fast and they're mostly underground.

And actually, in 1967, there was a guy called Peter Stafford who won the Wildlife Cameraman of the Year Prize.

He took a photo of a mole and its young in a burrow.

And for 40 years, that was the only photo we had of moles in their burrow with their young.

And then the reason they got changed was in 2012, Spring Watch were like, well, this is a challenge.

Let's film the moles.

But they got Peter Stafford back to help them do it.

So he is like the guy for filming moles in their burrows.

They're very mysterious.

Amazing.

Have you guys heard of molology?

No.

So this is a thing that's been coined by a guy called Jesper Jerman.

And he's an archaeologist who basically made an application to the Danish Cultural Agency to say we want to use moles to help us do our archaeological digs.

And the idea was that if you have moles burrowing down into potential sites where you believe there to be hidden cities, in the digging, the stuff that comes to the surface might have shards of pottery or have little elements of these bits of archaeological brick or whatever.

And so he's dubbed it molology and they do the work for him.

So they don't have to sort of desecrate the area and potentially ruin ancient sites.

Do they not think that like ancient Egyptians were just all eating earthworms and stuff?

Is that

but that's happened?

That's happening in the UK as well.

There are moles basically working at a site in Cumbria.

It's an old Roman fort, but it's protected, so you're not allowed to dig there if you're a human.

Moles are not bound by such rules.

And so

there are a whole team of human volunteers whose job it is to go through the molehills and find out what they've basically turfed up as they're digging.

And so far, the moles have found pottery, beads, and my favourite, a decorative bronze dolphin, which makes me think they were like, I'm not putting that in my borrow, I can send that up.

That's really good.

Yeah.

I prefer their original name, sort of circa 450 to 1100 AD.

Well, you're very old school, Dan.

Yeah, and I would appreciate it if for the rest of this segment we could refer to them by their original name, which was, and it's very nice, the idea, Andy, as you say, of holding a mole in your hand, because they used to be called wands.

Oh, you had a wand.

Yeah,

W-A-N-D.

And a wand eventually turned into a want, so they became a want.

And the mole hills used to be called a wanty-tump.

They did not they were not called that.

Dan was that back in the day you would be making a mountain out of a wanty tump.

All right

That's fantastic.

But their name before they were cool as well Dan's got the original molehill data

Another thing about moles is they got really fast reactions so the star-nose mole actually has the Guinness World Record for being the fastest eater on the planet so it can basically locate a snack eat it and then move on to looking for its next one in 230 milliseconds the average the fastest one was 120 milliseconds And for comparison, it takes humans 650 milliseconds to respond to a red light at a traffic light.

Wow.

So they are fast.

They are fast.

They look insane, by the way.

If you've never seen a star-nosed mole, Give it a Google.

It's the most alien-looking creature.

It's a sort of, it's like it's halfway through eating an octopus and it's just stopped with the legs hanging out.

That's what's on its face.

The rest of it's very mole-like and then suddenly, blah, alien on the face.

It's very magical, actually.

That organ on the front of their face is 12 times more sensitive than a human clitoris.

Wow.

I don't know what to say about that.

And it's a lot easier to find as well.

That's so good.

Oh, so mole catching.

I'm sure...

You guys have been reading about the massive feud in the British molecular community.

Okay.

No, I don't like that.

that.

There are three British bodies.

It's so stereotypically British, devoted to catching moles.

There's an Association of British Molecuers, there's the British Molecatchers Register, and there's the Guild of British Molecatchers.

Splitters.

Well, they had this huge feud in 2016 because Anne Chippendale, which is the name of the...

a woman who is in the Association of Pro-Molecatchers, she accused Louise Chapman, who's the head of the British Register of Molecatchers, of being an embarrassment in quotes.

This all happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal for no good reason.

No idea why.

Not the Mole Street Journal?

Why?

They've not got better things to report on.

Clearly they just wanted a bit of sort of exotic colour from weird backwards Britain and so they just wrote about this mad feud they were all having.

And there's this huge debate about whether you should check a mole trap every day because that's more humane or whether you should check it only a few days, which is, you know, could leave a mole in distress, but might also, you know, you've got to drive 50 miles to get to your next bloody trap.

And so there are there are eruptions in official pro-mole catching circles at the moment.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

I'm not actually a member of any of those.

I prefer the underground stuff.

Well, you are going for it, James.

This is.

Look, I've been away for a week.

I feel like if I don't, then you guys are going to replace me with JD full time.

Speaking of, and said earlier that they had really good reactions.

And that's why we have the thing called whack-a-mole.

whack-a-mole that game you know where the moles kind of pop up and then you whack them um so this was invented in japan in the 1970s it was called magura taiji in Japan and in 1976 and 1977 it was the second highest grossing mechanical arcade game in both of those years it was absolutely massive it was huge really and for people who don't know it the moles pop up like these little furry things and then you hit them with a mallet and every time you hit them you get a point, and then they drop back down into their holes.

But a lot of people in video game academic circles refer to whack-a-mole as the first violent video game, basically.

So, you know, when you're talking about how maybe Grand Theft Auto is turning us all into, you know, carjackers and stuff, they really can shake it all the way back to Whack-A-Mole, which was the first of these games.

Right.

That's really interesting.

I've played whack-a-mole like at a seaside fairly recently, and obviously not in the last year or so, but it wasn't moles.

It's always like sort of cylinders that sort of pop up.

So maybe that was an attempt to sort of separate it from cruelly bashing the moles, even though it's still called whack-a-mole.

I think maybe it was.

Because if you think about it, like, you know, whacking moles.

People say, oh, video games, they don't make you do that, but we have three societies in Britain dedicated to catching moles.

So that's evidence for you straight away.

I think we need a follow-up of which arcades they visited as children.

But yeah, there are some others like Whack-A-Banker and Wacker Warden, kind of like new versions of them where you can attack some people with unpopular jobs in the future.

The Versailles Palace in France, famously, has its own molecer and it has had for 330 years, okay, this, well, they certainly had in 2012, which was when I read an interview with the Versailles catcher Jerome Dormillon.

And he signs off all his text messages with molecer to the king, completely ignoring the fact France no longer has kings.

They literally dealt with that situation.

But basically, Versailles obviously is so neat.

The gardens are so pristine and the lawns are so gorgeous that he has to keep 2,000 acres free of moles.

How does he do it?

Does he have like a little mole guillotine or?

Genuinely, he uses a guillotine style trap.

No.

Genuinely.

He actually does.

And he is very lucky to be in his work because in the old days he wouldn't have had a chance because from the 1600s until 1812, all the molecule came from the Liard family.

All the you know, royal molecule.

And there's a story that the last one was a bit of a bit of a rake, bit of a scallywag, and basically turned the official molecule's residence at Versailles into

a knocking shop.

It was a brothel.

And one day, as Napoleon was walking in the gardens at Versailles,

a prostitute came out of the molecule's house and propositioned him and said, all right, Bonaparte, fancy a good time.

And as a result, the family was stripped of its ancient privilege after 150 years of mole catching.

Wow.

Yeah.

What a roller coaster.

What a mole coaster.

What a way to lose your family inheritance of so many years, though.

Just one

prostitute.

Every time someone asked you, you'd have to repeat the story as well if you had to pull me.

It was something cooler.

So I really love reading about moles, but also, obviously, there's moles in the human world.

But in terms of the word mole meaning a double agent, that pretty much comes from John LeCare's books.

And he has sort of said, like, some of the words he took from the world of espionage and some of them he made up himself and there's a bit of confusion over which ones are which because obviously things are secret and which things are coincidences and which things are definite but according to the Oxford English Dictionary they basically say it was very rare to use it to mean espionage before the Cold War style writings and they cite John LeCare as one of the very first people to use that.

And as well as coming up with the word mole, he also came up with honey trap.

That came from Le Carre, that wasn't something we used before.

And he also had to run past any character character names had to run them past the foreign office to make sure he didn't accidentally daub in any real active agents which I thought was kind of cool and then in a BBC interview they asked him if he did the same thing with jargon and he was sort of like no but I try and you know I have more fun making up my own words.

Well so Anne you've written a couple of kids books about espionage in the animal world.

Did you have to run and you've got friends in GCHQ I know that happen to know that so did you have to run those names past the I'm not allowed to comment on that.

And is there a honey trap in your book?

No, there is not.

It's for children and age birthdays.

Okay, cool.

It could be an actual trap of money if you're trying to trap Winnie the Pooh, for example.

Yeah.

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

My fact is that in 1800, a wig maker in London patented mechanical whiskers.

Great.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Are we we talking cat or human?

Human, which is nice.

Oh yeah.

Not the cat food.

No, not the cat food.

God, this is a semantic nightmare, this one.

Basically, this is from an article by an expert on beard and wig history, a guy called Alan Withy, who discovered in his researches a patent that a London wig maker had taken out.

And it was in a...

time when beards were reasonably fashionable.

They hadn't at huge heights, which was later on in Victorian times, you know, the mid-19th century.

This is the year 1800.

But there was a London wig maker who had made a contraption, or patented at least a contraption, which had fastenings made of a certain elastic compressed steel or springs.

It was basically so you could attach a beard to your face with metal and make it look really convincing.

Yeah, it would make it kind of almost flap a little bit in the weather, wouldn't it?

And stuff like that.

Well, that was the worry, wasn't it?

Because people who were obsessing with trying to wear fake beards were taping them to their face or gluing them.

And if a big gust came, their beard would fly off mid-chat and suddenly a naked face would be talking to everyone.

And that would not be seen as a good thing.

I spoke to Dr.

Withy this morning,

and what a great guy he is.

And he said that it was almost like you could buy this wig, and then it came with like optional extras.

And so he said that the mechanical whiskers were almost like the GoFaster stripes of the wig world.

So you would buy your normal car, but you would add the go faster stripes, or you would buy your normal wig and you would get these extras that went alongside it.

Cool, right?

That's so cool.

He's an amazing guy.

I'm so excited that you got to talk to him because his website, his blog on beards, and he's got a book out as well, it's just fantastic.

And one of the best things about him is a man obsessed with beards, he doesn't have a beard.

Well done.

I spoke to him on FaceTime today, and I can tell you, though, he does have a beard now.

Well, he's buckled then.

He's buckled.

Well, during lockdown, decided to grow a little beard.

There and it looks very cool.

What kind has he got, James?

Well, for him, like during lockdown, the rest of his hair kind of fell out.

He doesn't know why, but the one bit that's left is kind of a mustache with a goatee beard at the bottom.

Okay, yeah,

by the way, his website, we should just say, it is Dr.

Alan.

It's Alan spelt the Welsh Way.

So that's A-L-U-N-D-R-A-L-U-N dot WordPress.com.

And like Dan said, it is an amazing website with everything you would ever want to know about beards.

It's incredible.

So does he have his beard, if it's a mustache with just the goatee bit at the bottom, is that a bit like Iron Man's, you know, Robert Downey Jr.

Is it like that?

So not like yours, James, connected.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Although I can't obviously remember people's faces.

James has a, for the listener, James can't remember any faces.

So I'm questioning this whole

thing, Dan, you're just alive because you've been scooped on your research.

But that's supposedly called an anchor, that type of beard.

And I think, James, you have a goatee, which the way you have it, that might be a circle called the circle beard.

Is that right?

Yeah, there's so many different types.

And he brings up all these old types from the 19th century, particularly.

You know, some beards were called soup strainers and others thigh ticklers and there's the Piccadilly weepers.

But I obviously, I don't know if you can tell this is a video call.

I currently have not got a beard.

Apparently, in the 1800s, it was also quite fashionable for women to fasten their hair under their chin to imitate the look.

So I might try that next time I'm hitting the shop, see if it goes down well.

Exactly.

I spoke to Alan Withy about this, and he said that he found a few kind of advertisements for women to buy hair products for their beards, but they were usually like you got ringlets instead of sideburns.

They would kind of get those growing down, or sometimes would even draw whiskers onto their faces because they wanted to follow the latest fashion.

I mean, it must have been an amazing time, maybe the best time ever for beard owners, the 19th century.

Because people just went tonto for them.

So, the really big era of beard fashion was kind of that middle of the century, and supposedly it was starting with Crimea, the Crimean War.

Soldiers grew beards because it was very, very cold and they just wanted a little bit of, you know, facial protection.

So, that, then, all the obviously 1856, Crimea War ends.

Soldiers come home.

They're conquering here.

Well, I can't remember who won the Crimea War.

Anyway,

the soldiers are home.

That's the main point.

And they've all got beards.

And

that's an argument.

There's a book from 1854, actually, called The Philosophy of Beards, which said that beards could heal sore throats, or that if you shaved off a beard, you might get rheumatism and lots of other ailments because you don't have this protection anymore.

I read that book for a little while, and it's not the whole thing.

Alan Withy's read the whole thing, I'm sure.

And the author of this book says, you might be thinking, why don't women have beards?

If beards are so great, and the author is saying beards are really, really great.

Yeah.

And he wrote, well, look, women naturally have longer hair, but also women were never intended to be exposed to the hardships and difficulties men are called upon to undergo.

So I think the idea is that, you know, the men are out hunting mastodons or whatever it is.

And you need a beard to hide behind if there's no bushes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I love this as a man who clearly hasn't heard of a scar.

There is a theory that came out quite recently, isn't there?

That beards evolved so that if people punch you, it kind of lessens the force.

Do you see that?

That's amazing.

So, this was quite a recent study, and the scientists, what they did was they took a skull, and obviously, you can't get a skull with a beard because it's a bit late for growing a beards by the time you're a skull.

You can't really do it.

And and so what they did was they took a load of hair from a sheep and then wrapped it around the skull to kind of be almost as if it's a bit like a beard and then they pummeled the skull with this iron rod dropping down with different weights to work out how much of a force it could take and they worked out that actually the the one which had the sheep's fur on it could take a lot more force than the one without

right

i mean that's an amazing experiment experiment, but also, what a bunch of weird perverts these side guys are.

Pummeling a skull wrapped in hair with a rod.

Also, you don't see many boxers with beards, right?

Like, you figure this new research would change literally the face of sport.

I wonder if it's in their rules.

Like, you know, they're very strict.

Like, what kind of things you can have if you're a cyclist, if you're a boxer, maybe it's like you can't wear a beard.

It's like sucking.

Oh, yeah, or maybe it's like a real wussy thing.

Oh, look at him with his beard, softening the punches.

Like, giant six-foot beards

on all the flowers.

Well that was the thing with beards, wasn't it?

It was like that they were supposed to be like a sign of manliness.

And apparently that was because they were almost seen as a waste product, a beard.

It was like the exhaust pipe of sperm production.

So if a man was making lots of sperm, then this was almost like a waste product of the sperm making would be the beard that came out.

And that was the theory behind why, you know, the more masculine men would have beards.

Well, I didn't think you would say anything in this podcast more disgusting than your weird sheep experiment.

The exhaust pipe of sperm production is

pure nightmare fuel.

For me it was the star-nosed clitoris earlier.

But back to sort of spies and espionage, I read a really good thing.

There's an argument that prisoners shouldn't be allowed to have beards because if you escape and you've got a beard, if you shave it off, it's a pretty good disguise.

But if you're clean-shaven, to make yourself look different is much more elaborate.

It would take much longer.

Wait a minute.

Can you not just grow a beard then the other way around?

You'd have to be hidden for quite a while, I think, if you've escaped and you come in with your beard.

They catch you 10 minutes later, unless you're making a lot of testosterone.

Yeah, you can't just go into a phone box and wait in there for a week and then come out.

Famous convict Spermy Pete actually managed to avoid recapture every time he escaped.

So one really interesting thing actually on that, which Dr.

Withy said to me, which is that it's quite easy easy to know about posh people's beards from the olden days because lots of people had paintings and stuff like that.

But what did normal people have in their beards?

Did they wear beards?

Did they have different styles and stuff like that?

No one really knew because we don't have those kind of records.

But what Dr.

Withy decided to do was to look at prison photographs which they did have from the 19th century.

And what he found was that they kind of like to have this beard that you don't really see anymore, which is almost like a chin strap.

so it comes down the sidebones, it goes down the bottom of the chin, underneath the chin,

and there's no mustache or anything like that, and nothing on the cheeks.

I tried to look at other people who had it.

I think Henry Thoreau, maybe, or Stormsey, if you can think of either of those two people.

It's that kind of beard, but you don't really see it around anymore.

But that was really, if you look at the prisoner photographs from that time, they all had this kind of beard.

So it seems like if you're a lower-class person, that's the beard you would have had.

Interesting.

But if it's really thin lines, that means presumably there's quite a lot of upkeep to have that.

So you would probably have taken quite pride in that.

It's not because you just let it grow and it became bushy.

That's deliberate.

That's kind of what Dr.

Widthy was saying.

It is strange because you actually have to work at that.

You can't just let it grow and that's what it does.

You actually have to put some effort behind it.

So yeah, it must have been a fashion.

That to me seems a bit also like protection because you know that fact about cravats coming about as a result of wearing a bit of scarf around your neck might disguise where your actual neck is in war and if a knife was coming.

Imagine if you had a very bushy beard just in front of your neck if you're in prison.

That's almost like where's his neck begin?

You know, you'd be slashing with a knife and you might just trim the guy as opposed to cutting his neck.

Did he manage to cut his throat?

I don't know.

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

My fact is, we know who the most significant male actor currently working in German-speaking theatre is because he wears a special best actor ring.

The most significant male actor in the German-speaking region, which is, let's be honest, Germany and Austria.

He must like walk into a party with, you know, like when someone just gets engaged and they kind of have their hand in front of their face the whole time so everyone can see the ring.

He must do that his whole life.

He must, right?

And it's a real sparkly ring.

It's got 28 diamonds on it.

So it's a real fashion piece.

And the story behind this is that it's called the Ifland Ring.

And this was in dedication to a great German actor from the late 18th century called August Wilhelm Ifland, who was a brilliant director, dramatist.

He was a theater director.

He sort of ran most of the theaters in Germany at one point.

And the story goes, because it is a a bit of a murky story, that this ring was created and was to be handed on to the next person who the previous owner deemed to be the most worthy actor working in German theater that day.

So you would receive the ring upon the death of the previous owner of the ring.

And once you got this ring, you had three months to make your decision about who would be the next person to inherit it.

Now, they wouldn't get it until you yourself died, but they would then, once you died, open a vault where inside on a bit of paper, you will have written who you think that your successor is, and they get given the ring.

But what happens if you're one of those actors who has a couple of really good movies at the start?

Like, who's the guy who we talked about the other week who became a wrestler?

Who was in Scream and Courtney Cox?

David Alquette.

Richard David Alquette.

What if you're like David Alquette and you're like, well, what a great actor he is.

And then he goes downhill very quickly.

You're right.

It's absolutely mad that it's you pick the most significant person working within three months of you getting the award.

when if you're young you might be living for decades yeah yeah what if it what if what if it was like macaulay culkin for instance like they they the guy got his ring let's pretend macaulay culkin is a german but they got the ring and then they thought home alone and home alone too are killer movies he's the best actor he obviously is in the world let's give it to him and then 30 years later you die and it's just this guy who's living with pete dochery but do they have a backup plan because if you get it and then it doesn't pass on until you die there you know you can't guarantee that you, unless you picked someone like Macaulay Colgan, who was young, then you can't guarantee that you'll outlive them.

Well, is there like a list, like a sort of like a line of succession for if your choice is available?

It sometimes happens.

You're right.

So the previous holder before the current one was Bruno Gantz, who played Hitler in Downfall.

That was maybe his most famous role in the English-speaking world.

And he intended an actor called Gert Voss to get it, but Voss died in 2014 when Gantz was still alive.

So So he had to change his mind and re-nominate.

And as a result, he nominated the new fellow.

Yeah, and that's happened a few times.

By the way, Gantz, when we say Hitler and Downfall, for anyone who hasn't seen that movie, you probably have seen a very iconic scene from it because it's become one of the most memed movie scenes possible where the subtitles are changed with Hitler having a meltdown.

If you can picture that great meme, that's from that.

And that's from the great, most significant German actor of his time, one person.

I believe that's what what got him the nomination.

It was the name.

This is just such an impact all around the world.

But it has to be.

But I mean, so, you know, that has happened before Gantz had that happen.

There was a guy called Albert Basserman who was given the ring in 1908 and he really didn't want it.

And he named three successors and all of them died before he actually died himself.

So he thought it was cursed.

and he wanted to give it away.

So he actually didn't nominate his successor.

It was done by a team, an Austrian team, who decided who the next actor was.

But he was quite a cool actor, Basserman.

He was nominated for his role in an Alfred Hitchcock movie that was made in 1940 called Foreign Correspondent.

And during the filming, he had to have his dialogue spelt out to him phonetically because he spoke virtually no English.

So he was memorizing his lines from a phonetic translation and he memorized them and delivered them so well, he was nominated for best supporting actor.

That's ridiculous.

Basserman tried to destroy the ring by throwing it into a fire.

Into a volcano.

Well, this is insane.

It was at the funeral of the third person he'd nominated, who had subsequently died,

who was Alexander Moises.

I don't know how that's pronounced exactly, but the story goes that he threw it onto the coffin of Moises at the cremation, and it was sinking into the flames when the director of the Viennese theatre reached in and grabbed it.

And he said, This ring belongs with a living actor, not a dead one.

Oh my god.

And so as a result, there was a kind of a vote.

He gave it to the Austrian, you know, federal theatre body and they had to, they had to pick because he said, I'm not picking anyone more.

Wow.

It's so incredibly Lord of the Rings though.

And I also read that the Ilford ring was one of a set of seven originally, which definitely adds

limits to this.

And then I started looking into the Lord of the Rings.

I just found this potential origin story.

I think it's not completely, it's, oh, I'll tell you the story because it blew my mind and I hadn't heard it before, which is there is a ring at a place called the Vine in Hampshire it's a National Trust property and it's a massive chunky gold ring it's so big it can only be worn on a gloved thumb it's ginormous and it's inscribed with Latin that says sinisianus live well in God so they found this in a field in 1785 it's a ring it went in the display but then a few decades later they found a tablet at a site in Gloucestershire a little way away and this one contained a tablet which said that a Roman wanted to let them know someone had stolen his ring and he wanted it back.

And the tablet said, among those who bear the name Senicianus, to none grant health until he brings back the ring to the Temple of Nodens.

And the bit that makes this really exciting is they contacted a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University to help them work out who this god was.

And that was one J.R.R.

Tolkien.

Which I thought was so cool.

So you can see that ring, one of another mysterious rings at the National Trust property.

Although they do say it's not completely sure it was connected to the tablet, they were a long way away.

But the story, if that's true, is so cool.

Very cool.

That's such a great Lord of the Rings connection.

And they do think of the seven, two do still exist.

So we've got the one that sits on the most significant actor's hand, and a second one is in a private collection, but it's suggested that that's either been lost or destroyed.

So we could be down to the last ring.

And someone tried to throw it into a fire, and this is definitely Lord of the Rings.

You know, it's a shame.

I think Basserman would have rather it had burnt in that fire because the successor that they picked would have absolutely devastated him.

Because Bassemann was married to his wife, who was called Elsa, and she was Jewish.

And during the height of Nazism,

he was told that he would need to divorce her

if he wanted to continue performing in Germany.

He said, absolutely not.

And he and Elsa went away to Switzerland to live instead.

He was very against it.

So it would have killed him for the fact that the ring was passed on to Werner Krauss, who was part of what is seen as the worst propaganda movie that Nazi Germany ever made about Jewish people.

That was the successor of the ring.

Really, just horrible.

Yeah.

Actually, you were just saying about Switzerland, and Andy said that basically the only German-speaking places are Germany and Austria.

Well, of course, you did forget about Switzerland.

Oh, no.

Which is where Bruno Gantz is from, who played Hitler.

He's Swiss.

And in Switzerland, they have their own ring.

They have the Heinz Reinhardt ring, and that is for whoever's the best Swiss actor.

And actually, in 1991, Bruno Gantz won that as well.

So, for a short amount of time, he had both the best actor in Switzerland ring and the best actor in Germany ring.

What?

Incredible!

Oh, my God!

He wasn't, you know, he was in he was meant to be the lead role of Pretty Woman.

He was meant to be Richard Geere.

Julia Roberts.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

That would have been a very different movie, wouldn't it?

Richard Geer caught Hitler.

But actually, you know, this guy that I just mentioned, the Nazi Krauss, he actually tried to be the first person to give the ring to a lady because he thought this shouldn't be just male-dominated.

And the lady that he wanted to give it to was Alma Seidler, who is a brilliant actor at the time.

And they said no, because she was a woman.

And so, as a result, since the 1970s, a new ring has has been created, which is the Alma Seidler ring, which is given to the most significant female actor in German-speaking theatre.

And we're on our third most significant actor as of this year to hold the ring.

Yeah, there's a suggestion that Jens Hazer, who's the current holder of the IFLAN ring, might give it to a woman, isn't there?

Yeah, he better do.

We don't know, of course.

Yeah, he's really suggested he will.

So I hope he does, because otherwise that's just all talk, isn't it?

Yeah, and actually, the ring has been with a woman for the last few years, at least, because Jens Haza

apparently keeps it in his daughter's underwear drawer.

Does he?

For safekeeping, yeah.

It feels like a small victory for feminism, actually.

It doesn't feel like safekeeping if you've told everyone exactly where you keep it, and you've put it in your poor daughter's bedroom.

A 28 diamond ring.

Can I just say,

for any criminals listening, because I know you do listen to this podcast,

we know what you look like.

You've got that little beard going around.

For any criminals listening, he has moved it from the daughter's underwear drawer now.

It's not there anymore.

It's somewhere else.

Well, that's what you would say.

That's exactly what you would say if you hadn't moved it from your daughter's underpads drawer.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that countries can now send propaganda to individual enemy soldiers on the front line by text message every time they turn on their phones.

Wow.

And by countries I mean Russia.

Although I suppose anyone could do it but this is an article in The Economist from the last couple of weeks and it is about a thing called pinpoint propaganda and it's something that's happening on the front between Russia and Ukraine and apparently a Ukrainian soldier might turn on their phone and they'll get a message message saying who is robbing your family while you are paid pennies waiting for your bullet

that kind of thing settling it's pretty direct then it's not subtly saying hey have you maybe considered retraining

I think in warfare probably direct is generally the way to go.

Well they really do go for it.

So

this has been happening for a few years.

I think it was 2017 that the first examples were received by Ukrainian soldiers.

And they said things like, they'll find your bodies when the snow melts, or nobody needs your kids to become orphans.

And they also look like they're coming from your comrades sometimes, which is very creepy.

Yeah, except you could quickly ask them, why'd you send me that weird thing about my wife and kids?

I got one from you, so I sent one back.

And this article basically was all about how mobile phones are a problem in warfare.

So, for instance, if you're a country and that, you know, there's a front in between you and another country and you want to know where soldiers are you can scan and you can look for mobile phone signals and people might be told to turn their phone off but there was a quote by Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Habel

who is in charge of NATO troops in Lithuania and he says that it's just turning on your phone is like a fire in the dark it's basically it just lights you up exactly where you are and they'll know where to attack.

That's so interesting.

That's just like the equivalent, isn't it, of First World War, having a glowing cigarette, which can be seen from a really long way away at night.

I guess, interestingly, though, if you got a text message, you would report that to your superior and say, we got to get out of here.

They know exactly where we are.

Yeah.

But what if you're defending your own territory?

You can't then say, we've got to get out of here.

Yeah, that's why I should not be put in charge of military.

We can't do this, Commander Schreiber.

We just can't do it.

No, no, guys, let's just get out of here.

They know where we are.

They've heard about England.

We've got to go.

All of us now.

But yeah, but phones, but phones are such a huge security breach because, yeah, there's geotagging on stuff.

The army had to deny a case recently that somebody gave away information because someone on Tinder was asking them too many questions and they gave away information about planes.

They completely denied it.

And also there's things like, you know, if you send a photo to somebody, well, that can be geotagged.

And even if you've turned off the geotagging, if there's a time stamp on the photo and you can sort of tell by the light, you can sort of work out where you are in the world.

So you can also work out where troops are moving.

So there's tons of these risks that sit on phones.

And obviously, the really big one is location trackers.

And there was that really problematic story recently where fitness trackers got, well, they didn't even get hacked.

They released a heat map showing where the people who used fitness trackers were.

And a lot of them were in US bases abroad.

And a lot of them ran around their base for their exercise.

So it basically lit up all these areas in deserts.

And everyone was like, I wonder what's there.

Literally drawing a ring around the base.

That's amazing.

Well, if you were smart, what you would do is like, you know, in World War II, they would make fake cities, wouldn't they?

So they would set fires and put lights just outside the city so the bombers would come over and bomb the wrong place.

What you would do is you'd get your soldiers to run a kilometer away in a shape a bit like a military base and then trick them.

Yes.

And then all call home with like sort of some elaborate lighting setups at a different time of day and like completely throw everyone off where you actually are and what you're doing.

Yeah.

James, you got this fact from The Economist, didn't you?

And I was reading an article about propaganda in The Economist.

Might very well have been the same article.

This was an article about all the different terms that have emerged in modern day related to propaganda.

So in Russia, for example, there's a term which is propagandon, which is basically a propaganda condom.

It's an insult to journalists in Russia who are elastic with the truth.

And it's a portmanteau of propaganda and the Russian word for condom, which is sort of derived from the English word for condom, but it's gandon.

So propaganda and gandon together, propagandon.

So you would say of the journalists there who are just peddling basically state propaganda that they are a propagandon, the propaganda condom.

Wait, are they the condom or are they the penis?

They're the condom.

So what is the penis if they are the condom?

No, no.

It's not really.

Well, I suppose the elastic with the truth is kind of a thing, but it's like condom is just like a silly insult.

But they are the barrier between

the truth.

So the penis is, the penis or possibly the sperm cells are the truth, and they're preventing the truth from getting through to the people.

If you imagine like a sperm exhaust, and then there's a barrier.

Who's the beard in this?

Okay.

Propaganda on

the trade.

Yeah, if you want to use that.

This has all come a very, very long way from early propaganda techniques.

I didn't know this thing, which is that during the First World War, Germany and Britain both had their own propaganda newspapers, which were in French.

So, if you see what I mean, they were for people who spoke French in occupied Belgium and occupied France and French-speaking prisoners of war.

So the German one was called the Gazette des Ardennes, but the British one, Le Courieur de l'Air, was a floating newspaper.

It was distributed...

as a leaflet from hydrogen-filled balloons and it was just released to drift across the battlefields and slowly release bundles of papers as it went.

So, there was a really clever fuse which burnt down, and every five minutes it burnt down another notch, and it released another bundle.

Yeah, I think

I think they invented that because it used to be people dropping them out of planes, and then two people or two people got caught with a lot of propaganda leaflets and then sentenced to hard labor.

And they're like, okay, well, this is risky.

So, then they developed the balloons to just do it without people, and they can completely deny it and be like, oh, it just floated into your land.

Sorry.

There's no one obviously operating it.

It's a bit more difficult to know exactly where your papers are going to end up, though, right?

Than if people are actually like, if I'm a paper boy like I used to be, I couldn't use this as my technique for delivering newspapers in Bolton, could I?

No, exactly.

And in fact, James, you're so right, because they had to have a weatherman in the early days to consult.

And if the wind was blowing towards France, you tied the newspaper.

And if it was blowing towards Germany, you attached out-and-out propaganda sheets for enemy soldiers.

So they had two different bundles, and they had to pick which one.

But what if you said the wrong ones the wrong way and you like radicalized the wrong group?

You'd be like, Yeah.

Yeah, problem.

We've accidentally turned all the French into German soldiers.

Nightmare.

Propaganda, much older even than the 20th century.

During the Civil War in England, there was quite a lot of it against the Cromwells.

And actually, a bit afterwards, they were still really bad-mouthing the Cromwells after the monarchy came back in.

And there was a book called The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, commonly called Joan Cromwell, the wife of the late usurper.

And this was a propaganda cookbook.

And it kind of looked on the outside that it was Joan Cromwell's cooking recipes.

But actually, in between all of the recipes, there was just a load of like sexual slander about the Cromwells and what they used to get up to and all that kind of stuff.

And Stuart Orne, who is the Cromwell Museum's curator, I read this on Atlas Obscura.

He said that it would be a bit like today if you were to buy a cookery book that was supposedly written by Michelle Obama, but the first third of it was an essay by Donald Trump saying how awful Barack Obama was.

Oh, don't give him ideas.

Trump will do that now.

What's so great, though, is that especially Americans are really bad for this.

They're writing recipes where there's like a really long backstory before they tell you the recipe.

So a lot of people skip over those sections.

It's probably the best place to hide something because everyone's like, where's the ingredients for brownies?

I don't want to know.

Yeah, you're right, you're back.

Sorry.

You need to put the propaganda in a place that someone's going to read.

So it's like, first, set your oven to, Oliver Cromwell was a shagger down to 170 degrees.

Pick your moments.

I read a little bit about that, James.

And the other thing that I really liked was that all the recipes in it were, even they were picked to target the Cromwells.

They were quite basic recipes, if I could put it that way, designed to say that the Cromwells had been terribly common.

You know, eel pies.

Come on, guys.

Sorry, that's not rhyming slang for eel pies.

But, you know, they were just kind of scuzzy recipes and not for classy people.

I think like Dela Lawson does a recipe a day on Twitter, and I'm pretty sure the day Trump left, our recipe of the day was bitter orange tart, which is very well played.

I feel like it would fit into this.

It's everywhere.

Nice.

Joseph Stalin

of Russian fame.

Or more importantly, of Stalin fame, I would say.

You're absolutely right.

He had a plane which was used pretty much solely for propaganda purposes.

It was called the Maxim Gorky, named after the famous writer.

And

it was an incredible machine.

It was one of the largest planes in the world.

In fact, in the 1930s, it was the largest plane in the world.

There were only two built for that specific model.

And get this, it had a cinema on board, a library.

It was exclusively used for propaganda, this plane.

Well, no, no, it seems like it was often used for watching movies as well and reading books.

We don't know what movies were played, and we don't know what books you could prefer to like.

Oh come on Andy, right?

So Stalin doesn't need the propaganda.

You're not going to talk Stalin into going for communism by playing him a video.

You need to get the propaganda to the people outside the plane.

Okay, I'd say 60 to 70% of its function was for propaganda.

It had some leisure centre facilities attached.

It also had its own leaflet printing and dropping capacity, so it could print them in the air.

Pretty cool.

It also had a...

This is what I read.

It had a giant radio attached to it, so it could just blare out propaganda as it flew overhead.

How low is this plane flying?

It did fly pretty low because it did these cool flying exercises and that actually tragically led to it crashing because it was flying with several other planes, tiny ones, which were designed to point out how big the Maxim Gorky was.

And then, you know, they would do cool maneuvers around it.

And unfortunately, one of them crashed into it and then it crashed.

That is terrible, but the idea of having really tiny planes next to your plane to make it look bigger is quite amusing.

It's like those crabs that stand next to the ones with small claws to make their claws look bigger, but like in the...

Have you guys heard of the sexual deviance pamphlets?

Heard of them, Dan.

I've been writing them for five years.

Who made you the head of HR at QI?

I don't have to answer these questions, Dan.

These were used during World War II, and it was basically one of the ways to promote propaganda and change the mood of soldiers is that you would suggest that the wives and partners partners and husbands and so on of people back home were sleeping with other people.

So,

you know, one batch was dropped on the French front, which had images of British soldiers taking advantage of all the French women while they were there.

So they'd suddenly be like, those British bastards.

And then other leaflets had the French draft dodgers doing the same thing, but to French women while, you know, the hard-working soldiers were out there.

They weren't the actual...

No, it wasn't the actual people, right?

It was.

Imagine a leaflet with your wife.

I'm like, darling, that could be anyone's exhaust.

Okay, 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 have 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 Anne.

Anne, at Miller underscore Anne.

And you can also get us on our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are there.

Do check them out.

Go and check out our tour dates, our 2021 tour dates.

We are back on the road.

See if we're coming to a town near you and come see us live.

And also, most importantly, get Anne's new book, Mickey and the Trouble with Moles.

It's out now.

You can buy it in all good bookshops as well as online.

It's part of the Mickey and the Animal Spy series.

Guaranteed, absolutely no honey traps in the book at all.

It is absolutely brilliant.

Get it now.

All right, guys, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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