360: No Such Thing As May Pole Syrup

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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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Andrew Hunter-Murray.

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's my fact.

My fact this week is that in the 1910s, animal dances, including the camel walk, the turkey trot, the crab step, the chicken flip, and the kangaroo dip, were so controversial they were banned at the White House, condemned by the Pope, and warned against by doctors.

Wow.

Why were they so bad?

Were they sexy?

I bet they were sexy dances.

They always are, aren't they?

I watched the turkey trot.

You could argue there's a bit of sex in there, but ultimately you just look like an idiot, I think.

I mean, what could sound sexier than the crab step?

It's very raunchy stuff.

The chicken flip.

There are all these.

The sloth squeeze was another one.

Yeah.

The ball weevil wiggle.

That was another one.

It doesn't exactly sound like twerking.

They're very tame from they were tomorrow.

Yeah, but they were sort of that moment where it felt like people were liberating and this was seen as as people going out and having a wild time.

And they really did take it seriously.

So a number of U.S.

cities really cracked down on it.

And in Boston, John F.

Kennedy's grandfather, who was the mayor, ordered it, ordered it so that there was a matron of policemen posted to every dance hall in the city and they would crack down on anyone they saw doing that.

They had people,

just police forces out arresting whole groups.

It was a bit of a mania.

A lot of the reports at the time said they were, to be fair to the people banning them, actual imitations of the sex acts of these animals.

Now, it is quite difficult to believe that when you watch, for instance, a turkey trot, which sort of involves jumping, hopping to one side and then hopping to the other side and then flapping your wings a bit.

But they were meant to be kind of reenacting sex between these creatures.

It feels to me that if that's the way turkeys have sex, then we'd all be going hungry at Christmas.

There will be not many baby turkeys around.

Well, as no doubt people would mention, I don't think any turkey that we eat has sex, does it?

I think all of that.

Oh my God.

Imagine if the turkey trot dance was someone extracting some semen from your baby

and then putting it in a little test tube and then shoving it into your partner.

It would be the turkey base instead of the turkey trot as a dance.

I really like what you said about the White House, Dan.

This is amazing that in 1913, there was going to be an inaugural ball for President Woodrow Wilson, obviously very exciting, and then it was cancelled just because of the risk that people might start doing the turkey trot.

And he denied that, but the ball was cancelled.

It didn't go ahead.

And so there was no chance for anyone to do the grizzly bear.

Yeah, he denied it probably because it wasn't true.

Surely that wasn't the reason.

It was on the front page of the New York Times.

So the headline was, Wilson banned ball fearing turkey trot.

And that was on Jan 13th 1913 and it was a big story But obviously yeah, he he denied that that would happen But it was it was a real story It was from White House Insiders So it was just I reckon he probably did ban it because of that It was probably like I don't love spending all this money and he might have been specifically worried about his daughters who are massive fans of animal dancers So he knew he knew the underworld of animal dancing so one person who intervened in this debate was the ex-president of the University of Missouri's medical school.

He was a guy called Dr.

S.

Grover and he claimed in 1915 that it led to insanity to do these dances.

He said, many of the cases of insanity developed in the United States within the last few years may be traced to modern eccentric dances.

One-tenth of the insane of this country have lost their mind on account of troubles which may commonly be traced to modern dances.

That's what

they also said that it would give you some kind of foot illness, didn't it?

It was like there was like a turkey trot foot or turkey trot in step or something like that which would make you lame if you did this too much but then some doctors said it was good for you so there was a doctor called dr a a brill who sounds like a really good doctor and he said that modern dances should be considered beneficial and they're as soothing to the poplace as rocking is to an infant oh good old so like when you're rock and rolling you're also kind of being rocked like a baby

It's like everything.

It's probably best done in moderation, isn't it?

I'm sure if you did dance for 14 hours a day, you would actually get quite sore feet.

And I think that's absolutely fair enough.

I just think it's unlikely many people were doing that.

Yeah.

And it was, I think it was Tango Foot was the precursor to that, which was a big scare.

And there was a really nice news article from 1914, which pointed out that no sooner has a new entrancing diversion come in than someone appears to forbid it.

And it pointed out that Tango Foot is the modern version of bicycle knee and automobile face, yeah.

Which I think I feel like we may have talked about those before.

Also, movie eye, he said.

People used to tell us we'd all get movie eye from the cinemas, and we haven't.

And it was quite a good article to remind you that whenever there's a new trend, everyone always says this is going to ruin us.

Yeah, I always get Pokemon Shin and Fortnite Anus.

We've got anyone binging us, watch out for podcast earlobe.

Oh, yeah.

I want to know what Fortnite Anus is.

well the problem is people sit down playing um video games for too long right and they sit in the same place and it can give you problems like piles and hemorrhoids no i'm no no no i'm making it all up

oh okay i've just started playing fortnight and i need to know if my end you're allowed for no more than two weeks after that it's a problem

um one of these animal dances survives today which is so exciting because i've never heard of the bunny hug or the there were others called the uh like the buzzard loaf there was one called the fish walk did you hear that one I mean that is the one thing that fish don't do yeah insane but the the one that survived into the modern age is the bunny hug because it kind of became the fox trot and the foxtrot was coined and popularized around the same time as all these other dances and it was refined a bit and you know there are various sources as to who exactly came up with it but it's basically a slightly more neat version of the bunny hug but it's not named after the fox right it was named after a guy called fox that's what most most people think these days.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, there was a guy called Fox who was like the guy who popularized the fox trot.

And they think, although it makes much more sense, if there was, you know, a grizzly bear to jump and a bunny hug, it makes sense that it would be named after a fox.

All these dances were named after people.

The turkey trot was named after Sir Leonard Turkey.

And

well, the bunny hug, there is a famous version of it being danced in a movie starring a man called John Bunny, but he didn't invent it.

I think that just happened to be a coincidence.

Really?

Yeah, he's one of the most well-known comedians of his day in America.

I've never heard of him, but he's got a huge pornography.

John Bunny.

Not Jack Benny.

You've just misread it.

Yeah, John Bunny.

So speaking of band dances, have you guys heard of the cushion dance?

No, I haven't.

This is the 16th, 17th century version of the turkey trot because it was a scandalous, sexy dance.

And what it is, is you run around the place with a cushion for a bit you dance around holding a cushion and then you put it down in front of a woman and she will kneel on it and then you give your blojop no chase

you give her a kiss on the cheek and then

you pick up the cushion and you dance around a bit more and it's very innocent and sweet not as sexy as i thought it was going to be no i i sort of assumed the bloj i mean that's what you're led to believe by the description it's a completely innocuous dance, but it was very scandalous at the time.

Oh, God, why am I blushing over Zoom?

It's so annoying.

Take your camera down.

Did the woman get to get up before you took the cushion out, or was it a sort of tablecloth trick thing where you spun her off the cushion?

No, I think she's told.

I don't know.

Maybe she gets the cushion then.

I haven't actually got the full mechanics of it worked out.

Maybe it's like past the cushion.

And then she gets to put the cushion down in front of someone else.

Who gives her colulingus?

Oh, okay.

We have to stop this.

But there was a worry, right?

I read about this

cushion dance, which they were saying that a story that in 1633, the idea is that it would lead to sexual acts.

And a couple were accused, I think, after maybe having done this dance and taking it a bit further, of having sex against the village Maypole.

And against the Maypole.

That's going to be a Maypole.

Yeah.

You're going to end up with Maypole A-S.

The only reason they were found out was because apparently there was a bell on top of it, which they didn't know about, which was alerting the neighbor.

No, no

so that's the story i read if i had to write that up in a 16th century newspaper i would make the headline maple sauce okay

so it's like a pun on maple sauce oh but it's the saucy thing happening up against the maple did they have maple sauce back then no they didn't i guess it wow so you would have invented what year was it all new well yeah 1633 yeah they had maple sauce really it's it's always called maple syrup so i don't know why we're even talking about maple sauce

The animal dances were part of the ragtime genre, really, weren't they?

It was just part of the much broader ragtime era, which is basically the first jazz or the precursor to jazz.

It's the first time you started having syncopated, ragged rhythm.

And the story of ragtime is just, it's kind of cool.

It's this Scott Joplin, who's the king of ragtime.

He'd been born to a former enslaved person who used to play the violin for plantation parties.

So that's where he got his musical skill.

and he died eventually in 1917 i think of syphilis and he died really upset that he'd never been able to be famous for a serious music and today he gets 200 000 listens a month on spotify which is just such a nice thing to not be able to tell him yeah and he he will be i guess he'll be able to earn 15 cents from those 200 000 listens

but luckily at the turn of the 20th century that will have bought him a lot of stuff right so the problem is not that Spotify isn't paying people enough, it's that they're not paying people a hundred years ago.

Oh, I think we've just about guaranteed we still get to be hosted.

Cool.

Um, the conga was illegal in Cuba for a while.

Uh, don't think it still is, might be.

This was due to a politician called um Desiderio Arnaz II.

Uh, and the reason was because it had come over to Cuba from Africa, uh, and they thought that it had lots of immoral gestures and semi-naked people doing the conga everywhere.

Yeah, like at weddings, yeah, that conga, you know, where you hold on to the waist of someone behind.

Yeah,

that that that now we do the blow job.

Um, so it was banned by this politician, uh, but then the politician ended up being um put in prison, like politicians often do in some countries.

Uh, and the son of the politician called Desi Arnaz, he fled to America and then became like the king of the Conga.

Like he went around the whole of America touring, going on TV, going to all the different cities, teaching them the conga.

And what I like to think is that when he went from one city to the other, everyone just followed him and did the conga with him from you know LA to San Francisco to Seattle.

You can see the king of conga coming from a long way away if he's on his way into town.

I'm very impressed if he managed to make a living out of teaching people the conga because I would say it is at maximum a one-lesson dance.

And that's what's got a lot of fun.

Yeah, but I last did it.

300 million people in America.

That's a lot of lessons.

Yeah, and you didn't even know you're supposed to take your clothes off, Andy.

Yours is a good lesson, too.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a type of pasta that only three women in the world know how to make.

Ooh.

Will we have heard of it?

Is it fusili?

It's not going to be spaghetti, is it?

It's not going to be.

They're amazingly productive, like they are kingpins.

You will have heard of it because you've spent the last couple of days researching about it.

But I think the people at home will not have heard of it.

So, this is called Su Filendeu, literally Threads of God, and it's a Sardinian pasta.

and it's made once a year for the Feast of San Francisco.

And there is basically a group of women who have always been able to make it, and they pass the recipe down to their daughters, who pass it down to their daughters, who pass it down to their daughters.

But there are only three women left who know how to do it, really.

One of them is a lady called Paola Abraini, and her niece and her sister-in-law all know how to do it, but her daughters aren't really that interested.

They kind of know the technique, but it's really, really complicated and they're not particularly good at it.

And because all these three women who are doing it are all kind of, I won't say old, but getting that way, you know, in their 50s and 60s,

the people are a little bit worried that this might die out.

So we need to get more people learning quick.

And we tried to teach Jamie Oliver, but he just couldn't hack it.

Well, this is

the weird thing about it.

It's that it's not even like it's a secret recipe.

It's not something that they're hiding.

They're constantly trying to teach it to people, including Jamie Oliver.

And after a few hours, they're like, nah, bullshit, I'm not doing this.

Are we serious that Jamie Oliver's tried to learn it?

Yeah, he tried to do it.

He tried to do it for two hours and gave up.

Wow.

So for the people at home, I'll tell you how to do it, because I know how to do it.

Basically, you get some semolina wheat, you get some water, you get some salt, you knead it and knead it and knead it.

And then at just the right moment, which is the main difficult part, then you put it into loads and loads of really, really, really fine strings.

You get 256 of these filaments and you put them all together and then kind of mesh them all up and then cut it up.

And then that's your pasta.

And then you put it with some tasty sheep's broth and some pecorino cheese.

Bish bash bosh.

That's basically a hello fresh recipe that I've given you there, isn't it?

Yeah.

What about Jamie Oliver at the end when he said bish bash bosh?

It's like that is the thing.

If you do get a hello fresh and it is the Sioux Philan Deu meal, it will take you exactly 48 years to do it.

Although it wouldn't be, it would be one of those annoying recipes because that's just the prep.

So it would say cook time 12 minutes and then at the very end it would say prep time 10 years.

A lifetime.

Yeah.

So actually lots of people know how to make it.

It's just the fact that only three people can make it.

Yeah, it's really, really difficult because you just need to get it at exactly the right moment.

It's the elasticity of the dough that you need to get perfectly right.

Because if you don't do it perfectly, you can't make these threads thin enough.

And you can only do it from playing with the dough and just knowing from generation on generation and generation and knowledge to knowledge to knowledge, just knowing the exact moment to do it.

But the other thing is it's given an impression that it's much harder to learn because, you know, Jamie Oliver stopped after two hours.

I think it's fair enough that he didn't master it in two hours.

This has been a generational thing that's passed on.

That's, you know, you need to.

Because if you're Jamie Oliver, if you're Jamie Oliver, you can, in that time, you could have made eight of your 15-minute meals.

It's an inefficient way of cooking.

I did read because these women, as you said, James, right, they're in the same family.

So one of their male relatives is currently one of the Luke Skywalker figures who is in the process of learning how to make it to their Yoda.

He's called, he's obviously also, I guess, Sardinian.

He's called Leo Gilsimino, and he's Aussie.

Well, he's Australian.

He's in Australia now.

Yeah.

I mean, he's in, he's their family.

So I don't know when he moved to Australia or when the family moved.

But yeah, they've given him a little masterclass.

And he has a certificate, but I think he's still in the

middle of zone.

Basically, it's kind of a tradition where they have these kind of matrilineal or matriarchal cuisines, which you do pass on from mother to daughter to daughter to daughter.

But because they're so worried about this dying out, they have recently said, okay, we're going to let men do it as well.

And they are trying to teach more and more people.

I actually read this article in the BBC.

I think it was in 2016.

So it could be possible that few people have picked it up since then.

But if they have, they won't be nearly as good as these three women who absolutely smash it every time.

Because they don't have the special sense.

Is that, you know, we've done how,

you know, we have more than five senses.

Is the special ability to feel pasta.

There is that.

I don't think that's an X-Men character we're going to see.

covered up in future Marvel movies.

Actually, I just thought of something which is

that, you know how we were talking about maple sauce earlier on, Andy?

Yes.

Well, the related food, maple syrup, is also was traditionally a thing that passed from mother to daughter to mother to daughter.

Because in the First Peoples tribes of Canada,

the men would often go out hunting and the women would be in charge of all of the planting and stuff like that.

And the maple syrup came in that territory.

And so you would, as a woman, you would go to your maple grove and you would get the syrup every year, which would give lots of energy to

your tribes.

But you would pass on the knowledge to your daughter and you would even pass on your groves to your daughter as well.

So wherever your grove of maples was, that would be yours through generations, through generations, through generations.

So there are quite a few of these kind of matrilineal cuisines around the world.

And you pass, that would be, you pass on the knowledge of you make a hole in the tree and wait for the stuff to come out of it.

Because I like, did the women tell the men it was a really complicated processing dozens of ingredients.

It's the equivalent of the conger king passing it on to his conger son.

Yeah,

he's next in line, literally.

First, you put a hole in the tree, then you wait for the sap to come up.

No, because actually, there's more to it with maple syrup.

Oh, you've got to concentrate it a little bit.

You've got to lose some of the fluids.

You have to leave it out overnight so it freezes and all the water comes to the top, and then you skim off the water and then you boil it to get rid of more of the water.

It's like that's what my mum told me, anyway.

Just on pasta shapes.

Oh, yeah.

Do you guys know, you know the tortelloni, the little wrapped up parcel thing?

Yeah, although I think I call it.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Tortellini.

Sorry, sorry.

Tortellini.

That shape is supposedly based on Lucrezia Borgia's navel.

And you know, Lucrezia Borgia of the famous poisoning aristocratic Borgia family.

She was staying in an inn in Italy, and the innkeeper was so excited to have this beautiful aristocratic lady in his inn that he crept up to the keyhole to have a perv, but all he could see was the navel through her navel.

But what a navel, foi.

And he rushed down to the kitchen to recreate it in pastiform.

That's a terrible outie she had, isn't it?

It's an absolutely fucked-up umbilical cord cutting right there.

And he also, the next day, he went up and saw her husband and invented the bellogia sausage, didn't he?

Do you know why pasta has so many different shapes?

No.

Well, I think people think they know, or the theory is that the reason it does, and it is a ridiculous number, so there are more than 300 pasta shapes and I think 1,300 different pasta names.

And it's partly because it was so, it was such rivalry throughout Italy.

So some of the earliest Italian gilds were pasta guilds, the vermicelli and the macaroni.

And you'd have lots of little different localities trying to rival each other's pasta quality with their own pasta.

And so you made it into one into a bow tie.

And then you'd make your own spiral to be like, our spirals are better than their bow ties.

And it was very heated.

And they used to get so I mean, they got so competitive that the Pope had to step in a few times, I think, between pasta guilds.

And

he ruled in the 1400s, he ruled that pasta making, illegal pasta making, would be punished by a fine and three lashings of a whip because, you know, if you're not allowed, if you're not in the guild that's allowed to make that twirly pasta, then you're going to be beaten.

I'll tell you what, I didn't really appreciate until we did the research for this episode how busy the Pope's life actually is.

He's just constantly banning pasta shapes or turkey trot dances.

The guy's furious calling out stuff.

He's got a lot on.

Yeah.

There was actually, with what you were saying with these sort of these guilds and so on, it went a bit further.

In the Renaissance courts, there was one particular pasta shape, which is Corsetti, which the idea is that it's imprinted with the coat of arms of the royal families that would eat it.

So you would have these pieces of pasta that would each have the coat of arms to where you were eating on your plate, which is pretty extraordinary.

I love that as a piece.

Yeah, because they're all very, there's this great book called the Encyclopedia of Pasta.

I don't know if you guys read about it in the course of this research by Oretta.

What's it about?

Oretta Zanini da Vita is her name.

And she's went round Italy just asking every local person from a different town, city, village about the story behind a different kind of famous local pasta.

And she created this encyclopedia.

So it's a real first-hand encyclopedia.

And it's got all the stories about how the shapes came about.

There's the Ave Maria pasta, which is a great little one that's simply, it's not anything to do with the shape.

It's about the timing of what you cook it for.

So you chuck it into the boiling water.

And if you you say a Hail Mary, that's how long you cook it for, the Ave Maria.

And there's apparently a whole trinity of different pastas with the different lengths that you say the prayer to that will be the perfect cooking.

Doesn't feel like a particularly long amount of time to cook pasta, say the Hail Mary.

I don't know how long it takes to say a Hail Mary.

Okay.

Hail Mary, follow grace.

The Lord is with thee.

Blessed out thou, amongst women, and blessed in the fruits of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray to us sinners now at the hour of our death.

Amen.

Do you have to say very quickly?

Shame to be the most annoying priest as he's powering through the entire sermon.

I had to go to a lot of confessions in my time and had to get through a lot of Hail Marys.

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

My fact is that every hour, the buglers of Krakow have to climb 272 steps, play five notes, then walk back down again.

And this is a job that you can have if you're a bugler and you live in Krakow.

They have this church called St.

Mary's Basilica.

And since 1392, on and off, they've been doing this thing where every hour there's a bugle call from the top.

It's called St.

Mary's Fan Fair.

It's only got five notes in it.

So actually, it's not...

It goes up and down a bit and it takes about, I don't know, half a minute to play.

So it goes up and down, but only on those those five notes um

and

you play the tune to each point of the compass and um and then you stop and then you go back down again and then the next hour you climb back up again but actually don't you stop the fourth time you do it you stop halfway through i read um that's because in 1241 there was a bugler who was like telling about some mongols who were attacking the city and he was shot by an arrow uh halfway through his bugle and so in honor of this guy, they kind of stopped the last bugle.

Well, that's the story.

But there's a lot of stories about Krakow, I learned, which we might get to in a bit, but go on.

Well, it's first recorded in 1928 and from 1241.

That's obviously quite a gap before anyone wrote it down.

And it's first recorded by an American author who may have been, locals may have played a trick on him, but it might also have been an oral legend before that.

It's just that there isn't much written record.

But there was actually a trumpeter who did die on duty in 1901.

So only about 20 years before this guy wrote the story down.

And he had played the tune three out of four times because you do it to each point of the compass.

So he did it three times.

But then he died of a heart condition before he could play it the fourth time.

So that might be where that sort of fed into local myth.

And yeah.

Yeah.

That must have been such a weird moment for the town when you're waiting.

You're so used every hour to hearing these four.

And you're like, what?

How did it go?

But I thought, wasn't it even,

did you say the first mention of the bugler is 1928 or the first mention of this legend is 1928?

The Mongol thing.

The bugle thing's been going for donkeys' years, yeah.

Because I read that the bugle thing, even they only used to do it sort of once a day

until the 20th century.

And then suddenly they decided to torture this guy by ramping up to once every hour.

They're in a squad.

So I think you do, you have to be a fireman, by the way, to have this job.

That's That's just part of the conditions for entry these days.

So the reason this is current now is because they've just announced they're recruiting for a new one.

And they've had their first ever application from a woman for the position.

So great social progress is being made now.

If she gets it.

If she gets it, yeah.

If she gets it.

But it's for the audition process.

It's crazy.

It's insane.

In order to become a bugler for the church, you need to go through a whole process of doing chin-ups.

You need a beep fitness test.

They have a medicine ball tossing thing that you need to do.

And you need to scale a 20-meter ladder at an angle of 75 degrees to ensure that you're not afraid of heights.

But I would have thought that all these things, if you're a fireman, you probably would already be able to glow up ladders, wouldn't you?

No?

You would hope.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

I've got to say, I have been to Krakow on a stag do once.

And

I think I might be right about saying this is the square is basically just a load of bars all the way around it, with mostly when I went there just full of stagdos.

So

that's that seems to be the only people who are enjoying these bugles.

Is it Market Square?

Is it the main square, isn't it?

Actually, I think I remember hearing it when I was in Krakow.

Market Square was the biggest square, biggest medieval square in Europe, I think, wasn't it?

It was.

It got UNESCO Heritage, sort of, it was one of the very first places to get UNESCO Heritage, I think.

Yeah, it is beautiful.

It's really big and really cool.

And this St.

Mary's Tower is quite famous because it's got two towers that are slightly different heights.

And I know Andy's going to tell me this isn't true now, but I'm going to tell the story of why this happened.

So they had the church there and there was a guy who was in charge of Krakow at the time who was called Duke Borislaus the Modest.

Okay, and he's like, we need some new towers here.

Not too big, because I'm modest, but we need some new towers here.

We need two new towers.

And they tried to find the people to do it.

And they got two brothers.

one of whom was going to do one tower and one who would do the other tower.

One of the brothers did his tower and then the other brother did his tower slightly bigger and the brother with the shorter tower got really jealous and so killed his brother for doing such a bigger tower and then he could have made his tower back to the equal height but then he felt so guilty about killing his brother that he didn't do it anymore.

Are you going to tell me that's not true either Andy?

I'm not going to say that.

No way.

No.

It's probably not true.

Well cracked.

It doesn't make up for killing your brother.

I'll tell you that.

If I was murdered but then I found out that the the person didn't actually go through with the stupid bet we had, it's still not okay to murder you.

No.

You're right.

But there are great stories of Krakow.

And I'm, James, the only reason I'm not going to tell you that your one isn't true is because

the only other one I know is about

Krakow is about the dragon who lived under the hill.

And there's a medieval story of Krakov.

And the dragon loved eating virgins.

They all do, don't they?

It's the whole species.

Yeah.

And there was only one virgin left after this huge virgin-eating rampage that the dragon had been on.

Anyway, this poor cobbler filled up a sheepskin with sulphur and salt and then left that outside the dragon's cave.

Anyway, the dragon eats it, and it's so full of salt that he feels so thirsty.

He drinks so much water, the dragon, that he explodes and dies.

And then the cobbler is rewarded by getting married to the king's daughter, who happens to be the last virgin in the city.

Okay.

That's the story.

Yeah.

And the dragon's bones now hang out of the front of Vavel Cathedral, which is in Krakow.

It's the big cathedral there.

The bones hang from the door.

No one's contesting the illness of the bones anymore.

Some bones, some bones are there.

Bones are hanging.

They're quite good.

I wish they'd study them.

So they're not allowed to take them down, right?

Because there's this idea that if they fall down, then the world will end immediately.

So they're hung up by these chains, which are constantly checked, which is kind of a shame because apparently apparently the bones belong to some creature from the Pleistocene, a mammoth, or maybe a whale.

And we just won't know because the only way of checking them involves the world ending, at which point I suppose you can't check the bones.

It's a real catch-22.

They've done an awesome statue of this dragon.

It was first put up, I think, in 1972.

And they decided on to have it breathe fire.

Huge, like a flamethrower.

And it used to do that every five minutes or so.

But actually, they've started a new service where as you're walking by, you can text the dragon and ask it to breathe fire and it will do it on command.

So it can actually go every 15 seconds if it needs to.

The 15 second intervals between breathing fire.

Polish leaders of Krakow have had fun names over time, I realise, looking into the history of Krakow.

I particularly like the 1200s where the Duke of Krakow was called Tanglefoot.

That was in 1210, and he died and was replaced by Spindleshanks.

I think there was someone someone in between.

And Spindleshanks replaced him.

And actually, Spindleshanks ended up getting killed by a German girl that he was trying to sexually assault.

So well done.

Well, she killed him.

So well done.

Well, it was a bad start to the story, but, you know, he got his clothes.

It was a happy ending.

I thought Spindleshanks would have been killed by Voldemort by the sounds of him.

Their sworn enemy was Henry the Bearded.

Tanglefoot and Spindleshanks were on the same side, and then Henry the Bearded was their enemy and eventually became Duke of Krakow.

That's great.

It does sound like your J.K.

Rowling plot, doesn't it?

I really like King Sygmund the Old because him and his wife Bona Swarza brought soup vegetables to Poland.

Soup in the 16th century.

That's what they're famous for.

I mean, what's James?

I don't want to quibble, but all vegetables, soup, vegetables.

Well, they brought...

She was...

Bona Swarza was Italian.

And so they brought a lot of vegetables that didn't grow naturally in

Poland and they brought them over but that's what they're famous for.

Tomatoes I suppose you wouldn't get tomatoes in Poland but you wouldn't get them in anywhere in Europe but she brought them over.

They marked them as soup vegetables.

Is that how they got them selling?

That's what they're known as now.

Like

Polish soup vegetables, I guess.

Their daughter was called Anna Jagiellon and she was the last female ruler of Poland

and she was basically part of a family where she was like the youngest daughter and everyone thought that she was like an old kind of spinster who would never get married, kind of thing.

And then, suddenly, everyone else in her family died, and she was going to be the ruler of Poland.

And suddenly, she became the hottest ticket in town.

And Ivan the Terrible wanted to marry her, and

Henri Valois in France wanted to marry her.

Everyone wanted to marry her.

All the Habsburgs wanted to marry her and stuff.

I think this would make a great kind of 1990s teen comedy of, you know,

the overlooked girl suddenly becoming the hottest girl in class kind of thing.

Yeah.

You'd need to, I think you'd need to rewrite the bit where sort of all her siblings were brutally murdered or died in horrible ways for the teen comedy audience.

But she's in the poster, she's surrounded by soup vegetables and she's looking to the camera and going, oh,

I like it.

Well, she eventually married a Hungarian prince called Bathary, but they didn't really get on very well.

He refused to learn Polish, and so they spoke through an interpreter for the rest of his life.

And then eventually he died.

And instead of taking over herself, she pushed her nephew, who was called Sigmund III Vassar, who became actually like one of the great leaders in Polish history.

That's your sequel.

Exactly.

But he was actually the one who moved the capital of Poland away from Krakow to Warsaw.

So, you know.

Thumbs down from this episode.

We've done the Warsaw episode episode in 100 years.

He's a hero.

Oh, by the way, for Americans, you call it Krakow.

Just in case you've been wondering all this time what we're talking about, but we call it Krakow.

Thousands of Americans are just going, oh,

everything we've said, they're like, that's so weird.

They have that in Krakow as well.

Really weird.

I found a thing, which is that America is running out of buglers and they desperately need them.

They need them because in

2000, at the beginning of 2000, a new law was passed that if you were an army veteran and you had died, you were entitled to a military funeral.

And so, what they would do is they would have to send out three people to be there present and do a few military

regalia type things, one of which is they would have to play taps on the bugle, taps being that song.

I'm murdering that song, but it's the classic American tune.

Now, the problem is, they don't have enough buglers to go and play this song.

So, what they've had to invent is a ceremonial bugle.

And the ceremonial bugle has inside it a sound system with the song pre-loaded.

So, what you end up having is these people playing the song, but what they're doing is once they press down on one of the buttons, it just plays the song through a speaker system that is at the top of the bugle.

And they just pretend that they're playing it because that's the best way in order to commemorate

who's being buried.

Yeah, Dan, I read about it.

It's so weird.

It seems like it's this little black box that you shove into the end of your bugle and then you just press a button on it and then you just hold the bugle.

It's really bizarre.

It's quite controversial, isn't it?

Because some people are like, well, surely you should have a proper bugler at a funeral.

But then other people say, well, you know what?

If we, there is a shortage, like Dan says.

So if we don't do this, we're just going to have to have a boom box with playing the tap.

So that's going to be even worse.

But then then the other argument again is that you know when dan really murdered that tune a few seconds ago that's kind of part of it so it's not really supposed to be perfect note for note when you play the taps it's supposed to have emotion in it because the person who's playing it is quite upset and so the the notes are supposed to be slightly off and a bit shaky and stuff like that and you obviously don't get that with a recording

They'll get used to it.

It's like, do you remember when taxi drivers first started using sat-nav and it was really disappointing?

and then you do you realize that it's actually fine it's a bit like that yeah you're used to being taken three miles around the houses and that's part of the ritual and the tradition it shows the emotion in the taxi driver that you're being charged an extra tenor because he's not going to ask what exactly where this which tax code you're meant to be going to yeah

I accidentally researched you know the band uh the bugles who did video killed the radio star the buggles exactly i only realized that about an hour into my research.

I spent genuinely an hour looking at every song they did to see if a bugle had ever been played by the bugles.

And

as far as I could find, it hasn't, but it doesn't matter anyway, because that's not what they're called.

But

the buggles did have a member called Trevor Horn.

So did get one thing out of it.

Which is still not a wasted hour.

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

My fact this week is that when the conservationist Amy Dickman booked a dentist appointment in Namibia, she neglected to mention to the dentist that the patient was a leopard.

Wow.

How did the appointment go?

Do we know?

It actually went quite well.

Yeah, it was a series of appointments in the end, as often happens with the dentist.

And this was, it was on the BBC website a while back, I think, and it was an interview with her.

And she was saying that she works in various African countries with threatened species.

She was in Namibia and she found a leopard that had got into a farmer's trap because farmers trap them to stop them killing their livestock.

And she saw it had a broken canine.

So she anaesthetized it and she called the local dentist and just booked an appointment.

And then she said she arrived.

And there are obviously lots of people in the waiting room who are frightened enough already because they're in a dentist's waiting room.

And then a leopard gets carried through.

And apparently the dentist really took to it after a while.

And she explained, it's okay, I've anesthetized it, so it's not going to wake up and eat you.

And so the dentist was like, oh, brilliant.

And they had to make a specially hard tooth for the leopard because obviously they do much more tearing of their food than we do.

So he plotted using titanium and steel and silver to make this tooth.

And it was basically okay.

Except for that scary moment at the end when it woke up.

Apart from, well, it better face off.

Everyone died.

And that's the end of my story.

It was a moment where it had to go back for repeated fittings.

And on the very last appointment, she said she thinks there was a dodgy anesthetic.

And all these crowds had gathered around to watch at this point because they've got quite a name for themselves for having this leopard in the dentist.

So there were crowds of people in the room.

The dentist said, I'm pretty sure the leopard just blinked at me.

And they said, don't be silly, it's anesthetize.

30 seconds later, it let out a massive roar and then climbed up off the table.

She said, the crowd, she's never seen a crowd disappear from a room so fast.

They sort of just jumped out the windows and stuff.

and uh they had to chase it around and anaesthetize it again which she then pointed out i'd only ever really worked on cheetahs which apparently who knew have very prominent veins so very easy to um to vaccinate to anesthetize difficult to catch though a cheetah

but one of the things they had to do as well so the the the um the lion had got up and sorry the leopard had got up and it was walking around and the the dentist was too freaked out and didn't want to help with the grappling of it and they were all freaking out out.

And some of them ran out onto the road.

And by chance, the vet was walking down the road.

And they're like, vet, get here now.

And the vet was like, what's up?

We've got a leopard that's awake.

And he ran in and helped hold down the leopard.

And they re-anesatized it.

But like, just total coincidence as they ran out that this guy was just probably going to the shops.

And suddenly they were going to be able to do it.

You wouldn't believe it.

In a film, you'd be like, what are the chances he's walking by at that moment?

Not realistic.

I think anesthetizing the animals is one of the main problems of these kind of veterinary dentists isn't it because you know anesthetizing animals is just a difficult thing to do i was reading about one in 2004 which was a jaguar called hibalba uh who needed five root canals and um they gave it anesthetic um but unfortunately the jaguar went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing because it reacted badly to the anesthesia and so the dentist who is called namiak said that they tried a quick yank on the cat's testicles and he was awake just like that.

And the jaguar completely recovered.

That's, yeah, dentists do that.

That's normal, isn't it?

Yank on your works, do they?

Yeah, yeah.

You swallow, you rinse, you spit, the dentist gives you a quick yank down there, and then you go.

That's where you get the sticker, isn't it?

I have my testicles yanked by Mr.

Matthew Smithson.

It seems like you have to have nerves of steel to go into this kind of dentistry, the animal world dentistry.

I was reading about a guy called Peter Emily.

He's 82 years old and he's a pioneer in this territory.

He says that he's operated basically on everything with a mouth.

So he's done kangaroos, he's done ferrets, he did Syncrean Royce.

He's done a river.

And in this article, he was operating on a lion's head.

So you can imagine if that lion wakes up, it's going to be terrifying.

While he was operating on the lion's mouth.

Can we just say that as a dentist, most of the work he does is head-based, isn't it?

Well, yes, true.

my point of saying that though is at the very same time someone was down at the other end removing the lion's testicles so it was

it's a scary procedure yeah if he woke up that's one pissed off lion and then as he's doing that procedure they bring in next to him a black leopard which is just laying perpendicular on the table next to this lion so he's just surrounded in animals that if waking up can i ask would just rip his head off why did they decide to take the testicles and the teeth out at the same time

My dentist had one of those.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah, I have to say, no complaints.

Say are.

In this case, they were using them to grow stem cells.

So it was two different things happening from two different people.

It wasn't, yeah, in order to help out with a tooth.

I guess if anesthetizing is hard, which it is, and I guess you don't want to do it too often.

So I suppose you sort of take what...

chances you get while you've got a knocked out lion.

So there was a guy, a zoo dentist in the UK called Peter, another Peter actually, Peter Katej of Paynton Zoo.

He is, again, one of the only zoo dentists in the world.

And in 2008, he did an operation on a gorilla at Paynton Zoo.

And it took about 10 people to remove the gorilla's tooth because you've got people positioning the gorilla, you've got people monitoring the anesthetics, you've got all sorts of activity happening around.

And there is this huge, you know, 300-pound gorilla sitting in the chair, completely dead to the world.

And he's having to operate on it.

And he said,

Peter Katej was interviewed and he said, people often ask me if it is fun working on gorillas and tigers.

It certainly is not fun.

It is very hard and serious work.

Oh, what a kill, Joy.

He's having fun.

Imagine sat next to him at a wedding.

Oh, tell us about the gorilla.

It's not fun.

Oh, my God.

What a cool job.

Wow.

It's actually horrible.

Okay.

Moving on.

In terms of dentistry, it's not even just the teeth that they have to deal with.

So So this guy that I was talking about, Peter Emily, he also works on bird beaks as well.

And he's pioneered a speciality which he calls ortho beakics.

And beak braces, right?

I think he's the guy who does bird braces for beaks.

If you've got, I think the condition is called scissor beak, technically.

And you know, when you get a faulty pair of scissors, and the,

you can imagine the two bits, not a faulty pair of scissors, sorry, a functioning pair of scissors, but the two bits don't crash into each other like a beak should.

They slide over each other, and so that's what scissor beak is.

Um, so he has braces for birds that they have to wear, and eventually it wrenches them back into place.

But they do get bullied at school.

Can I just say if it's a crossbill, they're supposed to be like that.

Oh, no, do you think he's ruined loads of crossbills?

They're just called Bill.

Um, rats, if anyone has a pet rat, uh, they sometimes perform dentistry on their owners.

Oh,

this is a thing that people let them do.

I find rats quite gross, uh, as I think a lot of us do.

But what they like to do is inspect each other's teeth for spare food.

So they often get food stuck in their teeth, and their mate will have you know a bit of dairy milk stuck in its tooth, so they'll go and lick the food off.

And if you own a rat and you show it your teeth, it will lick between your teeth and lick the food out.

And who needs a toothpick when you've got a pet rat?

And people have been doing this i mean how many is is this a common i have a friend who had a pet rat i'm not going to tell you who it is because you know them i don't think that they will have done that what you're saying james is that is this is this rare enough that we can make fun of it and shame the people who do it or is it very common and we should be careful is it so common that i need to rethink my friend group

they also have rank teeth anyway rats sorry no offense to rats but they grow faster than human nails.

So they have to be constantly gnawing.

So you need to give them stuff to chew all the time.

And they grow in spirals at an 85-degree angle.

So if their teeth come out of their mouths and they don't gnaw enough, then they grow in this big spiral.

And when they're chewing, the masseter muscle, which is the muscle that controls their jaw, is positioned behind their eyeballs.

So if you watch videos of rats chewing, they do a thing called boggling at the same time, which is when their eyes burn.

That's Dan's favourite band, isn't it?

The boggles.

sorry what did that what is a boggling sorry Anna

is what you'd think their eyes pop in and out of their heads as they chew can I give you guys a fact about just general dentistry

You know how we all love nominative determinism?

Yeah.

Well, I have got off it a little bit, I have to say, after reading this fact, and I think that it might not be true because I read that the first woman to qualify as a dentist in England was called Miss Fanny Payne.

And I think if nominative determinism was real, she would have been a gynecologist.

Yeah.

Fanny Paine.

There should be something called nominative anti-determinism or something, where they've gone the wrong way.

So she qualified in 1914.

There were a few dentists before her because a few people qualified in Scotland before that, female dentists, I should say.

But like in the 19th century, really, you only had male dentists.

And then there was Fanny Payne, and there was another woman called Lillian Lindsay, who became the first female to qualify as a dentist in the whole UK because she did hers in Scotland.

And it was so looked down upon that when she tried to join the National Dental Hospital in Great Portland Street, the dean who was called Harry Weiss, Harry, Harry, Harry.

Harry Weiss.

Harry Weiss.

Yeah, that's what causes the fanny payne, isn't it?

He was called Harry Harry Weiss, Harry Weiss, Harry Weiss.

And he refused to admit her because she was a woman.

And then when she really insisted, he would only interview her on the pavement outside the school because he didn't want her to distract all the other dentists who were inside.

Wow.

But yeah, eventually they did.

And now I think it's more than 50% of dentists in Europe, I think, are women.

People are trying home dentistry now.

Are they?

And are being advised not to.

Is this a coronavirus thing?

Yep.

The economist reported on various dentists saying that they're very worried because a lot of their patients are saying they're doing things like using needles to burst their own abscesses in their mouths.

They're using knives and forks to take their teeth out and nail files to cut down broken teeth.

My word.

I've actually been doing this myself at home and it's a real nightmare because I've been having to yank on my own testicles when I've finished.

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 account.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com, and check out all of our previous episodes, as well as links to bits of our merchandise.

That's it.

We will be back again with another episode.

We'll see you then, guys.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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I'm Sean Ryan, showrunner of the night agent here with Eric Kripke, showrunner of the boys.

And on this episode of Creator Creator, we talk about the craziness of making a TV show.

I am in a fair amount of terror about a series finale.

You could have the greatest show for years, but if you stiff that ending, and that's what's sending everyone out in the parking lot, they go, oh, maybe that show wasn't that good.

Listen to Creator to Creator, wherever you get your podcasts.