359: No Such Thing As A Sneaky Badger Swapsie

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The following podcast contains comments that some listeners may find upsetting.

Specifically, people who are halfway through reading Anna Karenina and don't want to know what happens in the end.

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 Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Anna.

My fact this week is that badgers change their bedding more often than I do.

Specifically.

I don't think this makes me gross because specifically, badges change their bedding every 10 days.

Oh, you could have said they change it 15 times more often than you do, perhaps.

Screw you.

Okay.

They are very clean, unnecessarily clean, really.

But yeah, they're amazingly assiduous with their bedding.

They air it.

So they have lots of straw and grass and dried leaves and stuff that they sleep on.

And every 10 days, they drag it out into the open and they pull it sort of backwards.

So they're walking backwards, pulling the bedding in their forepaws, and they roll it along.

And when they're far enough from the entrance, they kick it away with their back feet.

And then they leave it out during the day to dry and air and get rid of the fleas and stuff that are on it.

And then they drag it back in.

And coincidentally, Anna, that is also exactly how you clean your bedding as well, isn't it?

Yes.

Is this something you have in common?

Sometimes they sleep on items such as crisp packets and other bits of rubbish.

Look, there's nothing

at night feast.

Wine bottle in their jams.

It's Tracy Emmin, a badger.

Is this what we're discovering?

Pretty cool that they have bedding generally.

We've sort of skimmed over that.

That's just quite sweet.

I've never pictured many animals with sort of bed sheets and blankets.

Really?

Okay.

Because you know, when they say that an animal lives in a certain habitat, habitat is the shop where they buy all their bedding from.

The up market badgers, yeah.

But they do, I mean, if they if they were going to habitat, they do have items in their bedding that kind of feel up market, like garlic skins, garlic pieces, so as to create an aroma.

And it's useful for them.

But, I mean, that feels a bit Habitat shop, doesn't it?

That's really cool.

I read the other day, and this is off topic, already off-topic, but in

Han Dynasty China, they used to have a room where the concubines of the emperor lived.

And some of the emperors would put Sichuan peppers in the paint or in the walls so that the room would be kind of tingly and peppery and stuff.

Because one, it kept it nice and warm, but then on the other hand, it was supposed to be like a fertility symbol because it's got lots of seeds.

That sounds quite dangerous to me because if you are in the sexy, spicy, chili fertility room and you just happen to lean against the wall for a bit, let's say you put your hand on the wall and then later on you're taking out your contact lenses, whatever,

then you suddenly got a red hot eye.

That's a really good point.

And also, what happens in the sexy fertility room?

People are naked.

What do you not want to touch when you've got chilies on your fingers?

I don't know.

Even when I'm naked in a sexy room, I'm really rubbing my dentals against the wall.

It's a good way for the Emperor, though, to find out who's been sneaking into his concubine room just by going, everyone quickly rub your eyes, and whoever starts freaking out.

All right, mate.

Busted.

Come here, eunuch number 30.

Anyway, badges.

Yeah, they should keep chili peppers in their sets, because their main problem is flea infestation.

Probably help them with that, wouldn't it?

But another clever thing they do with their bedding is they use it as radiators.

So, as well as sleeping on it, and this is especially in spring when they're having offspring, then they'll pull fresh vegetation as opposed to sort of dried up leaves and grass and stuff.

They'll put in bluebells and other fresh vegetation and they pull it into their set and then they pile it up in the corner of their bedroom.

And as it decomposes, it emits loads of heat.

And so, in that pile, that pile can take the temperature from 18 degrees to 38 degrees.

That's really clever.

Really clever.

That's very cool.

They travel far as well to get the materials, don't they?

They sort of have a 100-meter radius that they like to go foraging for.

They also, I believe, are the only other British mammal to build toilets apart from humans.

Okay.

So they dig their own latrine pits, and they will use these pits more cleverly than humans use their toilets, I would say, because they use these as a communication device.

Because they, once they do a poo, they will then spray it with a scent

from their glands near the bottom to say who they are, what they're all about.

Is the spray is that sort of a freshening device?

And this is a strange personal piece of information, but one of my housemates has installed in all our lavatories a thing called Pooh Puri and insisted that all of us spray that before we're going to do a poo.

And it apparently fresh the scent yep it has to be before and then you poo onto it and i'm just wondering if the badgers are doing a version of that wait so you spray you spray the inside of the bowl as opposed to the room

exactly yeah yeah

um and so

i don't know badgers are doing you know one badger is a real martinet was like look everyone stinks here's some spray i wonder if you're really ahead of the curve and in a year's time we'll listen back to this podcast and go wow anna was the first to do that or whether you're completely insane

quite work it out.

It's been forced on me.

It's like when we predicted Hamilton should be a musical before it happened.

We did.

Re-listen, guys.

No, it's for, it's for, so territory marking to keep enemies at bay, right?

That's what I'm saying.

And also, I think like it tells your enemies how strong you are.

So if you've done a really, really good poo

and like there's some really good smells with it, then it shows that you're really well fed and you're up for a fight.

That's an element that UFC should bring in.

If Conor McGregor just had a massive poo on the weighing scale,

opponent had a sniff and went, oh no, this is going to be scary.

With scent marking, they also scent mark each other.

So they

have these anal gland secretions.

And apparently they're the texture of margarine and very overpowering smell, according to pro-Badger Watchers.

But they either do mutual marking, which is where they simultaneously scent mark each other, which is quite funny to watch.

They rub their bums against each other.

Or they do sequential marking.

And what I read in one study about this is that that is like putting your own personal advertisement on another badger, treating that badger like a bus with your advert on it.

So when you scent mark that badger, it's going around with your scent on it, advertising to loads of other badgers.

Excuse me smell this amazing scent.

That's my mate, Bodger.

You should check it out.

They've also, when this is the honey badger specifically, I think they're technically not badgers, are they?

Honey honey badgers?

Just kidding.

They're definitely very different.

But we should say for international listeners, sorry, that we are talking about the European badger mostly,

which is...

Which is a kind of weasel.

We should also say it's in the weasel family.

Oh, my God.

Basically, all my research is on honey badgers here.

Oh, honey badgers are amazing.

They deserve their own.

They're amazing.

Yeah.

Sorry, Dan.

I've got another badger who isn't a badger, and that's Charlotte Badger.

Do you want to hear about Charlotte Badger?

Charlotte Badger was the first Australian female pirate and the first European woman to live in New Zealand, probably.

The probably bit is she definitely was one of the first couple.

She was transported to Sydney for housebreaking.

She was born in Worcestershire.

And then she was put on a boat to Tasmania and she started a rebellion and she took over the whole ship.

Okay, do you know about her?

I've read about this boat, this huge women's rebellion on a ship.

It's amazing.

But the captain afterwards said, oh, yeah, you know, there was quite a lot of women involved.

But you see the kind of one bloke over there, it was mostly him.

Because if he'd admitted that all the women had taken over his boat, he would have got in a load of trouble.

So he was like, no, no, it's mostly the men.

But it was basically the women took over it.

And they sailed to New Zealand and started living with the Maoris.

And then every now and then, like missionaries would go over and see these women who were living in New Zealand.

And eventually the Maori people kind of fell out with her because they'd heard that something had happened to some Maori people on her boat.

And she ended up in Tonga.

And about another like dozen years later, there were some missionaries going to Tonga going, oh yeah, there's that woman again.

Really?

How did she get here?

Yeah.

But anyway, that is.

She's culturally.

I know Dan said badgers traveled a long way getting 100 yards to the end of their territory, but that must be the furthest traveled badger.

I've got another human badger.

Oh, great.

Oh, okay.

It's a guy.

He's not a real badger.

He is a human.

And he's called Charles Foster.

He wrote a book called Being a Beast.

And the idea was he's a British guy who wanted to reconnect with nature.

And he thought the best way to do that was to go and live as animals and live the way that they live.

So badgers was one of the things that he did.

And he roped his kids into doing it with him.

So he lived for a while as a badger.

They went out into the forest and they built a big hole in the ground, which was their sleeping quarters, their set.

They were eating worms because that would be something that badgers would eat.

They were sleeping in the daytime and foraging at night.

So they lived for a good long time, a a few weeks, as these badgers.

And it wasn't the only animals that he did.

He did an otter as well.

He lived as an otter with his kids.

The reason I mentioned that is he also did that scat sniffing, the poo smelling.

So basically,

yeah, so by the end of that experience, him and his kids were each able to identify whose poo that was out of the family members.

A lot of people are listening to this.

They're really struggling to educate their children at home.

And

I think a lot of light bulbs have gone over over a lot of heads here, going, that is a great idea.

And it'll teach them to change their sheets more often.

Yeah.

So it's multi-badgers.

Why do you bring us these lunars?

I did think

I did meet another guy who did that called Thomas Thwaites, who lived as a goat.

I don't know if we've talked about him before, but

yeah, he was awesome.

Yeah.

Honey badgers?

No,

they're not badgers.

Have you heard?

They've got badgers in their name.

No, I haven't.

No.

Have you heard of the badger, which I can't believe this is last year's big badger for me.

And I don't know what we were all doing in February, but this was way more important.

On the 9th of February, 2020, a badger fell through the ceiling of the Northampton branch of Superdrug.

Can you imagine how terrifying that would have been?

Like, it's scary enough when a spider starts coming down from the ceiling.

Yeah.

A badger just fell through the roof.

Wow.

And it ran under the perfume counter, probably looking for some nice scents.

Um,

and anyway, I mention it partly because it got its own blue plaque in November.

Uh, Jesus, we have lowered the blue plaque bar, haven't we?

Do you remember last week, I think it was, we were talking about Dolly Parton, yeah, and what had she done?

The Moderno, uh, she'd she'd provided money for provided money for a vaccine.

Well, another person who's provided money for a vaccine is Brian May, uh, who is given £50,000 of his own money for a vaccine for badgers.

Which...

Wow.

And this is because basically people blame badgers for spreading TB and they want to cull them every year.

And they think one way of not culling them is to vaccinate them against TB.

So they won't, if indeed they do spread it, they won't do it anymore.

I was wondering who would be the first to breach the thorny subject of TB and culls and bovine.

awfulness and James you had guts to do it because now we're going to get letters oh no Dan honey badgers

Thank God.

So, honey badgers' skin so thick.

You can hit them with machetes and they probably won't die.

The only way to kill them is with a bullet through the skull.

That's honestly what they say.

That's true.

What they say.

That's what they say.

Can I just say, I went to honey badges to try and get us away from killing badgers.

I read an essay on European badger sexing and it's very hard to do because there's actually not too much difference between them.

And they basically, it ends up by saying, in the words of the Devon Badger group, the only way to be sure is to roll it over.

And then what?

And then you could see the vagina or a penis, I suppose.

I imagine, like a lot of mammals, you kind of turn it over and it's got either a penis or a vagina.

And then which is which?

Is it just like a penis?

It's not a sneaky swapsy.

No, no, they're very tread.

Got it.

One of the only times we've mentioned badgers before I checked was when James, you said said that the best way to

prepare badger meat is to let running water wash over it for several days.

So it is illegal to kill a badger unless you're part of a government-mandated cull and you're out shooting it with a rifle.

But

if a badger dies on the road, you are allowed to eat it.

And in 2012, the Guardian interviewed a man called Arthur Boyt, who was, I think it was in his 70s or 80s, but he said he'd been eating badger for 55 years

and he lived in the countryside.

The Guardian sent someone to interview him and to try eating badger.

Um, just before the guardian spoke to him, he'd had a bit of stewed badger with badger genitals on the side.

Which genitals was that?

Yeah,

uh, I think it must have been male genitals, badger nadgers.

Um,

but he said that sometimes you don't have to run it underwater, and that you do for

but this is the thing: his wife is a vegetarian.

Well, I'm not fucking surprised.

If the other option is eating badger bollocks every day,

I suppose if it's ethical eating, isn't it?

If it's died of natural causes, it's one step away from vegetarianism, eating badger carcass.

It's one step, but it's a fucking long step.

It's one giant leap.

Weird step.

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

My fact is that the chief designer of America's first stealth bomber also helped to design the Dumbo ride at Disneyland.

Amazing.

Very cool.

That's awesome.

So,

yeah.

So, this is from a new book that's called Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft.

So, it wasn't a book about Dumbo Rides that you were reading.

No, I do have a big book about Disney, actually, but I haven't read it yet.

It's just a little insightful.

This would have been the moment to read it.

Just use it in my honey badger section next week.

But this was a guy called Richard Scherer,

who he was working in the 40s and 50s for Ames.

He was an engineer and a designer, and he worked for a lab run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was the kind of precursor to NASA.

But in his spare time, he was hanging around with some buddies who ran a firm called the Arrow Development Company, and they made merry-go-rounds and things, and they did lots of engineering too.

And eventually, they got a Disney contract.

So he, Scherer, moonlighted from his day job, which was building serious weaponry and designing systems for this kind of stuff.

He kept getting these phone calls at work, which were from the guys at Disneyland saying, we need you to sort out the brakes and the rails on Dumbo and all these other rides.

Yeah, so he not only did Dumbo, he did the tea party ride.

He did the Matterhorn, which is a giant mountain.

I mean, it's absolutely humongous.

The little train that could, flying sorcerers' rides as well.

Like, he's got a big footprint on the design of that place.

Yeah.

And did he ever confuse his two jobs and accidentally in war, you could see teacups looming over the horizon?

Harry S.

Truman refused to ride Dumbo at Disneyland.

Really?

Because the elephant is the mascot of the Republican Party.

So he said, I'm not getting on an elephant.

And basically, I mean, it was just a joke.

But it's a thing that happened.

So there are big links between Disney and defense tech, which is bizarre.

So Disney,

for example, there were robot animatronics in the first Disneyland,

you know, little robots moving back and forth, that kind of thing.

They were controlled by a magnetic tape system, which was originally developed for the Polaris submarine missile.

And Disney licensed the patent to use it in their park.

So I know, really weird.

Well, he got the idea from Tivoli in Copenhagen, didn't he?

Which is a couple of us definitely went to that when we were on tour last year, which is beautiful fairground in the center of Copenhagen.

And that was his dream.

I want that in America.

And he was very good at doing research, sort of personal research, so far as I could tell, for how his park should operate.

So he used to walk after people in parks and just notice how often they would litter.

This is the story that I read.

Possibly he had researchers doing it, but supposedly Disney would walk around and he'd go, okay, this is the distance that it usually would take for someone to litter.

That's how far apart we need our bins to to be so that people don't do it in our park.

Yeah.

So he was very much part of the integral kind of feel of all the.

He was reported to the police for stalking on multiple occasions, wasn't he?

You might drop litter because you're trying to create a distraction from the man who's been following you around the park for the last hour.

So I can't believe we've never mentioned this system, the utilidor system.

It's short for utility corridors and it's part of the backstage area.

So this is another stealth feature of Disneyland.

And it was because

they're so strict at Disney with maintaining the fiction that all the staff are characters.

So, all the staff are called actors, and they're on stage when they're in front of the public, and backstage is when they're not in front of the public.

And you can never see them traveling to their destinations, and you can never see them taking out the rubbish, for instance.

And you're never supposed to see someone crossing the wrong kingdom, so you should never see Dumbo crossing the Mickey Mouse kingdom or or however it's arranged.

It feels like a gang system that they have.

That's why they have all the weapons of war.

So, what they have is, and especially under the Magic Kingdom, is a system of underground tunnels and that's for the staff to get to certain places.

And so, I think it's the largest wardrobe department on Earth because it's where they also keep all the costumes.

And it's one of the world's largest utility tunnels.

And so, if you have to sprint to a destination as a member of staff, you have to go underground.

Or, in fact, weirdly, at the Magic Kingdom, it's on ground level, and then the whole kingdom is built built above it on top.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That is insane.

It's weird, isn't it?

The staff have a really odd rule about names there as well.

So there was a tradition that rumor has it started with Walt Disney himself, which is he never wanted to be called Mr.

Disney.

He was Walt.

If you met him, hey, Walt.

And so first names is a thing.

However, there's a rule.

that if, say, they have an Andrew already, Andy, you were working there, and I arrived and I was called Andrew, I have to change my name because we can't have have two Andrews.

Why don't we do that in our office since James Ross had arrived?

I'm forever getting his emails.

If he was called Derek, there'd be no problem.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, yeah.

So Disney is your best place to go and work, James, because if you keep getting emails, like there's not going to be another James there.

Come on.

Sorry, Derek.

But I mean, they have quite a lot of,

they're called actors, but quite a lot of actors now.

Have they reached really obscure names?

Are you seeing Engelberts and Pompeots?

Weird.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm guessing it must be specific, like, there must be sub-category offices, right, within there.

It must be like, you're part of the rides, you're part of the janitorial staff, you're part of the creepy following people, see how much they put rubbish on the ground stuff, you know, that kind of thing.

I have to say, Dan, it feels like a less good system than the system we have, which is surnames.

Did you know that this is a problem?

Um, which is that Disney has a haunted mansion ride.

You know, lots of the Disneys have a haunted mansion, don't they?

Because there are themebooks all over the world.

But this is the California one, the original.

Every so often, the staff discover a pile of mysterious powder on the floor of the haunted mansion.

And it is said that this is...

Staff take cane.

It is said.

That's not as legally watertight as you think it is, James.

It's said that it's people leaving their loved ones' ashes on the floor.

Wow.

So, this is because people love the haunted mansion and they love to go on the ride and it's great.

Now, this has been furiously denied by Disney, we should say.

I found a guy who's called Rob Doughty.

He's the spokesman.

He seems to spend about half his professional life just denying that there are piles of ash in the haunted mansion.

And they interviewed a member of staff who said, All these people that think their loved ones are going to be in the haunted mansion forever, well, grandma's getting vacuumed up into a vacuum and getting sent out to the landfill somewhere.

Wow.

Where is this haunted landfill that I could go visit?

There was a big, big controversy at the start of the haunted mansion design over whether it should be funny or scary.

There were proper arguments between the designers, and they were called the Imagineers.

There were nine of them.

And there's one left who's called Raleigh Crump, which is just such a strong name.

He got there last after everyone else.

I thought the names have been taken.

I mean, neither of those is a name, but okay, I'll take it.

But

his ideas were all sort of too mad for the ride.

So there was supposed to be this museum of the weird to house all of his crazy ideas.

But anyway, one of the things that he recounted doing at the time was he recounted the fact that they, the designers, also had to clean the haunted mansion every night instead of cleaners because cleaners refused to clean it.

And the reason was, to be fair, they only had themselves to blame.

The reason was that the cleaners said, do you mind leaving the lights on when you leave?

Because it's a bit scary, all these animatronics and these crazy ghost sounds and these horrible figures.

So, can you just leave the lights on for us to clean it overnight?

And so, what Raleigh and pals did was they complied, but then they installed motion sensors that at certain moments would extinguish all the lights and turn on all the ghost effects.

God,

that's amazing.

He said the next morning they went in and the ghost effects were still running.

There was a broom lying in the centre of the floor, and they got a call from personnel saying the janitors would not be returning.

Wow.

Disneyland also has stealthily placed all around what they call smellatizers.

And the idea is that they emit a certain smell so that everything feels fresh wherever you're going.

So if you pass something that looks like a baking shop, they'll have the smell of fresh bread being pumped out from the side of the breast.

Basically, poop-pourri.

No one's pooing on the walls in Disneyland.

You get removed pretty swiftly.

Ah, you can be removed for lots of stuff.

They've just banned loose ice.

What's loose ice?

Just ice that's loose.

I thought it was like it was a really cool street slang for some new drug that I'd never heard of.

It's just literally frozen water.

You can't turn up with a cup of ice and get over there.

Have you guys heard of Jeff Wright's R-E-I-T-Z?

No.

His Twitter account was at Disney366, and it said,

I have been to Disneyland every day since January the 1st, 2012.

He was an honorary Disneyland citizen and an honorary mouse guiteer.

And basically, he and his friends joked that Disney had this advertising campaign during the leap year of 2012, saying you can go to Disney one more day this year.

And then him and his friends are like, well, you only get to go one more day if you go literally for all the other 365 days, right?

And they went, wait a minute.

We're unemployed.

Why don't we just go to Disneyland every day for a year?

And so from January the 1st, 2012, Jeff Wrights and a friend went to Disneyland every single day.

And his friend eventually kind of gave up, but he carried on.

And he carried on all the way until March 2020, a 2,995-day streak of going to Disneyland until it closed due to COVID.

Oh, and he just left him in there on his own.

They should have done.

And they said, are you going to go back when it reopens?

And he's like, no, it was a streak.

It was like an everyday thing and now that i've missed it every day i'm just gonna stop going that would make it pointless

oh

he really enjoyed it he said he someone said to him will you ever get sick of disneyland he says no i don't think i will get sick of disneyland because i like to change things up and do different things each time

wow

i like this guy the training to work at disneyland is called the traditions and it sounds people seem to be okay with it it's like a cult so it's done repeatedly I was reading an interview with one employee who was saying that every so often you'll be walking around in your costume and someone will walk up to you and give you a card that summons you to the magic kingdom for more sort of happiness training.

And

they're taught to seem happy.

It's called emotional regulation training.

And the idea is that you have to stay in character, whatever happens.

So for instance, I was listening to some people who went to go on the new Star Wars ride and the ride broke and customers were furious because they'd been queuing for days and there were thousands of people on this app trying to get on.

They were so excited about it.

So they went and complained to one of the actors who remained in character.

So kept on saying, Well, I'm afraid that's Kylo Wren's fault.

He's the bad guy in Star Wars, apparently.

Better talk to Kylo Wren about that.

Sounds like they're dastardly dealing.

And you know, people screaming and swearing and crying.

Let me get my line manager.

This is Donald.

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

My fact this week is that whenever Stephen King couldn't find the audiobook of something he wanted to read, he would put one of his three children into a room with a tape recorder and would get them to read out the whole thing for him.

Wow.

Yeah.

So he is a sadist because you do wonder if he's a sadist when you read his books, and it turns out he is.

That is cruel.

I love him.

I think he's amazing.

He's a big, big, big reader.

I mean, Stephen King, basically, if you ever hear him talk, talks about books.

He loves reading books and he lives in Maine, in Bangor, Maine.

And there's a lot of roads.

He does a lot of driving.

And he hates the idea that he's wasting time while he's behind the wheel, not reading books.

So audiobooks was a massive thing for him.

And back in the 80s, obviously prior to the internet, it was very hard to get your hands on audiobooks.

And so if he was unable to do that in the 80s, one of his three kids would be shoved into a room with this little recorder and they would have to sit there and read out the whole thing.

And they were reading stuff that was definitely not appropriate for their age so his daughter naomi when she was 12 had to read a book called raven uh which was the definitive journalistic account of the jonestown massacre um

she also had to read anna karenina for him oh what happens in the end of that um anna karenina anyone remember james i think she gets hit by a train really i've only seen the disney version where she gets hit by a ride

wow we've really leaned into spoilering this in a long time so i think i feel really bad about it now.

I feel like, because we've already spiled Anna Karenina, that we can get away with spoilering it again and again.

You're right.

I think.

And we don't spoiler anything else.

We'll just spoiler Anna Karenina.

Yeah.

And it's one of the things.

I think at the end of every show, we should close with, we'll be back again next week.

And Anna Karenina gets hit by a train.

See ya.

Goodbye.

I still don't feel okay about this and I'm signing out of the plan.

But I do want to hear a 12-year-old girl attempt to pronounce all the Russian names in Anna Karenina, please.

But the kids have become really,

they are now writers, aren't they?

Or a lot of them are now writers.

I think he's got a few kids.

Two or three.

Joe Hill is one of them, is it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Hill, who's one of my favourite writers, by the way.

I've read four of his books.

I love him.

He's awesome.

But the kids are now so into it that when they were dating, Owen King, who's one of the King children, and his wife, they swapped manuscripts to make sure they didn't hate each other's writing style before the relationship got too serious.

I think it's really sweet.

Wow.

Yeah.

But yeah, he did.

I mean, they did sort of breed good writers out of them via having them read these great works of literature.

They also used to, at bedtime, the kids would tell them Tabitha and Stephen bedtime stories as opposed to the other way around.

They used to sit around the dinner table and pass around the latest book that they were reading as a family.

So say it was The Hobbit or Narnia.

And they would all take turns reading passages around the table.

I mean, it's, I, as someone, well, we all love books.

I think that sounds really cool.

I might do it with my kids.

Yeah.

I couldn't believe about Stephen King.

And maybe this is just because I cannot work to any noise at all.

He listens to loud rock music while he's writing.

Well, I listen to really loud J-pop music when I'm writing.

Do you?

But the difference there is, and the distraction is English versus Japanese lyrics.

So you...

your mind gets taken away with English lyrics, which I find the Stephen King thing so hard to believe.

Whereas, yeah, I listen to Andrea Bocelli, for example.

I wonder if because it's loud rock music, sometimes you don't hear the lyrics quite as easily, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He does say it sometimes affects his word choice.

It's never his style.

So maybe all this time he's been trying to write like really nice children's books, but

Jane Austen.

Jane Austen only wrote romances because the music available at the time was romantic.

Yeah.

If she'd had access to the Battle of Los Angeles, it would have been a very different career.

But yeah, so just a super quick background on Stephen King, obviously one of the most prolific living authors that we have.

He's sold over 350 million copies of his books since he first debuted Carrie.

And he is someone who also has had probably more adaptations of his books into movies than any other living author.

One thing I really liked about him that I learned: if you go on stephenking.com, he has a page of dollar babies.

These are really cool.

So these are stories that he's written which are not under contract for movies.

So if you're a like a young movie maker, then you can buy them off him for like just one dollar or something, and And then he'll let you make that story.

So if you want to make a story such as The Man Who Loved Flowers,

that's one of them.

The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands, that's all of us actually at the moment.

And another one is called That Feeling.

You can only say what it is in French.

I don't know what the story's about, but that's the title.

I suppose the story is.

Yeah, so it's really cool.

I've been, I was reading up a bit on his house and just the contents of it.

So, yeah, he has a shelf of original audiobooks from his kids.

He's got the Dollar Babies shelf where he keeps all of the movies that have been made off his short stories.

One thing I really like is that he's been very active in the community in Bangor with helping to fund the community to have, for example, a baseball stadium that was built proper size, really good and functioning.

And so he's really active in that community.

But one of the things that he insisted with the baseball stadium is that the positioning of the of the scoreboard had to be placed at such a position on the stadium that he could see it from his window i read

i read that and i can't find out whether that's definitely true or not he definitely paid for the stadium that's for sure yeah but do you think he did that that's amazing if so that's really it feel it feels like a thing that he would do but i agree he's also so shrouded in myth because he's this this horror character that people think is a frankenstein-like character himself that he sort of walks around and weird things happen.

He once stayed the night at John Grisham's house.

They're very good friends, those two authors, and they had the same agent.

And John Grisham's wife was so petrified that Stephen King was in the house that she was furious that John Grisham went to sleep.

She's like, what are you doing going to sleep?

And then he said, out of nowhere, their alarm system at 12 a.m.

just beeped a color it's never beeped before and she was like i told you and they got really scared then they heard this crazy crow

and they were like what is that and they ran downstairs and two cats they don't don't have cats-were fighting right outside their window and having this massive bloodbath of the thigh.

So, she sat up the whole night in the lounge room, freaked out, and as soon as it got morning, she woke John Grisham up and went, Get that man out of my house.

It's not his fault, cats are fighting outside his house.

It's similar to when E.L.

James came around to my house, and then there were a load of foxes having sex outside my house all night.

I was like, Get that woman out of my house.

Um, something quite creepy he did in Australia was

it was in Alice Springs, and he was in Dimmock's bookshop in Australia.

And he basically the alarm was raised.

Another alarm.

It's got a history of alarms because one of the other customers noticed a strange man sort of fiddling around with the books and graffitiing in them and then leaving.

So alerted the manager.

And the manager went over to the books and checked and saw that they were Stephen King's books.

And in fact, they were Stephen King's autographs inside the books.

So they went out of the shop to look for him and he was across the road in a grocery shop.

That is an anticlimactic ending to this spooky story, Anna.

Dan's had a lot more, you know, pizzazz in it, the John Gresham thing.

Didn't end with him buying some corchets.

I'm no Stephen King.

There's another link between King and Tolstoy, apart from the fact that King made his daughter read Anna Karenina on audiobook,

which is that Tolstoy's grandmother owned a serf who was blind, who was a human audiobook.

What?

Yeah, his name was Lev Stepanich.

He was a professional storyteller.

And Tolstoy remembered as a boy, he would go to his granny's bedroom.

Lev Stepanich was there.

He was sitting in the windowsill, waiting for her to arrive.

She would undress in front of him because he was blind, so there was no risk of impropriety.

And then Tolstoy would be tucked up in bed next to his granny, and Lev Stepanich would read them a story.

Well, that's really cool.

His name sounds a bit like Led Zeppelin as well, which is

distracted me at the very start.

How was the

blind man reading a story?

You would have thought the audiobook is useful to be read to the person who is blind, which in fact was his subsequent use.

But he memorized it.

Presumably it's coming from, he's reading it from his own hand.

He's memorised the story, I guess.

Yeah.

Cool.

But you're right about the early audiobooks.

They did come because was it a lot of people had been blinded in the war or something?

They became useful.

Yeah, I think so.

Some Americans were blinded

in World War I.

And I think a guy called Ian Fraser set up a team to make audiobooks because he loved reading and couldn't do it anymore and experimented with lots of different machines.

And one of these machines, apparently, according to the RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, said that it turned letters into musical notes as a possible way of creating audiobooks for the blind.

Which sounds sounds to me, I don't know how that would work.

Do you have to distinguish between all musical notes and then make them correct?

You only need 26 notes.

So you just go.

That's more than we have, really.

That's a good point.

You could go up an octave, can't you?

Yeah, you've got, you've got, that's what, three, three octaves and a bit.

So you just go, you know, A,

and then sad,

and then.

It's either going to be a very slow read or it's going to sound like an extremely hardcore piece of list or something.

The speed at which you're going to have to play that book.

There was a guy who invented a language that was all musical.

And he thought it was around the time when everyone was inventing new languages like Esperanto and stuff like that.

And he thought if we could come up with a language where all you needed was the tones, then everyone in the world would be able to speak it and it would end all wars and stuff.

I can't remember his name.

It was in that book that I mentioned a few times called Bambard's Folly.

which people always ask about.

But yeah, it's really, he was really interesting.

I can't remember anything more about him.

Sorry.

Right.

I think it means everyone everyone will understand each other better.

Everyone will understand each other's insults.

There'll be lots more wars, actually.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Because that was the idea of all these universal languages, that it would end all conflicts.

But I suppose no one had your insight that actually, naturally, humans are just conflict-ridden species.

The Esperanto wars of the early 1920s were fierce and savage.

Just on audiobooks,

there's something

there was a great hero of audiobooks was a guy called Roy Louis Dotrice or Dotrice.

I'm not sure how his name is pronounced.

Okay, so he died in 2017.

He was 94 years old, but he had a Guinness World Record for his audiobook reading because he read the audiobooks for the first five Game of Thrones books.

And he had to read so many hundreds of characters.

So the first book has 224 characters in it.

He has to do a different voice for every single one.

He was actually meant to be in the Game of Thrones series, in the actual TV series.

Yeah, and he was offered a role and he turned it down because he was having medical issues at the time.

So he thought, I just can't play this one role.

So it's quite nice that he then ended up playing 224 roles.

I did read an audiobook actor saying that

one of the tricks is that when you get the text in advance, you check for what she called active attributions.

And that is if you have some speech and then after the speech, it says like, she shouted or he whispered.

You have to check ahead for that.

You don't want to do

that he's a good word of text.

I would love to write a book where on the very last page, you know, you've had dialogue all the way through, and on the very last page of the book, you say, he said in his trademark

Laswegian accent.

Just one more thing about audiobooks, which is so interesting.

You know, we were talking about how they were for blind people.

And the first LPs, LP records, were made in the early 1930s, but the only people who were legally allowed to buy them between 1934 and 1948 were blind people.

Wow.

Wow.

So isn't that amazing?

Why?

You couldn't, they weren't good enough quality to get good music on, but you could read audio books.

And so it was as great as that was for the blind, where you'd ask for a book on audio, you'd listen to the LP, you'd send it back.

But they had to sign contracts with authors saying we promise we'll check someone's blind.

You have to send in your blind person's certification so that we don't give free books out to psychologists.

It was that guy, was he called ian fraser did you say ian frazer yeah and he came up with the technology where you basically make the grooves narrower but you can kind of and you play it slower but you can fit more on a record

and that was like the lp technology that later became your 33s and ah cool yeah that's so cool yeah because you'd really seriously have to abridge Anna Karenina to get it on an LP, wouldn't you?

You just cut straight to the main incident, wouldn't you?

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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 in the 14th century, a weapon was invented that was essentially a windmill which flung out beehives from each of its arms.

Oh my goodness, we talked about some scary things already on this podcast, but what about that?

It's so amazing thinking of what this would have looked like and how it would have functioned.

Yeah, I mean, I doubt it probably existed, I'll be honest.

There was a guy called Walter de Millamet, and he was a scholar, and and Queen Isabella of France commissioned him to write a treatise on how to be a good king for her son.

And part of this how to be a good king was going to have all the different new weapons and stuff like that that are out there.

And he, in fact, gave us the first Western illustration of a gun.

We didn't have anything before that, or if we did, we've lost it.

And one of the things that he had was this siege weapon, which was a windmill with beehives flung out at the enemy.

And whether it existed or not, it was definitely existed in people's minds enough to be included in this treatise.

It's like a really cool concept warship or something.

You see those all the time these days.

You know, this is the warship of tomorrow.

This must have been the thing everyone was really excited about in the 14th century.

It's like a hoverboard.

Yeah.

Where's my beehive windmill?

Yeah.

Do you think they had those kind of demonstration days where it's like an expo, you go and see the latest?

Definitely.

Yeah, that is amazing.

So, we don't know if it ever was deployed in war.

We don't know, and I suspect it wasn't, because I suspect if it was, we might have a lot more people writing at the time about this amazing windmill beehive thing.

I don't know.

Bees seem to be deployed quite often, though.

Maybe it was just so run of the mill, run of the windmill.

But bees do seem to be a wartime weapon.

So that's, you know, just standard.

I was reading about the Kichet people, the Mayan people, who have the Popol Vu, which I think we've talked about before, which is their book of their history.

And they used beehives to frighten away the enemy.

In fact, they used kind of scarecrow-come Halloween pumpkins.

And they described it as surrounding their citadel with these effigies that were built to look exactly like people.

So with armor and arrows and shields and stuff.

And then they had huge headdresses.

And then they had gourds.

I think as heads or possibly beside them.

It's not clear in the text.

And then they stuffed the heads with wasps and hornets and stuff.

And then you smash it open when the enemy comes along.

It's like a terrible piñata on a horrible birthday.

It's a bit like that movie where the bees come out of the guy's mouth, which I haven't seen.

Candyman, yeah,

it's also, I was thinking, it's a bit like Home Alone, where Kevin creates a party out of cardboard cutouts.

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

All these things were inspired by this Mayan text.

Richard the Lionheart, when he went on the crusade, he had enough beehives to fill 13 ships, according to people writing at the time.

Doesn't sound very likely, but that's what they said.

How many ships did he have?

14.

It's just all beekeepers in the army.

More modern times, still deploring the bees.

Oh, yeah.

So bees were used in the Vietnam War, and it was particularly when the Viet Cong would be hiding, and they'd be watching the Americans and watching the trails that they used.

And then they would plant beehives along these trails.

So they took beehives from elsewhere, planted them on the trails, rigged them up to explosives, little explosives, and then they'd explode them under the hives as the Americans ran past.

And you just get a horrible sting.

A nasty bee sting.

Did you read about the yellow rain in the Vietnam War?

I mean, that's a really interesting thing.

So the idea was there were all these reports that yellow rain was coming down and it was believed to be chemical warfare.

So the Americans, the Secretary of State Alexander Haig, accused the Soviet Union of using T2 mycotoxin, which would then be dropped over the people, and they were all getting burnt and stuff.

And there's been so many, and it's still ongoing.

There's a dispute about whether or not it really was that, because what most people who've studied it think it was, is honeybee feces.

And that's what they believe.

was being dropped on them, basically not by the Soviet Union, but huge flocks of honeybees that were traveling around together and defecating at the same time, a sort of mass defecation.

And that's what the yellow rain was.

And there are so many reports have been continuing on and on where people are saying that it was chemical warfare, locals saying that they were burnt and stuff, other people saying it wasn't.

It's very embarrassing to have to backtrack, say you're chemically attacked and suddenly you were just shattered by a bee.

I wouldn't accept that if I were the locals.

But yeah, they've studied the substance, haven't they, and found that it can only have come from these bees.

And apparently it's when it gets particularly hot.

So it was on hot days that it would rain yellow.

And it's because the bees get super hot in their hive.

So they have to go out and lose mass because the more mass you've got, the more heat you generate.

So you all go out and do this mass, mass shit.

Cools you down.

But one of the theories then was in order to disguise that they were using chemical warfare, the Soviet Union had actually gone to Vietnam, collected all of this, brought it back, mixed it in to the actual chemical warfare stuff because it helps it to have more of an effect, supposedly, this pollen that would be within the chemical.

I mean, it's bizarre the roads people have gone down with.

How would you collect the bee feces

to mix it into your chemical weapons?

You get 13 boats of bees.

I found one other Roman bee use in war, and this is in Appian.

Appian is a Roman historian.

He described this thing in the Third Mithridatic War, so 72 BC.

Basically, the Roman army were besieging Themiskira, which is a city,

I think it's south of the Black Sea.

And basically, the Roman army were besieging a city.

That's all you really need to know.

But the inhabitants cut openings in the ground because the Romans were tunneling in as part of the siege.

That's what you do in a siege, you dig tunnels.

But the inhabitants apparently cut openings from above into the tunnels and they would thrust down bears and other wild animals and swarms of bees into the openings.

So if you're a Roman soldier in the tunnel and you felt something coming down from above, it might be a swarm of bees or it might be a bear.

Oh my God.

It's like a lucky dip.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like one of those which would win in a fight between a thousand bees and one bear.

Yeah.

It's like what happened in the Northampton branch of boots on the 9th of February 2020.

There was also in the first century, there was, and this was in Asia Minor,

there was the idea of using, and we've spoken about mad honey before, but using mad honey.

So this is this is honey that has a poisonous element to it, which a lot of people, if mixed in lightly into a drink, can drink and have a high off it, but quite a big amount could actually cause you to have huge stomach problems, possibly even fatal to some people.

And supposedly, this was used as a way of taking out an army that was advancing onto this city of Heptapomotes.

Have you heptapomotes?

Never heard of it.

Sorry.

Yeah, I tried to look for a pronunciation online.

Was that where a lot of hep cats lived?

Heptokomotes?

Is that it?

Heptacomes.

Heptaptomotes?

How are you spelling it?

Heptomotes.

H-E-P-T-A-K-O-M-E-T-E-S.

All you need to know is it's a town in Asia Minor.

Is that a?

Yeah, just.

So there's a town in Asia Minor that being advanced on by a Roman army, and there was about a thousand of them.

And the story goes, and this was written by a philosopher called Strabo.

He said that basically they had taken this honey and they'd mixed it up, but they'd left them in pots.

And the idea was they would see it on the way.

And it'd be like finding a bottle of water on the way if you were advancing on somewhere and you needed it badly.

Dan, Dan, it's a honey trap.

Yes.

It's a honey trap.

Yeah.

It was a big build-up you made Dan do for that.

I know.

Giving me all those big words.

What are you doing?

Did we get to the end of it?

It kind of like with your story about the windmills.

It's sort of a lot of these histories about this stuff stuff are quite disputed.

We don't fully know.

There's a lot of people who've extrapolated what they think then happened, like the army was then taken out.

We don't actually have any written evidence that it actually had any effect on the army whatsoever.

Right.

I think mad honey has, well, certainly people have claimed that they've used it.

So there was Empress Olga in 946, Olga of Kiev, who offered the enemy mead to drink and it was full of mad honey.

And what it does is it kind of knocks you out.

Like if you take a strong hallucinogenic, you just pass out, you're stupefied.

And then they massacred 5,000 people, I think.

And then again, Ivan the Great, I think, just left vats of spiked mead, spiked with mad honey in his own camp.

And then he and his soldiers left.

And yeah, the troops came.

And like you said, Dan, they came in and thought, Oh, I wonder why this has been left here.

Let's drink it all.

And then drank it all, fell asleep, and were massacred.

Why can't they resist?

Don't they know?

They're not Winnie the Pooh.

They don't know.

I know.

Honey.

Honey.

Yummy.

Tommy.

I think Olga of Kiev, I might be wrong about this, but was she the one where

they killed her husband and to get her own back, she kind of got her army to this town, forced them to all give her a pigeon and said, okay, give us a pigeon.

or I'm going to do you in.

And they went, okay, we'll give you a pigeon.

So everyone in the town gave her a pigeon.

And then she tied some fire stuff to the legs of the pigeons.

And they're all homing pigeons.

So they all flew back and they burned the town down.

Oh, is that Olga?

I think so.

She was full of wacky ideas.

She should have been employed by Disney to build the haunted mansion.

She was the dick dastardly of her day.

Can I just quickly mention one last thing before we wrap up, which is that

I discovered animals in war and accusations of people using them for their benefit.

In 2007, the British forces had to actively deny rumors that they had released a plague of ferocious badgers into Basra.

Really?

Yeah, Major Mike Shearer, the UK military spokesperson, say we can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

And this had been claimed by a lot of the locals that they had been seeing and killing these large giant honey badgers.

And

was that his trick when he was denying it?

He was like, no, we haven't done any badgers here.

No.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Tribaland.

James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter Emb.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

That's right, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise that we have.

And that's it.

We'll be back again next week.

And don't forget, Anna Karenina gets killed by a train.

Bye.

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and where your bigger kids remember who they were.

It's where dreams are born and come to life.

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With Everlights, your home can become a princess castle, a summer oasis, or celebration of even the littlest wins.

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