349: No Such Thing As Tug of War for Clowns

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that museums need visitors' breath in order to preserve their exhibits properly.

Interesting.

Museums rely on the moisture from our bodies to keep their things nice.

Because when you breathe out, it's more moist than when you breathe in.

You breathe in normal air and it takes a bit of your internal juice and it transports it to the outside.

Don't say internal juice.

That's horrible.

Sorry, Andy, can I just ask,

at the moment with COVID happening, not many people going to museums, is there a way that we can donate our internal juice?

Yeah, the British Museum is taking donations.

You just say Free Post, British Museum, and you slap that on a big bag of juice.

And they'll release it among a.

Right.

Yeah.

So this is according to a curator at the British Museum, which has been closed for the longest time in its history.

And normally they will get about 17,000 visitors a day.

And all those people and their breath help keep the right level of humidity in the air because they've got so many objects which require certain levels of humidity.

You know, things that can dry out easily.

Maybe they're objects made of bone which might crack if it gets too low.

And this is a problem.

Objects have been at risk of cracking out.

So when we all are able to return to museums, are you suggesting maybe we should go around spitting on the exhibits?

Yes, I am.

Absolutely.

We all have a lot of friends who work in museums.

So I thought I'd contact a few of those to see if they have the same problems in other museums.

So one of our friends is Paolo Viscati at the National Museum of Ireland.

And he said that this is spot on.

Their problem is less with people breathing out so much, but more that when you open the door, normally, it would bring in a lot of moisture from outside because it's always pissing it down in Dublin and so basically you would open the door and that would bring in moisture from outside and no one's opening the door at the moment so that's a problem.

I also spoke to our friends at the Penis Museum in Iceland to see if they have any problems with humidity at the moment and Thoda wrote back to me and said

they've not had problems with conservation due to the lack of humidity.

We have discontinued stuffing our penises because it led to considerable shrinkage, which may prove problematic when you're in the penis business.

But the few tax domain specimens we have have actually fared a little bit better due to COVID, mainly due to the lack of people touching them.

Right.

So

people aren't touching his penises as much, and so things are a bit better for him under COVID.

That's a blessing.

And just a reminder for anyone who visits the museum, don't spit on them when it's open again.

No, penises alone.

Can I just interject here to say how angry I was that you chose the one week I was away to discuss the Icelandic Penis Museum?

I just want to mention that that was quite thoughtless.

I discovered this week when I was listening back that you let Sandy Tuxbig talk about it instead of me.

I'm really sorry about that.

When lockdown's over, just come, you can come round and we'll get a bottle of wine out and we can talk about the Icelandic Penis Museum.

Honestly, Anna.

Thank you so much to me.

Anna, we didn't know you listened to the podcast.

If we thought you did,

of course.

I tried to avoid it.

Someone else had it on in the background.

But they, I don't think you did mention they've got their only human penis quite recently.

You didn't turn this into a penis museum, shall I?

Yeah, I'm getting it back to the penis museum.

I will make up for that lost time.

No, I just did enjoy a quote from the penis museum when I was looking at how they preserve their objects.

And they got their first human penis in 2011 from the 95-year-old Pally Arrison, who promised it, I think, 15 years ago.

I don't think he mentioned this.

So he promised it 15 years ago to his friend, who's the curator, lived for an extra 15 years, which possibly wasn't expected.

And there was an interview with the curator who was looking down at this 95-year-old man's penis, which he now has preserved.

And the Independent reporting on it said, glancing down at the glass container holding a grayish-brown, shriveled mass, he admitted that the preservation had not been successful.

Oh, dear.

I remember that.

I remember that story because I think there was a race to get the first human penis into the penis museum.

And it was between this 95-year-old guy and some 27-year-old bloke.

And whichever of them died first was going to donate their penis.

That is a brilliant plot for a murder novel, isn't it?

Right, anyway.

Anyway, so I've got that out of my system now.

You can go back to property.

Don't worry, we'll edit that into the previous episode.

I'd appreciate that.

But it's a big, it's a huge problem.

And it's not the only problem they have.

So in June, you remember it was very hot summer this year, the British Museum had to specifically send in a curator because they thought that Oliver Cromwell's death mask might melt because it's made of wax and it was so hot in the museum.

That and that, obviously, it's a very rare and precious thing.

But so, I assume that even during lockdown, there were one or two caretakers that were able to walk around the museum.

Because, for example, with the problem of no one breathing and creating that humidity, they do have sensors over 700 all around the museum that go off when the temperatures and humidity are not at the right level.

So, they can adjust them, they can press buttons to make sure that it regulates.

It's not entirely reliant on humans breathing.

So I would have assumed there just would have been someone there to, you know, put a hat on Oliver Cromwell's death mask or something.

I think there is.

There are people who can do that.

They have a few people who go in.

There's a brilliant interview with James McLean, who I think Dan definitely knows, I would say.

I'm not sure if you guys know him, who's the fish curator at the Natural History Museum.

And it's been his job during lockdown for some of the time to go and have a look around and make sure that everything's okay.

So he's had to look after the flesh-eating beetles, for instance.

So they have these beetles there which strip down the bones.

Whenever you get a new little animal, you put it in and the beetles eat all the meat off it and you come out with a perfect bone.

And he's had to feed them so that they don't go looking for other things to eat.

So he has to give them some congerial heads to keep them happy.

Oh my God.

And he said something else in this.

This is not about conservation, but I thought it was really interesting.

He says he monitors the alcohol supply system in the Natural History Museum.

And apparently, in the Natural History Museum, there is a series of pipes that go through the whole museum that, like, they're powered by steam power and they fire alcohol through the whole museum.

And there are little taps in all the rooms where you can just get little bits of pure alcohol if you need it, if you need it for preservation.

Isn't that amazing?

Wow.

That is incredible.

It's

can you drink that or is that too intense?

It's pure ethanol, so I would advise against it.

If you ever get stuck in the Natural History Museum, they're probably, you know,

there might be.

Don't check the tap.

Don't check the tap.

Go to check out the staff canteen if you need some alcohol, probably.

Yeah, rather than the tap.

Otherwise, you've drunk from an ethanol tap, you're absolutely hammered, and you're in a room surrounded by dead, stuffed, giant, extinct animals, which sounds like something out of a nightmare.

That movie, The Night at the Museum, is very different if you've been drinking pure ethanol the night before.

It's quite dangerous having all that ethanol there for preservation in the Natural History Museum.

They have to be careful with the bigger animals.

So I think the head of fish curation, who is called Oliver Crimmon, or he claims to be the head, but maybe your friend is his rival.

They work together.

Ollie and James work together, yeah.

Okay, work together, rivals, whatever you want to call it.

They uh they stuffed their largest fish recently.

So they've got 900,000 dead fish in there.

Um, and it was a blue marlin, which was four meters long.

It washed up in Wales in 2016.

And I just love the fact that within 24 hours, Oliver's there on the the beach on the Pembrokeshire coast immediately.

And it needed 10,000 liters of ethanol, which is what you'd normally preserve it in.

But that's incredibly flammable and very dangerous.

That would explode the entire museum if a flame got to it.

So they had to sort of create this new solution for it, glycerol.

10,000 liters.

Yeah, it's big.

How big is a marlin?

They're much bigger than I realized.

It's like the size of a tuna, isn't it, a marlin.

Yeah, it's small.

Marlins are massive.

I guess.

That's amazing.

That is really extraordinary.

Does one of them do the heads of the fish and the other one does the tails of the fish?

Yeah, but they flip through it at the start of each day to see who does it.

Just back to the British Museum very quickly.

What do you suppose the two most popular things in the museum, what do you think the two most popular things are?

Okay.

And I'm getting this from a British Museum blog from 2017, so it might have changed since then.

I was going to say,

the mummies, I would say.

People always go for the mummies, don't they?

I'd say all mummies.

Number one, Egyptian collection, mummies, is the number one most searched-for thing on their website that people want to find out about.

So, what's number two?

For number two, I would say maybe the stone is that in there?

Yeah,

it is in there.

I would say the Fiji mermaid.

Oh, is that all the Elgin marbles?

Oh, the Elgin marbles, yeah.

Good, cool.

It's actually Japanese erotica,

so shunga, it's called, and these are on panels.

It's painting of very erotic Japanese, kind of karma suturesque-looking drawings.

And there was a big exhibition in 2014.

The second most searched for thing on their website, more so than the opening hours.

It's called Japanese Erotica.

No way.

It's no good knowing the opening hours if you don't know the way to the Japanese erotica.

That's what you constantly see, very disappointed-looking, slightly horny people at two in the morning, looking really angry outside the British Museum.

Didn't realise they weren't open.

Yeah, 40,000 annual searches for Shunga on their website, and the Egyptian collection gets 53,000.

Do we know if that's 40,000 different people, or is it one?

Unbelievably horny.

One cool thing during this whole breath thing, one of the collections of the head of collections care is a woman called Sandra Smith.

And she said about the breath crisis at the museum.

She said, it was not alarming.

That's a bit scaremongering.

But it's fair to say that when we started watching the moisture dropping, we were all holding our breath and wanting it to normalize.

What?

Stop it, you idiot.

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

Okay, well, before I say my fact this week, I just want to warn any more squeamish listeners that it is kind of gruesome, but I want to reassure them that it has a happy ending so steal yourselves my fact this week is that in 1997 a mass tug-of-war went so badly wrong that it ripped two of the contestants arms off Anna no I'm sorry I'm sorry all of your guys faces are making me regret this we knew what you were gonna say Anna exactly it doesn't make it any better every time you hear it it gets worse actually I'm just gonna say immediately before I go anywhere near the rest of this, that they had some very extensive microsurgery and their arms were reattached along with extensive nerve grafting and they regained their hand functions, okay?

So, we're okay to talk about this.

A tug of war ripped their arms off,

and that can happen.

It was uh, it was actually meant to be a day of celebration, it was in Taiwan, and it was the anniversary of the end of Japanese rule.

It was to celebrate that, and 1,600 people took part, and people don't realize how dangerous tug of war is.

So that ended up putting 80,000 kilograms of force on this five centimeter-wide nylon rope that could only bear 26,000.

So it's kind of impressive that it hung on that long.

And the rope snapped, and the rebound force of it snapping seems to have just torn off the left arms of the two people at the front of each row.

So it's kind of amazing.

physics, I guess, that that massive force is sitting in the rope when it's being pulled.

And as soon as the rope breaks, that force has to go somewhere.

That energy goes somewhere.

And so it immediately goes straight into the body of the person who's at the front of the row, who essentially pulls his body away from his arm.

I'm so squeamish that I actually didn't do any further research on this specific incident that happened.

And so I assumed that it was just that they got tugged at the wrong moment or that like the other.

3,000 people on the other team all pulled at the same time and only one person had turned up for their own team or whatever.

It was was not that.

It was interesting because it was a slightly different to the normal tug of war, I think, that we have in that there were lots of branches that came off the rope.

So it wasn't just like, let's say it was 16,000 people.

It wasn't 8,000 people pulling on one end of the rope and 8,000 people on the other.

All the rope had loads of kind of bits coming off it that people would pull on the side because

that's the way they do it in Taiwan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Depending on your level of squeamishness, there is a really good Snipes article on it,

the picture in which I found extremely confusing.

So

it does show a man lying on the ground after the tug of war next to his arm.

And then the only other person in shot is a cameraman who's sitting there with his back to this man, pointing the camera in a completely different direction.

And what I want to know is, what in God's name is he taking a photo of?

That is more interesting than that.

Oh, man.

Well, there were two guys, right?

Maybe it was the other guy.

There were two guys.

Imagine coming around after extensive microsurgery, hearing the surgeon saying, don't worry, we have brilliant medical science these days.

We've managed to reattach your arm.

You look down and you think, that's not my watch.

This happens a lot, right?

And not enough that it's a sort of public announcement to say, stop doing tug of war, but

this isn't a one-off.

There are cases that people are.

I don't say one-off.

But sadly, in these mass tug-of-wars, people do lose hands.

In some cases, sadly, some people have died.

But it's only with

these mega tug-of-wars.

I think one of the problems is that in professional tug-of-war, they have rules, right?

They have very strict rules of what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do.

If you just get a load of people, like 1,600 people, pulling on a bit of rope, they're not going to necessarily follow all the health and safety things.

The main problem is like when you

wrap it around yourself to kind of pull.

And, you know, that's obviously a problem.

In In a professional tug of war, you're not allowed to do that at all.

It's amazing how widespread tug of war seems to have been throughout history and all around the world, isn't it?

Yeah, so in

Thailand, it happens at Buddhist funerals, I think, in Thailand and Burma.

And it's only if you're really high-up Buddhist, if you're a really senior monk, then there's a massive tug of war over your corpse.

Not over your actual corpse.

Okay, well, it's over your hearse with the corpse on it.

And this is, it sounds kind of fun.

It's your body's put on a cart and it's pulled to this field and it's going to be cremated.

But first of all, all the villagers gather around and they pull at the cart on either side.

And sometimes this goes on for days of just pulling the cart one way and then the rope snaps and the other team pull it a long way the other way.

And they get cheerleaders and they have megaphones with people kind of egging one team on.

And with just with this Buddhist monk's body rollicking around on the cart for a while.

Wow.

And And I think the idea is that it's a way of getting all the goodness out of the monk, all the merit, they call it, before you cremate him.

And

sounds like an absolute laugh.

I was reading about professional tug of war and the world championships and stuff like that.

And the best women's team is from Taiwan.

And they are...

unbelievably good.

They've won every single world championship to date, right?

Wow.

But they go under the name of Chinese Taipei because obviously there's political things between China and the Taiwanese.

And so they compete under the name Chinese Taipei.

But whenever they play China, they always want to absolutely smash them.

Okay.

I read an interview with one of the players called Shen Li Hui.

And she said that when she played against the Chinese, they could have beaten them really, really quickly.

And she says, but instead, we tortured them slowly before making them lose.

So they just kind of make it look like they're going to win, look like they're going to win, look like they're going to win, and then they smash them.

Oh, my goodness.

That's cool.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I watched a professional tug-of-war match just this morning, and it was very different to how I pictured it would be.

As in, I thought you would have the gun or whatever go, go off, and it would be kind of just kind of a lot of pulling, a lot of just, come on, let's do this, a lot of tugging.

But what happens in the one that I saw, and this was a finals, and it was, I think it was,

England and someone else.

They basically, they started it and they go completely rigid.

They put their feet in, they lock down and they hold and they're pulling really hard, but there's no movement whatsoever.

And this match lasted nine minutes long.

And for the first five or so minutes, it was just them basically holding firm.

I think with a tension that I guess it just tires you out a bit and then you make your move.

So it's a sort of

boring for the first five minutes.

You're just staring at people leaning backwards.

It's not a good spectator score.

Yeah, it's just motionless motionless motionless oh a load of people have fallen over the end

i read one um article and this was in a physics uh website so they weren't going on the sporting side of it but they reckon that it's just basically about friction it's not even about how strong you are because if you think about it if you're pulling on a rope which is attached to a wall you can pull it as hard as you want and if you pull and pull and pull all you're going to do is move yourself closer to the wall you're not going to move the wall because the wall is stuck there and so the idea is that if the other team has got a really good base and really stuck on the floor with good friction with nice solid boots and you're on ice you could be a million times stronger than them but all you're going to do is pull yourself closer to them you're not going to pull them closer to you so

i read i read a lot of the uh tug of war international federation rulebook in preparation for this recording oh my god they're called twiff uh for short and uh their rules are so good they're so interesting so there are all kinds of rules there's a whole page about doping in tug of war it's not allowed.

And there's not much anyway, because why would you?

But the rules about shoes.

Because it makes you stronger, surely.

Well, but it doesn't give you more friction.

It doesn't

take a drug.

They're rough.

Yeah.

It would need to be a stickiness.

You want sticky feet, don't you?

Well, stickiness.

This is exactly.

This is why the shoes section of TWIF rules is so enormous and comprehensive.

You aren't allowed to have shoes that are more than 20% longer than your feet.

Because when you think about it,

that's why the clowns won the first five Olympics, didn't they?

They would win, wouldn't they?

Because they've just got so much more surface in contact with the ground.

And there are all these things you could be banned for.

You could be banned for sitting down.

That's happened when it was an Olympic sport, actually.

The British team ones got banned for sitting down.

It's not really sitting down.

It's

the first ever rules.

I read them, and explicitly it says sitting on another member of your team is not permitted.

That is fair.

But also, not trying trying hard enough is a disqualifiable offence.

Really?

So it says in the rules, teams failing to actively engage in a competitive effort during a pull, leading to a prolonged stalemate, which could bring the sport into disrepute.

I don't know how.

That's what I was saying.

Basically, what the Chinese, Taipei, slash Taiwanese team were doing.

Yeah.

Like deliberately not trying hard to try and make it.

Well, they've got to watch out then.

Yeah.

That's very interesting.

Twiff is a wonderful website, by the way.

I read the latest newsletter.

They've just celebrated their 60th anniversary as the Tug of War International Federation.

Sadly, due to COVID, aren't able to meet up to be there with each other.

So they're going to do it next year.

The Olympic sport is the perfect sport for keeping people at fixed two-meter intervals.

Yes.

Yeah, so

they're going to be meeting up next year for their 60th plus one anniversary in 2021.

And I was reading their mission statement, and the mission statement basically is it's their main objective is they want this to become an Olympic sport again.

They're desperate to get it back in the Olympics because in the early Olympics, there were five Olympics that they were a part of, I think, was it?

1920, I think, was the last that they ever did.

And Britain,

the holders of the, well, not necessarily Britain, the holders, because it's actually a very specific bit of Britain.

It is the city of London police

who are the reigning Olympic champions of tug of war.

And yeah, they're constantly trying to get it back into the Olympics, but it's not happened yet.

And I think it should go back in.

It's no different to the discus.

It's no different to

Egg and Spoon Race or that race where you run across, put a different item of clothing on each time until you look like a farmer.

That's no different.

It requires much, much less skill than those.

It requires being fat and having spikes in your shoes.

No, that's not.

No, no, no.

It is, it's not just about strength, as we know.

It's skill as well.

No, that's what I'm saying.

It's not about, it's nothing to do with strength.

It's about standing there and being heavy.

Heavy is nothing to do with it.

I found it really interesting that we've got two people, me and Anna on the side of Tuggerfor is not a skill spot, and then we've got you two on the other side pulling in your direction.

Only one way to settle it.

I am pro of the Olympic theme because Great Britain did seem to absolutely smash it.

Because not only did the police team win,

we were allowed to submit various teams.

And I think Great Britain won all three medals in 1908, as well as winning various medals.

It wasn't just Great Britain winning all three medals.

It was specific police forces from Britain winning all three.

So the City of London took gold.

Liverpool's police force won silver.

And then more other London policemen took the bronze medal.

It could not have been a more dangerous thing.

It was quite controversial, though, because the Liverpool team, there is a suggestion that they were wearing such enormous shoes.

And according to some people who wrote about it at the time, their shoes were so heavy that they could only just lift their feet off the floor after the play when they had to leave the arena.

Well, so if you read the latest newsletter from the TWIF website,

there's an actual breakdown of how a lot of these problems were solved by one of the members, founding members who helped to solve it, which is when they had their first international matches, every different country had different rules for what they were allowed to do, different size shoes, different grips, different laying down on stuff.

And so it was this guy who writes his historical piece in the newsletter who says that he got together with everyone and they sort of internationalized the rules for tug of war so that there's now one solid way that you, if you enter this competition,

you can only perform it.

I really hope that the TWIF website gets a massive spike in visitors.

If you're listening to this, just please go to the TWIF website because I want whoever runs the TWIF website to say, like, phone its colleagues, it's finally happening.

We're doing it.

Twiff just sounds like a swear word you use when you've got a toddler around so you can't say the actual word in it.

Absolutely Twiff.

I think that there should just be the prerequisite that if you cannot mount the podiums to claim your medal because your shoes are too heavy, that's automatic disqualification.

I'll just chuck it down here.

That's fine.

Imagine the very start of the Olympics where they're all marching around the stadium with a big flag and you've just got the tug of war team dragging their feet along.

Oh, here they come.

It always slows down for this bit.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in medieval elections, you were supposed to object to any suggestion that you wanted to win.

When he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, Saint Anselm refused to accept the ceremonial staff, so they had to break his fingers to force it into his hand.

Come on.

This is.

And if you go on Snokes, you can see photographs of the hand being broken.

No, obviously.

There's a scribe looking at something else.

What was he looking at?

So I read this from BBC History Magazine.

It's an article by Professor Bjorn Viler from from Aberystwyth University and it's about medieval elections that took place around that time and there were always elections for things like bishops and archbishops and popes and councils and stuff like that.

Sometimes also kings.

Some kings were elected which I didn't know.

But the idea was that whoever won was going to be whatever God wanted and you shouldn't really want to have power over other people if you're a holy good person.

And so you wouldn't try and go around getting people to vote for you or anything like that.

It was really, really looked down on.

You should just accept the nomination, accept the win, and say, well, I didn't really want this, but since you insist, I'm going to do it.

And then St.

Anselm, he got the Archbishopship of Canterbury, and they had to give him the staff as part of the ceremony, but he was like, nope, I'm still going to pretend that I don't want this.

And they had to break his staff.

You'll have to force that ceremonial staff into my dead band.

Oh, so he was definitely acting.

Well, actually, probably not, because he was a saint.

And if you believe all the stories about Saint Anselm, he was an extremely pious man who didn't want any kind of it's it's funny because he's quite a famous saint and he did lots of cool stuff but all the way through it's like oh no i don't really want anyone to know who i am oh no like he deliberately went to become the number two of a very famous monk because the other guy was so famous he thought that will deflect all the fame off me he's like the two fish curators at the natural history museum is what we're saying.

I love it, it's such a funny idea.

Although, he wouldn't have been a saint at the time, I guess.

He would have just been Mr.

Anselm.

So,

yeah, or probably not Mr.

Yeah, Mr.

Mr.

Anselm.

We should just say he obviously set an example that a lot of world leaders follow today in his reluctance for power.

I like Anselm because

he's the father of scholasticism, which was a massive deal, which was basically the biggest intellectual movement of the late Middle Ages.

Stop Stop laughing, Andy.

That's not why I like him.

Okay, that's just a session.

Sure.

I'm not an absolute no.

Okay.

So scholasticism was this very important new wave thing, which was using logic and reason and debate to justify religious arguments instead of just monasticism where you bought everything you read in the Bible without questioning it.

Anyway, the reason I raise it is because the most famous scholastic is one of my favorite people, who's Peter Abelard, who is the guy who was inspired by Anselm.

And he was the leading philosopher of the 12th century, really arrogant, bit of a pain, argued with his teachers all the time, totally uninterested in women, because all about his study.

And then suddenly decided he really wanted to be the best seducer on the face of the earth.

So he fell in love with this woman called Eloise

and shagged her in the convent kitchen and in her uncle's bedroom.

And then he married her, but he also wanted to get a religious post.

So he married her in secret.

And her uncle thought that he'd refused to marry her.

It was all a bit of a misunderstanding.

And her uncle did what any good uncle would do and sent some men round to chop his bulls off.

And they're now hanging in the penis museum in ice.

Here we go.

Leave it alone, Anna.

You missed the episode.

Get over it.

Sorry, Anna.

Perfectly preserved.

This is why you like St.

Anselm.

Because he was an excuse for me to delve back into Kinch Avalar, my favourite person of the 12th century.

I just love that.

You've got your testicles chopped off over a misunderstanding.

That's all.

That's terrible.

Yeah.

St.

Alselm's father was called Gandalf.

No, no, worse.

Gandalf.

I guess we only think that's funny because Tolkien then went on to use the name,

but that is hilarious.

Yes.

Yeah, hands up.

That's why I find that funny.

I'm not going to hide it.

Gandalf, ironically, though, loved his ceremonial star.

That's true.

Whereas Anselm, of course, not a fan.

That's true.

Anselm once was in church with Henry I,

and he

issued the decree of excommunication against people who had long hair because long, curly hair had become fashionable in court.

And he did a sermon that was so convincing that several of the people with long hair in the church burst into tears and pulled out their hair by its roots.

And the king also started crying, and one of his assistants had a pair of scissors and chopped off the king's hair there and then.

Wow.

That's convincing.

That's good rhetoric.

That is.

So, just on these sort of medieval strange elections that happened and sort of the strangeness of their structure and how, you know,

have you guys heard about the elections in the Venetian Republic?

No.

Oh, no.

Okay, so medieval Venice was led by the Doge,

D-O-G-E.

And the Doge was elected by the Great Council of Venice.

Okay, this is a huge council, had lots and lots of members, and it was run by a few noble families, but it had, you know, hundreds of members.

And everyone wanted to be the Doge, obviously, very powerful.

But the system was designed very carefully to stop anyone gaining and keeping power.

Okay, so you had to stop people consolidating their authority once they were elected Doge, you know?

So it sort of keeps things in balance.

So this is how they elected a Doge, right?

You pick 30 members of the great council at random, okay?

Then you pick nine of those 30, also at random, okay?

You're trying to pick the electing body here.

You've got nine people.

How are you picking them at random?

You're just sort of

throwing a bouquet or something.

Names out of a hat.

Yeah.

Those nine members, they then select 40 more members, right?

Then of those 40, 12 are randomly picked.

Those 12 choose 25 more who are randomly cut down to nine.

Okay.

Those nine then choose another 45, of whom 11 are picked at random, and then those 11 choose 41 more.

Those 41 then vote for the doge.

Wow.

Exactly.

And can I ask what proportion was done by postal voting?

Because if it's any more than 10, I don't believe a word of it.

Just reading into some of these mad elections, there was that classic one of after Pope Clement IV died.

They spent three years trying to decide on who the new pope was.

And it took so long that eventually the citizens of the area got so angry, so pissed off, they locked all of the people voting into a church and they refused to feed them anything.

So they're just like, get in there, decide on this.

No food, no water.

And they even ripped off the roof of the church so that the elements could rain on them and so on, just until they had that decision.

And they finally did get that decision.

Pope Gregory X.

We should say that that instant that you're describing is the reason that papal elections and conclaves happen as they do today right conclave means with keys and that goes back to that time where they had to lock them in the bloody church so the new rules said that after three days of voting you then you only get one meal per day from then on then after eight days you only get bread and water uh plus a little wine apparently just just to soften it but under the next two popes were elected under those rules and amazingly that it both took under 10 days to decide because the food rules have been changed.

That was it.

But then in 1292, it took two years again to get a pope.

Yeah, the rules, the rules fell apart again.

They all instituted the rules, and then they stopped obeying them for quite a long time.

That time, they only elected a pope because a pissed-off hermit wrote into them warning them of divine vengeance if they didn't elect the pope.

And when his letter came in, one of the brothers who picked it up went, well, let's just make this guy the pope.

And they did, not the hermit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He tried to run away, didn't he?

He genuinely didn't want to.

I think he was legit, Pietro Damaroni, who was, yeah, he wrote to them being like, decide.

They picked him.

He tried to flee.

They stopped him.

They forced him to go into power.

And only one edict that he passed when he was in power as pope remained in force.

And that was the edict he passed that was the right for a pope to abdicate, which he did within five months.

Yeah.

Wow.

Sometimes you can protest too much.

In the 1190s, in Bury St.

Edmunds, they were looking for a new abbot and there was a few different candidates but of course they were all, oh no, I don't want it, I don't want it.

But then one of them was really loudly and annoyingly saying, no, I don't want it.

Anyone, don't vote for me, whatever you do, don't vote for me.

And everyone thought that really he was actually campaigning because he was like shouting a lot and like making himself seen.

And everyone thought that really he was taking the piss a little bit.

And then he was killed by a collapsing beam, which all the other priests saw as a sign from God that, yeah, he was definitely, he was definitely taking the piss.

Did all the other priests have to bury the chainsaws that they brought to that meeting very quickly?

I would love it if political campaigns today just involved the politicians all insisting loudly they didn't want it.

It would be brilliant.

It would be fun.

If they were trying to force your hand onto the Bible at the inauguration and you're saying, no, I don't want, no, I'm not touching it.

No.

It used to be like that in America.

So when Horace Greeley ran against Ulysses S.

Grant in 1872, he was the first one who went across a whole country kind of canvassing for votes.

And all Grant's team, they just mocked him for it.

They said, look, this is just, I can't believe what you're doing.

This is not what, this is not the right way to want to become president.

We want a president who is a humble man.

We don't want someone who's shouting from the rooftops that I'm the best.

God, that's interesting.

And when was that?

That was kind of 1880-odd or?

1872?

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Okay, yeah.

and actually it's still the rule in america really or it's supposed to be that if you're going to be the running mate of a potential president then you're not supposed to campaign for that and that's now you're not supposed to do that so whenever yeah when joe biden was looking for his running mate and he said i'm definitely going to have a woman we don't know who it is yet but definitely be a woman obviously all of the journalists would ask all of the main probable candidates you know would you be up for it and a couple of them said yeah i'd definitely be up for it and then a lot of the commentators in America said, Well, that's not really on.

You're not really supposed to do that.

You're supposed to say, Well, if it comes my way, I'll, you know, I'll see what happens.

But I'm really, I'm concentrating on campaigning for the president.

And so,

I guess that still happens, doesn't it?

Like in British politics, they say, Do you want to be prime minister?

And they say, No, I'm doing the job.

I'm that's what Rishi Sunak says every week, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

It's so transparent.

I wonder if it was as grotesquely transparent as this in the olden days when even the nice ones, you know, AOC and people, no, it wouldn't cross my mind, be president.

No, I didn't.

I just, I'm just here for the people, for the do-gooding.

I wish someone would just say, the only reason I'm in this job is to achieve ultimate power.

I've just got one more thing about electoral malpractice.

This is actually a recent story.

It got sent to me on Twitter by Kata Ovari.

So thank you to you.

This is about the New Zealand Bird of the Ear competition, which has identified 1,500 fraudulent votes.

so there has been voter fraud in one election can i just ask how often in the new zealand bird of the year competition does the kiwi not win because it feels like it's i had no idea it's a the field is wide open really it's amazing yeah i mean in this case there was a lot of tampering on behalf of the little spotted kiwi which got 1500 fraudulent votes got pushed at the top of the leaderboard they've been removed but no it's wide open so and this is not the first time this election has been tampered with So, there's a whole report about this in Vice, which said this: In 2015, two teenage girls tried to rig the results in favor of the Coca-Cola.

In 2017, a number of fake email accounts were created to boost the polls in favor of the white-faced heron.

And in 2018, someone voted for the shag more than 3,000 times.

I didn't even know Boris Johnson was in New Zealand around that time.

That's the same guy googling Shunga, the British Museum website.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show.

That is my fact.

My fact this week is that the reason America has a national anthem is down to Robert Ripley.

Believe it or not.

That's very clever wording to see people.

I felt yucky saying that.

It looked fine on the page when it came out of my mouth.

That was a bit weird.

So, Robert Ripley, the creator of the very famous Believe It or Not series of books and museums around the world,

wrote in 1929 that the Star-Spangled Banner had never actually formally been adopted by America as the national anthem.

It was used in lots of ceremonies.

It was done everywhere.

And he got a lot of angry mail from that saying, how dare you say that?

Until it was realized that actually, constitutionally, it wasn't officially their anthem.

So 5 million people signed a petition that was forwarded onto Congress.

And eventually in 1931, President Hoover signed a law to say this is officially recognized now.

So, yeah, it's down to Ripley.

Amazing.

Thank you, Ripley.

It's not just thanks to Ripley, interestingly.

So it had to be proposed that law by a representative.

And it was the man who proposed that was called John Linthicum.

And he represented parts of Baltimore, which is what the song is about, isn't it?

It's about a fort, Fort McHenry in Baltimore.

So get this.

Linthicum himself, the politician, his first wife was a woman called Eugenia May Biden, who appears, from what I can tell, to be a relative of Joe Biden, distant relative.

No way.

No way.

Yeah, I don't know about a distant relative.

I mean, he is quite old, so she might just be his older sister or something.

But yeah, that's amazing.

He should have made more of that in his campaign.

He might have actually clinched the bloody election proxy if he emphasizes

connections to the national anthem.

Okay, Donald Jr.

It was actually signed as the national anthem in an executive order by Woodrow Wilson about 20 years earlier, wasn't it?

But it hadn't been properly rubber stamped by Congress.

And it was in 1931 that they rubber stamped it.

So it was kind of a half-law when Ripley did this.

And then it became a full straight-on law in 1931.

Yeah.

And his piece that he did, so this was, he used to do illustrations that would sort of have little bits of writing around around it to tell you this fact and in his original illustration it was a bit controversial the wording that he used for it because he said america has no national anthem so that was his big headline statement then he said the usa brackets being a dry country because of course prohibition at the time has been using without authorization a vulgar old english drinking song um so he was sort of doubling down on not only is it not our song but it's it's completely against what our government stands for at the moment hence all the sort of outrage.

But wait, so then he petitioned to have the vulgar Old English drinking song actually formally instituted.

No, that was separate to him.

He just, this was him putting out a fact.

This was people randomly realising we need to petition.

He didn't push that at all.

But then they did adopt the drinking song, of course, didn't they?

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

Because the Star Spangled banner, the tune came from a society in London, didn't it?

Called the Anacreontic Society, which was like a drinking club on the Strand and in various parts of London.

And you would go down and you would drink and you would sing the song.

It sort of sounded like an 18th century Bullingdon club a little bit, didn't it?

Yeah.

Gentlemen hanging out drinking.

Except actually not as fun because they met once a month and it was fun on the one hand, but it did start with a three-hour long instrumental concert before you would have your supper.

No.

Yeah, they dropped that.

And then it only lasted a few years.

It came to an end when the Duchess of Devonshire attended one of the meetings and then they started singing some of these quite ribald songs and she was not very happy about it at all.

And it wasn't just that she wasn't very happy, it was that the people singing them felt that they couldn't really sing these rude songs in front of a lady.

And so they slowly stopped singing them and then resigned one after another that same night

and just all went, no, no, actually, I'm not doing this anymore.

And one after another, they all left until there was only a couple people left and the Duchess of Devonshire.

and the duchess

i know i know but i mean that the thing is that she really wasn't a buzzkill like georgiana the duchess of devonshire she was the great great great great aunt of diane the princess of wales uh and she was really famous for being kind of a bit out there as far as duchesses were concerned she was always drinking she was gambling um she got in real trouble in the election of 1974 because of claims that she was trading kisses for votes

really

Not 1974, presumably.

1774?

Well, weirdly, it's 1784, so I'm not sure.

I got the one and the far right in that.

That's all that matters.

But yeah, apparently she'd said that she would kiss a particular butcher if he voted for this guy Fox.

And then supporters of William Pitt said, well, that is just basically akin to prostitution.

So this is going to be a massive scandal.

And it became a massive scandal.

Although it seems when we look at it now from the future, it looks like perhaps it wasn't even her who was saying this.

It might have been her sister.

Wait, was her sister saying, I will kiss the butcher?

Or was she saying, I'll get my sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, to kiss you, Mr.

Butcher?

What I believe happened is the sister said, I'll kiss the butcher if you vote for Fox.

And the papers...

thought it was the Duchess of Devonshire who'd done this.

Oh, so the sister was like the dodgy relative who's dragging down a proper political campaign.

Kind of, yeah.

Although really it was just an excuse for the pit team to just, you know.

Yeah, it's such an ineffective method of winning an election as well.

Like, if you have to transport someone around the country kissing everyone, every butcher.

Yeah.

Did this poor butcher end up getting a kiss, for God's sake, from the duchess or her sister?

That's what I want to know.

Everyone forgets about the butcher in this story.

The butcher did.

The butcher got a kiss.

Thank God.

I think that was.

If she'd have just said, I might give you a kiss if you vote, then it might not have been so bad.

But it was the fact that she did did the kiss and then he voted.

So they were like, yeah, that's bang on prostitution.

She was a cool dude, though.

It must have been a bad, really bad song for it to put her off.

I think if you're ashamed to sing a song in front of the Duchess, then actually you shouldn't have been singing the song in the first place.

Yeah, but it is very hard, isn't it, to sing the Star Spangled Banner.

So I've never actually had a crack at it, but apparently it's got 19 semitones in it, and it's just such an inappropriate song for almost everybody's vocal range.

And mostly when you're watching someone sing it, you're just thinking, are they going to hit the high note or not?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was written by a guy called John Stafford Smith when he was still a teenager.

He was a lay vicar of Westminster and he died at the age of 85 from a grape pip lodged in his windpipe.

No.

Will,

can I say something about this?

Yeah.

I wasted a day, I think, trying to track this down.

So John Stafford Smith, who incidentally never claimed that he'd written the anthem, refused to acknowledge he'd written it, even though everyone in the society was like, like, yeah, mate, you wrote this.

Now, there's like various books say that the way he died, he was aged 85 or 86 from a grape pit lodged in his throat.

But the society, the Anacrean Society, was named after this ancient Greek poet, Anacrean, sixth century BC poet, who also, according to Pliny the Elder, died from choking on a grape pit at the age of 85 or 86.

Now,

this just is, this is too much of a coincidence to be possible.

Someone has copped up those sources.

You're too skeptical.

It's definitely, you know, they're both famous drinkers.

They drank wine.

What's wine made out of?

Great.

It was one of the leading causes of death for the over 80s.

So quite recently.

For about 3,000 years, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was.

It was.

Back in the days when you still had pips in the wine, it's nice that we get pitted wine now, isn't it?

Yeah.

So the old vicar, sorry, he's the one who wrote the original.

Did he write the original lyrics or did he write the tunes?

He wrote the two

Sorry.

Oh, yeah.

So when I was doing the lyrics semitones thing, that's about the

lyrics that came in.

Yeah.

So that was written by a guy called Francis Scott Key.

And he was 35 years old at the time when he was on a British ship in the Baltimore harbor.

And there was the bombing of Fort McHenry.

And he was watching as all the bombs went down and so on.

And it was in the dawn's early light that he saw this massive flag, the stars and stripes still flying there from this vantage point on the boat.

And he just found it so amazing that he wrote down these lyrics for not that song, just as a poem.

And it got published in a paper and it got adapted then by someone else into that song that we now have.

Seriously weird moment for him because the way it happened was he, the War of 1812 was happening in 1814, as it did, and he boarded a British ship to try and negotiate the release of this doctor guy who was a good guy who treated lots of British soldiers very well.

So he boarded this British British ship, said, look, give us our doctor back.

He's a nice man.

And the British guy on the ship, the British general, British Admiral, said, yeah, absolutely, you have the doctor.

Would you mind just waiting a day because we are about to bomb the absolute shit out of this harbour right in front of us?

And so he then has to sit on the ship while all the Brits on there sort of flatten his homeland.

And then,

yeah, I guess what else can he do except write this poem?

But the fun thing about it is the flag probably wasn't actually the same flag that was flying the next morning.

This is according to the History Channel.

So when it's like, you know, for just say, can you see by the dawn's early light?

The flag that you're looking at is actually a new flag they erected that morning because the actual flag was so massive and it was pouring with rain the night of the battle.

It would have been wet and it would have weighed 500 pounds, more than 500 pounds, which would have snapped the flagpole.

So actually, they had to do a replacement mini flag while the battle was going on.

And then overnight, the flag erectors got the massive flag back and holded up the flagpole.

And so, in the morning, it was the replaced large flag that he was looking at.

So, it hadn't even stayed there during the battle.

It's a false song, guys.

This show hasn't even gone out yet.

And already, I can hear the fury of the Americans listening to this episode.

I just hear it in my ears.

That's pitying us right now.

Shall we talk about Ripley instead, who's a great American?

Yes.

So yeah, Ripley, believe it or not, started as a cartoonist, had a bit of spare time, and so drew some cartoons of crazy things that athletes had done.

And that became really, really popular.

And so the next year, he did another one.

And then a few years later, he started doing more and more and more of these amazing, unbelievable feats that people had done and illustrating them himself.

And then eventually that became believe it or not.

He's basically a one-man QI.

It's so interesting.

And he, you know, he was, he loved doing the thing that QI loves to do, which is to debunk commonly accepted truths, hence the national anthem thing.

But

the brilliant thing about him was how much post he got.

Because he was known as Rip,

Robert Ripley.

And people would write to him in a series of elaborate codes.

So they would write his address backwards or upside down or in.

braille or they'd draw it on in semaphore flags.

Some people apparently would put a very slight tear in the letter, right?

I.e.

a small rip, and they would then post that and see if it got to him.

Anyway, this became so popular that the U.S.

Postmaster General had to announce that the Postal Service would no longer be deciphering codes for people.

They said, no, stop all this bullshit.

We just write the address on like normal people.

But he was so famous that they tended to know to send it to him.

Yeah, absolutely.

Although I do imagine if that rip thing is true, that was he also getting loads of letters that were loving letters of daughters to mothers, which had accidentally got a bit ripped in in the post?

So, oh, must be one for Rob.

And also, whenever anyone sent like some flowers saying RIP on them, did he get all those as well?

Oh, yeah, he thought he was much more loved than he actually was.

You say he was a one-man QI.

I think he sort of was James.

The life he lived was essentially traveling around the world, but not going to the normal places most of us travel, going to the really weirdo places so he could come back and talk about the weird shit he'd seen.

He went to

the window because I'm not sure it was.

Think of it.

It kind of felt like a compliment until the word weirdo came in and then I wasn't sure.

It's a QI compliment.

I'm going to leave you to take it as you see fit.

He went to Norway and immediately visited a place called Hell, which is a tiny Norwegian village, just for the sake of coming back and saying he'd been to Hell.

And he went around finding...

I guess people who before the internet existed would have been complete extraordinary people, just people from different cultures, from different tribes, and then reporting on them.

And no one believed him.

It was like QI.

Every time he announced something, everyone refused to believe him, didn't they?

He announced some pretty fruity stuff, in my opinion.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

he claimed things like, a Frenchman once drank 13 pints of wine in one breath.

And you think, hmm.

Did he?

Okay.

Well, believe it or not.

The tragic thing was, the tragic thing about that was that there was a single pip, a great pip, right at the end of 30 pipes.

He would have done 40.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We also have links to bits of merchandise, or you can, of course, go to the much superior website, tugofwar-twiff.org, where you can read all the latest news about the world of tug of war.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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