347: No Such Thing As A Bacon Scented Sleep Mask

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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 Toshinsky, Andrew Hunt and Murray and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1978, chess player Viktor Kochnoi accused Anatoly Karpov of cheating using an elaborate yoghurt-based code.

Was it an elaborate yogurt or an elaborate code?

I actually added that word elaborate to kind of make it feel a bit better than it actually is.

No, it is an elaborate yogurt.

It was blueberry, wasn't it?

How basic are the yogurts that you're eating day to day?

You think blueberry is elaborate.

Well, anything above standard Greek is elaborate.

I've read some places that it's blueberry, but some places that it might be the even more elaborate Bilberry yogurt.

Okay, that actually

is top tier.

But basically, what had happened was,

we'll get onto everything that was happening around there at the time because it was an extremely controversial match.

But Karpov was just playing chess, and then suddenly someone brought him a yogurt, and no one knew that they were going to bring a yogurt.

Normally, you would have your snacks at very specific times, but suddenly they just brought him this blueberry or Bilberry yogurt, and then he made a really good move and Korchnoi who for various reasons was quite suspicious thought that this must have been a code and whatever the flavor of the yoghurt was going to be that was telling him what kind of move he had to make and then Korchnoi later on he did say that it was a joke and he was trying to sort of parody the fact that people are always blaming each other of cheating but the truth is that he definitely did make the accusation.

The officials took it seriously and they changed the rules to say that everyone had to decide what snacks they were going to have before the game started and they had to have them at certain times.

So it's not the idea that maybe he wrote something in the yogurt in Bill Brown.

Oh, if you drizzle it in in honey,

that would be clever.

So basically, this was 1978.

This guy, Kochnoi, is a great...

great chess player, possibly the best chess player never to become world champion.

But he had defected from the Soviet Union.

And the reason he defected is because the Soviets had decided to give other people a chance as their main challenges and not let him do it.

So he decided, fuck this, I'm getting out of there.

And so he went to live in Europe, eventually in Switzerland, but because he was so good, he was still like the main challenger to Kapov.

And so they had this game, but the Soviets were trying every trick in the book to stop him from winning.

So at first they said that it wasn't allowed to take place because he didn't have a state, as in he wasn't Soviet anymore, he wasn't Swiss yet, he didn't have a country.

And then when eventually the chess authorities said, well, you know,

he's the best, he's just beaten a guy called Petrosian, who was previously thought to be the best.

So they thought, okay, well, he's got to take part.

But the Moscow newspapers refused to name him.

They just called him the opponent or the challenger.

They wouldn't say what he was called.

And his family was still in the Soviet Union and the Soviet authorities refused to let them leave.

So they kind of kept them hostage because they were so upset about this guy who defected and was possibly about to become the world champion.

Wow.

God.

So were the family pissed off when he was just lounging around eating blueberry yogurt mid-match?

That's a bit casual for somebody whose family's got a gun held at them.

Yeah, no, I see that point.

I see that point.

But he thought that possibly, I think, that by becoming the world champion, they wouldn't be able to get at him because he'd be world famous.

The match had other accusations as well, didn't it?

So Korchnoi brought his own personal chair, which he'd like to play chess in.

Fair enough.

You're sitting down for several hours.

You want to be comfortable.

But Karpov's team, they were the ones who were suspicious now, and they requested the chair be dismantled the next raid.

Wow.

Really?

Yeah.

What were they expecting to find in there, you wonder?

An extra chess piece?

Oh, it doesn't work like Monopoly, does it?

You can't just bring an extra bishop on the

theoretically.

If no one noticed, you could accidentally just drop an extra bishop on there.

Wait, I'm sure I took both your bishops.

Nope, you're misremembering it.

Yeah, no, you only took one.

But this one is a different design to the other bishops when you are.

Well, it looks like a bit of a chair leg, to be honest.

The paranoia looking into this of chess players and what they must go through.

I mean, if you were playing a game, it feels like half the game is just looking out for ways in which the other player is cheating.

There's a yogurt, there's a man standing over there, there's a chair.

Like, you know, which one of these are giving him the details?

The man standing over there is a really good one.

Are you talking about the French team in 2012?

Yes, that's right.

Yeah.

In 2012, there was an Olympiad in Russia, and there were accusations that the French team were managing to get the messages to the actual player by standing in pre-arranged spots behind the board.

So I'm not sure of the exact code, but it's like, if I'm standing over here, then use your knight.

Or if I'm standing over here, there's a great move that you can't see with the official, or whatever.

Did they not all stand in the exact order of which the chess pieces are on the board?

Two of them were on a horse.

Yeah, one of them had a little mitre.

That would be really fun.

One of them's a poorly.

Why is your manager only walking diagonally?

What's going on?

Why is there queen here?

And they never proved that, did they?

They often don't sort of prove it.

So that's still an accusation, we should say.

I don't think the French team were found guilty of doing that.

But it does make you think: is it not,

after a point, easier to just play the game well than to memorise this very, presumably quite quite complicated code of standing formations.

The problem is that computers are better than humans now, right?

And so if you can somehow get a computer to tell you what to do, then you're going to be able to be even the best human.

And so that's why cheating now is even more of a problem than it ever has been before.

Although I listened to a more or less podcast, the Radio 4 show more or less, and they interviewed the head of research at chess.com who was saying,

it's quite interesting now spotting cheaters who are cheating with computers because computers play in a completely different way to people.

So he was acting like anyone could tell the difference straight away, which I imagine we couldn't.

But he was there, you know, you can tell after a few moves that someone is suddenly using a computer.

And the key difference is that computers don't plan.

They don't have a memory of the move that preceded and they don't have a long-term strategy.

And so they, when it comes to a move, they act like they've never ever seen the board before and they just do what's the exactly perfect move for that moment.

Whereas human beings, we have a plan and then we want to stick to it, even if sometimes circumstances happen that mess with the plan.

So for instance, it's very unusual for a human to willingly take back a move in chess.

Because if you've made a move, you don't want to retract it.

A computer got no compunction about that.

Just do it when it wants to, when it sees it's the best move.

The thing about retracting your moves with computers, that's like where you almost go back to your previous position, right?

Because the retracting moves that you or I might have a problem with if we were playing chess would be if I moved my knight to a place and then I took my finger off it and then I go, no, no, I want to take that back.

Right.

And that actually did happen with one of the greatest chess players of all time, which was Kasparov, Gary Kasparov, when he was playing against a woman called Judith Polgar.

And she is probably the greatest female.

She almost definitely is the greatest female chess player that's ever played.

And if she'd have beaten Kasparov in this game, it would have been the first time that a woman had ever beaten a world champion in a game of chess.

And he moved his knight into what would be a bad position.

And then he took his finger off it and he went, No, no, I did take my finger off it.

And he put it back.

And then he ended up, I'm not sure if he won or tied the game.

Eventually, she carried on.

She became the 10th best player in the entire world, anyway.

But that could have been such a big moment of the first woman beating a grandmaster.

But

did you guys read about her, Judith Polgar?

She's amazing.

So

she was, her father was called Lashlow Polgar

and he had three daughters and he trained them all to be chess players.

And it's one of those stories which kind of half sounds a little bit like, you know, he's really forcing them to do this and it's quite bad.

But then on the other hand, they all loved it.

And whenever you interview them, they were all like, oh, this is what brought our family together.

We all absolutely loved it.

And so his daughters, Susa, Sophia, and Judith, all became grandmasters eventually.

Judith could beat her father by the time she was five years old.

At 15, she was the youngest person, male or female, to be awarded a grandmaster title.

And then eventually she played against Kasparov and should have beaten him, but wasn't allowed to because of that.

And there was a great interview with Souza when they asked her about playing against men.

And she said that she'd won loads of matches, but she'd never won against a healthy man.

After every game, there was always an excuse.

I had a headache.

I had a stomachache.

There was always something.

I think that's a bit eggs in one basket training all three daughters to play chess.

If it was up to me, I would train one to play chess, one to play drafts, and one to play snakes and ladders.

And I would hope that one of them in the field would become the world champion.

Yeah, the problem with snakes and ladders is it is literally all down to luck of the dice, isn't it?

There's

literally no strategy there at all.

A lot of people say that it's just luck and there's no strategy, but I would say actually, I do remember when I played against you, there was that guy stood in the corner with a ladder in front of him to me.

Don't you say that about snakes and ladders?

I was reading this article that really annoyed me because of what you've said.

So about cheating and games, it was in the LA Times.

It was about whether you should let your kids cheat in board games.

And it was written by this guy whose four-year-old daughter cheats at snakes and ladders by like climbing up the snakes or jumping forward to the ladder bit.

And the gist of the article was, you should let kids cheat because they don't really get a sense of fairness and ethics till they're seven or eight.

And before before that, they're just developing their creativity.

But the question was framed at the top as, you know, you're playing Snakes and Ladders, she's cheating.

Do you insist that your children play by the rules and then trounce them every single time?

Or do you let them cheat?

And I was like, snakes and ladders is the one game where a five-year-old does have a chance of beating you.

It sounds like the dad is cheating all the time.

That's why I never let my little sister play me at snakes and ladders because she would have a chance of beating me.

Actually, I'm like, no, we're going bowling.

We're doing the test your strength machine again.

That was until she was about seven years old.

Yeah.

Chess.com, they have chess detectives, which I love.

So they've got six chess detectives.

And I didn't realize how big chess.com is.

I mean, it's absolutely massive, this global site.

Since March, the number of accounts they have closed for cheating specifically is 85,000.

Jesus.

Now, obviously, that might be some people setting up new accounts after they get busted the first time, but that is a lot of people cheating around the world.

Well, apparently it's 30% of chess masters.

Chess masters.

Again, according to this class, exactly.

The people you'd thought should really be a buffet, but they quite often play matches on there for money or tournaments.

And 30% of them, he says, he's had to give a warning to.

And he says there's a system where you give them one warning and you say, our computers have seen that you're cheating and using a computer.

And then he says the vast majority of them don't do it again which he said as though they're really being noble and realizing they've done wrong but presumably they just think oh shit they've got detectives on this one in 2013 there was a bulgarian player called borislav ivanov uh and he was forced into retirement um due to a scandal he walked into the arena and they wanted to search him for an electronic device uh and they said can you take off your shoes and he said no my socks are too smelly so i refuse to take off my shoes and they said right okay well you're disqualified And basically, you won't be able to play in any international competitions anymore.

Wow.

Jesus.

Has he stuck with that?

Has he just said

anyway?

He doesn't play anymore.

And that's maybe because he has such smelly feet.

It's possible that he has such smelly feet.

He also, I think, in that same tournament, though, he had a few suspicious moments.

And another one was where a competitor spotted a suspicious bump under his shirt and grabbed it, which seems like an incredibly awkward moment, if you've got that wrong, but said it was indeed an oblong object similar to an MP3 player, but then somehow didn't catch it.

I don't know if you ran away into the crowd or something.

My torso, he said, is so smelly.

Well, there's that story in 1993 at the World Open where there was a guy called John von Neumann.

And he came in and he was playing.

He was an unrated newcomer and he was wearing headphones the whole time, suspicious already.

And he drew with the Grand Master in this tournament.

This is an unrated player.

And everyone kept pointing out that he had a suspicious bulge in one of his pockets, which appeared to make soft humming noises and buzzing sounds at real pivotal points in the match.

And so they got him afterwards and said, listen, we think there's something dodgy going on here.

And one of the tournament directors quizzed him about chess.

And it turns out he didn't even have the basic...

fundamental knowledge of how to play chess when asked the basic questions.

Yeah, so he was sent in.

He had someone on the headphones just telling him what to do.

The knobbly one.

No, not that one.

No, no, the one with the one with five knobs on the end.

Don't take your finger off it once you've touched it.

I want to see the Michael Spicer, the man in the other room.

You tit.

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

My fact is that imitators of Harry Houdini included Howdini, Boudini, Ooudini, Howdini, Houdini, Hardini, Houdini, Bernardi, and Cunning the Jailbreaker.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

There's a footballer called Troy Dini.

I I wonder if he was originally a Houdini.

Probably.

Probably.

Is he very good in the box?

That's a Houdini joke about him getting out of a box.

There we go.

So

this is from a great article on Genie magazine, which is a kind of magic Wikipedia, a Wikipedia about magic, that is.

And it's just about all the people.

Houdini was so successful that just everyone started imitating him.

There was another guy called Kola, who obviously didn't get into the main fact because it doesn't sound enough like Houdini.

But his catchphrase was give my regards to the chief of police which is just such a great thing to shout as you're escaping yeah um yeah

and often these people would uh advertise in a way that you would definitely think it was whodini right yeah so like there was a guy who was called the great alexander that you would think well that sounds often like whodini he's fine right but then i saw on um wildabouthoudini.com which is like a blog all about whodini there was a flyer from from this guy called The Great Alexander, and it just said in massive letters, Houdini.

And you would think by walking past that Houdini would be there.

But actually, if you read the small prints, it said, Houdini, the great escape artist, would be outdone by the great Alexander.

I think we should give a shout out to wildabouthoudini.com

because it is unbelievable.

It's made by this guy called John Cox, and he's collated.

I think it must be every single primary source about Houdini ever, like every newspaper clipping, every diary entry of everyone who ever met him.

It's so good.

You can just disappear into it.

What's really nice, isn't it?

Because you get the article and often you then have to do extra digging.

But he's put the picture of the newspaper where it was originally mentioned.

Like, for example, Houdini didn't start off as Houdini when he got into the world of performance.

He was originally a trapeze artist and he was billed as Eric Prince of the Air.

And you read that, but next to it, he's tracked down the original citation for it in an advert in a newspaper to show that this existed as a real thing.

So he's really done his research for the website.

Yeah.

He's got the Houdini source of why he left one of his very first jobs as Projaya, the wild man of Mexico, or ProHea, maybe, which I think we've mentioned before that he played this role and his job was to snarl madly as raw meat was thrown at him.

And so this is one of his early performance acts.

And he quit when he ended up being hit in the eye with a slab of meat.

And indeed, he recalls this himself as a 1902 newspaper article.

What's also great about him is that he wrote prolifically columns for newspapers,

and he was writing while he was in Berlin for October 1st, in fact.

And he said, I couldn't look at my trainer for three weeks because my eyes were closed.

That caused me to become tame because of this meat slab.

Wow.

Slapping him in the face.

He had his own magazine.

Who did?

Houdini?

Houdini had his own magazine called Conjurer's Monthly Magazine.

And it wasn't explicitly his magazine, but if you read any single edition of it, you would notice that it was plugging Houdini.

It was writing malicious gossip about other magicians Houdini didn't like and criticizing all the people imitating him.

It only lasted for about a year, but yeah.

He did like to sort of have a go at other magicians because he did find himself constantly having his ideas and his invention stolen.

And he desperately wanted to make sure that people couldn't use them.

But that was really hard because if you were to patent your invention as part of the patent you would need to reveal what the trick was so he could never do that

he did get around it slightly there was one loophole that he managed to find which was he had the chinese water torture cell and that was one that he prized a lot and what he did was he put on a play where that was in the play this act that you would escape but he only put the play on to one person sitting in the audience and then he was able to copyright the act as opposed to patent it so that no one could then do it because it was copyrighted as a play.

play.

It's so clever.

When he died, he gave his tricks to his brother, didn't he?

So his brother was also a magician or an escape artist, which I didn't know.

He was called Theo, but he went under the name Hardeen, which is almost like one of these rip-off names, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, it's just about the only sound that is not made by those imitators.

And when Theo died in 1945, the props went up for sale and they were eventually bought by David Copperfield.

And they're currently in storage in Las Vegas.

And the way to get through them, they're in a big room that's next door to a sex shop.

And you have to go through the sex shop to get to the warehouse.

And there was an interview with Hugh Jackman who went to see them.

And he said that the way you get to this warehouse is that there's a mannequin in the sex shop, and you have to press the nipple on the mannequin.

And when you press the nipple, a special door opens, and you can go in and see all of Houdini's tricks.

Oh, my God.

That was so good.

Would he be happy about that?

Those tricks should never.

They shouldn't exist really still, should they?

Because when Houdini died, he gave them to his brother, to Hardin.

And the stipulation was that once his brother had died, that all of his stuff, all of his magical

effects and physical things had to be burnt and destroyed.

So that's how that was meant to end.

However, Hardin sold a lot of it during his lifetime in the 40s to a guy who was a Houdini enthusiast called Sidney Hollis Radner.

And Radner then then put it in a magical museum, the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame at Niagara Falls.

Now, in 1995, a fire broke out in the museum and completely destroyed the museum.

However, all of Houdini's stuff survived, despite the whole building going down.

So it feels like it doesn't want to disappear.

It feels like it wants to continue on.

Who really was escaping all that time?

Was it Houdini or his equipment?

Because if they escaped a fire, maybe he was a a patsy to them.

His tricks were quite interesting, weren't they?

Especially the escaping things.

He escaped from piano boxes, from coffins, from ladders that he was locked to, from glass boxes.

He once escaped from the belly of a whale.

Is that living or dead?

The whale?

It was dead, the dead whale.

Okay.

So good.

And when he was in Leeds, he got into a big barrel of beer.

You guys read about this one?

It's pretty cool.

It was at the Tetley Brewery, and they put him in a massive barrel of beer and said okay you have to escape but houdini was teetotal and he became overcome by the alcohol and lost consciousness and had to be hauled out by his assistant that is so good wow he used to do that by the way there was a level of pr about that where the beer keg in particular would be if it was a town that's centered around a beer industry he would use that as a way of promoting and appealing to everyone there but if you're somewhere that doesn't do beer let's say he's going to,

you know, the home of Melton Mowbray pork pies, does he have to escape from an enormous pie?

The home of Melton Mowbray pork pies.

You mean Melton Mowbray?

Yeah, exactly.

I had a momentary loss of confidence thinking, is that an actual town for a maximum digestive?

But yeah, imagine that because actually the pastry case of a pork pie is technically known as a coffin, isn't it?

So he is escaping from a coffin.

And actually, what you do is you put him in the pie and you put the pie on a conveyor belt going towards a massive oven.

And if he can't escape the pie in time he'll be cooked.

He has a connection to the first ever episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Can you guess what that is?

Okay, what did we do?

What did we talk about?

We talked about CERN and the

Large Hadron Collider.

Oh, we talked about the Philippa Langley finding Richard III under a car park.

I cannot believe you guys have not mentioned the most of the record from episode one.

We recorded the whole thing locked inside a cage with seven different padlocks on it, suspect enough.

Yep, that's what I said.

That's right.

Before Andy andy came here we had an andrew hunter flurry an andrew hunter murray an andrew hunter flurry

does he have something to do with president garfield's anus yes he does huh did he escape from president garfield's anus he did not no he did not he never went in in the first place um he was obsessed with murderers so He bought all this paraphernalia.

He had this massive collection.

And he was obsessed with John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln, of course.

And he was also obsessed with Charles Guito, the man who killed President Garfield.

He bought all of these things to do with him, like his phrenological analysis.

And he was locked in Guitto's death row cell and escaped.

And that was one of the famous tricks.

And in the process, he freed all the other prisoners on...

the same death row as him.

Really?

Well, apparently he freed them and then he locked them up again in the wrong cells.

I have one more thing about Houdini's habits at home because he and his wife were extremely close.

Not as close as he was with his mother, which is another, it's another story for another time.

But when Houdini and his wife had an argument, he would leave, he'd walk around the block, and then he'd come back and he would open the door of the room where his wife was and throw his hat into the room, right?

If it was thrown out again, she was still angry and I guess he would do it again.

And if the hat remained in the room, she'd calm down and go in and resolve it.

What if the argument was about him leaving his clothes hanging around the house all the time?

Like a lot of the arguments in my house are about.

You keep throwing your things all over the floor.

He was actually, one of the things he was as famous for as his escaping, apparently, and this is according to the World About Houdini website, was his needle trick.

And the East India needle trick involved him basically swallowing a whole load of needles and some thread, and then he'd vomit it all back up again.

But the thread would be threaded perfectly through all the needles with a little knot before each one.

Very impressive, yada, yada, yada.

But the weird thing about that is, talking of how close he was to his wife, she died in a place called Needles.

No.

Dun, dun, dun.

Needles, California.

That is the least spooky thing I've ever

heard.

It's like I've spent days searching for a Houdini-based coincidence.

That is the least impressive coincidence since Jeffrey the cat and that mongoose that time.

I have one last Houdini imitator to mention.

This Houdini impersonator was dubbed Harry Houdini,

and it was an orangutan from Borneo who lived in San Diego Zoo and whose real name was Ken Allen.

That was the name of the orangutan.

His real name.

Real native.

His real native, isn't it?

Yeah, his real name is King in orangutan language, probably.

It's what the zoo called him.

He was called Ken Allen.

But Ken Allen's quite a famous orangutan, I think.

Very famous.

Yeah, for the fact that he was constantly successfully escaping from his enclosure and no one could work out why.

So he got given the name Harry Houdini.

And they eventually had to bring in mountaineer experts to look at the wall to see if it was the crags in the wall that he was somehow gripping onto to getting out.

And it turns out that that's what it was in the end.

And they had to spend $40,000 eliminating all the holes in the wall so that Ken Allen couldn't escape anymore.

But yeah, Time magazine listed it in 2011 as one of the top 11 zoo escapes of all time.

And I refuse for this podcast to ever end until we cover the other 10.

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

My fact this week is that when the gates at Surman Lina Prison in Finland are locked, it's to keep tourists out, not to keep prisoners in.

Wow.

This is this prison on an island just off Helsinki, just really near Helsinki, and it's an open prison.

But I was reading an article in the News Statesman, an article written by Helen Lewis, a journalist who went and visited.

And she wanted to go and check out the prison because it's quite famous.

And they'd have to close the gates because tourists keep on wandering to the island, which is a tourist destination in its own right, and trying to get in.

So prisoners allowed to wander out, people not allowed to wander in.

But it's an amazing place.

Finland is one of these places that has lots of open prisons.

So it's got 13 open prisons.

I think about a third of their prisoners are in these prisons.

And they can do things like they have like therapy horses and they have saunas.

They have their own little houses, like huts that are sort of like hostels that they stay in with shared cooking facilities, a nice little sitting room with a big widescreen TV.

You can go to the mainland if you want, stay with your family overnight if you ask for permission.

It's a good sitch.

And as a result, it has practically no recidivism.

It's really interesting because it seems like it's for people often nearing the end of sentences where they might have been in higher security prisons for the early part of their sentence.

This is a way of slowly acclimatizing them to life on the outside.

So you're not just going straight from maximum big house, you know, 23 hours a day in a room to the open world again, because that's a really juddering change.

I did read, though, that, and I'm quoting exactly here, attempts to escape are limited to a few dozen a year, which sounds like a lot to me.

It does sound like a lot.

Like an enormous amount.

Given that there are, I think there are only about 100 prisoners in there.

That is a large percentage of them.

Yeah.

In 2013, they had double the number of attempted prison escapes in any other country in the world.

Wow.

But the idea is, why would you try and escape?

If you're getting towards the end of your time and you know that if you try and escape, then you're going to get put back in the big house again, then that's the idea, right?

That's why you would never, in theory, make sense that you would never try and escape.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

Um, maybe it gets you more time, more jail time in that same place because that sounds like a pretty cushy deal.

Sadly, I think you get sent back to one of the normal prisons if you try and get out, so it's not a good plan.

But I mean, the conclusion of most people who look into it is that the disadvantages of the odd escaped, not too dangerous prisoner are outweighed by the advantages of the fact that places like Finland and Norway is another one like this have a recidivism rate of 20%.

So only 20% of prisoners, after like, I think it's 10 years, end up back in prison.

Whereas here, it's 75%.

And in the US, it's 83%.

Wow.

So it seems to be working.

And also, there's no challenge in an escape because you literally get given a key to your cell.

Yes.

The Harry Houdini of Finland is not very impressive at all, is he?

Opens the door, wanders onto onto the ferry

saves loads of money as well i don't know how our prisons which are very kind of unpleasant situations manage to be also so expensive but i think it costs whereas these ones are quite cheap so it costs the equivalent of 160 euros a day compared with 205 euros for a closed jail i guess maybe those those locks those locks cost money yeah it'll be tiny things won't it don't remember that fact james told us about when they took a single olive out of the meals on airplanes that they saved?

If you take a single bar out of a prison gate over the year, that actually leads to huge savings.

Yeah.

America used to have rotating prisons, which I did not know.

That sounds fun.

It's unbelievable.

It's basically there's a central pole and there's a cylinder of cells all the way around it.

And if the warden turns a crank, I've no idea the mechanism that powers this.

It must have been pretty big.

The prison rotates and you get locked away.

You basically don't have a door to escape through once the prison has been been rotated.

Oh, that's clever.

A bit like an escape room.

It's exactly like an escape room.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There are only a couple left.

One of them is called Squirrel Cage and it's in Iowa and that was three stories tall.

But that's not a functioning, that's now a sort of museum heritage thing, isn't it?

There are no rotating prisons currently operating in America.

Yeah.

That would be too much like fun.

Because they were really dangerous.

It was too dangerous for the prisoners as well.

Because let's, well, let's say a fire broke out in the prison or if the mechanism broke down and it took ages to fix, you would have people dehydrated, not being able to eat, not being able to escape.

Yeah, absolutely.

It was too chaotic, so they eventually had to abandon it.

I assumed you were saying that people got squished as the rotating happened, like in the revolving door.

Oh, no.

Oh,

your hand could be caught as if it's suddenly, if you were putting your hand outside the bar and they suddenly very quickly rotated it.

They were saying that hands would get lobbed off and arms.

What?

Yeah, so it was a very dangerous mechanism.

Jesus, squishy.

you just need a recording that you get at the theme parks.

Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle/slash prison cell at all times, and they won't get lopped off.

Wow.

Boy.

Oh, that turned horrific very quickly.

Another very dangerous prison that is also a kind of open prison is this extraordinary place, San Pedro Prison in Bolivia.

It's the largest prison in La Paz, and it basically is its own town,

but sort of not deliberately.

deliberately it's through corruption really so the inmates all have jobs within the prison walls and the only way in which it's now a prison is that it's surrounded by guards who won't let you out but the inmates all have these jobs they rent accommodation they live in there with their families quite often they get their money mostly from working in the cocaine factory inside the prison

and then they sell the cocaine to tourists who come and visit the prison and in the 90s I don't know if any listeners were backpacking in the 90s but apparently it was a backpacker hotspot.

It was this unwritten rule that if you went to the Paz as a backpacker, you could get let into this prison and hang out in this really quite dangerous environment, just lapping up the

local culture.

And the only reason they cracked down is because they used to offer tours around the prison.

And the government cracked down on this because they thought the police would be extorting the money from the illegal tours.

And they have politicians and stuff inside.

They have elected leaders in the prison who apparently enforce the laws of the community mainly by stabbing people.

Wow.

That's like a fit, like only in the hand or something.

You know, you steal an apple, you get stabbed in the hand.

Because you can't just send someone to prison within a prison, I guess.

No.

No.

Okay.

It sounds like you're an advocate for this place, Anna.

It does a little bit, especially when you said it's where you get the cocaine and then you're like, oh, and this is also the place where you lap up the local culture, which sounded like the most obvious euphemism for drug taking I'd ever heard in my life.

You can lap it up, you can sniff up the local culture.

Rub the local culture into your gums if you want to.

It's the backpacking experience.

Oh my word.

You guys, of course, know Eamon de Valera, the hero of Irish politics, right?

Sure, but why don't you just, for the listeners at home, why don't you quickly explain to them?

Eamon de Valera, great hero of the Irish independence movement.

He was locked up in, oh, I think it was about 1917 or 18, right?

That's right.

And

he escaped, right?

But the story of how he escaped is absolutely insane.

He was in for possibly conspiring with Germany.

That was the charge.

So he stole a key from the prison chaplain.

Impressive.

He got some candles from the chapel and he pressed the key into the candles, right?

So now he's got an impression of the key.

But the problem is, you need someone to make the key.

You know, he didn't have the facility to do that.

You need to make some metal to pour into the thing, right?

Exactly.

So what they did was,

he and a couple of, I think, co-fellow prisoners, they sent the IRA a Christmas card on which they had got someone to draw a cartoon of a drunk man holding a big key.

And the key that they drew on the card was an exact copy of the impression he had taken from the chaplain's key, right?

So

basically, it was a code saying, make a key that looks like this and it'll get me out.

The guards didn't notice.

They made the key to the dimensions on the card.

They sent it inside a cake, genuinely inside a cake.

Christmas cake, probably.

Probably.

It got through.

It didn't fit the lock.

They made it too small.

As soon as he got it out of the cake, he thought, oh, this doesn't fit.

Did they make it the size of the drawing on the card?

That's the big mistake.

Well, they had to do it again.

They had to send another amusing cartoon, this time with a kind of Celtic symbol in the middle of which was a key.

I was going to say, did they have to wait till next Christmas or did they do it like maybe as a Valentine's card or an Epiphany card?

They were like, oh, in Ireland, this is the thing we do every year.

So then basically, they had to set, they sent the second cartoon, they sent it back another key.

That also did not work.

This time it was too big.

The Goldie locks, the Goldie unlocks key is coming up.

Very nice.

Eventually, they just sent, so they sent a third cake to the prison, and inside that cake was just a blank key and a set of files saying, make your own bloody key.

And it worked.

Wow.

Um, just one weird thing on prison, like living within a prison, is that women don't have to wear prison-issue clothing in British jails, and men do.

And that's been the case since 1971.

And it's because research finds that people adhere to the rules better if they're not actually wearing a uniform.

And I think the idea is that it sort of humanizes you, and so you're more willing to obey the rules.

In America, it was famously quite strict penal system.

The inmates often do have to wear orange.

Or in fact, when Orange is the New Black came out, some prisons stopped their female inmates from wearing orange and made them go back to stripes because orange had become cool.

Really?

Not allowed to be cool.

There is in Norway as well at the Bastoy Rehabilitation Center.

I don't know if it's the pronunciation of that.

It's got an O with a line through it.

Bastui, I think it is.

Bastui.

They have a similar thing where the guards don't wear uniforms and they don't wear uniforms because they say they don't want to create sort of unnecessary division between them and the prisoners there, who they don't call prisoners, they call residents because it just feels more friendly.

It just feels like a cool dad, really, that prison.

I've tried a bit too hard.

Speaking of words that begin with B-A-S-T, as we just were

with your bastui place or whatever it was.

Segway incoming.

The place in Finland, which is called Suomenlinne, is it, Anna?

How would you say?

Suomenlinne.

Yeah.

Suomenliner.

That is, like you said, a famous tourist attraction.

And it's because it's a bastion fort.

And a bastion fort, you guys might have seen these, it's where you have a fortress, but instead of being a normal castle, it's in a star shape.

Have you ever seen those?

You get them around Europe, don't you?

Do you know why you have star-shaped castles or why you used to have star-shaped castles?

Is it something defensive?

Is it to confuse aeroplanes because they'll look at the castle and think that that's up because it's a star, so they'll fly in the opposite direction.

brilliant such a good idea oh my god that's so genius but no it was a time before planes unfortunately okay

but andy was pretty much there so um basically it was in a time of cannonballs And if you fire a cannonball at a normal castle, it's going to hit the wall and it might make some damage.

But if you fire the cannonball at a surface which is not straight on, which is not perpendicular, it's actually slightly slanted, then the cannonball might just kind of hit the edge of it and skid off the side of it.

And so the idea was to make these star-shaped forts where if anyone was firing cannons at you, then it wouldn't initially do as much damage.

And so that's why they have a lot of them.

That's so clever.

So clever.

Is that a thing called, I want to say a ravelin?

Or it might be connected to a ravelin.

I think it is that, yeah.

I remember reading that word while I was...

reading this fact, but yeah.

Because there's, I went to one of them in Kronborg when we were all on tour in Denmark.

Oh, yeah.

There's Castle Kronborg, which is the setting for Hamlet.

Oh, yeah.

And they have got these star-shaped fortifications outside, and it makes it, yeah, as genuine.

And that's a ravelin.

Useless to throw a javelin at a ravelin, right?

Yeah.

As the saying goes.

That's their catchphrase.

They got that painted above the gates.

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

My fact this week is that one of Hawaii's biggest annual festivals is devoted entirely to spam.

That's

spam the food.

So

when they invite you to the spam festival, do they send you 5,000 emails telling you it's on every year?

Extend your penis at the Hawaii Spam Festival.

Yeah, I love this fact.

It was given to me in a conversation that I had with a mutual friend of ours, Jason Haisley.

We were chatting about it and he said, by the way, did you know that they have the Waikiki Spam Jam, which is this annual spam festival that takes place in Hawaii?

And it is a massively popular festival there.

35,000 people attend according to their website.

They have live bands playing.

They have merch.

You can get spam t-shirts, shorts, slippers.

They have craft booths.

Can I just check?

Sorry, the t-shirt, shorts, and slippers, they're not all made of spam, are they?

No, they just feature a picture of spam, I'm guessing.

Right.

Because that would be absolutely disgusting and not survive a wash.

I got to say, Dan, when you sent round this fact, I thought that it was a massive exaggeration.

And I've been to Hawaii and they have lots of festivals all the time.

And I was like, there's no way that the spam one is one of the biggest, which is what you say, but it so is.

It's absolutely huge.

Yeah.

And they are obsessed.

Hawaii is obsessed with spam and they have spam in places that I've never heard of or dreamt of thinking they would would appear.

Okay, no need to get into personal feeders.

Well, okay, maybe I big that up too much, but you know, McDonald's has spam burgers and so does Burger King.

They have a spam burger and yeah, you can get them in all the local dishes, everything.

Spam is just integrated all over Hawaii.

I think the most common way in Hawaii that it's served is quite nice because it's a sushi spam.

And that's kind of a nod to they've got a big Japanese population, actually.

And also, I think it's quite nice because Hawaii obviously has quite a difficult history with Japan.

And now they serve spam sushi and it's spam on top of sushi rice wrapped in seaweed.

And it's called spam musubi.

And that's where you'll usually see it.

I think the reason that spam is so popular, not just in Hawaii, but also throughout the whole of the Pacific, is due to the war, isn't it?

It's due to the Second World War because basically the Japanese soldiers took over a lot of these islands and the people, people, whenever they grew food, they had to give it to the Japanese soldiers and they were forced to do all this stuff.

And then when the Americans came and sort of liberated them, they didn't have any food.

They were just kind of searching for any kind of food they could eat.

But the American soldiers had tons of this stuff.

Like they had spam coming out of their ears,

the American soldiers during the Second World War.

So they gave it to the to the locals and that's where the kind of love of spam came from.

Yeah.

I listened to a podcast all about spam, which was great.

It's actually the business insider podcast.

It's called Brought to You By, and it's about the kind of the stories behind big old brands.

And anyway, it was like places that have had a US military presence around that time because spam was just kind of taking off,

and places that have rice-based dishes because apparently it goes very well with rice.

And then places with very hot climates because it's canned, and so it's like a canned meat that you don't even need to put in the fridge.

So it's like Korea, Guam, the Philippines.

It's massive.

True.

The founder was a man called Hormel, and the firm that still makes it is called Hormel Hormel.

So his son took over the family firm, Jay Hormel, and he was interviewed by the New Yorker in 1945, just as the war was ending.

And he said that there was a file called the scurrilous file, which contained hundreds of letters of abuse sent to him by soldiers all over the world, saying, I have to eat this spam and it's disgusting, right?

And he said in this interview, maybe the verb to spam will come out of this war.

Nothing would surprise me anymore.

I.e., he was saying that sending random letters or communications to someone who hasn't asked for it is to spam.

Now, that is not where the word spam as the verb for email comes from, but it is an earlier link between the two concepts.

Isn't that weird?

That is so good.

That is so good.

We should say what the sort of received.

acknowledged fact of where it comes from is which is it was a monty python sketch where terry jones was running a restaurant where the only thing that you could have was spam.

And would you like spam, spam, spam, spam?

It just was always different.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.

And that's where the people who gave it its name took it from that.

So, but I think you're right, Andy.

I think that's that's more of a direct.

Very weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Monty Python sort of ruined spam for a while.

For a while, Hormel was really angry about it.

It was just getting popular again.

I think people hated it in the Second World War.

And then they started to enjoy it in the 40s and 50s.

There were these spam girls, weren't there?

These hallmail girls who the company employed.

And they were a band.

They were this musical group.

And they were worried because after World War II, 90% of sales had been to the army.

And they thought, oh my God, we're going to stop selling it.

And so the hallmail girls traveled around the US in 35 white Chevies doing sort of singing, dancing, parades.

They had their own radio show, and sales shot up.

They made spam cool.

They were known as the spamettes sometimes, this band.

and they were all dressed in like um soldiers in not soldiers' uniform, but like uh soldiers' band uniform, weren't they?

And it was kind of to remind you of the of the wartime effort, really.

Um, yeah, but then also Hormel sold chili honkani, so he saw this thing with the hormel girls working so well in America, so he thought, Okay, I'm gonna try and do it with chili concani.

So he created a mariachi band

which went around Mexico trying to sell Hormel chili concani.

How did that go?

It sounds like it was less successful.

It was less successful, yeah.

Hormel's grandson was also in the arts.

He still is.

He's a guitarist, and we all will have heard his work.

He's called Smokey Hormel, and Smokey is his birth name.

That's not a nickname.

He was called Smokey.

It sounds like the company was too used to naming hands by that point.

And he's a guitarist.

He plays blues and country, but he also appears on albums by Adele and by Beck and by, yeah, McJagger.

And he's the main guitarist on what was Johnny Cash's big final major hit, Hurt, the nine-inch nails cover.

Kid Rock, Joe Strummer.

I mean, he's done them all.

Well, Mel have a new innovation.

They've got a thing that they've just announced this October.

It's bacon-scented face masks.

All right, okay.

In a very 2020 story, they say it has.

Is that to wear when you're asleep?

No, it's to wear when you're going out and about and you want to

constantly not like a face mask that covers your eyes.

Not a sleep mask.

I mean a COVID-y face mask.

James, have you been going around in these COVID times just wearing a sleep mask every day?

It's terrible.

I keep walking into people.

How are you supposed to keep two meters away from people when you can't even see them?

Because I was thinking, like, a sleep mask that smells of bacon is completely pointless because the smell of bacon famously wakes you up, doesn't it?

Oh,

no,

this is a thing.

They claim it has, and I'm quoting here, the latest in pork-scented technology.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know what the last thing in pork-scented technology was, but it says, keep the delicious smell of bacon always wrapped around your nose.

Not sure.

You can get a spamarita.

along a similar vein, which is a spam-flavoured cocktail.

And Soho, here in this very capital.

Wow.

Yeah, get it at a Jinju Korean restaurant in Soho, and it's made of tequila, mezcal, agarvey nectar, pineapple, and fresh lime.

Sounds absolutely delicious until you add the spam.

One more member of the Hormel family, which we were talking about a few minutes ago, is James Hormel.

And he is the main donor of the Hormel Center of San Francisco Public Library, which collects all the important sort of LGBTQ books from the last 20, 30, 40 years of American history.

And he also was the first openly gay man to represent the US as an ambassador.

So this was under Clinton's administration, and they needed a new ambassador for Luxembourg.

And they chose this guy, James Harmel, obviously done a lot of philanthropy and stuff.

And so he's a really good person to have to do this.

But the Republicans were just not having it.

They were like, we cannot have an openly gay man representing the United States as an ambassador.

So there's a massive, massive argument.

And to support their argument, the Republicans went to the Hormel Library and then looked through all of the history and then found a load of what they regarded as very pornographic things.

And they said, look, this man supports pornography.

He shouldn't be representing the United States.

And it got really, really high up, this argument, until it was pointed out that all of the works that they pointed out were in his library were also in the library of congress

so yeah and then he became

yeah and then he became spam on your face

have you heard of um

mark benson

no andy you don't mean mark benson do you i do give it his full name mark i love spam benson

are we got we're going from one great philanthropist to another here here out there.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And what links them?

A single can of spam.

This is a spam lover called Mark Benson.

He's from the UK.

And in 2017, he and his wife went to the festival in t-shirts saying, Mr.

and Mrs.

I Love Spam Benson.

So his wife's in on it too.

And he has changed his name.

He's just the Hawaiian festival they went to.

Yes, they did.

And not only that, and not only has he legally changed his middle name to I Love Spam,

but I think if Mark Benson really likes spam he'd change his first name to I Love Spam

actually I think you can hide your middle name can't you?

That's a good point.

I mean he does have a t-shirt saying his name.

He's not gone very far to hide it.

But they went to Hawaii after they went to the Spam Museum which is where's that?

Is it Minnesota?

It's at the headquarters.

They call it the Guggenham.

Very cleverly.

But they went to the museum and they got married there.

They got married at the Spam Museum.

The Spam's brand manager

got themselves ordained in order to officiate at this wedding.

So

it's the most spam-themed wedding ever.

So good.

You are now spam in life.

What on earth?

He said, do you know why he said he changed he loves spam so much?

Or he said he changed his name as a tribute to spam, to his grandpa, who worked in the spam factory in Liverpool Liverpool, and to the war effort.

Okay, quite right.

It's one way to remember the war, I think.

That museum that's.

Oh, go on, Andy.

You're about to say something.

Well, they've got some lovely children as well, so we know at least they didn't need a spam donor.

Okay, I'm glad they let you talk there.

That museum is in Austin, in Minnesota, and it sounds quite interesting.

They have volunteer guides that are known as spam bassadors,

and they walk around the spam museum with little bits of spam on toothpicks which they call spam poles.

Oh my god.

Did you guys hear about the 1990s spam carving contest in Seattle?

No.

This was amazing.

It ran for 10 years before being shut down.

Or maybe

people lost interest.

I don't know.

But you were given two cans of spam, one plastic knife and 15 minutes, right?

You were allowed to bring your own extra tools if you wanted to, but power tools and chainsaws were explicitly banned.

Sorry, two cans of spub, and you might want to use power tools.

Well, you're absolutely right.

You would have been, you would have gone on very well with the organizers, James, because they said that's overkill.

Well, sometimes it's hard to open those tins, isn't it?

So you might need a sort of pneumatic drill to get in there.

I think they're wrinkles,

aren't they?

To ourselves, they are wrinkles.

They are wrinkles.

I'm looking at them upside down.

But

there were so many sounding winners.

There was in 1994 the winner was nude descending a staircase.

Someone had carved that in spam in a quarter of an hour.

Are you sure that wasn't just a description of the person who'd won?

I've not done a very good sculpture, but I am nude and I am walking down the staircase.

Other winners included Jurassic Pork,

Spam Henge, very good.

And my favourite, a model of singer Spammy Wynnette, singing Spam by Your Man.

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 all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James at James Tarkin.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

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 our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Bits of merchandise are up there as well.

Go check it out.

Anyway, we'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then with another episode.

Goodbye.

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