344: No Such Thing As The Icelandic Trampoline Corps

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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 Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that's Anna.

My fact this week is that in India, you automatically get a government job if you qualify for the Olympics.

And if you win a medal, you get a promotion.

Wow.

Wow.

Does the size of the promotion depend on the size of the medal?

Not the size of the medal, the material from which the medal is made.

Yeah, you don't get sort of of giant gold medals, do you?

It does, yeah, essentially.

I think the level of promotion depends on how well you do generally.

And it's not just at the Olympics, it's in various other sporting competitions.

So this is a system which seems to exist state to state.

They have various different policies from one state to the next, and it seems to also exist at a federal level.

And the truth is that to train to qualify for the Olympics is basically a full-time job.

And a lot of people can't afford to take time out of work.

Like, where do you find the money to support that?

the athlete's diet can be very expensive and so the way the indian government and state governments encourage their citizens to you know get get sporty is to give them government jobs which is like monthly salary you can't be fired you get medical care you get a pension but they do actually have to turn up to work so that's

yeah go on if you

Are the government jobs you get related to the sport that you do?

So if you're a really good high jumper, do they sometimes give you a job like turning on light switches on very big walls?

Oh yeah, those really high light switches that are purposely behind normal human high jumpers.

I guess the reason they put them there in the first place is because they were installed by high jumpers.

Exactly, yeah.

It's a vicious circle.

It's the whole thing.

I mean, is it like that?

It's not, no, is it?

No.

It is.

Is the answer?

It's exactly like that.

Yeah, it's a very good question.

They almost all work for the railways, don't they?

Or a lot of them.

Yeah.

Police force as well.

The biggest employers are the railway, the police force, the army,

but various government departments.

So there's an air rifle world record holder called Suma Shiru.

And she got a job on the railway, for instance, and she had to turn up to work sort of not, I don't think every day, but quite regularly and just did data entry.

Literally sitting at a computer doing data entry in order to claim her government salary.

Well did she.

Did she do it from a computer which was 10 meters away from her?

Because she's so good at air rifle.

Well she was shooting it.

And she has to shoot each key.

There was an old game called Duck Hunts which came out before any of you guys were born, which probably would be quite useful for that.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's how she trained.

I think I'd stretch this beyond the point.

But it seems like in some cases that the athlete, it's the other way around.

They became athletes and tried to get into competitions just to secure a lifetime government job.

Wow.

So, because you get, as Anna said, the pensions, you get medical, you get lifetime job, basically.

But surely that would be easier to just get the job than become an elite athlete, considering how difficult it is to become an elite.

You know, you have to get to the Olympics.

That's pretty hard.

Some people are very bad at data entry, James, but naturally quite fit.

It's amazing how badly India does at the Olympics relative to the population size.

So they've won 28 medals total at the Olympics, which is the same as Michael Phelps has won.

Wow.

Now, it's obviously, Michael Phelps is very, very good at the Olympics, but India has roughly a billion people.

And in 2008, they won one medal per 383 million of their population.

So that's a low hit rate, basically.

That's what people say, isn't it?

Like, it's not really fair, the Olympics, because, you know, you might say, well, it's not fair that, you know, some countries in the Eastern Bloc might have used drugs or whatever, but also it's not really fair that the rich countries just get.

to do way better because we have way better diets, we have better facilities, we have better everything in the Western world.

So, yeah, it's pretty hard to be just a lowly born Indian person and get into the Olympics.

And that's a huge amount of the population population are basically excluded because of for financial reasons from even ever having this as an option in their lives.

So it's not really a billion people who are in the pool to be selected.

But they do, there's a stat that I read in an article talking about this where they say that there's more than a hundred billionaires in India.

That's a lot of, that's a lot of billionaires, which means there must be a lot of millionaires, which must mean there must be a middle class that is good at sport and have the facilities and have the training.

That's true.

They just don't do it for some reason.

Well, there's a saying.

There's a popular Hindi saying, and this is the translation of it.

It's, if you study hard, you will live like a king, but if you play sports, you will ruin your life.

So it might be a cultural thing as well.

I think there's a bit of a disadvantage as well to the people who have grown up wanting to work and get high up in the railway services.

You know, imagine you're like, I want to kick ass and be at the height of this job.

And then you've suddenly got this Olympian who's won a silver medal getting promoted over you because that's part of the, like there's a guy called Sandeep sejwal who he competed in breaststroke at the 2008 beijing olympics and he's never been to the office because he's always training but he's got this full-time job and he says if you swim continuously and win a medal at the nationals or just represent the indian railways at the national level you can get promoted so i'm going to file for a promotion hopefully i get it and then i'll be the boss he might be the boss of

of some guy who's worked his whole life to get up the railway.

It's mad.

The system's crazy.

I think we'll we'll know when the Indian, entire Indian railway infrastructure falls apart, it's because of this breaststroke professional, isn't it?

Who's risen to the top and ruined it?

Yeah.

But it's good for the state departments because what they get in return is PR, right?

So it's sort of seen as them representing the police or the army or the railways when they go and compete.

That's what they get in return.

Also, the Indian Railway competes in national championships of things.

So like you might have American colleges competing or or at least like on a semi-professional level they play.

But the Indian Railway has like teams that are in all of these different spots.

So it does give them, you know, like Anna says, a lot of good PR.

Have you guys heard of Abhinav Bindra?

No.

He's great.

He is an air rifle champ.

India's actually really good at the air rifle for some reason that, you know, countries just have the thing that they're really good at.

So when he won, his training was amazing for it.

So he ordered 10,000 specially Chinese-made air rifle pellets, right?

And he weighed every single one of them on the super sensitive scale.

And he looked at each one under a magnifying glass.

And if there was any irregularity in it, it went in the bin.

Wow.

You see, that's where the admin skills come in, isn't it?

Right.

That's data entry.

You've got a spreadsheet with 10,000 pellets in it.

He, Abhinav Bindra, is India's only gold medalist, isn't he?

He's the only individual to win a golden medal.

An individual, right?

Yeah, so they won.

Basically, India's won a very large number of gold medals in hockey.

To be fair to them,

they did really dominate.

1920 to 1980, they won 11 medals in 12 Olympics in hockey, and eight of them were gold.

And the highlight was 1948, and this really must have felt good.

1948, so immediately after independence for India, when the final or the silver gold, you know, showdown, however, the Olympics works, was against Britain and they beat Britain 4-0.

So it must have been fun.

Well, they had that golden period

where they were winning goals.

It was 1928, 1932, 1936.

They won the golds and they had this one amazing guy called Richard Allen who was the goalkeeper for the team.

And in that time, in those three Olympics, he only conceded three goals.

One of them was in 1932 when they were playing in LA.

They beat America.

They beat the USA 24 to 1.

And the only reason they scored the goal was because Richard Allen was off field signing autographs for fans.

No.

He just sort of went off to sign.

Yeah, and that's the only time that they got a goal.

I would say that's bad goalkeeping.

That's amazing.

At the 1948 one, the hockey team, when they won, would have got their gold medals, but no ribbons.

Because this was the Austerity Olympics.

So this was held in Britain and was, you know, rationing was still happening.

Everyone was a bit poor.

There was that whole war thing that had just happened.

And so it was the Austerity Olympics.

Medals were given without ribbons.

I can't believe that they made the saving on the ribbon i can't believe they looked at the big gold medal and ribbon combo and go where can we economize but you you can't just give people a ribbon if they want

no

so this rule in india um they've changed it slightly this year so there's more sports that you can do which will allow you to get your government job so if you are in the tug of war you can get it now if you play roll ball or if you play malakamb so those are the three main new sports that have have come in.

Two of them are traditional, well, two of them are Indian sports.

Roll ball isn't traditional Indian.

That was invented quite recently and that's kind of like basketball on roller skates.

And Malakamb is a traditional Indian sport.

And there was a Malakamb team who have already got Olympic medals.

So Malakamb is a sport where you get a big, huge pole and you have to balance on top of it while doing yoga moves.

Okay, so this is a really awesome sport in India.

And in 1936, there was a Malacamba group who went to Germany and they showed off their skills.

And Adolf Hitler was so impressed that he gave them all Olympic medals.

Wow.

Wow.

I've read a tiny bit about Malakamb.

Is it true that the pole in Malakam represents the phallus of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god?

And did Hitler know that when he gave out these headings?

I think probably.

Yeah, I do know you have to lubricate it before you get on it so that you don't get any

wood burns.

Wow.

That's fair.

But a lubricated pole would not be a very stable

slip, wouldn't you?

That's the sport, Dan.

Yeah.

Right.

There's a different level.

There's different levels of lubrications, I suppose.

You can have like just covered in butter or you can have it just slightly smooth so you don't like get any splinters.

And I think it's closer to the second one.

Is it...

Are they doing the yoga moves on top of the pole?

Yeah, they're kind of balancing.

So imagine a yoga move where you're on one foot and then your other foot is kind of wrapped around your head or something.

Well, you're doing that, but your foot on the ground isn't on the ground, it's on top of a massive pole.

And is there on the top of the pole, is there a little platform you can squeeze your foot on or is it?

It's not a platform.

It's the end of a pole.

It's the end of a pole, but it's kind of...

That's very difficult.

Well, that's a least spot for you.

Again, I think it's probably easier to just do the exam to get into the government job.

I'll stick to data entry.

It feels like there's a time with the pole vault that they should be able to do.

As in, you start doing the pole vault, but

when you get right to the top, you just stay there.

Oh, you downward dog it.

That occasionally does happen with pole vault, where they kind of get to the top and they run out of momentum.

And they almost, it looks like they're just going to stay there.

And then what happens is the weight of the person kind of bends the pole down and they get sprung off like a cartoon.

That does happen on occasion.

They never get stuck at the top.

funny.

That's funny.

They fired.

Eventually, the Olympics just goes home and that is left there and they copy this topic.

Somebody, please.

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

My fact this week is that the photo of the Wright brothers' first flight was taken by a man who had never used a camera before.

So we're lucky it's not just a picture of someone's feet.

Lucky he didn't have it on selfie mode or something.

That way.

His first ever photo.

His first ever photo.

I read that he'd never seen a camera before.

Yeah.

It was.

Exactly.

Like every imagine the day for that guy.

He's seeing a camera.

He's seeing a photo where plane's flying.

This is a big thing.

This is magic.

Yeah.

So this is a guy called John T.

Daniels, and he was working at the life-saving station at Kill Devil's Hill, which is where the first flight took place on December 17th, 1903.

And he was positioned with the camera by the Wright brothers, who were obsessed with cameras.

They told him everything he needed to do.

And there's really a lot of risk when you think about it as well, because they needed to position the camera at a place where they believed the plane was going to take off, having never took off before on a plane.

They needed to tell him the exact moment for him to press this button that would allow them to capture the perfect shot.

And they were giving it to a man who, as we said, not only had not seen a camera before, but was about to witness flight, man-powered flight.

And so there was a genuine moment where he almost forgot to press it because he was so in awe of the historical thing that he was seeing.

And at the last second, kind of shook himself and took the photo.

And by some insane magic, we have the perfect shot.

It developed perfectly.

It caught it perfectly in flight.

And it's an amazing photo.

It's a cool thing to reflect, actually, when you look at that picture, which I guess people have probably seen before, to think how unlikely that was that that was actually going to work.

I mean, how did they pick the exact spot?

Because you can't swivel it around, can you?

No.

Exactly.

I don't think they had a turn.

Even if they did, the guy wouldn't have known what to do.

Yeah.

And from the account of it, he was also that day involved in the first ever plane crash.

Yes.

So, because after they landed it, after their flight, it blew away because it was really light.

It was basically a glider with a little bit of an engine.

And he got tangled up in it.

He tried to grab it as it blew away, just tried to stop it from going away and he got sort of caught up in it and had to be helped out and he was he was injured yeah yeah when he flipped over he was holding onto a strut and all the others let go but he desperately didn't want this thing to break and so he flipped over with it and he was a bit mangled but he was fine but he they let him keep the strut that he was holding on to which he kept forever for the rest of his life and he would carry it around with him and every time he told this story this amazing story of being the first person to be in a plane crash he would take out a penknife and as he was telling it, he would shave off a little bit of the strut and he would give it to the person he was telling the story to.

Wow.

You've got to limit the number of times you tell that story, haven't you?

Towards the end of your life, I'm really sorry I can't tell it today.

I've just got a bit of sawdust left, to be honest.

Oh, just find another piece of wood.

Exactly.

It must be like the crucifixion, you know, the true cross.

Relics.

Yeah, relics.

There's a billion.

Wright Brothers planes worth of strut shavings out there now.

But you say as though he thought he was witnessing this incredible historic moment, which he did.

And I think there were sort of four or five people there who did think that.

But I hadn't quite realized that the rest of the world, A, thought it was nothing, what had happened, and B, didn't believe it.

So they were completely ignored by the press.

For five years after 1903, that first flight, newspapers and journalists just didn't believe them.

They told newspapers on the day that this is what they were trying to do.

And they basically thought these guys were crazy crackpots.

It's such a slam.

It's such a slam to say not only did nothing happen, we don't don't even believe that nothing happened.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

Quite nicely, the only paper that did report on them on that first day was a paper called The Virginia Pilot by chance.

But the way they got the story was the Wright brothers, once they'd achieved flight, they telegraphed to their families to be like, hey, mom, hey, dad, we've flown.

And so the telegraph operator said, oh, couldn't help but notice that message you just let me mum and dad.

Do you mind if I tell the press?

And they said, no, don't want you to tell the press because they wanted the press in Ohio, where they were from, to get the story first.

And the telegraph operator ignored that, told the Virginia pilot, but Virginia pilot knew nothing about it.

So they completely made up what had happened.

And so they had them flying for sort of three miles.

You know, I think we've said before they only flew for about 100 feet, 120 feet.

They were like, they flew for three miles.

They were 60 feet in the air when actually they were 12 feet above the ground or something.

They said Wilbur was flying the plane when it was Orville.

And so the first account of the Wright brothers' flight was total fiction.

Total fiction from the Virginia Pilot.

I thought it was in a B magazine that they

were reported in.

It was Gleanings and Bee Culture.

So that I think those are the later.

Yeah.

Because they kept flying.

I don't know if you guys know that, but they actually did more flights after their first ones.

And

the...

I say quit while you're ahead.

Completely, yeah, yeah.

But this, they were doing these flights.

Oh, where exactly was it?

I can't remember if it was still a killer.

In Dayton, though.

In Dayton, okay, yeah.

And this was in 1904 and 1905 when they were making flights up to 40 minutes long and nobody paid any attention.

It was amazing.

I made dozens.

But this guy, Amos Ives Root, he had kind of heard about it and he saw them flying

because they were out in the styx.

They weren't near a major population centre.

And he wrote to Scientific American and Scientific American didn't reply.

So he wrote it in Gleanings in Bee Culture.

along articles which are things like beekeeping in the southwest and midwinter flights of sellered bees and it's just

mixed in with that.

Do you think they got complaint letters from bee fans saying, I couldn't really see what relevance your article about the first ever powered flight had?

Amos Eisrout was so cool, so he owned the first ever bicycle in Ohio.

That makes him cool.

Definitely.

Yeah, he was friends with them, wasn't he?

And he had, I think he just had his own kind of comment page in Gleanings of Bee Culture where he was allowed to write about whatever whatever he wanted, even if it wasn't about bees.

That's so cool.

The first lot, what was the hill called, Dan?

It was called Kill Devil.

Kill Devil.

So Kill Devil Hill.

And that was in Kitty Hawk, wasn't it?

That's where they did it.

And the reason that they went there is Wilbert.

Well, when you're flying, you need like

some wind coming straight towards you.

It helps you to take off, right?

And he wanted to find out where the best place in the U.S.

to go for that was.

So he wrote to the U.S.

Weather Bureau, who sent him data on the wind velocity in more than 100 places around America.

And he settled on this place where he knew there was a hill.

He knew that they had really good, steady wind always coming in their favor.

And then he went to Kitty Hawk because it was just like a bit of nothing kind of marsh, not marsh ground, but kind of wilderness ground.

There was nothing there.

There was like 50 households.

They were all descended from sailors who'd been shipwrecked there over the years.

So they were all like, it was like a sailing community.

And the richest person that lived in that town was a guy called Doc Cogswell and he was the richest because his brother owed him $15,000.

It sounds miserable when their conditions when they were living there because they had to dig for water.

They had to catch their own fish.

One of them said that there were so many mosquitoes, they almost darkened the sun.

Whoa.

I know.

It just sounds like really unpleasant living conditions, but they went out there for weeks and weeks on end.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's got such an ominous name.

If I were trying to fly for the first time ever, I would ask not to fly in a place called Kill Devil.

I don't want either of those words in the place I'm attempting to fly.

It's true.

And they, um,

it was a it was a thing, wasn't it, that people not only didn't believe it, but they didn't think it was possible that we could fly.

And there's a few, you got some famous quotes from that period before they went up of people saying this will never happen.

There was one bishop who was asked if he thought that flying would ever happen.

And he said,

what a nonsensical idea.

Flight is reserved for the birds and the angels.

And that bishop was called Bishop Wright.

And that was the father of the Wright brothers.

Really?

Yeah.

He absolutely thought there was no way.

And once they did it, and after the years of them doing it, he actually loved it.

And he used to go up with the brothers separately.

He had a rule.

They couldn't fly together.

He didn't want to lose them both in a crash.

But he would fly with one of them and he'd go, higher, higher, get me higher.

I think he went up just once, didn't he?

It was the one day he allowed the brothers to fly together in 1910.

It was that day once he'd done that.

They didn't all go up in the same plane, though.

No, that would have been really all eggs in one basket.

Yeah.

You just got mum left.

Not the bishop.

But it wouldn't have been...

It wouldn't have been just mum left because there were two other Wright brothers.

Yeah.

And the Wright sister.

Yes.

They had more weird weird names.

The brothers, the other brothers, were called Ruchlin, Reuchlin, and Lauren.

And they just worked as bookkeepers and they appear to have had no interest in flight.

Whereas the Wright Sister is the reason that we kind of accept the Wright brothers as the first flyers today, because the Smithsonian, they thought that the first person to fly was a guy called Samuel Langley, which he did in 1903, nine days before the Wright brothers.

But what he actually did was fly his plane for about maybe about half a meter meter before it smashed straight into a lake or something.

But they said they didn't believe the Wright brothers at all.

And so they decided that this guy Langley was the first person.

But then for years and years, Catherine Wright, who was the sister, it was her life's job to try and make sure that people believed that the Wright brothers were the first people to do it.

And she was super famous in her day, wasn't she, Catherine Wright?

Yeah, it was pretty much the three of them who were equally famous, it seemed, because the Wright brothers were bad with the press.

I think they were not good media personalities.

They were very shy whereas Catherine Wright was very gregarious and so she was like the front facing right

and so she like met the king of Spain and the prince of Prussia and spoke for them at events.

She got the French Legion d'Honneur which they gave the Wright brothers and Catherine at the same time the highest order of merit you can get in France.

And yeah, she was great.

And she was the first woman ever to attend the Aéro Club de France because basically when they went to France which was when they became massive really because in America they were kind of ignored, especially they tried to sell the plane to the military, and the military just weren't having it.

So they said, fuck it, we'll go to France instead.

But the French, they love kind of aerospace.

They loved the balloons.

They loved their new gliders, things like that.

And so when they saw the Wright brothers, they absolutely loved it.

And Catherine was the main face for that, like Anna said.

That's very cool.

She had kind of a sad end.

So they were incredibly close.

And they seemed to have had a pact, Wilbur, Orville, and Catherine, that none of them would ever marry.

I think we think that's what happened.

And they made this pact very, very early on.

And she stuck to it.

She was incredibly close to Orville.

So Wilbur died in 1912, I think, but Orville lived for a long time.

Very close to him.

But eventually, 1926, age 51, she decided she wanted to marry her childhood sweetheart.

And Orville completely stopped speaking to her.

That is mean.

That is harsh.

That is very harsh.

Childhood sweetheart.

If you've waited about 45 years to marry someone.

It is harsh because they seem to have had that pact where none of them will marry.

But for Orville and Wilbur, it seemed to be quite an easy thing to keep because

they weren't particularly good with the press, but they just weren't good in social situations at all, were they?

Whereas like Catherine, she was just everywhere.

She was...

So

were the two brothers

just not sort of romantic people at all?

And they've got this mega babe sister, but they keep saying, no, no, no, we made a pact when we were all nine.

Nobody will ever get married.

The brothers, they lived together, worked together, ate together, and they even shared a joint bank account, Orville and Wilbur.

really they so yeah that's kind of easy and then catherine went on to become a suffragist didn't she uh and also the vicar went on the march with her not the vicar what was he called the bishop the bishop yeah the bishop sorry and the bishop went on the march with her so um he kind of in his and that was when he was in his 80s so he was kind of like joining in with all of the kids stuff when he got a bit old that's really that's really fun he really embraces kids' hobbies what an amazing 80s he must have had just being a bishop your whole life and then you get to to go on a plane, you get to go on a march.

That's really cool.

That thing about how they only became successful when they got to Paris.

So in Paris,

I think Wilbur was the one who went to Paris and Orville stayed in the USA.

And Wilbur was a bit more of a showman.

He was...

He was better with the press than Orville.

Orville really was quite reclusive and shy.

Wilbur was put up in the Hotel Maurice.

Have you heard of this place?

No.

Oh, my God.

It's amazing.

I got in a complete distraction about this amazing hotel he was put up in.

So it was, it's very, very classy.

It still exists today.

The lift was a copy of Marie Antoinette's sedan chair.

That's how sort of lush this hotel was.

Everyone has stayed there.

Awesome Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Picasso's wedding meal was there.

Salvador Dali stayed for one month every year.

And he once ordered a flock of sheep to be delivered to his room so he could fire his pistol at them.

Right.

Blanks.

It was blanks.

Even so, if I were at the hotel reception and someone asked for that and told me why they wanted it, I think I wouldn't do it.

I'd at least call my manager and say, I'm not comfortable doing this.

He might have asked, he might have given you the other task, which was he asked staff to go to the Tuileries garden and catch flies for him for five francs per fly.

When I used to work in a hotel, they used to say to you.

You have to say yes to everything, basically, unless it's illegal or immoral or whatever.

If they ask you for something, you always immediately have to say, yes, I could do that, but it might cost a lot of money.

You know, you have to agree to everything wow

and just hope Dali doesn't check in

oh no you see the handlebar moustache coming around the corner here we go again

it's quite hide the clocks

there's one other thing about this hotel which is that it's where the decision was made not to blow up Paris

so in the war Hitler

Hitler really kind of went off the deep end towards the end I would say and he as the retreat was being sounded he ordered lots of key bits of Paris you know know, the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, the bridges over the Seine.

He ordered them to be wired up with explosives, which they were.

And General von Choltitz or Koltitz was in the hotel and it's there that he made the decision.

He was either persuaded, we think, there are various different versions of events, or he was trying to save his own skin.

And that's the hotel where he said, actually, maybe there's a lot.

Let's not blow up the most beautiful city in Europe.

Let's just leave.

That is interesting.

But there is one other thing about the Hotel maurice um that you might be interested in andy uh because we have mentioned it before quite recently and that is because they had 148 pneumatic clocks in their hotel one in each room

that were attached to that air system in paris Of course.

Oh, I'd forgotten that.

That's so cool.

Of course they did.

I really hope that when Dali did room service, he would save the crazy request right to the end so that the person would think they were getting away with it.

What can I get you, Mr.

Dali?

It's just eggs benedict this morning.

An orange juice, please.

And is that it?

One more thing.

7,000 sheep.

And a gun.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that on the French island of Ile de Ray, the donkeys wear trousers.

Sounds like the score of the kids' book, doesn't it?

Do they wear the trousers?

What do you mean?

Like, do they wear the trousers?

Oh, I see.

As in Addie in charge.

Well, I would say

with a donkey, basically, the donkey always wears the trousers, don't they?

They don't do what you tell them to.

Very wise.

Not really.

But this are

originally working donkeys on this island.

They used to work in the salt marshes.

And in the salt marshes, there are lots of mosquitoes.

maybe not enough to block out the sun but there's definitely a lot of them and so to stop their legs from getting bitten these particular donkeys their owners would put little kind of trousers on and they look a bit like you know really old-fashioned pajama bottoms um which they would tie around the bottom part of their legs and their butt is still exposed so it's like uh like pajama bottoms with a with a flap allowing your buttocks to kind of hang out.

And so these days, they still wear the trousers, even though they don't work in the salt marshes,

but they just give rides to children around the local park, which no matter what you think about donkeys giving children rides, whether that's fair play or not, definitely better than working in the salt marshes.

Donkeys around the world, they do seem to have a very two-track career path.

Either it's horrible, backbreaking work and they get really mistreated all over the world, or it's working at the seaside taking children out for a bit.

Yeah.

They are quite, these ones are amazingly big, aren't they?

Yeah.

Before you start any too, sorry for for them having children on their back.

I didn't realise a donkey could even qualify as a donkey at this size.

So they're Bordé de Poitou is what they're called, I think.

They can be 16 hands, which is...

That's like a big horse.

That's a horse that you feel really high up when you're sitting on it.

16 hands is a big horse.

I think I might have met some of these donkeys.

Because they have them in the New Forest.

Do they?

Do they?

Yeah, they do.

They have a few of them in the New Forest.

Was it really fluffy?

Like, they're quite fluffy.

They've got long, shaggy hair.

it's very shaggy.

We and we met one right up close, although it wasn't 16 hands high, so maybe it was a younger one.

And presumably without the trousers on.

It had no trousers on.

Not by the time.

No, don't go there.

That's really cool because they're very rare.

You've seen an endangered species.

I may have just seen a normal donkey.

I already regret.

You may have seen a sheep.

It's possible.

But they're less rare than they used to be, aren't they?

They went really, really rare in the 70s and 80s, so much so that there were only a dozen or so of them left that could reproduce.

But now, thanks to some kind of bits of conservation, there's a lot more of them in France and they're starting to send them to other places like the New Forest, I assume.

I think there's about a thousand, isn't there?

Maybe just under a thousand in the world.

And you should look them up.

They do look bizarre.

They look a bit like,

you know, if you have an old English sheep dog, the really shaggy dogs, but they've got quite an irresponsible owner who doesn't look after their coat and it really dreadlocks.

It's like that, isn't it?

They've got long dreadlocks.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

What would you replace a donkey with on a beach if you had to?

I reckon like

maybe seven ducks and they have like a little carriage underneath them that the child can sit in and then fly around.

You know, I'm thinking Wright Brothers-y kind of flight is the future.

I mean, that is nice.

That's, I'd go to that beach.

That was dangerous.

In 2016, health and safety.

It's never going to pass.

Sorry, Grant.

In 2016, Torbay Council replaced their donkeys with three small trampolines, and there was outrage.

Really?

Because it wasn't as much fun.

They said this is just not as good for children or for the donkeys.

The donkey keepers were furious.

Well, do the kids have to haul the trampolines along the beach then?

I mean, if you want a ride along the beach, the trampoline's not going to cut it.

Yeah.

You could jump from one to the other, but I think if there are only three small trampolines, it's quite a short ride.

It's a quick ride, yeah.

You're not getting far.

in iceland when i went to iceland every small town has like a massive trampoline in the middle of it it's so weird

yeah it's like you know how in most in like towns you might have a park that kids play on with swings and slides and stuff in iceland they just had these massive kind of plastic kind of tarpaulin things um that appeared to be filled with air.

I don't know what they were filled with because I never jumped on them, much to my shame.

But they were like, yeah, just everywhere you went, it seemed like kids could play on these bouncy things, like bouncy castles are.

So, bouncy castle, right?

Kind of.

James, is it true?

I think I've read that they were initially for defence, as in you'd have to have someone guarding constantly jumping up and down, looking out for an invading army.

Yeah, I was, you know what?

At the start of that sentence, I genuinely thought that you were about to say something real.

I saw you going along with that.

So, donkeys, eh?

Donkeys.

Donkeys.

Donkeys are cool.

The word donkey used to rhyme with monkey.

Donkey.

Donkey.

Donkey.

Used to be donkey.

Yeah.

Nice.

And it didn't really exist until the start of the 17th century.

You would always say ass or ass instead of donkey.

So in Shakespeare, there won't be any donkeys.

They'll all be asses.

And in the King James Bible.

Was it because that was it was also rude and an insult that they kind of boulderized it?

There is one thought that that's it.

The word probably comes from dun meaning brown or grey.

But I think that's why that the word donkey became more commonly known is because of the association with bums.

Like rooster, because in America they didn't want to say cock, so they said rooster instead or man chicken.

Man chicken sounds more rude, I think.

Yeah.

So the donkeys, donkeys in the UK,

they are big on the beaches, obviously.

There are still lots of donkey rides.

So you know the Donkey Sanctuary.

That's one of the major donkey charities in the UK.

And they have, I'm going to say secret agents who travel around the UK checking up on donkey abuse and making sure that they're not being badly treated or that

their backs aren't being strained at the beach.

And they can turn up and they can, I think they have the power of,

they don't have the power of arrest, but they do have the power to take your donkeys away.

So is that if you're doing donkey rides on the beach and someone who looks suspiciously like an adult but is dressing up as a child and claiming they want a donkey ride turns up, but has sort of a notepad they're trying to hide.

That's probably your guy.

Yeah, they go undercover.

I think they do go undercover because if they phone ahead and say, I'm ringing from the donkey police, then you'll just get out the nice donkey.

Whereas if they turn up incognito and they see you've got your ratty old donkey and you're beating it, then they'll intervene.

Yeah.

Wow.

Good.

Doing great work.

It might be quite fun to be a donkey in

the US,

specifically if you're pack burrow racing in Colorado, which is a sort of ancient historic Colorado sport.

And it's in honor of miners who used to go gold mining with donkeys.

And the rule with pack burrow racing is that a donkey can't carry a person, but a person can carry a donkey, if needs be, in it.

And you basically have to run along with your donkey.

Right.

Is it one man, one donkey?

One man, one donkey.

Okay.

How often does anyone actually carry the donkey though?

Because they're pretty heavy.

They're heavy.

I was reading one person's account of his pack burrow race where he should have carried the donkey and didn't.

So I think they must be too heavy.

This is a guy called Curtis Imri, who's a veteran borough racer, and he was really near the end of a 15-mile race.

And suddenly, his donkey called Jackson had to cross a wooden bridge.

And as donkeys are want to do, he'd crossed the bridge countless times before, suddenly stopped.

Like not doing that.

That's stubborn.

And he, and right at the end of the race, and he had to tie Jackson to the bridge, walk into town and return with a winch-equipped Jeep to pull the donkey over the bridge.

At which point, I don't think he'd won the race anymore.

That's amazing.

Yeah, they do freeze donkeys.

That's the weird thing about them.

I hadn't probably realised that's what they're doing.

Like horses, if you scare them, bolt.

A donkey goes stock still, turns to stone.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, this is why people think that they are stubborn.

And this is

some study done by the Donkey Sanctuary in the UK, which is about people's perception of the donkey,

which incidentally found they're Britain's second favourite farm animal.

Pretty good.

Oh, can we guess the favourite?

After

cow.

Gotta be sheep.

No one's said the right answer yet.

Chicken.

Horse.

Man, chicken.

No, Anna's got it right.

It's a horse.

A horse.

Everyone loves a horse.

Anyway, sorry, that's completely irrelevant.

Cow does it come into the top two?

Yeah.

No one likes cows.

Oh, my God.

Wait a minute.

Donkey is number two.

Yeah, you seem rigged.

Because I think if you are a kid and you have like a set of all your farmyard animals, very rare is there a donkey in there, is it?

Or certainly cows and sheep come in first.

Are you guys suggesting that this study conducted on behalf of the donkey sanctuary was in any way improperly done?

No.

But basically, people think that.

You know what?

I just want to carry on talking about this.

What they've done is they thought, right, we need to make it seem like it's the best animal, but no one's going to believe us if we say that the donkey is the most popular five-yard animal so we're going to have to put it in second place that's what they've thought isn't it it's like when you know um kim jong-un gets 97.9 in the election it's like no one will believe 100 so i have to go down a bit

yeah but 55 of people do think they're stubborn and the donkey sanctuary explained that they're not stubborn they they're just freezing one in three people think they're affectionate and only 18 of people think they are charismatic

yet they rank number two This doesn't add up, mate.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy.

My fact is that in the late 1960s the CIA considered assassinating people using lightning.

Wow.

Is that you bringing back your old nickname and admitting that you were part of the CIA?

I'm very glad that you've mentioned my old nickname being lightning because I'm determined that it's going to make a a comeback.

So this is something, there's a great article on Forbes about this, a journalist called David Hambling, found it, and it was a proposal in 1967 that was made seriously,

but it wasn't carried out.

But the idea was developed.

They thought, well,

lightning's pretty powerful, isn't it?

And if there was a way of directing lightning,

then you could get it.

They used a real euphemism.

They said it would produce effects favourable to our purposes.

I don't don't think you don't have to read too much between the lines to realize that that's killing people with lightning, basically.

And yeah, the plan was basically to get a very, very thin wire, which would be only a fraction of a millimeter wide, but several miles long, to effectively drop this from an aircraft or to use a kind of parachute to keep it up there for a long time.

And then if there was a storm happening above the person you wanted to assassinate, it did rely on that.

That was the flaw in the plan.

The person person had to be in a lightning storm.

But wasn't also a flaw.

They had to somehow get this wire next to them.

So, like, you run over to someone and say, oh, just hold this wire, will you?

Exactly.

So it was, those were the disadvantages.

There were advantages, obviously, like cheap, because you're not getting an electricity bill for this.

And also, it would leave no evidence.

Yeah, but you can always have incredible advantages to something impossible.

That's true.

I think we should go ahead with the impossible thing because the advantages are just so good.

Yeah, that was, I mean, the disadvantages were big as well.

Yeah.

I think there's contextual evidence.

I think that if Fidel Castro had suddenly been struck by lightning around that period, it would have been very suspicious.

Well, if all the CIA's enemies suddenly got hit by lightning, I think you can do it twice.

I had a good look to see if all the, there's a list of Wikipedia people who were killed by lightning to see if any of them were possibly enemies of America at this time.

I couldn't find any, I'm afraid.

A few sports people.

One person from the American War who was the guy who invented the phrase, no taxation without, what's that one?

No taxation.

He was killed by lightning.

You're not a true believer in democracy, really, are you?

Without, what's the thing that we need for them to tax us?

So I don't really give a shit.

Yeah, so no, no, unfortunately.

Yeah.

That's a shame.

Was that, so those were the most notable people on the list?

There wasn't really anyone.

There was a few people from the, you know, from ancient times who were killed by lightning.

Not that many famous people are killed by lightning, it turns out.

It feels like if the CIA had time travel and this thing,

they probably still wouldn't use it.

Just think of the advantages of time travel, though.

Like, I know it's impossible, but just think of all the advantages.

Let's just do it.

Why aren't we doing it?

I can see, you know, anti-universal suffrage campaigner, politician, not liking the no taxation without representation gun i think there's the kernel of a conspiracy theory there that he was assassinated yeah i was aiming for a conspiracy theory and i was aiming a bit higher than this to be honest

i was hoping that an actual you know dictator from the from the soviet times had died but no shame they came up with some pretty wacky plans didn't they yeah

there was there's there was sort of a massive dump on all of us which you might remember in 2017

we all got

that's a strange weapon, isn't it?

A shit bomb.

They just came up to me in the streets and said, hold this wire.

And then before I knew it, I was covered in shit.

No, 2017, the CIA sort of dumped 13 million pages of documents on us by putting them online.

And that was 800,000 declassified files, which useful journalists went combed through and found the insane plans they had.

Like, I think it came out that they interviewed Yuri Geller.

I think that's one of my favourites in the 1970s.

They took an interest in spoon bender Yuri Geller.

And according to him, when he was asked about it, he said they were afraid that there were people like him in Russia who, I guess, would pose a threat by bending cutlery.

in the Soviet Union somehow.

And the way they tested Geller, to test his skills, was they shut him in a room.

And then the CIA taped to the wall outside his room a picture of something.

And the way they chose the picture was they opened a dictionary, they got a word, so they chose the word, for instance, bunch.

And then they drew what first came to their mind, a bunch.

And then they asked Yuri on the other side of the wall to draw what he sensed the picture was.

Was it a bunch of grapes?

Well, exactly.

He drew 24 purple grapes.

To be fair, there were 24, so that's kind of impressive.

But basically, the CIA's conclusion was he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner, which I would say he hadn't.

You hear bunch, you think grapes.

But they didn't, did they tell him the word bunch?

Yeah, they said bunch.

Oh my god.

They said we've picked the word bunch out of the dictionary.

Draw the first thing that comes to mind.

But he did draw 24 grapes and they had 24 grapes in their picture.

Yeah, but I have to specify they did this on him dozens of times and he only got a few of them right and that was one of them.

I would have drawn some flowers.

Yeah.

A bunch of flowers.

Do you know what?

I deliberately went with grapes thinking it was the wrong answer as well because I was thinking it would be flowers.

James, you are the new Yuri Geller.

What's more impressive is if you say that you've picked the word giraffe and it's actually a dub truck and he draws a dub truck.

That's, you know,

that's true.

That's when you know you've got someone dangerous on your hands.

The most impressive thing that Yuri Geller did and the most controversial actually was in Euro 96.

He was flying over Wembley Stadium in a helicopter I think.

And Gary McAllister was taking a penalty for Scotland, which would have put them level with England in the game.

And if you watch the video back, the ball moves about one inch just before he kicks the ball and he misses the penalty and then Gaza goes goes at the other end and scars and Yuri Geller claims that he made that ball move.

No.

But he doesn't claim it was the downdraft of the helicopter.

He says it was his magic powers.

But I thought you were going to say he dropped a bent spoon on his head, which is slightly concussed him.

Weirdly, I read a thing just this morning about Yuri Geller, which is that in 1974,

a paternity suit was filed against him by a young mum in Sweden.

She didn't claim that he was the dad.

What she claimed was, is that his magical bending powers had altered her contraception coil and it became inoperable.

And she got pregnant as a result.

And as a result, he should pay for that because he's the sort of pseudo-father.

Wow, that's a really difficult position to put him in because on the one hand, he really wants to admit to having those

powers.

Well, it was the same with the football thing because he wants to claim that he moved this football, but actually, he had 11,000 hate letters from Scottish people after the game saying, how could you scupper our chances in the European championships?

Wow.

Hey, I read a really cool invention by the CIA, which was used.

It's called the sky hook.

And the sky hook was basically a way of extracting CIA operatives or anyone that was in need of help, who was involved in the military in some way, from a location without having to get on the ground to pick them up.

So, what it was is that they would drop a package over to where they believed the operative was.

And

the package had a little description on it.

And in it, they had a helium balloon that would lift a cable 500 feet into the air.

And then the operative would strap themselves to a harness that was connected to the other end of that cable that went up with the balloon.

And they would sit and wait until a very slow-flying plane would fly to where the helium balloon was.

And it would hook its nose of the plane around the hook that had been sent up, and it would carry the guy off into the air and back to safety.

That is so cool.

I mean, if you timed it right, you could say, just so you know, all this time, I've been working for the CIA and then bang, you go out of there.

But if you get that even slightly wrong, then you're just immediately arrested.

Yeah.

Or if a lightning storm comes over and it attaches itself to the 500-foot wire.

He told us he was working for the CIA and then he just exploded.

Really weird.

Yeah, I can see why they didn't go with that.

Or sort of any of their mad plans.

I wish someone one day had turned around at the CIA in sort of 1950, just early on and said, you know, these crazy ideas we keep having that never come to fruition?

You know the ones that always work?

They're the ones where we just shoot someone in the head.

Should we do that from now on?

There was a guy called Edward Geary Lansdale and he was with the CIA and he was requested by the president of the Philippines to come over.

There was a United States military assistance group to come up with ideas to fight the communist Hukbalahap, which was a regime that was threatening the Philippines at the time.

And he came up with this idea of convincing them that there were vampires out in the woods.

And the way that he actually tried to convince them that this was really happening is they captured an enemy soldier and they drained the blood from his body and left him, making it look as if he was trying to flee and got caught by one of these vampires.

So when they found him, they believed the myth was real.

It's bizarre, these little tricks.

Who benefits from this?

Well, I suppose if you've got an enemy believing that there's something paranormal going on, as well as an enemy who are physically real that just keeps you on edge it keeps you psychologically all over the shop because do you remember that fact that you and i both found down about um in japan they were gonna capture some foxes and then paint them in luminous paints and then release them into the japanese countryside so that people would see these glowing foxes and think that they were some mysterious kind of um apparition Yeah, that's right.

They would believe.

And there was a thing where one was connected to some balloons.

The idea was there's a floating fox god.

Yeah, like

you'd just see the balloons, wouldn't you?

Not at night.

And you would just see the illuminated figure of a floating fox.

Floating fox.

And again, is the idea that you sort of make them all a bit edgy because there are these scary foxes around.

Or that everyone thinks it's a Pokemon and chases after it.

Again, there's just always, you know, Killjoy Barry in the corner of the meeting there going, guys, we just shoot them in the head again.

I'm really sorry.

It's a great idea.

one cia agent maybe the most surprising one uh i found out about uh was the dalai lama oh yeah yeah in the 1960s his group was being given over a million dollars a year by the cia

and they did deny that the dalai lama was on a personal retainer of 180 000 a year the his organization have denied that but that's because uh the cia were paying for uh garya operations against china when china invaded tibet and so the dalai lama was an important part of that resistance So we don't know what his kill total is.

Yeah.

That's a great series of novels to be written.

The secret CIA adventures of the Dalai Lama.

But that's another one where Barry never gets what he wants because if you do shoot the Dalai Lama in the head, he just comes back.

That is so frustrating, isn't it?

It's just a pointless assassination.

He's on your side.

You wouldn't shoot your own agent.

Maybe if you're playing a double bluff, maybe it's the Jason Bourne.

But think of it, the Dalai Lama can get to anybody.

There's no one can refuse a meeting with the Dalai Lama on security grounds.

No, that's true.

Yeah, yeah, true, true.

A lot of the people in the CIA are just massive nerds, right?

They're kind of our people.

So like when Wikileaks exposed a load of stuff that the CIA was doing in its hacking program, we managed to see a lot of what the tools were called and what the programs were called.

And they're all named after memes or...

references to pop culture.

There's one of them named after a World of Warcraft trading card.

There's another one that's named after some characters from Talladega Knights, Knights, which is the Will Ferrell movie.

And there was another document where a guy just listed a load of awesome tool names he wanted to use at some stage, including Awesome McTool Name and Starving Weasel.

And the second of those is a Weird El Yankovich song.

And they're just like, we've got to invent something so that we can give it this really nerdy name.

Yeah,

funny.

Somewhere there's a dangerous sniper CI agent who's just heard James call him a nerd.

What's that red dot that's just appeared on my head?

Actually, that's a myth, isn't it, about the red dot?

Because lasers go in a straight line, whereas bullets don't go in a straight line.

So there's no point having a red dot aiming at someone's head because it's pointing straight from the gun.

You need to be aiming slightly above the person's head if you're a stipend.

So in the film, it should be there's a red dot slightly above you on the wall.

Exactly.

And that's when you know you're in danger.

And if you there's a red dot on your head, you think, oh, few, I'm sorry.

No, you don't.

You think, oh shit, they're going to shoot me in the balls.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter 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 our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Links to bits of merchandise are there as well.

We hope you're doing well, everyone.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We will see you then.

Goodbye.

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