342: No Such Thing As A Presidential Fight Club

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Phish.

I just want to let you know that the episode you're about to listen to was recorded live at the London Podcast Festival at King's Place and that it was recorded just a few weeks ago.

That's right, we actually managed to do a live gig in the year 2020.

It was such a fun night.

It was actually the first time that the four of us had been in a room together since this whole pandemic kicked off.

It's about seven months.

So that was incredibly fun.

It was amazing to see some of the fish listeners sitting out there in the audience, all sitting there with their masks on, spread out around the auditorium, so that we can make sure everyone was nicely, socially distanced from each other.

And so, big thank you to them.

Big thank you to everyone who joined us online to watch it as it streamed.

It was our first ever global gig as a result.

And most importantly, a big thank you to the staff at King's Place who made sure everyone felt safe going ahead with this gig.

So, yeah, we hope you enjoy it.

It's our first gig of the year, possibly our last, hopefully not.

But here it is, live in London in the year 2020.

Enjoy.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the London Podcast Festival.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tachynski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my fact this week.

My fact is that Theodore Roosevelt once was shot in the chest, but survived thanks to a 50-page long speech tucked into his coat pocket.

He delivered the speech reading from pages that now had two massive bullet holes in them.

Wow.

And he did a speech which lasted about 90 minutes.

And that's where the idea of bullet points came from, isn't it?

Come on, it's been seven months.

Yeah, this happened in 1912.

He was in Milwaukee.

He was on his way to the Milwaukee auditorium, and he was in an open-top car.

And as he was standing up to wave, a gunman, who was called John Schrank shot him in the chest basically at point blank range and the bullet still went into his body and was lodged inside his body but rather than go to the hospital he said I'll just quickly do my 90 minute speech and you can actually see if you go online they have in a museum the pages of this speech and when I say massive bullet holes they are ginormous these two ginormous bullet holes but yeah he was a badass like that he was a badass like to make sure that it hadn't penetrated his lungs he coughed into his hand three times and checked for blood to make sure that he didn't have to go to hospital.

That's pretty hard, Carr, isn't it?

All of his aides were sort of standing around because they were quite nervous about this.

They thought he should go to hospital.

Lots of the crowd, he announced right at the start, he said, Friends, I should ask you to be as quiet as possible.

I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.

And so people were standing around, sort of ready to catch him at the side of the stage, basically.

And he kept glaring at them and he refused to even cut it short.

Did he not have to miss out the odd word that the bullet holes had gone through?

It actually didn't make any sense at all.

Yeah, it kind of came out as like a redacted speech that he wasn't giving us all the info on.

Did you guys see this?

This allegedly happened when he announced, by the way, I've just been shot, right at the top before he got into the actual stuff that was on his pages.

Apparently, when he said that, someone in the crowd shouted, fake.

Whoa.

Well, I didn't know Donald Trump was alive back then.

Supposedly, he stepped forward and said, no, no, it's real.

Here's my bleeding shirt.

The guy had to come up and put his finger in the hole to me.

They left the bullet in, didn't they?

Forever and ever, I think, because it was too dangerous to extract it.

So just kept it in forever.

But he sent a telegram to his wife, I think, straight after giving the speech.

He dictated a telegram to her when he was on his way to hospital saying he was in excellent shape and he just had a little injury, no more serious than one of the trivial injuries their kids were always getting.

So

the children were neglected, is what I've read into that.

It is one of those things that makes you understand why there are generations who say, oh, they don't make them them like they used to.

You can't imagine the, you know, us snowflakes standing there and delivering a 90-minute podcast with bullet holes through our chests.

I wouldn't do it.

I'm not going to lie.

Yeah, it's very weird.

I mean, he was, what was interesting about him was he was very much into physical exertion.

He was in pushing his body all the time to sort of be the strongest he can be.

There's accounts of him where he would hang a wire over a river and it would be a fast-flowing, very dangerous river with currents, and he would just hang on the rope just to bring his body strength better but like the risk of if he'd fallen into the water would be possible drowning and he was just like always on the edge well do you know that's because he was brought up that way his parents were something called uh muscular christians what

that sounds so cool well half it sounds half cool doesn't it

they worship at the church of our blessed lady of the six pack don't they

yeah yeah like what is a muscular christian it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like so the idea was to be a good Christian, you had to kind of look after your body and be really muscular.

It was quite...

I won't say misogynistic, but it was of its time.

Like it was basically men should be strong and they should look after the women kind of thing.

And it was quite popular in America at the time.

And according to Wikipedia, I read this verbatim.

It said, muscular Christianity spread to other countries in the 19th century.

It was well entrenched in Australian society by 1860, though not always with much recognition of the religious element.

so I think that explains quite a lot doesn't it yeah

but he was quite a wimp initially wasn't he Teddy in his childhood he was well a wimp is harsh he had asthma um so

that tells you a lot about allah in the schoolyard doesn't it

I had a very specific role in the playground

No, he had a really difficult childhood.

He had really bad asthma and he was, he described himself as quite sickly and quite weak and he got beaten up as a teenager and found he couldn't defend himself.

and so he demanded boxing lessons from his dad and got them and he devoted himself completely to becoming someone who was able to beat the bullies in future yeah and yeah it was hardcore there's lots of sources that say he was the first american to get a brown belt in judo uh which like a lot of his biographies claim he was certainly very good at judo what's brown definitely is below black right it's below black yeah that's not like the greatest boast it's the one below black okay just because brown's a bit of a yucky color no it's just but then black just has like these extra extra like first and second down, like black goes on.

It's fine, we'll talk later.

All right, Dan.

Come back to me when you've got a black belt in judo.

I have one in Taekwondo, I'll have you know.

Second Dan.

Yeah, you do.

Really?

There were two Dan's in the class.

I think as well, I think he had mega anger issues as well because he wouldn't let something go.

There was a story that happened in 1886.

Are we still second Danning?

Is that what's going on?

Sorry.

I'm just laughing at my own joke all day.

So good to see you again.

Yeah, so 1886, Roosevelt, his boat was stolen by these two thieves, and they took the boat and they started riding it away.

And rather than letting it go, he was like, no, I'm going to...

chase them and I'm going to get it back.

And he knew that they had such a head start.

This would take days.

And so he was like, screw it, I'm doing it anyway.

So he decided to do it.

And this is how prepared he was.

He took food that he wanted to take in pursuit.

He also took a copy of Anna Karenina because he thought to protect him from the next bullet.

Yeah, no, I think it was downtime.

He was like, just going to bring a book.

That's Tolstoy, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he was effectively a cowboy for some of his pre-presidency life.

And he, I think this may have been the same incident, but he was chasing outlaws.

I don't know if he was kind of a deputy sheriff or a deputy marshal, something like that.

He was chasing three outlaws at one point.

He caught them.

He then had to watch them for 40 hours when he was sort of bringing them in.

And he kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy.

Yeah, that was it.

He was reading it and he was holding his shotgun over the kind of bad guys while he was reading.

No way.

And he finished Anna Karenina halfway through the 40 hours.

And he was like, well, what am I going to do now?

And one of the outlaws had a book and he said, Give me your book.

And he started reading his book.

Oh,

what?

So funny.

Did he read it to them?

I don't think

Theodore Roosevelt's lethal audiobook time?

Or was it...

Yeah.

Because Anna Karenina loses her head at the end.

Maybe he was like, this must happen to you.

Wow.

Spoiler.

I cannot.

If you haven't read Anna Karenina, she loses her head, either metaphorically or literally.

We won't specify which, but it involves a train.

There is no one.

There is no one listening to our podcast that has not read Anna Karenina.

I actually can't believe you just did that.

I think we've just lost all the online listeners.

Some people at the back have walked out.

And also, I don't think she's not leaning over to vomit on the railway.

The train doesn't knock her head off, as far as I remember.

It's just a full-on death by train.

If we are really revealing the ending,

I thought we've committed now, so yeah, go for it.

It's amazing.

It's a thing that's sort of not attached to 19th-century outlaw folktales, that there's always a sort of break to read a book during the chase.

Always carry a book.

Everyone's got a book on them.

How cool is that?

It's the Outlaw Code.

I just wonder what the Outlaw's book was.

Because it can't have been more Tolstoy.

What are the odds of them having

probably something really like

how to steal a boat?

He had cowboy practice actually when he was a kid.

His parents used to stick him on a horse or in a carriage just behind a horse and make the horse gallop at breakneck speed as fast as it possibly could with his mouth open.

Not the horse, Teddy with his mouth open.

Because they thought that would cure his asthma.

No.

It doesn't feel like that would work.

Well,

I mean, I'm not a doctor.

But didn't Thomas Jefferson try to, and I think thought he successfully cured his diarrhea by horseback riding?

That feels like that would cure your constipation rather than your diarrhea.

Yeah, you would think, right?

Yeah,

maybe it floods it out.

Yeah.

But you put asthma sufferers on the carriage behind him, and that's two birds, one stone.

I just love all these old horse prescriptions.

Get on a horse, and yeah.

Theodore Roosevelt kind of invented piranhas.

So

interesting.

He

I and I stand, I stand by this.

So, wait, I know what's happened.

Andy, you've got my notes.

Sorry.

No, he did.

He genuinely did.

So, he wrote a book, I think it was in about 1913.

So, he'd already been president by this point, and he'd been shot and everything.

But he did lots of expeditions and big game hunting and all of this.

He wrote this book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, and in it, he has this long bit describing these ferocious piranhas that you get in the Amazon and how they can strip a cow's flesh from its bones in a few minutes.

And he said said that they will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water.

I never witnessed an exhibition of such impotent savage fury.

So that's all it's basically all thanks to him.

But the reason, I mean, piranhas don't do that unless they're really, you know, unless it's really dry and they're really crammed in together and it's, yeah, and they're really, really hungry.

Some of them are vegetarian, for example.

But

the ethical piranhas.

There are more and more of them.

But they reckon that maybe, this is just a theory, that when he was visiting the area where he saw this kind of exhibition display of piranha activity, it's because his hosts had blocked off a bit of the river, chucked a load of piranhas in there, let it dry out, not fed them at all.

And so by the time the Ruzvad arrived, they were really, really, really ready to eat.

And that's what made it like that.

And are you saying he invented the piranha because he sort of invented our idea of the piranha as a very vicious animal?

Yeah.

I see.

It's half fair.

Yeah.

He was a tough boss.

Given that he was a tough man, he kind of expected the same from his cabinet, for instance.

He had this thing called the tennis cabinet, which was initially started as a way of him exercising with all his kind of younger employees.

And so his younger ministers would go out and play tennis with him.

And he thought tennis actually was really dull because you didn't really get to fight each other hand to hand.

And so

what the tennis cabinet became was every day they had to get together and they picked a target on a map and without checking any of the terrain whether it was full of rivers or mountains or piranhas they had to just walk to that target without stopping and without diverting from a straight course.

And so they ended up doing things like at one point they were all made to swim through a half-frozen river.

And yeah, if you survived.

And he was president.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's his cabinet.

Well, and he used to have these big boxing fights in the White House, didn't he, where he invited professional boxers to come and fight him.

Yeah.

You were asked to come and beat up the president.

Imagine if the current president offered that.

Imagine the queue.

We're going to have to move on very shortly.

Well, we have to talk about the most hardcore member of the Roosevelt family, which is his daughter, Alice.

She was amazing.

She basically was such a handful.

At one stage, Roosevelt said, she kind of interrupted when he was doing something.

He said, I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.

Wow.

And she was...

Totally hardcore.

I mean, to be fair, it sounds like he was basically running a fight club instead of being president.

She was wild because he had a bit of a traumatizing upbringing.

Because so his wife and mother died on the same day, and he was very upset about that, understandably.

And he refused to ever speak his wife's name again.

But awkwardly, his wife's name was Alice, as was his daughter's.

And so he never, he refused to ever say his daughter's name.

So she was a bit messed up about that.

And then they sort of made friends again a bit.

But she used to do crazy stuff.

Like she smoked publicly on the roof of the White House.

She played poker.

She partied all night.

She kept, so she had carried a bag around with her all the time, in which she just kept a dagger, her pet snake, who was called Emily Spinach, and a copy of the Constitution.

Sorry,

the snake was called what?

Oh, Emily Spinach.

Emily Spinach, great.

And a copy of the Constitution.

The Constitution, the U.S.

Constitution.

Was that a tip from her dad in case she got an assassination?

It was, yeah.

Folded up.

The reason that she smokes on top of the White House roof was because he said he forbade her from smoking cigarettes under my roof.

And so she's like, fuck it, I'll go on the roof then.

What a dick, that's so wonderful.

And then

once Roosevelt left and the next guy came in, who was Taft, and then Woodrow Wilson afterwards, she was banned from the White House, wasn't she?

Oh yeah, was that when she buried a voodoo doll of someone in the grounds?

She buried a voodoo doll of Taft's wife under the grounds before she left.

And then she made some kind of ribald joke about Woodrow Wilson that no matter how much you Google, you can never find this joke.

Believe me, that's how I spent the last five days trying to find this joke.

But yeah, everyone hated her who came after her and they wouldn't let her in the White House at all.

Wow.

The woman who made a joke that's too rude for the internet.

We need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact is that some squirrels can put themselves in a deep freeze for the winter, then thaw themselves out to have a pee, and then freeze themselves again.

Yeah, they're very cool.

They have a piss break during hibernation.

Well, it seems to be, yeah.

So this is the Arctic ground squirrel, and they are the most extreme hibernators on the planet.

They live so far north.

They hibernate for about 270 days of the year.

Wow.

Yeah.

Imagine they'll leave in your house for 270 days.

They don't even have Netflix, James.

They don't have anything.

So, yeah,

they slow down so much that their hearts beat twice a minute when they're in this sort of deep, deep, chill state.

They can stop breathing for several minutes at a time when they're in this state.

And most of their body gets down to almost minus three degrees Celsius.

It's incredibly cold.

We don't know how they do it, but they don't freeze, as in ice crystals don't form throughout them.

They have some way of stopping little ice crystals forming.

Because that would kill them, obviously.

But they aren't that cold.

And they just look like little stones on the ground, basically.

Yeah, so if you've got a bottle of water and you can kind of make it go really, really, really cold, but then there's nothing for the ice to form around, then it won't freeze.

And that's the same with these squirrels.

But what that means is if you pick up one of these squirrels that's hibernating and shake it, it will die.

So don't do that.

Would it freeze at the same time as you shake it and then it would like smash into ice, wouldn't it?

Yeah, it'd be like a frozen squirrel.

And

is that because shaking it, you get a bit of debris in, and as soon as you get a tiny particle into their body, presumably it gets into their blood and it freezes it.

Even just like by shaking it, a little bit of carbon dioxide inside the blood might just come free, and then that would everything would nucleate around that.

But they do have these periodic wake-ups, don't they?

Yes.

Where they sort of wee and actually don't do much else, really.

In fact, I think like largely they don't even urinate.

They just wake up in order to go to sleep.

So

which is amazing, right?

Yeah.

I always thought hibernation was sleep, but no, it's

sounds snackering.

Yeah, it's absolutely exhausting.

So they've got this store of fat between their shoulders, which apparently acts as a sword of thermostat.

It's the only bit of them that's staying functional when they hibernate.

And when they get a bit too cold, they shiver themselves awake.

And if you watch a video of them, it is very sweet.

They're a little ball that starts shivering until the little ball of fat pumps blood around.

And it's just so that they can wake up out of hibernation in order to have eight hours good sleep and go into their REM cycles, have some dreams, and then otherwise they get sleep deprived in hibernation.

I don't know if you guys read this because you said they had dreams.

I read one article and it was from Brian Barnes, who is like the main guy on this subject.

And he said that they take a lot of magic mushrooms just before hibernation.

And nobody knows why they do it.

Well, they're trying to get as much fat as possible, so they're trying to eat as much as possible.

But it just so happens that the thing that they eat are these mushrooms, which are hallucinogenic and we don't know whether it gives them crazy dreams for the 270 days

or whether the liver might be able to detoxify it or something so we don't really know but it could be that for that whole 270 days they're just thinking of dogs with nine legs

that's so cool um they do they're quite um chemically altered in lots of ways because i don't know that but i The other thing they do to survive is that they produce steroids in their body, massive, massive levels of steroids during the summer months when they're building up.

And they build their muscles by a third in size.

They increase by a third in just a few weeks.

And now, normally, that would lead to what we call roid rage.

You know, extra aggressive behavior, real fury.

Tiny testicles.

Tiny testicles.

And a deep urge to spread Christianity, of course.

But for some reason, they don't go into a rage.

So they can survive the testosterone coursing around them.

And the males have to stop when they do hibernate.

And then this is a bit weird, but their testicles shrink a lot.

So we see that.

But then when they wake up, their testicles swell hugely.

And they get a massive extra rush of testosterone when they wake up the next time around.

And they basically go through puberty again.

So they basically do this every year.

That's rough.

Yeah.

That is rough.

And the males live way shorter than females do.

They live about six years.

And when they wake up, they do actually go into a sort of fighting frenzy with other males.

And then they have puberty, and then they hope to mate.

And then I think the reason they live shorter is because they have to go through puberty six times in their life.

And it's too embarrassing.

The voice drop it where it's a bit wobbly.

Yeah.

The acne again.

They are awake for longer than the females, though, aren't they?

They go to sleep a bit later than the ladies.

They sort of store food in a little cash, whereas the ladies just fall asleep.

And they wake up earlier in order to kind of get start getting ready for mating.

And essentially, the females wake up about three weeks after the males, and their entire waking life is waking up, immediately being mated with, within 12 hours of waking up by a male, being pregnant, gestating for 25 days, caring for the young for 10 weeks, going back to sleep.

That's their lives.

They probably need a lot of sleep after all that, though, don't they?

To be fairness.

They have very weird burrow systems, or very, very clever burrow systems, actually.

So they have three different kinds of house They don't just have one basic burrow the way they know that is because when you're researching Arctic ground squirrels when researchers are researching them They have to make really detailed maps of where all the burrow entrances and exits are so that if you take one away to study them when you put them back you put them at the right door like you don't put them in someone else's house

So they don't notice when they wake up.

They have no idea someone's been and rearranged the house basically.

I guess so.

Yeah, they don't wake up and go, where am I?

That's not my picture.

But they have.

You could put them the other way around when they're hibernating, just to freak them out.

So they think, oh, lovely, I'll go to sleep facing my favorite nut or whatever.

But they wake up facing their second favorite nut.

That's like my wife.

She goes to sleep facing her first favorite nut.

Facing your nuts.

And

she wakes up with a second down.

I mean, it did sound like you were going to say facing her first favorite nut.

Oh, poor woman.

I was,

just to steer away for a second, but on hibernation, I was reading a blog about hibernating hedgehogs, and there was this wonderful thing where a person says, A way that you can tell that a hedgehog is hibernating is because they look like they're dead, basically.

If you go up to them, they're in the ball.

All you need to do is go right up to one, put your ear next to one, and you know it's hibernating because you can hear it snoring.

snoring.

Isn't that sweet?

A little

of a hedgehog and they snore when they hibernate.

Not all of them, sometimes and possibly not even then.

But it's yeah,

it's just from a blog.

But that's really sweet.

I have a fact about squirrels, other squirrels, Californian ground squirrels.

Oh, yeah.

Slightly different kind of ground squirrel.

So in 1918, California basically decided to wage war on the squirrels and they had something called Squirrel Week where posters were put up all over the state encouraging the children of california to kill as many squirrels as they could

and there were posters just aimed at children saying um things like slay the mother squirrel during breeding season march to may and because because they were quite invasive and they ate a lot of crops and they carried bubonic plague which is a bad thing so there were like there were reasons for it but i mean it was pretty dark so one there was a pamphlet which advised how you could hook up your exhaust pipe to a squirrel burrow

and

wipe out a whole batch of them like that and they they were depicted with little German soldier helmets because the First World War was still going on.

It was saying, This is, you know, we may be fighting Germany, but we're also fighting the squirrels.

In Squirrel Week, the children of California killed 104,000 squirrels just in that week.

And there were prizes for the schools that did best.

Yeah, wasn't there one girl who had like a kill list of over 3,000 alone?

Yeah,

she was like the head of the top of the pack.

She went on to single-handedly defeat the Nazis

following war.

The Cape ground squirrel is an interesting ground squirrel, and that's because they can self-folate.

And not only can they do, they do so.

It's not like you and me just telling people we can do.

They prove it.

Prove it.

For God's sake, don't prove it.

Not before you showed me your favourite nuts.

Right.

Can Can I get on about this

self-masturbating squirrel?

You know, self-masturbating is the only kind of masturbating, James.

Well.

Go on.

If I do the fact, some of it might get in the podcast.

Because if I masturbate a pig for the

breeding.

I don't think you're masturbating it.

I think you're just...

You're giving it a handy.

Give me it a handy.

No, no, no, because

there's a breeding program for pigs.

I'm not just, I'm not just, sorry, just to

dress the seam,

I think I would be masturbating that pig.

I think technically that's probably not true.

Really?

I would say technically.

I think.

Well, I've got to go and refill in all the forms now.

You've got to rename the blog.

So

squirrels,

they

do it supposedly as a form of self-medication.

And the idea is that if they clean their genitals, it might stop them from getting an STI.

And the best way for them to do that is to masturbate.

However, they live in the desert and they can't afford to lose any water.

And so they need to get the water back into their body.

And so they clean their genitals and they take in their

fluids.

It's base two and base three, is what you're saying.

Base five.

Golly.

Oh, gosh.

Wow.

Whatever works.

That's the thing about this podcast.

You always learn something you didn't know before.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, let's.

Yeah.

We've actually got to move on, guys.

We don't actually need to, but I really think we should.

I have one more thing about this was about going to the loo in the middle of the night.

Oh, yeah.

So, Victorian tourists, I mean, 19th-century tourists, what you would do if you were a tourist in France, because lots of

accommodation would not have much in the way of sanitation, women would purchase an object which was sold called the Inodorous Standard Pale, okay, and pale as in bucket.

And it had a mahogany rim and a hermetically closing cover.

And it was basically a what are we calling it, a kind of chamber pod?

But the brilliant thing was it was disguised as a hat box so that you could carry it around without embarrassment.

But you definitely don't want to put your hats in it.

Presumably, if someone asks, Can I borrow your hat box?

I've got a spare hat I need to carry.

What is the excuse, the recommended excuse you're supposed to concoct?

But it is a good excuse if you accidentally piss in someone's hat box.

We need to move on to our next fact.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1385, a four-year court case began after two knights embarrassingly turned up to a battle wearing the same coat of arms.

How embarrassing.

Yeah, were they completely mortified?

Did someone go home?

Did they both fight the battle?

They both fought the battle.

It was a bit later that the court case happened.

So this was during the Hundred Years' War with France in 1385, and Scotland had signed a pact with France, and some French soldiers had arrived north of the border.

And so Richard II, just come of age, trying to kind of show that he meant business, he decided he was going to invade Scotland.

And so they all went over this big army to invade Scotland.

And when they did, there was a guy called Richard Scroop,

spelled Scroop, but pronounced Scroop.

He was the first Baron of Bolton, and Sir Robert Grosner of Cheshire.

And they both turned up and they realized that they had the exact same coat of arms, which was an azure with a bend or that's a blue background with a gold sash.

And everyone felt very awkward.

The court case sounds amazing.

The court case really was, it was the who's who of the 14th century.

Yeah, really?

Well, it was a bit of a, I think it was a bit of a fix, this court case.

So it was, it was, who do you say?

It was Scroop of Bolton against Grosvenor of Cheshire.

But it was, it was held, I think, in York Minster.

And in York Minster, the Scroop coat of arms was all over the place.

So it's kind of subtle branding for the Scroop side.

Yeah, I should say it's not the good Bolton in Lancashire, it's the shit Bolton in Yorkshire.

Ah!

Okay.

Right.

Got it.

That's why in Yorkminster they had his coat of arms.

Got it, got it, got it.

That makes more sense, actually.

I was wondering about that.

Yeah.

But then it turned out later on, after this court case was over, there was a third family also using the same coat of arms.

But they were in Cornwall, and everyone said, said oh well it's cornwall you know it's a they said basically they said well it's a different country so the rules are different there as at the time it was well also the guy in cornwall who claimed that his crest was the same was a guy called carmenow and he claimed that his crest had been given by king arthur which was quite impressive considering he didn't exist

we didn't definitively not exist what yeah king arthur didn't definitively not exist there are later reports of a character called arthur anyway we don't but he's not an absolute he's not like Peter Pan.

Well, it's a good job you weren't in charge of this court case, Anna.

Wow, so there's maybe a King Arthur.

That's why he didn't do any of the stuff.

Well, that sucks.

Yeah, he's

just a guy called Arthur, then.

It's kind of like Robin Hood.

There's someone with the name, but none of the rest of it is true, so it's not even worth it.

Okay.

Who was Who of the 14th century?

I want to know what a court case of the Who's Who of the 14th century.

There's only a single person for the 14th century.

They were there.

What was that?

Geoffrey Chaucer?

Yes, exactly.

What was that?

John of Gaunt?

Owen Glendower?

Yes, him as well.

That really is a who's who.

Anyone I've heard of in the 14th century was in this court case.

Was this the most exciting court case of the era?

It doesn't sound like a big deal.

It really wasn't.

It was quite dull.

And it was just basically everyone came in.

And so let's say John of Gaunt turned up.

John of Gaunt would go in and he would say, I once saw this guy with this coat of arms on this date.

And I saw this guy with a coat of arms on this date.

And I saw this on this date, and then they got all of the evidence together, and they worked out who had the best claim on it.

Yeah, it was precedence, wasn't it?

Exactly.

Yeah, who would seem at the first?

But this was

in the Court of Chivalry.

And the Court of Chivalry is an exciting thing because this is a real court that exists, and it hasn't sat since 1954.

Okay.

It really is dead, isn't it?

Well,

it might be coming back.

Wait a minute, but what were the Knights of Armour in 1954?

Oh, the 1954 case was a dispute between Manchester Corporation and Manchester Palace of Varieties over unlicensed use of the Manchester coat of arms.

That is dull.

But before that, so, okay, there is a chance that the Court of Chivalry is going to have to sit sometime soon because of weatherspoons, okay?

This is so exciting.

So last year,

last year, Barry Town Council in Wales.

I thought that was his name.

What a budge, that's so name that is.

No, he invented the town town council.

It was very impressive.

Yeah, what a guy.

Sorry, yeah.

Barry Town Council in Wales.

They were furious with Weatherspoons because Weatherspoons in Barry had put the coat of arms of Barry, the Barry coat of arms,

on a carpet in their pub.

And Barry Town Council said, hang on a second, you've got people walking on the Barry coat of arms.

Maybe they're going to the bar.

Maybe they're going to the toilet.

We don't know where they're going.

You know, maybe they've got a dog with with them.

I mean, they said it was very disrespectful.

Tim Martin, the boss of Wetherspoons, refused to remove the carpet.

He said it's a perfectly good carpet.

We paid a lot of money for it.

Just let it wear out and we'll replace it in 10 years or so, whatever.

So they may yet go to the Court of Chivalry, if anyone can be bothered.

Yeah, and they'll have to resurrect the entire court.

And do you think it will be a who's who of the 21st century with sort of George Clooney Bracket?

Everyone.

Have you ever met Barry Town Council?

I've met Barry Town Council.

Yeah.

I love the rules of chivalry, the whole chivalry thing.

I didn't quite know what goes into becoming a knight when you were made, and you were kind of trained in order to become one, but it was more than battle.

It was all these things.

Like you had to learn how to box, wrestle, run, you had to read, write, you had to play the harp and sing.

That was part of becoming a knight, yeah, which is really sweet.

You also, you had to be a very good wooer.

That was part of the code of chivalry, was you had to devotedly woo one woman.

And it didn't, the woman could be married, that was fine.

Like, Lancelot, I think, was constantly wooing a married woman.

Again, possibly didn't exist?

No, yeah, yeah, he was a figure of chivalric mythology.

But, you know, he was like a being to emulate.

He was wooing Guinevere, wasn't he?

Yeah, I thought he went for

the top trumps.

I really remember it.

Yeah, yeah.

You can't all hope for Guinevere.

But Guinevere, also, I think, a figure of chivalric myth.

So not real.

So all of these people are setting the standard that you're supposed to imitate.

And the reason it all came in, the chivalric codes, was because knights were so badly behaved.

They were just like ran rampant around the countryside.

So, there were lots of books written about how to correct knights' behaviour.

And so, there were all these courtesy books written in the sort of 12th century and 13th century.

There was one called The Book of the Civilized Man, directed at knights, and it just had sort of a bullet-pointed list of rules.

So, don't spit, don't talk with your mouth full, don't take huge helpings, don't blow your nose on the tablecloth.

All things today that we would agree with.

Don't wine cough a peg.

Don't auto-filate a mixed company.

You may be thirsty, but the bar's over there.

There was a don't defecate while sorry, there was.

You were allowed to defecate.

You weren't allowed to attack your enemy while he was defecating.

Unchivalrous, yeah.

Unless he's riding a horse to cure his diarrhea.

In which case, he's on a horse, he's fagging.

Yeah.

Wow.

Have you heard of the Scottish court and what they do to badly behaving knights?

No.

They will destroy your arms.

I presume your coat of arms.

It will be very mean.

They will break your stained glass windows, which have got your coat of arms in them.

They will smash any unwarranted seals.

Again.

Again.

Seals.

But then they will issue a letter of horning.

Okay.

Of what, sir?

Of horning.

Like horn, horn, the horn.

Yeah, sorry.

Like, I've just given this pig the horn for my dog.

So.

But they do a letter which denounces you as an outlaw, and then they have three blasts of a horn.

And that means you have technically been put to the horn.

Pretty exciting stuff.

Yeah.

Wait.

And wait, what does that mean to have been put aside from the fact that you do three blasts of a horn, but what's I don't actually know what the ramifications are?

You're not a knight anymore, right?

You're a nightmare.

Yeah, you're not a knight.

You've been put to the horn.

Do you know why they're called coats of arms?

It's because you used to have a coat that you wore over your arms, your armor, and that's where the word comes from, really.

Isn't that amazing?

Yeah.

But everyone was hoping that it was a coat made of arms.

Yeah.

That's the dream.

But you used to have your armor, and you would always wear a cloak over it.

And the reason being that if you're fighting somewhere hot, then wearing armor is pretty bad.

Like, you're basically going to cook in there.

And so if you wore a cloak, then it could stop you from getting, from the sun's rays from cooking you.

And so you would always have to wear this cloak, and on the back of the cloak, it would have your arms, your coat of arms.

And so that's where the word came from.

Wow,

yeah.

Superman, basically, like the original

saying who you are, your logo on your back.

That's so cool.

And the idea was you wanted people to know who you are, because if you're an important person in a battle, you don't want to be killed, you want to be captured.

Well, you don't want to be captured, you want to win.

But if you're not,

your second best, if you don't win, is to not die.

The team talk and it like that the halfway mark, right?

We've We've given up on a win, but we are going for being captured, all of us.

So, yeah, so you wanted to be captured, and so you would have this kind of coat of armor so that people would see you on battle and not kill you.

They'd think, oh, well, he's worth something.

I'm going to take him instead of killing him, and then I'll be able to get some money.

It's like catching someone else's shiny pog.

Is it?

Yeah.

Yep, that was a very specific

sort of 1994 kids there.

Jeff Bezos has a coat of arms.

Yeah, it's got two tortoises and a rocket.

A rocket?

Is it I'm just imagining a cock on balls formation?

You know what?

I haven't seen it.

I presume it is.

You've got to assume it's Jeff Bezos.

Absolutely.

You can just get them made, though, because there's the College of Arms in the UK except Scotland.

Do you know what the Blue Mantle per suivant at the College of Arms gets paid each year?

I didn't know what most of those words are.

No, exactly.

There's a lot of kind of cod Latin and cod French and stuff.

No, Blue Mantle Per Suivant or Per Suivant is a junior position at the College of Arms.

Guess what he gets paid?

A tenor a year, or seven shillings and sixpence, half a crown.

Three sticks and a dead porcupine.

Okay, lovely.

Tenor.

And pogs.

Pogs.

Anna was closest.

It's $13.95.

Really?

For the ceremony where he was invested in his role, he had to buy a pair of silk tights, which cost double his annual salary.

And is that taxpayer-funded, for God's sake?

Who knows?

Do you know what the

weird words you just said?

All that language.

Do you know what it's called?

It's called Blazon.

So in heraldry, the weird language of heraldry, which is lots of stuff that we don't understand, is called Blazon and all the vocab.

And it's also related to the habits of heraldry, so or the traditions.

So for instance, there's a difference between English and Scottish heraldry in Blazon.

And that is how you erase a bear's head.

And so, this is, you know, if you see a coat of arms, then you'll sometimes have an animal like a lion or a bear on it.

And if you've got an erased head, what that means is a head that's been decapitated from a body, or it looks like it's been torn off from a body, so it's got sort of ragged edges of the neck.

You will have seen it a lot.

But the way you tell the difference between an English coat of arms and a Scottish coat of arms is a bear's head in English heraldry is erased horizontally under the neck, and so it goes across and you get some neck in.

Whereas in Scotland, it's erased vertically and you cut the neck off.

So if you imagine a vertical line going down, yeah.

So if a bear's got a neck, English, no neck, Scottish.

We've been doing this podcast for six and a half years now, and I think that is the least useful piece of information

ever seen.

If you are galloping into battle against the Scots, which may well happen in the near future,

you're going to need to know.

We need to move on to our final fact of the show.

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

My fact this week is that the Audubon Bird Protection Society has warned its members against bird splaining.

So, mansplaining is when a man annoyingly

if man splaining is when a man is awkwardly explaining something which he doesn't need to, is bird splaining when a bird explains something to you?

We don't call them birds these days, we call them women.

Sorry.

I've been asleep for 270 days

and my testicles are so sore.

It's not an you're right, it's an incorrect use of the splaining etymology because it's not like when a pigeon gets really patronising.

It's basically this is in an article on the Alderman website, which is sort of like the authority on birds.

And it was a bird writer, Becca Heisman.

She was sort of inspired by birdwatchers who do things like get extremely agitated if people refer to a Canadian goose as opposed to a Canada goose or a seagull.

Bird watchers hate people calling it a seagull because there's no such thing as a seagull.

There are gulls.

A lot of them don't live by the sea.

A seagull apparently is a nonsense term.

Her warning to bird watchers is, and I'm repeating it now, that it can put people off if, as soon as you casually mention a seagull in conversation, someone says, oh, she has no such thing as a seagull, so you're not making any sense.

And

that's the official word of the Birdwatching Society.

But that's my life with you three.

Yeah, sorry about that.

But yeah, birdwatchers are a pedantic breed.

They can be.

And just to clarify, yeah, a Canadian goose should be a Canada goose.

And gulls, lots of different, 11 different types of gull in the UK.

And there is actually an account, a Twitter account called At No Such Gull,

which is about, and the name is No Such Thing as a Gull.

And it's kind of about how gulls, seagulls, don't exist.

And so I don't really want to slag off people who are really pedantic about it because they do actually follow QI and retweeted us very recently.

In fact, yesterday.

I think the most fascinating thing about that fact is you were on Twitter?

Yeah.

I only go on for bird watching updates.

I can be hard, though, being a bird watcher.

I think we should cut them some slack.

In 2013, they found this amazing rare bird on the island of Harris.

It was a white-throated needletail.

Normally, you'd only find it in Asia or in Australia, but it was on the island of Harris, probably got caught on a draught of wind or something.

And so, everyone suddenly got a message on their phones or on their Twitter account saying, guys, there is a white-throated needletail on Harris.

And loads of people went up there to the island all the way up in the north of Scotland to see this bird which was then hit by a wind turbine

in front of all these bird watchers oh

that's what it was going I've got an amazing updraft here wow this

that does it does happen doesn't it I think there was a story that someone there was a is it a pharaoh there's a book called a pharaoh I think anyone know actually it's

I think it was something like a grey pharaoh and I'm going off memory so I really can't remember it it, but it was these bird watchers had got to it, and they were so excited about seeing it, very rare in the area where they were, and then they saw a buzzard just arrive and land and eat it right in front of them.

But then they did say, although the buzzards actually, they very rarely feed on that kind of prey, so kind of two birds with one stone, to be honest.

They used that phrase, they used that phrase, genuinely, yeah.

Well, they're funny guys.

Have you heard of other bird watching slang?

Oh, yeah.

This gets used in the bird watching community.

Do you want to have a guess at what not a bird is?

Is it something that's not a bird?

Something that's not a bird.

It's something that looks like a bird from a distance, but once binoculars or a spotting scope is used, it turns out not to be a bird at all.

Is it something that's either a plane or Superman?

That's right.

Have you heard of a pseudo-bird?

Pseudo-bird sounds like it's also a not a bird.

Yeah, well a pseudobird is something that looks like a bird and perhaps even moves like a bird until it is examined through binoculars or a spotting scope and found to be something completely different.

What is an example of a pseudo-bird?

Like a bag of crisps.

Bag of crisps.

Very good.

Wow, sort of, you know, caught in a tree.

This very much feels like sort of class one of ornithology, doesn't it?

You struggling to identify a bird.

Do you know what?

More slang, do you know what jizz is in it?

Yes.

Let's move on.

I see you read my blog then.

Jizz is the sort of when you can't quite see what the bird is and you talk about the vibe of the bird, like it's giving off this vibe, so it must be this kind of bird.

So it kind of moves a bit like a blackbird and it's kind of blackish.

And you think that probably is a blackbird?

Is that what it is?

I think so.

It's basically the whole demeanor, isn't it?

Jiz.

That bird's jizz is, well, it's tall, it's fat, it's brown.

Wow, what is wow?

It's tall, it's fat, it's yellow.

I'm watching Sesame Street.

It's been in use for a long time, though.

I think it even predates jizz as we know it today.

But

there are rumors that it stands for general impression size and shape, which was a military term in the Second World War.

But it actually comes from before that, from 1922.

And it now spread to all biologists.

So you'll talk about a plant jizz as well.

I like one etymology.

I don't know if this is true either, but people say it just is.

What is that bird?

Oh, it just is.

Yeah.

Jizz.

Feels to me like it comes from jist.

Hey, what's the gist?

Jist, yeah.

It's the jizz.

That's better, isn't it?

Do you know what gripping someone off is in bird watching?

Well,

it can get very exciting.

You've got to do something to pass the hours while waiting for the white-tailed needle thing.

But

gripping someone off is a bad thing to do in birdwatching.

It's where you see a bird that someone else has missed out on and then you tell them about the bird that you've seen.

So you're sort of bragging to them, and you know that they've missed the opportunity to see this bird.

Oh, really?

So, yeah, yeah.

And if someone's not noticed it, maybe they were looking in the wrong place or whatever.

So that's a bad thing to do.

Don't grip off if you do go birdwatching.

So you're just not allowed to share.

If you see something cool, you're not allowed to have to keep it secret in case someone gets it.

They didn't see it.

You're supposed to share, but some asshole birdwatchers grip people off and they're like, oh, yeah, I saw it last week.

You're too late.

I could have told you, but I didn't.

Right, right.

Just as it's disappearing down the buzzard's gullet, you say, I've just seen a Farallope.

Or whatever, yeah.

This fact was about the Audubon Society, right?

The Bird Society, and he actually is an incredible character from history who was the first person to put together a sort of great collection of paintings published in a book of the birds of America.

And it's one of those rare books now that it basically outsells any book in terms of price value at an auction.

So a copy went a while ago for about 11 million, 11 million.

Yeah, it's we've got one in our house.

No, in the original?

Oh, I don't know.

Okay, so it's not all of them going for that.

No,

no,

no, your Kindle PDF is not going to be sold at some of these.

Have you noticed that every branch of Waterstones has a massive safe in the middle of the shop floor?

That's where they keep that book.

I was this close to standing up and walking off the podcast.

Fuck you guys!

Bye.

Sorry, Sorry, so some versions are very expensive.

Yeah?

No, this is so it's an amazing book and he used to paint these birds and it used to be a bit more of a vicious bird spotting thing.

These days the idea I think of hurting a bird in any way would be horrible.

Back then, in order to paint the bird and spot them, you actually had to kill them.

So he used to go around and he would shoot birds and then what he would do is he would put sort of wires onto them and pose them as if they were mid-flight so that he could capture them as if they were in the nature and they were alive, which is very different to any kind of drawing at that time.

It was usually very posed and very still.

So he kind of did that brilliantly.

But the other amazing thing is this book, the original books, how tall is your book?

It's about this big.

Yes, it's big.

It's a big book.

And the original, the idea was he wanted to capture the birds in their full size.

So when you saw it, it was almost as if you were in front of one.

Wow.

Yeah, but what's really wonderful is he slightly miscalculated the size of some of the birds.

So in some of them, they've had to be contorted to sort of fit

to the page, like squished down with wings and stuff.

Yeah, but yeah, really fascinating character.

He was, do you know how he made his living before he got into the the bird drawing business?

Or in fact, as like, you know, while he was drawing birds as a hobby, he made his money as a deathbed artist.

So that's someone who, if someone you love dies, you go, oh my god, we forgot to get a portrait of them.

We better get one now.

And you went and you would paint a portrait of a dead person of the corpse and it would be lying in repose with maybe a bunch of flowers or a photograph or something.

But would he would he pose them like he later did the birds, as in with wires and with absolutely yeah doing the high jump or backflip however you wanted it

have you guys heard of Phoebe Snetzinger?

Phoebe Snetzinger's amazing so she in 1981 was diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided that instead of going into a home and just kind of succumbing to it, she decided, well, I've not got much time left, so I'm going to go and look for birds.

Okay, and she took a trip to Alaska to look for birds and she kept looking for birds and kept looking for birds and luckily enough got into remission and kept looking for birds and she was the first person to see more than 8,000 species of birds ever.

And when she died eventually she'd seen 8,398 birds which was 85% of the known species in the world she'd seen.

Isn't that amazing?

Wow.

So good.

We're going to have to wrap up soon, guys.

No, what?

Yeah.

We are.

But we are.

No.

Yes.

But I I haven't told you about Graham Moss yet.

Right.

You've hooked me.

Go for it.

This is a bird watching story from this year and it's just a rather rather nice one.

It's Doncaster baby owl webcam banned by Facebook over sex and nudity rule.

So

this summer a man in Doncaster called Graham Moss He set up a very sweet webcam of some baby owls in their nest and just so were you looking at Moss News?

You weren't working

before.

This is a complete coincidence.

Although there is a book about bird watching by someone called Stephen Moss.

Right, you've been looking at Moss News, and fortunately, it's coincided with the research for today, but you got lucky.

But it got his webcam was taken down twice because it breached the community guidelines on adult nudity and sexual activity.

But what was happening?

Nothing.

Nothing was happening.

It was just some baby owls.

But either algorithmically it saw.

Algorithmically.

There we go.

No one's seeing this outside this room, aren't I?

But yeah, all he thinks he was pranked.

But I think it's possible that algorithmically someone would see some sort of writhing flesh in a nest and think

that looks rude.

Were they featherless?

Well, they were baby owls, so I think they probably would have been very feathered.

You can get in trouble with things like that.

The Christmas Island Tourist Board went onto Facebook to advertise the island's annual Bird and Nature Week with the headline, Some gorgeous shots here of some juvenile boobies.

Oh,

no.

And Facebook, for some reason, took them down.

And they appealed to Facebook, saying, surely some mistake.

We're just talking about this bird, which is called a booby.

And Facebook went, nope.

That's kind of fair.

I read there was an interview, Birdwatch Ireland.

There was a member called Niall Hatch.

And the

person interviewing just got so excited that he was called Hatch that he derailed the conversation in order to say, that's funny, isn't it?

And

then he turned out, he said, it's actually not as sort of uncommon to have a bird-related name for members of the Bird Watch in Ireland.

It's a bit more common.

So he then listed off a bunch of people that were past and present people as part of it.

So we had Donald Finch, Ashling Talon, Stephen Wing, Dave Bird.

Bit on the nose, Dave.

That is so a fake name, isn't it?

Look at Ms.

Talon over here.

She's picked a part of the bird.

Dave Bird.

Dave Bird.

Yeah.

Anyone else?

There's Mark Robbins.

You see, Mark's picked a species of bird.

Not like you, Dave.

Olivia Crow.

Mark Robin.

Do you think sometimes people in bird running societies go, Mark Robbins?

And then just saying, look, Robbins.

Do you think they go, Dave, bird?

I've got one last thing, just on the subject of being pedantic and bird spaining.

We've actually had, I've been sent a WhatsApp message by Alex Bell, who is one of the fish team.

He just wants me to pass this on to Anna.

Anna's gull Twitter thing is at no such seagull.

Not at no such gulls.

And I think we now know who runs that account.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Or

at porkiesbigadventure.org

James

at James Harkin and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

We can get us on our group count, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

So, just quickly before we end, just a huge thank you to the London Podcast Festival and to King's Place.

It's truly awesome that the arts are trying to get through this, and we feel so lucky to be able to do this in front of you guys today.

And I hope you had a fun time.

And so, that's it.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.