336: No Such Thing As A Delicious Emergency Salad

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Hi everyone, before we start this week's show, just so you don't think that Anna has suddenly affected an East London accent, she is still away and in her stead this week we have the absolutely fantastically funny, brilliant, smart, amazing comedian Sarah Pasco.

Now, Sarah has a book that's just come out in paperback.

It's called Sex Power Money and that book has an accompanying podcast which is also called Sex Power Money, which you can find in all your normal podcast providers.

Both of those things are absolutely brilliant.

You should definitely check them out.

But for now, on with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming 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 special guest Sarah Pasco.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Sarah.

Hello, everybody.

My fact is

for 15 years, German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist.

Wow, that's amazing.

It is amazing, but it's also quite dark.

It does involve things like murder.

So this isn't like a trigger warning, but I know that your show is sometimes just like, oh, this ladybird bought a hat.

So if anyone is listening,

I think you're confusing us with play school.

Yeah, I mean more like this ladybird looks like she bought a hat, but actually it's a very interesting evolutionary shadow.

We have done that, yeah.

So I just wanted to say to people who are listening: like if there are children, I'm not going to go into any great detail about murders, but it does mention murders.

So in 2007,

two police officers were shot in Helbronn.

So obviously it's terrible.

A 22-year-old female officer is killed and her male colleague was badly injured.

Now they found the DNA of the killer at the scene and they ran it through a database where obviously DNA has been stored from other crimes and they found multiple matches.

In 2001, a 61-year-old furniture dealer in Freiburg, Germany had been murdered by strangulation and the DNA of the killer of the police was found in his apartment.

And so this is completely befuddling for the police because this is completely different MO.

This is a manual strangulation of a furniture dealer and then this murder of the police, which seemed to be completely different.

They couldn't connect the reasons why you would commit those murders.

This becomes even more confusing when they found a match to a very, very cold case from 1993, a 62-year-old woman, and again, a different murder MO.

They tried to find links between those two victims, the 61-year-old and the 62-year-old, but they weren't connected in any way at all.

So they've got a serial killer, and it turns out from this DNA that this is a woman, which is

incredibly rare to have a female serial killer.

She's been working for nearly 20 years, not working.

I know it's not working.

She's been employed as a serial killer for

two decades.

They're going back through all of these cold cases, going through the data, and the stuff that's coming up on her is just so incredulous.

So at the end of October in 2001 in Budenheim, Germany, there's a break-in in a trailer.

Right, so no murders are committed because it was empty at the time.

And her DNA is found on a half-eaten cookie on the side of this trailer.

So they don't know what she was doing there, but they now have a name for this serial killer, this woman.

They call her the Phantom of Hell Brune.

Now, if I was the German police at this point in the case, I would have called her the cookie monster.

She's killed three people.

I think that the reason they had no sense of humor about it is because she'd killed a police officer.

I think if she hadn't, they'd have had a lot more fun with the naming but Sarah you're saying she didn't exist what's going on well well

at the moment she does exist very much one of her sorry that sounded so play school Andy that I think Sarah's justified in the ladybird with a hat but what happened

so so it's it's um completely incredible.

At this point, they now have a whole room of police officers who are just completely focused on catching her.

They also call her the woman without a face because also so far they have no witnesses.

Obviously, wait a minute.

How did she eat the cookie if she didn't have a face?

This is why she's so mysterious.

So,

so the woman makes no sense.

She's killing, she's robbing, she's snacking, and there's no consistent MO.

And by 2007, she's now in another country.

She's in Austria robbing an optometrist.

And now, because her crimes have gone into Austria, they actually have different rules in terms of what they can do with DNA.

And so they they find out that this woman is of very likely Eastern European descent.

So between 2003 and 2007, the Phantom's DNA is found at over 20 burglaries or motorcycle thefts.

They've got a reward of 300,000 euros for her capture and over 16,000 hours of overtime have already been paid for the police force.

And I've also looked at some of the press from the time.

So this is from 2007.

Now, this was quite a big deal because because they found her DNA on a syringe that was half full of heroin.

So, perhaps she was also an addict.

Was that why her spree was so unpredictable?

Such an old story, isn't it?

You start on the cookies and then you just work your way up to the really hard stuff.

Or maybe because you're so, I don't know if heroin gives you the munchies, but maybe that's why

she was like, I'm busy, I'm busy robbing, but also I would love a biscuit.

So, this is from Time magazine in 2009.

The Phantom was not only a brutal killer suspected of committing six homicides, but also a common thief.

She had been involved in a car dealership robbery and a school break-in, but in both cases, others convicted of those crimes denied her existence.

No one had ever seen her.

No security camera had ever captured her image.

But when witnesses described her, they sometimes said she looked like a man.

So this is what those police are dealing with, right?

So this criminal, this Eastern European woman who looks like a man, is so incredible at her job

and everyone is so scared of her that even people who they definitely know were in the same place as her doing the same crimes are like, no, no, no, no, there was no woman.

What woman are you talking about?

It's crazy.

It's like Kaiser Sosi.

It's like this mythical super boss that everyone probably thinks they're working under.

Exactly that.

Like, so who is this woman?

It's starting to sound to me like she doesn't exist.

Addy, where was the clue?

Was it in the original fact when Sarah said she didn't exist?

So the story ends.

In 2009, they found the burned body of a male asylum seeker.

They took his DNA in an attempt to identify him and their results had a hit on the database.

It was the Phantom of Hell Brune.

They found him, but the DNA is definitely female.

So they've got this man who's been killed, but then the DNA is coming up as this definitely, definitely female DNA.

So obviously, I've written, what the fuck was going on?

was probably what the police

was probably what the police said in that task force.

What the?

hell is this?

And that's when they realised that this must be a contamination.

All of the places that had had shown up the Phantom of Hellbron's DNA, the cotton swabs that are used to take DNA traces,

they all came from exactly the same factory in Bavaria where they employed Eastern European women.

And the reason that this had been allowed to happen was that those swabs were supposed to be for medical use, not for forensic police use.

So there was never an instruction to them that they couldn't like lick the swabs.

I mean, they're not licking the medical swabs, though, are they?

No, I don't think so.

I think they're just maybe not having the same, you know,

airtight, completely safe things.

And so yeah it was just this incredible dna mistake and there have been other dna mistakes

do you think sarah because it's like everyone trusts dna so much don't they it's like this basically if dna says it's right then it must be right and all of the other evidence pointing to it being wrong must be wrong Do you know what I mean?

But people who are really scared of DNA, it's for that exact reason.

Like, so we've had cases in the UK.

There's a case, I think his name's Adam Scott, which you guys might have read about, but he was sent to prison for four and a half months for a crime in Manchester.

It was a really brutal crime on a woman.

And he said that he was in Plymouth or Portsmouth.

It was one of those places down south.

He said, I was definitely there.

So he had an absolutely watertight alibi, which they didn't check because they had his DNA on the victim.

And then after four and a half months of being in prison, and obviously he was actually in a paedophile and rapist's wing of a prison.

So he's also having like a terrible time.

It then turned out that his crime actually, what he'd done is he'd spat in the street and they'd taken his um saliva and they'd in the lab they'd confused the samples, one from a brutal crime, one from one from spitting, and he'd gone to prison for nearly five months.

Now, I'm not saying that that's an appropriate sentence to spend five months in a paedophile wig of a prison for spitting in the street, but I it's not far off.

Yeah, I do hate spitting, I do, but but also I think a lot of Premiership footballers are going to suddenly be in prison.

Oh my god.

Can I just ask, do we know who this Bavarian woman woman is?

And was she informed of all her crimes?

She's the Phantom of Hell Brew.

Right.

So did they track her down?

I actually couldn't get to the bottom of that.

I'm sure she really made

her.

There must be data protection issues about that.

Although, if I was a serial killer and I wanted to commit crimes across multiple jurisdictions across multiple years, I would definitely get a job in a factory that packed cotton swabs and then I would just track the cotton swabs to where they had been.

That's a lot of work.

And I'd commit my crimes there.

Andy, that's your second novel, right?

Yeah.

Wow.

There was a murder called the Time Travel Murder.

It was in the 90s.

And what happened was they found the body and they took DNA from it and they matched it with someone who had died a few years ago.

And they were like, how on earth could that happen?

You know, how can you have someone who

died and then committed the murder?

And what it was is they'd been using the same nail clippers to cut the fingernails to test, right?

And from now on, they always use disposable fingernail clippers whenever they're taking any fingernail stuff.

And they always put the clippers in with the clippings.

So whenever you take the DNA, you always have the item which found the DNA in the first place.

I found a case like that as well.

So this is this is in America in California.

So a man called Lucas Anderson was considered as the main suspect in the murder of a Silicon Valley millionaire.

But what happened was that paramedics had treated him earlier in the day.

So he hadn't died, but they'd then accidentally transferred his DNA to the crime scene when they attended with the victim later on.

They must have thought that's such a coincidence as well.

God, that's so weird that that bloke we were treating earlier today turns out to have been here murdering someone.

But I don't know if it's the same one, but there was one that was like that where the guy was being treated because basically he was blind drunk and they took him into the hospital and obviously all this kind of contamination happened.

But then when they arrested him afterwards, he was like, well, I was drunk.

I might have killed someone, I guess.

It's pretty bad.

But you can, like, if you shake hands with someone for two minutes and then the person that you shook hands with touches a knife, then your DNA will be on that knife.

That's another great plot.

That's a great plot line.

And it's the handshake murderer.

No, it's

not.

No, no, no, it is.

Two minutes.

He's very friendly.

He needs to shake your hand for two minutes.

I bet Darren Brown could do it.

That's true.

I found a DNA-related crime this this year that was a good, this is a good result for the police, but it's not a human one.

It's the police in South Wales.

There's just been this year a trial about a missing cow.

Oh yeah.

So this cow went missing, very expensive cow, cost £3,000.

It was worth that.

And the farmer who had owned it, he suspected one of his neighboring farmers.

So they've took blood samples.

And this, by the way, this all happened three years ago and it's come to trial now.

I imagine there was a very lengthy pre-trial procedure, but they took blood samples they compared with them with samples from the complainant's farm from the victim's farm and it proved that the cows were related so it's a good result that's a good news story yeah

no one was murdered and the guy got his cow back you know what 2020 hasn't been that bad after all

um have you guys heard of soulmate

um

you're gonna have to give us more context so i've been looking looking into lots of different ways that you can bust a criminal.

And obviously, it's from DNA through to looking at prints.

There's so many different ways.

And Soulmate is a really interesting thing that's been set up, which is they also track the footprints of criminals as they're leaving and arriving.

And often, you can see the print of the sole of a shoe, but you don't necessarily know immediately what that shoe is.

So, Soulmate is a database that has over 31,000 individual footwear records that quickly helps you to identify.

So, on the the spot, you can put in the shape, you can put in a logo, you can put in the crime scene print, basically, and it matches it to an existing type of footwear.

It's remarkable how they can track down if it's a new shoe, they can find out who bought the shoes in the area and so on.

Andy, another one for your novel maybe is like someone takes some converse and cuts the sole off, and then puts them on the bottom of some Doc Martins or something.

Oh, wow.

That's really good.

Different size.

Some more ideas for your novel, Andy, while we're still brainstorming.

So

if you get a bone marrow transplant from someone, then your DNA will be the same as the person who gave you the transplant.

So that's quite a good one.

That's wow.

That's amazing.

And also, you know,

they kind of, one use of DNA is to find species in the wild, right?

You might take a bit of soil and then sequence the DNA and you can tell what animals have been there and stuff like that.

Well, the best way of doing that is not by collecting samples, but by collecting stuff from spider's webs.

Because whenever an animal hits a spider's web, they leave some some DNA in that web.

And so you can take the webs and you can work out what animals live in a forest, for instance.

So maybe your murderer kind of is running through a forest, gets caught in a massive spider's web, and they use that as a

thing.

I love that.

Okay, so how about this?

While you're shaking hands with someone for two minutes, you're the killer.

You use that, they're distracted by the handshake, and you use that time to inject them with some of your bone marrow, right?

So then they've got your DNA inside them, but you've got their DNA on your hand.

And then you can go and commit the crime.

It's like face-off, but slightly.

Wow.

But hang on,

if you're able to transfer the bone marrow as the murderer, isn't that all you'd need to do?

Transfer the bone marrow and then drop them off outside a police station and they would be busted as you for all the crimes.

Andy's just going for a second level, I think.

I haven't committed the crime yet, Dan, because I need their DNA on my hand before I hold them.

I think the third level is what you're forgetting is actually it should be a spider because they've got eight hands.

They can shake hands with eight people at the same time.

They can get eight lots of DNA while catching people in their webs and stealing their DNA.

And also, no one will suspect them because they're a spider.

And then imagine how small their fake converse will be.

Oh, well, guys, thank you.

You've put so much thought into what is going to be easily the worst novel published.

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

My fact is that to run a Boeing 747, you need a binder full of floppy disks.

Okay.

Is that like the key?

Is that the key to turn it on?

A floppy disk.

It's not the key to turn it on.

No, wouldn't that be nice?

But this is a fact that's been revealed recently, or I mean, I think quite a lot of people who work in 747s will have known it already.

But Boeing 747s, and in fact, a lot of planes, Boeing 747s, 737s,

they were products of the late 80s.

And at that time, the most effective way to store information was with the floppy disk.

And

there was recently a cybersecurity firm did a walkthrough of a decommissioned 747.

And someone spotted a drive in there and said, oh,

that's a floppy disk drive.

That's very old-fashioned.

Now, this isn't every 747.

Some of them will have been updated by now, but it is still quite a few of them.

Wow.

Didn't we have a very similar discovery a few years ago about Trident?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

The nukes were all.

Well, certainly American nukes were all on floppy disks.

I think until like only last year or something, right?

The American ones.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

It's terrifying.

It's kind of terrifying.

It's also kind of really.

It's terrifying because I guess, you know, as long as you have the equipment to read these things, does it even matter what they're on or not?

Exactly.

I like the idea of the old-fashioned technology because I like, I always really liked Clippy, the Microsoft paper clip.

And I really like the idea that he might be just like popping up on things.

I was like, hello, it looks like you're trying to launch a nuclear missile.

And so, Andy, what do they use these?

I read, I think, that they have like the details of where the airports are and the flight paths and things like that.

Pretty much that, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And there is a problem, though, because these disks, they

can store, I think a standard, like three and a half inch floppy disk can store about 1.4 megabytes on it, give give or take.

But the databases that they are loading onto the planes are getting a bit bigger.

And sometimes you have to load up to eight disks in sequence and get all the information off them and onto the plane.

Wow.

But there might be a bad disk and you might have loaded seven floppy disks worth of stuff on.

And then you find one of the disks is flawed or corrupted in some way.

And then you need to start all over again.

It'd be a bit disconcerting if you got through seven of the floppy disks and you had to start again.

If I was a passenger and I heard an announcement saying from the captain, apologies, this flight is going to be taking off late the uh floppy disks are not uh responding does anyone have floppy disk number eight for the london to barcelona route just on the off um do you know that tim berners-lee used to go door-to-door with the internet on a floppy disk no yeah in order

in order to because the big problem obviously when you were telling people about how the internet would work is that you would need to show them but the reason he invented the world wide web is because computers weren't talking to each other if he'd sent them something their computer was running on different systems.

It wouldn't necessarily translate it.

So he had on a floppy disk in his computer, which he would carry around with him.

He would go to different places and show them the first website, the original CERN website that he'd created.

And it lived on a floppy disk.

And there's a project that's going on at the moment where there's a guy who works at CERN.

He works a couple of offices down from where Berners-Lee worked.

And he's trying to preserve the earliest bit of the internet where we have the first websites and so on.

And the very first website is missing, which is the one that Tim Berners-Lee created.

Wow.

That's very cool.

We don't know where the earliest one is.

We don't know if that's the one.

They're convinced it's out there somewhere.

They think that there's a disc out there and it was lost at some sort of conference in California one night.

Someone disappeared with this and so it should be out there still.

There's a hunt going on.

They've asked the globe.

That's the job for the work experience kid, isn't it?

Can you just go through these five billion discs?

One of them should have the first website on it.

If there are any pilots listening, can you just have a little look around the cockpit?

There is a spare disc.

Just check what's on there.

I would think that the work experience kid wouldn't even know what a floppy disk was.

Did you see this survey in 2018 that asked children under the age of 18 what each of these things are?

So they showed them like a floppy disk and a teletext or a postcard or whatever.

And 67% of children didn't know what a floppy disk was.

Wow.

I think that's fair.

I think that's fair.

I think it would be higher for things like the mini disc, which we have an extensive mini disc collection at the family home.

And

yeah, well, you know, my parents got really into storing things on mini-discs, which didn't take off.

Spoiler, sorry.

It's weird, isn't it?

That basically everything that we use now is just going to become obsolete.

And it doesn't even matter what kind of things we're saving or whatever.

It's all in 100 years' time, no one will be able to read any of it.

It's not like a book where you can, everyone will always be able to to read the book.

Well, maybe not always, but for a long time they will be able to.

It's like they've come up with a new way of storing data on like a little quartz thing, and it'll last for 13.8 billion years.

It lasts forever.

But of course, the problem is that in about 20 years, no one will even know how to access it.

It's just going to look like a bit of rock.

Yeah.

I just find that really interesting.

It'd be really cool though if like the next Rosetta Stone is literally a little stone.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It could be like the next Rosetta Stone.

They get a USB stick and a mini disc and a floppy disc.

And they're like, how do we get the data out of this one?

It's a bit like getting the data out of that one and stuff.

James, just on what you're saying there, the

BBC in 1986, they made what they call a digital doomsday book.

Okay, so I'm not sure if it was a copy of the real doomsday book or if it was an example of what civilization was like in 1986, but they made it on an Acorn computer and they used a video disk player for the storage device.

Anyway, 13 years later, by 1999, it was completely unreadable.

And a team of researchers had to spend three years developing the software to access something from 1986.

Oh my god.

So yeah, it's a problem.

It's cool, though.

There is a lot of floppy disk archaeology going on, which is quite fun.

So, for example, Andy Warhol, a lot of art of Andy Warhols is saved onto floppy disk that we don't have.

And I think it originates with there was a party that Yoko Ono threw for Sean Lennon when he was young, just after John Lennon had died.

And at the party was Andy Warhol, and one of the guests was Steve Jobs.

And Steve Jobs brought him the original Apple Mac computer as a present.

And he was showing Sean Lennon the paint.

function on it where he was drawing and Andy Warhol spotted that and went over and started doing his own drawings on it and he was fascinated by it and that led to a whole uh thing of Andy Warhol doing original art purely on his his apple on paint and uh or on another computer sorry wow On Peck was that on paint.

Wow.

Yeah.

And he saved them to floppy disks and never published them.

And so people have been finding lost Andy Warhol art on all these floppy disks that are kept in his archives.

They're going through all the floppies.

He might have the original internet.

Yeah.

He might do.

I've got just one more thing on floppy disks.

Which is about Prince.

Oh, so cool.

Yes.

The artist Prince, the musician Prince.

Prince.

We all know who I'm talking about when I say Prince.

So you may remember in 1993, he changed his name to a symbol, which he called the love symbol.

And it was a combination of the, you know, the male and female symbols with the arrow and the cross and things.

And it had entered his consciousness during meditation.

And so, obviously, he wanted to get it out there.

But the thing is, nobody knew how to print it.

And so, his management, Warner Brothers, they did put it up online as well.

But they also sent out floppy disks of the symbol to various magazines saying, This is what you have to call Prince now.

This is his name.

And so, yeah, that was how they distributed the new name of Prince.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

I think he did it also because he was very annoyed with his management.

Yes.

Because he had a lot of beef with them.

He had 500 songs that he wanted to release.

And Warner Brothers said.

That might flood the market for Prince songs just a little bit.

Could you not do that?

So he was furious about that.

And as a result, he changed his name to that.

I got one tiny thing which is referencing back to our first fact, which is that there was an American serial killer who was,

they were on the hunt for him and they were reaching out to this guy to communicate with him.

And the guy asked out in various channels whether or not he could communicate with them, not in person, but via floppy disk.

And they said yes to that.

And they did that by putting it in a newspaper by saying, Rex, it will be okay as a message to him.

But they said you couldn't be tracked.

Wasn't that the thing?

As in.

Yeah, yeah.

It'll be completely anonymous if you sent it to floppy disk.

Exactly.

He was asking, will this be okay?

Will I be, will it it be anonymous?

And they said, Yes.

Anyway, he sent in the floppy disk.

They were able to trace it back to his church.

And then they caught him.

This is extraordinary.

And he was furious.

Because they found out that he'd used the floppy disk on a particular library computer or something like this.

And they said, who's a member of the library?

And it turns out he was, I think, the head of a church.

Yeah, they lied.

So basically, they lied to him.

He said that you can't trace computer geographic information via floppy disk.

And they said, no, you can't, but they can yeah and he was really annoyed with them for fibbing about that when he murdered multiple people yeah lying is also against the law andy

yeah

is it yeah you don't expect the police to be also criminals

it's like you can't trust anyone anymore

why are they called floppy disks when they're not floppy I'm so glad you asked, James.

They should, actually, they should be called stiffies.

In South Africa, they're called stiffies, aren't they?

Yes.

Are they?

It's because the the very original ones.

Well I think also if you're on an aeroplane and you hear the captain saying has anyone seen my stiffy then that's going to be even more in isn't it

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

Okay my fact this week is that in the 1920 US election which was the first after women got the vote in America only one woman in the whole of Georgia managed to cast a vote.

So this is the 19th amendment.

It was ratified in August 1920 and it granted women the vote.

But the election took place on the 2nd of November.

So, it was only a few months later.

And most of the states kind of facilitated the new voters.

They came up with ways to make sure that people could register in time.

But Mississippi and Georgia, especially, were so against the idea.

They were so massively against the idea of women voting that they tried to make it as difficult as possible for women to vote.

And in Georgia, they said

you had to have registered six months before the election in order to cast a vote.

And obviously, six months before the election, they hadn't ratified the law yet.

But luckily, there was one lady called Mary Jarrett White who somehow on April the 1st signed her name on a poll tax and also registered to vote at that time.

No one's quite sure how she managed to do it.

The time-travelling voter.

It's so strange because it seems like she shouldn't have been allowed to do it, but whoever was organising it allowed her and she was allowed to vote in November and she did.

But she voted for the losing candidate, but she's still nice to vote.

Oh, wow.

I like the idea that they were like,

well, what harm can she do?

Silly idiot.

We'll let her sign up.

She'll never be able to actually use our vote.

Also, April 1st, not the best day to sort of have what looks like a prank.

a woman finally voting.

I don't know if you'd believe it.

Oh, do you think that's what she was doing in April Fools and her husband?

She came home, like, guess what?

I've got the vote.

And then at midday, she's like, ah, I got you.

Yeah, but Georgia, at the time, 58% of the population of Georgia were Baptists.

And the Baptist religion, certainly then, it's still now, but certainly then, it was very much against women being allowed to do anything.

They were subservient to the men.

The men organized the family and the women just, if they had any influence, they were supposed to influence their husbands husbands, and then their husbands would influence society.

Georgia's constitution said that females are not entitled to the privilege of the elective franchise, nor can they hold any civil office or perform any civil functions.

And there was only one position in office that they were allowed to hold, and it was state librarian.

If librarian was the only job that I was allowed, and I was to be subservient, what I would do is cut the last page out of every single novel in the library.

And then I'd be like, fuck you, man.

Oh my God, imagine getting through all the way through Andy's second novel and not finding out that it was a spider after all.

All the reveals are on the last page in this novel as well.

I'm really packing it right in at the end.

I was looking into sort of other examples of women voting early or sort of other earliest women to vote in various places.

This was a really weird thing.

After the American Revolution, for three decades in New Jersey, women and men had exactly the same voting rights and women were allowed to vote, not in national elections, but in New Jersey.

They could.

And

they did vote.

So people have been looking through old electoral lists and they've found lots of women's names.

In some places, it's not 50-50, but it's up to about 15% of voters were women there.

And it was

it was racially equal to, it was whether you were black or white.

And then

it was restricted in 1807 to white men.

It was seen as some kind of oversight that had happened because there were all these charges of

people said there were petticoat electors, which is women who'd been manipulated.

You know, they couldn't possibly know, make an informed decision about who they were voting for.

So that was one supposed problem with the system.

And the other problem was apparently men putting on dresses to vote and then voting six or seven times for the same person and manipulating the vote that way, which I would have thought would make you more conspicuous as

a voter.

It's not clear to me

how that helps.

And how come they're not petticoat manipulators if they're dressed as women?

Surely that's also.

Yeah.

Yeah, Andy.

Again, I'm not saying that I approve of this

lockdown that happened on women voting, but I think that's amazing that that was such an early sort of aberration there.

Again, not aberration in a bad sense,

a positive aberration from the norm.

But actually, before 1920, there are a few different states that allowed women to vote.

So, Wyoming had full women's suffrage from 1869.

But the reason they did that is because they wanted to attract single women to the state.

Really?

Yeah, they had a lot of kind of migrant male workers who were working in Wyoming, and they thought, well, how can we get more women here?

Well, let's let them vote.

They should have done what nightclubs did in Essex on a Friday, which is make it free hooch.

Free hooch for ladies in groups who don't have a man with them what what is what is hooch sarah

you're so young what hooch is that no it's not young what it's poshness

um so you remember alcohops uh yeah yeah yeah yeah so so hooch was kind of one of the original mass marketed wow uh it was it was a lemon flavoured drink uh so like uh uh i guess and it was marketed towards women oh well i liked hooch as well well okay well i mean

when I say marketed towards, I absolutely don't mean that it was supposed to be an effeminate drink, but it was like a, if women don't like the taste of beer, then you've got this now sweet drink you can drink out of a bottle in a nightclub.

Actually, I quite liked watermelon Bacardi Breezes as well.

So maybe I was just...

Of course you did.

You've got a heart

and taste buds.

And the other state which had full women's suffrage at the time was Utah.

And the reason they did it is because they wanted to show the rest of the country that women were not oppressed by the practice of polygamy.

And they were saying, no, no, but look, they can vote.

They can vote.

I read about this.

And they also, didn't they hope that women would vote for

the non-church leaders?

So they would perhaps this was a way of ending the practice of polygamy was to allow women to vote and then they would vote against it.

Unfortunately, they kept voting for it.

And then people said, all right, well, let's take the vote away from women in Utah after all.

So very backfired.

Well, that was the thing, wasn't it?

They sort of worried that once women were given the vote, that it was a sort of useless vote anyway, because of the nature of the relationship between husbands being this dominant character in the relationship.

They would only vote for what the husband told them to vote for, anyway.

So it was a sort of

cancelled-out vote in terms of if they'd go the other way, which is really interesting because there's been recent polls that show that had it not been for the voting of women in recent elections in America between 1968 and 2004, Republicans would have swept every single presidential race in that period when they broke it down and looked at it.

Yeah, so interesting.

But also, that's why it's so important that voting is secret, because then, of course, even if you did have somebody oppressive in your household, you can always say, oh, yeah, I voted for exactly who you told me to, but you still have your autonomy and your freedom to cast the vote for

you believe.

If all of your wives are telling you to vote one way, you've got to have the freedom to say.

Yeah, absolutely.

Of course, yeah.

I love the idea that the women in Utah were like, why would we get rid of polygamy?

I don't want a husband all to myself.

God, spread him out between, I only have to see him once every eight days.

When the 19th Amendment was passed, the president at the time was Woodrow Wilson.

But Woodrow Wilson had had a stroke in October of 1919.

And actually, his wife was the de facto president of America around that time.

So the doctors came in kind of secretly and didn't really want anyone to know that he was really sick.

And they said, he said, well, obviously Woodrow Wilson can't really do anything, but what we're going to say is maybe Edith Wilson can kind of run everything on the sidelines and he can kind of just be there and not do any press and stuff like that.

So technically, or not technically, but...

de factoly,

the president of the United States when the 19th Amendment was passed was Edith Wilson, female.

I knew it was suspicious.

I knew it was suspicious.

Well, on the other hand,

she was very much anti-suffragettes.

I think possibly because she had to be, and because, you know, obviously they were fighting against the president at the time.

But she called the suffragettes the devils of the workhouse.

So.

Yeah, that's reverse psychology.

That's how you,

that's how you get yourself into a powerful position.

No, no, that's the last thing I want.

Done it.

Have you guys heard of the suffragette suffragette cookbooks that were published in the USA?

No.

This is very weird.

So you don't associate the suffragetist movement with, you know, the home economics thing and publishing cookbooks, but this is exactly why they were published.

So the kind of stock impression

that was given by opponents of the suffragette movement was that, you know, these women were neglecting their families, they were letting their children go hungry, they weren't looking after the home.

So

the movement got together and published lots of cookbooks with kind of suffragette recipes.

And

they were quite good.

One of them was for emergency salad, which is one part onion to nine parts apple with any dressing.

That's the salad.

How bad is this emergency that's going to eat an onion?

Yeah, and so these books had lots of stuff in it.

One of the women inside there was Alice Bunker Stockham, who was only the fifth female doctor in the USA.

And she was openly pro-masturbation for men and for women alike, which was her, that was her big thing.

Was this part of the recipe?

This is not in the cookbook.

You did say Eddie dressing.

I don't know if I, if one of my criticisms of the suffragettes was that these women aren't neglecting their domestic duties, I don't think the apple onion salad would convince me otherwise.

No, that's a good point.

I think that would be be my proof of like, look at what these lazy bitches are underneath,

calling it dinner.

It's an onion and an apple.

Are you kidding me?

I want lasagna.

I didn't realize what an influence the British suffragettes had on the American ones.

I read a few articles about this.

So, for example, Emmeline Pankhurst did tours of America talking to huge groups of people about the fight for women's rights.

And she played Madison Square Garden,

which, as you know, we're all performers here.

Like, what a gig.

Madison Square Garden.

Yeah.

Do you think that was already like I've broken America?

Exactly.

She didn't fill it.

She had 3,000 people there.

But I mean, that's as big a gig as the three of us from Fish have ever played.

That's Danny.

Are you comparing no such thing as a Fish to the suffragette movement in the USA?

Can I just say also, Dan, we played 3,300 at the Hammersmith Apollos.

So

Slightly more, actually, than the Pancaska got.

Yeah, okay.

What is the capacity of Madison Square Gardens?

It's over 30,000, I think.

Oh, okay.

So actually, she did really badly.

She absolutely tanked it.

Maybe she said it's socially distanced.

Yes.

Spanish flu.

Yeah, got to be careful.

Yeah.

Sorry, it's 19,810 just to just to lessen the bombing of the sales for her.

No, but that is that is that's the depressing thing when you get the email every Sunday with your ticket sales

And she's sending out loads of tweets like plenty of tickets left bring your friends Two for one can't find out about British feminism.

There'll be a free emergency salad for everyone who buys a ticket

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

My fact this week is that there is a species of Japanese water beetle that survives being swallowed by a frog by crawling through the frog's body and escaping out of its anus.

Now,

this is amazing.

It's the first documented example of prey doing this through a predator, escaping via the digestive system.

It has to literally crawl all the way through the digestive system and make its way out the back.

And

it's a thing that was discovered at Kobe University where a frog was put into this enclosure, see-through box, and this water beetle was in there.

Water beetle got swallowed, and there was nothing for 115 minutes.

And then suddenly you see, and there's videos online you can watch, crawling out of the bumhole of this frog is this full water beetle that's covered a bit in feces.

You can't really see that, but they tell you it is, and it just wanders off.

And we've never seen this before.

So it's a very exciting moment.

I'm a bit worried that you sold that so well that you could go online and watch a video of a beetle crawling out of a frog xanus covered in feces that probably no one's listening now.

They've probably all gone to watch it.

Oh, that's true.

Okay, well, welcome back to the show.

You've seen it now.

Amazing, isn't it?

So, yeah, so

this is a guy, by the way, who experiments a lot on the defense mechanisms.

The defense mechanisms that he says are sort of impossible defense mechanisms that you could not predict.

And he's found a number of things that are really interesting.

A bombardier beetle being swallowed by a frog will eventually be vomited back up because of an explosion of chemicals inside.

He's responsible for us documenting all that stuff, and this is his latest discovery.

We should say this guy's name.

He's called Shinji Sugiura, and he's an ecologist at Kobe University.

And he's got loads of form on this, as you say, Dan.

It's unbelievable.

And so

he wanted to test properly because the frog doesn't have teeth when it eats the beetle.

So that's partly why the beetle survives.

But I say it's a really big part of the reason.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They haven't.

Because I feel like all the animals who can't escape from bum holes or from mouths, like it is because they've been chewed up by the person or the animal eating them.

It's not because they haven't evolved to be clever enough.

No, no, you're right.

It's yeah, it's a major part of the success strategy.

Make sure you're eaten by someone which has no teeth.

But he wanted to test how they do it.

And so he took some of the beetles that he was going to be testing on and he glued their legs together with sticky wax.

So basically he turned them into Harry Houdini beetles and then he let them be swallowed by the frog and those ones

were immobilized as it were and those ones did not manage to make their way out.

So his hypothesis at the moment is that

what they're doing when their legs are free and they're swallowed is that they're using their legs not only to propel themselves through but to hammer on the sphincter of the frog and convince it to expel them.

I read it as tickle the cloical opening rather than hammering.

over this one.

I may have sexed it up a little bit.

I'm sorry for, you know,

hammering over tickling is more sexy.

Well, it depends how it depends how you want to kind of anthropomorphize the beetle.

Is it terrified, going, get me out of here?

Or is it going, oh, this is funny?

I really don't like this hypothesis where he's like, I wonder if things are harder if you're handcuffed.

Oh, yes.

It turns out it's actually more difficult to do things.

It's interesting, though, because the tickling at the end almost suggests that that's a bit of information that's passed on to all the Beatles.

That once you get to the end, the way to open the magic gate is there's a little tickly thing and you've got to tickle that.

That sounds to me more like that's you have to have inherent knowledge, whereas the hammering.

Dan, can we use the technical words like anus rather than magic gate?

We tell you this every week.

Dan, what you just said sounded like what used to happen in like Just 17 and Moore magazine, where it's like, if you want your guy to speed up, there's a magic button up his gun.

Tickle the Magic Gate has very different overtones to hammer on the anus.

Yeah, it's a terrible children's book.

But yeah, the hammering sounds more like the right hypothesis, I would say.

It's sort of just a, I'm at the end, I'm trying to keep going.

It's like when, you know, when you're running out of seconds at the crystal maze, get me out.

It's that kind of moment.

But also, presumably, if you've been struggling all of the way down through the frog's body anyway, like you would still be moving there.

It's just that, because human beings have two sphincters, don't we?

We have kind of one that we have no conscious control over and one that we do have conscious control over.

And so obviously if there's movement in a part of your body where it's kind of automatic, you would just then feel the need to go to the toilet.

It's how you can have emergencies.

Because

the part of your sphincter that you don't have conscious control over will be like, right, I'm ready to go.

And then the conscious part goes, oh my God, this is an emergency situation.

What's the why did we

evolve to have a dumb sphincter and a smart sphincter?

I think maybe it's a safety thing, as in there might be scenarios where it's more dangerous to draw attention to yourself.

Yeah, if you're trying to stay very quiet and avoid a predator.

And then

which doesn't make sense because actually it's a fantastic weapon to have to hand.

Yeah.

If you are in danger.

What, just randomly pooing with no.

No, because then you could just throw it at the lion or whatever or

the bad monkey.

So just very quickly on the rest of this study, so the really interesting thing is we do know of other animals that pass through the digestive system of another animal, right?

There are a few of those.

But what is really interesting about this is the fact that we...

we think that they're actually actively crawling through there.

And the reason that we know that is because, like you say, he sellitates his legs together or whatever, glued the legs together, but also that the bugs can get out with as little time as like six minutes, whereas normally it would take a couple of days for a frog to digest its food, but they can get out of there in six minutes.

Six minutes is the real, that is the real crystal maze thing, isn't it?

Yeah.

Imagine eating a meal completely unaware and then feeling terrible and realizing that your meal is still alive and it's

it's got a destination in mind.

there is a beetle called the coffee berry bora that lives exclusively on coffee beans um but it can't eat caffeine

so it only eats coffee but it doesn't like caffeine and the only way they can do it is they have a special bacteria inside them that kind of deals with the caffeine and if you take all the bacteria out for it out of this um beetle by giving it antibiotics or whatever it'll die because it can't can't deal with the coffee so it only likes the science is so awful And if you glue all their hands together, then they can't even pick up any more coffee beans.

What's an interesting science experiment?

Yeah, you're right.

I mean, how are you going to learn things, but at the same time, for the individual coffee berry borrower.

Why can't we just all appreciate life's mysteries?

Have you guys heard of the Epomis beetle?

In fact,

I don't think we've mentioned this before.

Again, frogs prey on it.

The frog bites it.

But at the moment where the frog bites it, this beetle larva sinks its teeth into the frog's tongue, right?

And then it starts releasing enzymes which melt the frog's flesh.

And

this goes on for a few days, unfortunately, for the frog.

And the frog is just stuck there with what it thought was its lunch, and it's slowly being eaten by its lunch.

It's basically...

It gets turned into a straw through which the beetle larva is drinking.

And eventually the frog is just a pile of skin and bones it's dead and the the larva wanders off so the scientists who were testing this they observed 400 standoffs um between these two the beetle always wins oh my god there was one case there was one case where a toad managed to grab the beetle and quickly swallow it and then it started looking a bit peaky two hours later it threw up and then the beetle ate the toad

Oh my god.

And Andy, can you let me know?

Is there anywhere I can watch this on YouTube?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's funny pranks for toads.

There's another beetle, the male diving beetle.

It has sperm which team up with each other.

So this is very rare, obviously, because normally sperm is a kind of what are those games?

It's sort of one versus everybody, you know.

Zero-sum game.

Yeah.

Like British Bulldog.

British Bulldog.

It's like British Bulldog.

Sorry.

Sarah came up with a proper academic answer on what I was trying to say was it's like British Bulldog.

So, So, but this is the really weird thing.

The male diving beetle, their sperm effectively do a conga and they team up hundreds of them and even thousands of them and they all go in a line or they sometimes go in a crocodile, they'll go in pairs.

And it's because the female diving beetle's reproductive tract is unbelievably complicated.

And the female will often store sperm for months or years to fertilize herself later.

And the males kind of form a train trying to just get through to the area they need to be to fertilize the egg because otherwise they will just be lost.

What's in it for the other sperms, the sperms at the back of the conga?

I don't know.

It will probably improve all of their chances of getting there, even if they're not the person at the front.

I suppose.

And you all have this very similar genetic material, don't you?

So you're still passing it on.

That's a good point.

But as you say, what is the point of being at the back of a conga?

What's the point of being in a conga?

Well, sometimes it splits off and you become the front.

That's very stressful.

I wonder if that happens with these sperms.

Not at the back though.

You can't let go at the back.

That's just a person walking.

If you're still kicking your legs out to the side, then it's still a conga, even if it's just you.

I've never had that happen to me doing a conga, but I would be terrified that it would.

I would cling on for dear life to avoid the responsibility of becoming the

sometimes the conga sometimes like flips around in a way you're not expecting and no one has a good enough grip to hold on to the person.

in front of.

Or it goes into a place you don't want to go.

Like if they start going, they think it'd be funny to go into the toilets.

It's like it's a wedding.

I don't want to go and look at people at the urinals.

I think if they have like very complicated labyrinthine

vaginas, that probably that is exactly what we're saying about there will be...

conga and splits off and things going around and also getting becoming becoming very tired the energy exerted means that some of them will get tired at the front and I think it will be a collective yeah Still give you a good chance.

Because that also happens in a conga sometimes.

You get like a wave of speed, don't you?

Like some of the people at the front go a bit too fast and then some of the slower people can't hold on and then they become the front of the conga.

That's very cool.

I feel like biology is actually so easy.

You just use a conga analogy.

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 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 Sarah?

At Sarah Pasco.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing, or our website, no such thingasofish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise.

Or you could also go to an independent bookshop website and get the new paperback, Sex Power Money, by Sarah Pasco, Sunday Times bestseller.

That's out now.

Do Do do that.

We will be back again next week, guys.

We hope you're all doing well.

We will see you again with another episode.

Goodbye.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaysF.com

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