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Hello and welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that's my fact.

My fact this week is before hermit crabs were called hermit crabs, there was a hermit called Crab.

This is a

man called Roger Crabb, who

his dates were 1621 to 1680, and he was an English soldier, he was a haberdasher, he was a herbal doctor, an author, and a hermit.

And he predates the naming of herbit crabs.

So did he live in a kind of shell which he would periodically exchange for a very slightly larger shell?

Are hermit crabs named after him?

Well, hermit crabs, I believe, are named after hermits generally, but I don't think he was such a famous hermit that he sort of defined the whole species.

He was semi-famous, right?

Isn't there a thought that he

was a hatter?

And there's a thought that Lewis Carroll's mad hatter was maybe based on him because he was also

quite mad.

Yeah, I couldn't find anything that sort of truly links that other than people saying it was thought.

Did you get anywhere with that?

Like people were writing about him a lot in the 19th century when Lewis Carroll was also writing.

You know, people would reflect back on his life for quite a lot of sources.

So maybe he was your famous Mad Hatter.

But he wasn't.

Was he when was he alive?

He was in the 1600s.

Oh, okay, cool.

They just talked about him a lot.

Hermit crabbits were named in the 1700s.

So he predates them only just, but he gets there.

It's sad, isn't it, in in a way, that you know, he never knew that those animals.

If he was a really famous hermit, like you guys are saying, then hermit curbs might have been based on him, you know?

Yeah.

It's possible.

Yeah.

And he had sort of a sad life, even though I guess he claimed to like it.

Didn't he by the end of his life?

He was all about denying himself sort of all pleasures.

Yes.

And he didn't limit himself to potatoes and carrots and then he sort of quit that and just lived off bran and turnip leaves.

And then he quit that.

And by the end of his life, apparently was living off dock leaves and grass.

grass.

Yeah, he was just eating grass at the end.

I don't know if directly mouthed to ground or if he turned it into a sort of picked it and put it in a bowl.

Anna you wrote something last week which I read which says that you can't eat grass.

Yeah, it's interesting isn't it?

So I'm not quite sure how he was surviving.

Maybe he had a cow's stomach implanted into his horse.

Because what you need is like cows have the right bacteria in their stomachs, which means that they can break down the cellulose and get to the good stuff inside the grass.

But we don't have it in our stomachs.

So unless he's licked a few cows to get the bacteria, I don't know how he's.

I mean, maybe he died almost immediately after

deciding to eat only grass.

It is the last thing on his menu of diet changes, so I think we can assume it might have played a part in that.

No, he was, yeah, and he um, he was accused of witchcraft in his lifetime as well because he used to make prophecies.

I couldn't actually find any of his prophecies, but um,

I bet I'll die really soon after adopting this brand new diet,

but yeah, um, so good to know know he existed.

I'd never heard of Roger Crabb before.

He seems like a proper hermit, too.

He seems like an in-it-for-life hermit, because we briefly mentioned before that you used to be able to kind of hire a hermit for your garden if you're a landowner.

Yes.

Which is more, they're more in it for the money.

There's a guy who's written, Gordon Campbell is his name.

He's written a book which has got one of the best book titles ever.

It's called The Hermit in the Garden, From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome.

And he tracked down a load of newspaper adverts which were kind of hiring hermits or advertising for hermits.

So some said you'll get £50 a year for life as long as you live underground for the rest of your life and no one sees you.

Okay.

That's one offer.

And I think that

you could ring a bell and a servant would bring you stuff, but you weren't allowed to chat to anyone and you had to grow your hair and your fingernails.

So it's really unclear what the landowner gets out of this.

But someone took that for four years and stuck it out for that long.

But there are so few shops underground, it's hard to work out what you'd spend your £50.

I think Amazon would deliver to your underground place.

That's a good point.

There was one guy called Charles Hamilton who offered a job on his Surrey estate, which was £700 in exchange for seven years of hermiting.

So it's like a fixed-term contract.

And the successful applicant took the job and then was found in a local pub three weeks into the hermit shop.

Wow.

Yeah.

He lasted longer than I would.

There was, I think it was also in that book that he talked about Peter the Great's hermitage, which was very much more on the side of not a proper hermitage.

I've been to the hermitage in St.

Petersburg, and it's

if a hermit lived there, he was living at large.

Yeah,

so actually,

that was an even bigger upgrade compared to Peter the Great's original one.

But he originally decided to build a hermitage in his garden, which was sort of a retreat from matters of state.

And this was in the 1700s when it was quite popular, the hermit lifestyle.

And this was described as being a hermitage and that it had no servant.

So you were really living like a feral human.

And it was two floors, and the dining room was on the upper floor, and the kitchen was on the lower floor.

And there were no stairs going from the lower floor to the upper floor.

So the guests, when they arrived, had to be hoisted on chair lifts.

So on their individual chairs, hoisted up onto the upper floor to eat.

And then when the table was loaded with food, it would be descended through the floor onto the ground floor, loaded up with food, and then hoisted up onto the upper floor again.

Sounds so cool.

Who's doing the hoisting if there are no servants?

Yeah.

Because I thought I'd read that there were just no servants on the first floor.

Like obviously there'll be loads of servants on the first one

doing all the pulling and the cooking.

Yeah, that's not really living an ascetic life, is it?

If

you only have servants on one of your floors.

Come on, he's making an effort.

Fair enough.

There are more modern hermits, aren't there?

There was a guy in America called Billy Barr who lived in the Rocky Mountains.

And he's really cool because he got bored quite soon into being a hermit or living on his own, let's say.

And so he decided to kind of make a diary and he started measuring the snow levels and all the animal tracks and when the first bird song would be every year.

And he did it for 44 years.

And now his notes can be used to measure climate change.

Which I think is really cool.

They're actually using his diary to say, ah, wait a minute, in 1970 something, the birds sang on this date and now they're singing on this date.

Wow.

Are there any awkward entries in the diary which he hasn't, which they have to just skip over?

Wow, in 1976, he started masturbating in June, but in 1978, he started masturbating in May.

What does this tell us about the temperature of the Rocky Mountains?

I found a pro-hermit.

in the UK who seems to be operating in the UK, or definitely he's done stints here.

So he's an Indian artist called Ansuman Bizwas, and he was recruited in 2002 by Staffordshire Council to live for a weekend, a weekend of being a hermit

in a place.

That's so ridiculous when we've all been in our house for three months.

So that was 2002.

He was paid 600 quid to live in a grotto for a weekend.

Not bad.

Then in 2009, there's a news report of Manchester Museum hiring a hermit.

Guess who it is?

It's Indian artist Ansuman Biswas again.

And then

he's done another one.

Recently, this year, he was going to do the Horniman Museum in South London and live there.

He was going to be locked in their clock tower.

But unfortunately, due to everyone staying at home, he was not allowed to become a hermit.

That's so amazing.

So when lockdown finishes, he gets to go and lock down again.

Really?

Yeah, I wonder if hermits have generally been furloughed across the board.

We've read a lot about that.

Apparently, I was reading a Victorian source reflecting back on hermits throughout time, and it was, it was, it's such a religious thing, and all religions seem to have this tradition about self-denying.

And this source was saying that basically the women did it properly, and the men didn't really do it.

So it said that basically there's a division between hermits proper and recluses.

And hermits proper tend to see quite a lot of people have guests go out into the world.

And then recluses are the ones that don't see anyone.

And it said it was basically done down gender lines.

So the recluses would be women and they would see nobody.

But then, actually, I think because anchoresses were the recluses, essentially, and they were meant to be hermits.

Again, Julian of Norwich, a very, very famous example.

And they essentially were agony aunts, I think.

Which so they would deliberately have their hermitages built in the middle of quite a busy thoroughfare.

Like in the Trafford Centre or something.

Yeah.

And then you would just go and sit next to her and say, Oh, I'm feeling a bit sad today.

I've been doing some sins.

And then she'd help you.

She'd say, well, at least you don't live in a box in the Trafford Centre with anyone allowed to come up to you anytime.

My friend Jenny lived in a box in the Trafford Centre for a little while.

Did she?

Yeah, Jenny Ryan actually did the chase.

Yeah, she did.

I don't know if that's on record.

I suppose it must be.

What do you mean she?

I don't fully know what this box is.

Is it just a cardboard box?

Do you remember David Blaine?

Yeah.

Lived in a box for a while.

Well, I think this was pre-Blaine.

She was in a competition where she had to go and sit in a box for as long as possible in the Trafford Centre.

Oh, cool.

This is right.

It might have been the Arndale Centre.

But the basics are

the basics of the story are true.

Wow.

So

did you visit her in the box and tell her your problems?

It was a long time ago.

I don't think so.

I think I was at university.

You can't remember if you visited your friend in a box in a mall.

The fact that I can't remember it suggests I didn't.

But it also suggests I have a terrible friend, so I don't know which way to go.

There was also, so the more sort of social hermits, we mentioned a long time ago on the podcast, the stylites, which I find so interesting.

The idea, this was during the Byzantine Empire, you would have, so we're talking sort of the year 432.

They would be just, you know, you guys look a bit...

Byzantine Empire.

So, you know, around 432.

Oh, a magnificent magnificent but very short-lived empire wasn't that

it's like a weekend hermitage that empire

uh so the uh the idea of this was it was gigantic poles in the center city centers and people would climb up them and they would become hermits up there and just stay there for their lifetime and they would like the pulley systems they would send up food to them and they would stand and preach so they were hermits but they were also giving out sort of religious advice uh the whole time it would be their their soapbox as it it were.

It feels a bit unfair.

Have you heard of Mary of Egypt?

No.

She was a very early hermit and she isolated herself to atone for her insatiable carnal appetites.

Okay.

Which just seemed to be she liked having sex with people.

She also sat on top of a massive pole.

But all the stories about her say she wasn't even charging money to have sex with people, as if that was the worst element of the story.

Yeah.

But she ended up still naked, didn't she?

At the end, didn't someone stumble upon her in the desert?

And she was unclothed.

So, I'm not saying she wasn't sticking to her vows, but it's very hot in the desert,

it was hot.

Um, a couple of things on hermit crabs, yeah.

So, hermit crabs are really great.

Uh, there we go, that's all I got.

No, um, do you know how old the oldest pet hermit crab known is?

Oh, God, I'd say about 35.

That's good, um, Dan?

15 days,

15 days.

Okay.

I'm under egging at this time.

I'm in a, I'll go middle, so

13 years old.

James is closest.

It's 42.

It was 42 last year.

And he lives at a retirement home, which is very nice

because his owner also lives at a retirement home.

And it's called the Shell Point Retirement Community.

He's hoping to move into a bigger retirement home next year, isn't he?

But they do, they upgrade their homes, don't they?

It's the most incredible thing about them.

And the way that they do it is like it makes our property ladder look very simple.

So a hermit crab will have its shell on its back, its house on its ass,

and then

its ass starts getting bigger and its house becomes too small for it.

And so it will find another shell that's a bit bigger.

But often this shell will be too big.

you know it's like a mansion and so then they'll have to wait for another hermit crab to come along that's sort of a different size and then enough hermit crabs have to come along in all different sizes that they can line up from smallest to largest and then the largest one can move into the vacant hugest shell and everyone else can move up one shell level it's amazing it's insane how are they organizing it it doesn't make any sense it's brilliant it's so cool and there are videos of it right online people have to google hermit crabs moving house and look at the videos because they're absolutely amazing it's incredible but sometimes two chains kind of get to the same shell at the same time, and then the two biggest hermit crabs have to have a fight with each other to see who's going to get the big shell.

And everyone in your queue is going to get a new house if you win the fight.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so all the little guys are watching these two big guys fighting, thinking, I hope my guy wins.

But then sometimes they swap queues and go to and see that one of the other guys is doing a bit better in the fight and kind of sneak over and join his team.

That is amazing.

That's incredible.

That is amazing.

They

also, there's cases of gangs of hermit crabs coming to steal a single hermit crab's shell.

So they nick it for their mate.

And I read that that's the reason that they have extremely long penises, because if you're having sex as a hermit crab and you leave your shell to go have sex because of your smaller penis,

then

you're leaving your home open for burglary.

So by having a very long penis, you can stay indoors at home, but send your penis out for sex.

Talk it through the letter box.

Yeah, exactly.

So if you're a shy hermit crab, you have more sperm than if you're a brave hermit crab.

Really?

This was found out by scientists who startled hermit crabs.

So they would take a crab from its tank, kind of scare it, and then put it back.

And then the crab would go into its shell because it was scared.

And then they would measure how long it would take before he came back out again to see if everything was okay.

And they compared that with with the amount of sperm in their spermatophores, which is what they use to make they have little bundles of sperm.

And they found that the ones who were shy have more sperm than the ones who are brave.

Do they know why?

Well, is it that

what they said is that there are two different approaches.

You can either have a live fast, die young approach where you just go out and do it or like the more successful ones have a stay safe and protect your giant sperm package approach.

Right.

So it was the idea that they sort of know they've got this valuable package and they're really trying to preserve it.

Yeah, but the ones who have got less good package of sperm, they have to go out and find the

females.

Yeah.

It needs to be more outgoing.

So actually me staying in my room and reading throughout my university years was just because I'm an exceptionally high quality male.

Is that what we're saying?

Or that you were storing up a lot of sperm in the tank

that other people were utilizing

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Magna Carta smells of newly pressed sheets with traces of old socks.

So this is the Institute of Digital Archaeology, and they're planning an exhibition called Sensational Books, which will be at the Bodleian in Oxford and at the New York Public Library.

And what they've done is they've taken a load of old books and they've taken the essence of the smell from all of these books.

And you're going to be able to go and smell what these old books smell like.

basically.

What they do is they take the book and they put it in a sealed chamber and they fire a load of air over it for 24 hours and then they capture the particulates or the little kind of molecules from the book and then they can take those filters, they spin them around, spin them around, spin them around until they turn into like some kind of paste.

And then that paste they can use to synthesize the odor so they can work out exactly what's in it and they can make new versions of it.

But if you're one of the first people to go to the exhibition, you'll be able to get the actual smell that they found from the box.

So it's one of those things that if you're in the first couple of people who go, you're going to get the really good stuff.

And if you go a few weeks after it's opened, then you're going to get something that smells exactly the same but isn't the true Magna Carta smell.

Okay.

Well, because they would have recreated it based on those kind of things.

So basically, we've invented the smell printing press 600 years after the actual printing press.

Yeah.

Sort of good.

Did you say that?

Kind enough.

Andy's face makes it look like you can't say that.

Are they going to release a Magna Carta scratch and sniff?

Because that'd be awesome.

I think they might do that.

I think I might have said this before that I went to a smell museum in Sunderland once and I got a book which you could get all the smells of different things and it was a scratch and sniff thing and you could smell the sun sun and you could smell like the death mask of Tutan Khar Moon and stuff like that.

Wow.

That's what I'm suggesting.

Okay.

Some of the better smells that are going to be in this exhibition, C.S.

Lewis's private collection smell is going to be you can smell his cigars very slightly in the background.

That's incredible.

Isn't that cool?

And there's going to be books from Boston which smell a bit like molasses because do you remember there was a big flood of molasses in Boston where there's like sugar went down the street and I think killed a few people.

But

is it someone's diary writing about the molasses flood saying, oh no, it's coming in the door?

I think it'll probably be someone's library from the time which got covered in molasses.

But yeah.

Wow.

I hope that that hermit who recorded all the snow isn't going to have his diary done because it's going to be heavy centre semen.

And so does answer that.

Okay.

Can we talk about Magna Carta, please?

Yeah.

We should say what it was, sort of, like,

what is this thing?

Basically, King John, we had a king who was spending loads of money on stupid things like going battling in France and stuff like that.

And then we had all the barons in Britain who owned all the land, but the king was basically really pissing them off quite a lot.

And he was making them give him money and he was doing nasty things to their families and stuff like that.

And so they'd had enough and they were like, fuck this, we're going to get rid of the king.

One time they tried to assassinate him.

And then a few years later, they went down and they said, look, we have had enough.

And he said, okay, okay, okay, I'll make a load of new laws that stop me from being an asshole.

And they said, right, fine.

And so they all agreed to all these laws.

And then a few weeks later, he went, ah, only joking.

Pranked you.

I was crossing my fingers.

Yeah.

He contacted the Pope saying,

I've been forced to sign this dreadful document.

Can you cancel it?

And the Pope did so.

He said, oh, yeah, I'll issue a papal bull.

And

so that was 10 weeks after he'd signed it.

I thought it was this huge founding document of English law and liberty.

And it turns out it lasted 10 weeks.

Well, it didn't, because it was reissued 10 years later, and then it did stay on the statute books.

But do you know what he had to give the Pope in exchange for the Pope admitting to that?

No, no.

He had to give him England.

And that has never been reneged on.

So the way he got the Pope on site, the Pope was actually really pissed off with John because there was this absurd situation where King John wanted one Archbishop of Canterbury, the Barons wanted another, they fought.

So the Pope picked a third, and then King John just hadn't let the third come into England.

And the Pope had, like, you know, got really pissed off and banned England from doing any kind of mass or anything.

So the Pope hated John.

So John got him back on side by saying, I'll give you the whole of England as a papal fiefdom, and we'll pay sort of rent to hire it off you every year if you say that I don't need to stick to this Magna Carta.

And formally, the papacy has never resigned its claim.

So technically, it could come up to England and say,

Could I claim sort of a few centuries of rent off you, please?

That is so funny.

That sounds classic, King John.

He sounds like he just got a lot of stuff wrong because he was never meant to be king, was he?

He was seen as the worst of the brothers or the sons of the previous king.

He, most famous of all, if you don't know King John, is he plays the lion in the Robin Hood Disney animation, just to put in your head who we're talking about.

And he had many brothers one of who was Richard the lionheart and his father the king gave them all bits of land so Henry his oldest son was given Normandy and England and Geoffrey was given Brittany they all got given stuff except for King John who was just given a nickname which was lack land because he was given absolutely nothing so he was he must have been such a prick as a young man for his father, the king, to be handing out all this lovely land to people.

And he says, I'll give you this and I'll give you this and I give you this.

And you're going to get the nickname land that's

he must have been awful as a young person as well

or he was meant to he was meant to be a priest or something like this yeah but then the other three all died didn't they and slowly but surely he got closer to the throne it really is very hard to find a revisionist historian who's willing to back john up if only most people will say well there's another side to this story but he was basically a dickhead and the but not that the barons were the greatest guys ever right they just wanted power for themselves but i hadn't realized that the barons before Magna Carta was signed and they were trying to, you know, negotiate with John or overthrow him, took control of London.

So while John was off fighting his wars in France, the Barons marched into London, surrounded by walls, and just took over completely.

And he came back to find it, you know, ruled by barons.

And the way they got in, he said, how on earth did you get in?

Because it's surrounded by these walls.

It's meant to be defended.

And they said they just found a ladder lying up against the wall and all climbed over it.

And I just find it so weird that to take control of a city, you could just leave a ladder surreptitiously lying against the wall and the whole army of barons climbs over it.

That's so good.

Bizarre.

But then after Magna Carta and after it was repealed, the French came along and took over London, which you don't often read about in like in schools and stuff.

But basically there was a civil war straight afterwards between the king and the barons.

And the barons were known as the Northerners, which I like.

And the French came along and King Louis just came along and went to London and was proclaimed king.

He was proclaimed king.

And then at the end of the war when he went back in the end he signed a treaty saying, oh no, I wasn't king.

No, honestly, I wasn't.

Wow.

But he was given 10,000 marks to do so.

So basically King John just bought him off and said,

is that a lot of money we're talking?

10,000 marks.

Well, I assume.

It seems unlikely he would have backed off for not a lot of money, doesn't it?

I mean, he was in control of more than half of England.

I'm sure it was more than a fiver.

It seems like it was a lot, then, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, no, they were just giving away a lot of weird things at the time, like England to the Pope.

You know, just

curious what the equivalents were.

But it didn't do King John any good all this stuff because he died in 1216, so the year after Magna Carta.

And at the time, he was also not popular because the medieval writer Matthew Paris wrote that hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.

Jeez.

Like,

imagine.

Why did we book him to deliver the eulogy?

What's What's going on?

There were some weird clauses in Magna Carta, weren't there?

Given that it's held up as this,

it's like the start of, it's a British constitution, basically.

It was the start of the rule of law in England and then what became Britain.

A lot of individual people mentioned

with their birthday shout-outs in Magna Carta.

Shout out to the Lionheart.

It was basically that, but the opposite of a shout-out saying you're banned from ever holding royal office.

And so if any of these people are listening, Engelard de Segoyne,

Peter, Guy, Philip and Mark, and your brothers, and Jeffrey, your nephew, none of you can hold.

And your mum.

And your mum.

Sort it.

None of these people can hold royal office.

Wow.

Very specific for a founding constitution to name Phil, Bob, and Mary.

They had one bit in Magna Carta, which basically had complete freedom of immigration.

As long as you're a merchant, you're allowed to come to Britain and work as much as you wanted.

Wow.

James, this is you're throwing a cat amongst the pigeons here.

I know, but it is.

You're ready.

It's quite interesting, isn't it?

And they also

said that no one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.

Yeah, I'm constantly accusing people of murder.

And if my word were taken seriously,

there was this thought that women were constantly saying, oh, this bloke murdered someone and weren't to be trusted.

I think one of the reasons it was thought to be happening is because women are exempt from trial by battle.

So, if, as a man, you accuse someone else of having murdered someone, then you could do a trial by battle where you'd have to fight that person and you might die.

And so, often men ask their wives to accuse the person instead.

If you were in a battle with that person who you accused of being a murderer and you lost that battle, your final words would be like, See, I told you it was a murderer.

It's like minority report, it's a predicted murder.

So we thought there were only a few of the Magna Cartas around the place.

We thought we knew how many there were.

And the most recent discovery of one was in 2015.

And this was a 1300 one, which is so recently to have found a new one of these.

It was found in a scrapbook in a council archive in Sandwich, in Kent.

And the really nice thing was it was kind of sandwiched into the scrapbook.

Yeah.

It was just in there, folded up.

And it's a bit tatty and it's a bit moldy and it was a bit wet, but it's still a Magna Carta from 1300.

So this is worth up to £10 million.

They're all different shapes, aren't they?

Because they're on parchment made of sheep

bodies, made of sheepskin.

And so I didn't realise that basically the thing that you wrote on, it was dictated to by the shape of the sheep.

So if you had a really fat sheep, then you had a particularly big parchment.

That's why he was writing, and his brothers, and his mum.

He was just trying to fill the space.

I've seen Magna Carta.

You've seen Magna Carta?

Yeah, I went to, there was an exhibition at the British Library

in 2015, I think it was.

And

they didn't let many people in.

I think there was 1,217 people were allowed in to see it as

a nod to the dead.

Because

it was signed in 1215, but they let in 1,270.

Two extra people crafting.

Dan climbed in through the roof.

Sorry, you're right.

It was 1,215 people.

No, really?

Amazing.

Oh, man.

Imagine if I was at the end of the queue and I'd counted them all and like, we're fine.

We're fine.

We're getting in.

You have ticket number 1217.

No, it was amazing to see.

It felt like you were witnessing the foundations of not only British uh law but American as well.

It was, it was, was it, how was it kept?

Was it in a box?

No, it was, um, no, because, oh, yeah, yeah, like a C-3 blanket.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like a car pump box.

Imagine if you went to see that and it's just in a box.

You're like, can we look inside the box?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Jenny Ryan is inside the box and she's busy thinking.

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

My fact is that Ford has a car wash made of giant ostrich feather dusters.

The whole car wash.

What?

The whole thing, yeah.

That's amazing.

It's really good.

It's this huge frame.

So it's at their factory in Valencia, in Spain, and

it's to clean the cars, but not in exactly the way that a car wash does, but it looks exactly like a car wash.

So once the frames are stamped and welded together, they need painting, but they've still got some dust on them, probably at that point.

And that car painters hate the dust because obviously, you're just painting dust, you're not painting the car, it doesn't give you a nice smooth coat.

So it goes through this huge machine, which is lined with massive,

sort of, it looks like a really upsetting Donna kebab covered in feathers, like those elephant legs that you get in kebab shops.

It's that, but it's just covered and swirling round and round and round, and it's covered in ostrich feathers.

Like, so to get rid of the dust, they have these feathers, is there no better material that we've invented over the last hundred years?

Like,

like you would think there would be, but it turns out that ostrich feathers, in particular, are really good for dusters because they have these tiny little sort of barbules, these sort of micro hooks, which are really good at picking up the dust.

And they also

prevent static electricity from building up, which is also useful for the process.

So, yeah, so this is their process.

So, if you whack at an ostrich, are they really dusty?

Do they just emit huge plumes?

I guess.

BMW says that it, in 2004 at least, BMW said it exclusively uses ostrich feathers to dust all of its cars.

And yeah, because they claim because of this innate static charge not found to the same degree in other feathers.

I thought they used EMU.

That's interesting.

I wonder if they've swapped.

Well, maybe they do EMU in Australia, but they certainly in 2004.

No, they don't.

They've actually got, they've got an EU farm in Bavaria, which is where they get their EMU feathers from.

So maybe that's...

Maybe they've operated.

Yeah, maybe they've gone to ostrich.

Well, ostrich and emu are pretty similar, aren't they?

Yeah.

Sorry to be reductive about it.

So ostrich feathers,

they are now used for cars, but they've been really popular as fashion items for quite a long time, haven't they?

And if you were an ostrich farmer, you could make millions from just getting the feathers off your ostriches and selling them on.

Yeah.

They used to have feather palaces in South Africa, which aren't what they sound like because that would be a terrible building material.

It was

around about the 1880s.

South Africa provided about 85% of the world's ostrich feather supply, I think.

And the feather palaces were palaces built by people who got rich off the back of ostrich feathers.

They're still there.

They went out of fashion because of

there was a, I think it was morning fashions changed.

So it used to be, well, big daft hats stopped being in fashion, basically.

Well, it was partly because of cars.

Yeah, I went to the hat museum and they said it was because of cars.

Because when you get into a car, if you have a big hat with a feather on top then it's going to get squashed by the top of the car yeah or knocked off as you get in and you have to replace your hat at the end of every car journey go oh shit

on the road somewhere

And also there was actually quite a strong campaign.

This is in America where they thought they were going to widen the market.

There was a really strong protection of birds movement in America, which I didn't know about.

This was around the turn of the 20th century.

And these two women, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall, led this campaign against hat plumes, which were all the rage.

And they used to hold these big soires and invite loads of women to their parties and then persuade them not to have bird feathers on their hats.

And it really worked.

And it ended up being banned in Massachusetts to have feathers used in the bird trade on your hats.

And so that kind of screwed the industry too.

Yeah.

Does anyone have stuff just more generally on ostriches?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, great.

Dad, you sounded like you were really up for it.

So let's hear it.

Yep.

So

ostriches are so fast.

They are ridiculously fast.

So they've got a land speed that they can reach the top speed of 43 miles per hour, which is insane.

And it's too fast even for them to be able to work out what to do.

Like if it was us running, we would lose all control.

And this is where the feathers and their wings come into huge use.

They act as basically rudders for them as they're running.

So when they reach these speeds, they can bring their wings up and they can zigzag using their wings to sort of push them in directions with the wind against them.

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

And they can break suddenly by pushing their wings out and using their feathers to sort of break the wind on them.

It's an incredible thing, but that is so fast.

Have we talked about their penises?

It's not yet, but I think everyone knew it was coming.

Okay, great.

So very few birds have penises.

3% of bird species, the males have a penis, but ostriches are among them.

But

when they have an erection, what do you think it's full of

blood

right there we go it's not blood they've got blood obviously they're not saying ostrich is done of blood but they don't fill their penises with it to get an erection they fill it with lymphatic fluid sand sand

just thinking what they have around that's a very uncomfortable experience for the lady ostrich i think if it's full of sand

um no they they're full of lymphatic fluid which is so weird and there's a big problem because it lymphatic fluid in an ostrich body is under much lower pressure than blood.

Their lymph fluid pressure is much lower than their blood pressure.

And what this means is that they can keep an erection for a few seconds maximum.

Oh, wow.

It's a real problem.

And so it means all mating is incredibly short because it just, as soon as they've got an erection, they have to have sex or they're not going to have to.

And all the males are constantly apologising.

But all the females are constantly going, no, it honestly is completely normal.

How quickly can they get an erection again after they've deflated?

Unclear, not sure.

You think it's like an up and down sort of.

I think it's like when you're trying to blow up a balloon and you get that initial and then it goes back down because you've lost breath.

You've still, you can go right back into it, right?

So.

Oh, Dan, you've got to keep, you've got to pinch your fingers over the seal when you bring it back.

Sorry, are we talking about ostrich penises or balloons now?

I'll go to your next children's party there.

The thing is that ostriches do get turned on by by humans.

There was a study done quite recently which won an Ig Nobel Prize and it was that both male and female ostriches do way more mating dances and movements when there are humans nearby.

This is in farmed ostriches I should say.

So it seems that they find the farmers attractive and it makes them feel a bit more amorous.

And the guy who worked this out was a scientist called Charles Paxton.

But we have mentioned his work before because he was also the person who worked out that a lot of people who saw sea monsters actually saw the penis of a whale.

Yes.

Because whales mate in threesomes and there's always one spur penis floating around.

And that's, in theory, could be the idea where sea monsters come from.

What does this guy's C V look like?

That's so cool.

They've got really big eggs, ostriches, obviously.

Big bird, big eggs.

Makes sense.

Do you know how long it takes to cook an ostrich egg?

Hard-boiled?

Hard-boiled.

Yeah.

An hour.

One hour.

Yeah, good guess.

Yeah, it's about an hour and a half, roughly, to cook an ostrich egg.

I like mine a little bit softer, actually.

Oh, well, there you go.

Perfect.

I found that out on a BBC website that gave recipes for boiling different kinds of eggs.

So the next closest that they had on the list was a goose egg, which takes roughly 13 minutes to hard boil.

So that's, in terms of size difference, that just gives you an idea of how big they are.

But what's weird is they have incredibly tiny eggs in relation to their body size.

So they should have much larger eggs than they do.

But yeah, you could argue that they have the smallest eggs in the animal kingdom, in the bird kingdom, right?

Yes, compared to their body size.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Because, yeah, actually, when they're born, they are surprisingly cute because they're so tiny, but also creepily fast.

So when they're three weeks to a month old, they look microscopic, but they can already run at 50 kilometers an hour.

And it is quite literally smaller than a chicken.

It's running at 50 kilometers an hour.

That's so good.

I was reading the other day, this is off topic, but this was about a guy who saw an insect called a deer butt fly, and it was in the early 20th century, I think.

And he wrote, he was an entomologist, and he wrote that he'd seen this buttfly flying at 300 yards per second.

No, if that was true, and this was, they reported it in the New York Times.

It was such a fast insect.

They were like, this guy has found the fastest insect ever.

And it turns out now that we've found other deer botflies and they don't fly nearly.

They fly quite fast, but not that fast because that is so fast that if it was in a 100-metre race with Usain Bolt, it would have reached the end before Hussain Bolt had been able to react to the gun.

How on earth was this guy claiming to measure that?

How fast was he running?

But he claimed he was keeping up with it enough.

enough

exactly

what he's seen is two butt flies that's what he's seen that's very that's impressive in its own way but um what you think you saw a buttfly then travel 20 miles home saw another one

it's you again

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

My fact this week is that according to Kellogg's, Tony the Tiger is an adult cartoon.

Oh boy.

Wow.

I think it's because he's naked.

So

it's obscene.

I can't picture him because I can't picture anything.

But on the boxes, do you only see his top half then?

No, you get his full half.

Yeah, he's really buff as well.

And he's naked.

Do you see his?

You don't see his...

No.

No.

I thought you didn't see his top.

I'm going to have to look it up.

Has he got like a bowl of cord flakes over his genitals?

Actually, he has no genitals.

Does he?

Of course he doesn't.

He's a cartoon character.

He's been spayed.

He has been spayed.

When you get spayed, they don't cut your penis off.

Then what did I pay for?

But hang on, Adam, with your shock there, name a single cartoon character for children whose penis is hanging out.

Dan, I think we've established Tony the Tiger is not for children.

But some of them wear trousers, right?

Some of them wear trousers, so you would assume that they are in Scots that's true.

Although Winnie the Pooh doesn't.

Winnie the Pooh t-shirt only no trousers.

Strong look.

Donald Duck.

Donald Duck, you don't see that corkscrew duck penis coming out of him, do you?

Okay,

okay, let's be clear actually about why he's an adult cartoon because it's not really to do with the pornographic elements.

This is about the government trying to reduce sugar in children's cereals.

So in 2017, the government said that by 2020, this year, sugary products that targeted children should have voluntarily, but still should have, reduced their sugar content by 20%.

And so Kellogg's tried it out with Frosties,

took 20% of the sugar out.

I think there was sort of a tasting thing, and everyone went, well, this is absolutely disgusting.

And so rather than take the sugar out, they actually sort of rebranded Frosties as an adult cereal.

And so the argument was that they're not targeting children with Frosties.

And they've removed all children's advertising, like anything on the pack that aims at children.

And they've said that there was a spokesperson actually this year speaking on behalf of Kellogg's who said that with Frosties, they're recruiting new shoppers into the brand and in particular adult shoppers under 28 years old in the pre-life family stage.

And so that's their defense.

And they said that they'd done some research and found out that most of the people who eat Frosties are millennials.

Did they?

They've,

I don't know how rigorous the stats that they've got are, but they certainly say that, yeah, their research tells them that that it's mostly millennials.

I read the market.

I read it, I think it was in the article in the Telegraph about this, where they said that it was only one in five people who eats Frosty's as a child.

But then the Telegraph did also point out that one in five people in the UK is a child, so it's basically the same proportion.

Although that, so that makes sense that it's not targeting children if it's the same proportion as the population.

That makes sense, but it also means that they're targeting children as well as adults, right?

You're right.

They're sort of targeting everyone.

Although, apparently, millennials have changed the way that cereals are advertised now because we are eating them more.

I suppose there was that cereal cafe that made a big hoo-ha in Shoreditch or somewhere.

But they've started advertising cereals to not be eaten at breakfast because the idea is that millennials don't have time in the morning to eat cereal.

So if you watch adverts now, I think there's one with them sitting with Tony the Tiger on a sofa, these two blokes, and it's obviously mid-afternoon and they're watching some telly and eating some cereal.

How can you tell it's mid-afternoon?

They're watching Pointless.

So there were other rival figures for Tony the Tiger.

It could have been Katie the Kangaroo or Elmo the Elephant or Newt the Gnu.

But those were all rejected.

I just think Newt the Gnu

is a bad character.

It was rejected, so that's fair enough.

That's true.

But it's not alliterative unless you don't pronounce the G in GNU.

And also...

What kind of maniac would not pronounce the G in GNU?

That's the most fun letter to say.

And also, he's named after another animal.

That's a very good point.

It's just, I'm not surprised they didn't go with it, is all I'm saying.

I think Newt will have known from the start he was doomed.

I mean, because also young children, I'm not sure how familiar they are with the GNU as an animal, as opposed to the tiger.

Yeah, but that's a failing in education.

That's not the fault of the cereal firm.

They also were going to go for Henry the Hermit Crab.

When he reached his penis out of his house, he got turned down.

Have you heard of big mix no um what do you mean sorry big mix big mix is what is mick is that mick apostrophe s or is it a mix of things it's mix with two x's and big has two g's just so you know oh wait a minute is this the parents of little mix

yeah that's absolutely right

It was a serial released in 1990 by Kellogg's and it sounds absolutely horrific.

It was multiple different cereals all mixed together in the same box.

So

I mean, pretty well.

But

they had their own mascot, which was called Big Mix, and it was a chicken, wolf, moose, pig.

And basically, they've got this horrific crossbred Island of Dr.

Moreau animal on the front of the box.

It's encrypted, basically, of cereals.

That is terrifying.

It's frightening.

Also, not for children.

You know, cereal mascots.

I challenge anyone to name a famous female cereal mascot.

Oh, okay.

One of the Rice Krispie elves?

Is there a female one?

Snap, crackle, and pop.

Come on.

You think one of them's a gal?

I think they're all gal.

I can't remember.

No.

Oh, wow.

That's really.

Right, there's a Wikipedia list of all the cereal mascots.

There is not a single famous mascot.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Let me try a few more guesses.

Oh, yeah, you think you're going to be Wikipedia here?

No.

So, wow, that's amazing.

No, no.

That's incredible.

I mean, I know this probably isn't the hill that I should die on, feminism-wise, but let's get a gal on the front of a cereal box.

Women can eat cornflakes too.

Katie the Kangaroo, I guess, would have been your closest then that we know of in this conversation.

That's true.

And she was the runner-up.

Yeah.

It was down to the last two.

They got rid of Newt the Gnu and Elmo the Elephant pretty quickly, but Katie the Kangaroo was the second last in the running.

Things could have been so different, guys.

Not very.

We could have brought down the patriarchy with Katie the Kangaroo.

So in Japan, they're obviously mad about mascots.

And the term for it is Eurochara.

And you had three fundamental components to what made up a Eurochara.

So the three things were it must convey a strong message of love for one's hometown.

Its movement should be unique and unstable or awkward.

And it should be unsophisticated or laid back and lovable.

And it's such a big deal that they, since about 2010, created the Eurochara Grand Prix, which is all of the mascots come together to be named the ultimate Japanese mascot.

Ah, I thought you were going to say it's a race because they have that in like soccer teams, football teams in England have like

every year they have a grand national of mascots where they're all running against each other on like

do they?

Yeah, and the thing is like some of them, some of the mascots is just a normal quite fit human being with a big head on them.

And then some of them are in a massive costume that you can hardly move in.

So it's just completely unfair.

But yeah.

You guys who like football will know about West Bromwich's Boilerman, won't you?

Much better than I do, which I hadn't seen before, but that's terrifying.

It's a boiler with arms and legs because they're sponsored by a boiler company.

It was so funny.

I remember seeing that when it happened.

It was on Twitter.

And I thought, this has to be a hoax.

Because West Brom were quite a big football team.

It was so weird.

Boilers, I mean, boilers keep you warm.

They're cuddly.

They keep you warm and cozy in your home.

They're awkward.

Like you said, they had to be.

You can make a lot of money by being a mascot.

I didn't realize that if you were the mascot for, say, a football team or an America, a baseball team, basketball team,

huge amounts of money because it's usually one person who's got the gig.

It's not necessarily tens of, you know, I assumed it's a new person, whoever's free on the day jumping.

But in America, for sure, they make a lot of money.

Yeah, because it's not just the actual games.

And, you know, they, they, there's a lot of games, particularly for like basketball and, well, like every sport, there's a lot of games per season, but it's also the private events that they get hired out for and public space events, like in malls.

And they're actually, they're in a very privileged sporting position in America at the moment because they are one of the only spectators that are allowed to watch sporting matches at the moment.

So while all the stands are empty, the mascots inside there, you know, very COVID-proof.

Yeah, that's got to qualify as PPE.

We need to get more supplies of a mascot out.

I would be very unhappy in hospital if I saw, you know, Fred the GNU turnover,

the boiler guy coming up to.

Hi, Mr.

Shryberry.

I'm here to deliver your wife's baby.

Have you heard of Cyril the Swan?

Is he from Swansea?

Yes, mascot of Swansea City and an absolute thug by all accounts.

So in 2001, he got into a fight with Milwall's Zampa the Lion,

tore off the lion's head and kicked it into the crowd before shouting, don't fuck with the swans at the headless lion.

Fined £1,000 for that.

Was he the one?

There was one who got into a fight with the three little pigs.

Was that him?

I don't actually know if it was him.

He has got form, though.

So he has been accused of throwing pork pies at West Ham fans, pushing over a dog mascot.

He's had a touchline ban, which is quite a big thing, isn't it?

It's quite serious to be banned from the touchline.

And he was represented at his, after attacking Zampa the Lion, he was represented at the Welsh FA hearing by the same lawyer who defended Eric Cantenar after he kicked a fan in the head.

Amazing.

Wow.

Is he actually raising awareness about how dangerous swans can be?

He's not raising any awareness because his Wikipedia page says as a mute swan, he doesn't give interviews.

Maybe he is in character and he just goes around breaking people's arms

with a single blow of his wing.

Sorry, can we go back to, I can't let this sit, not talked about.

Can we talk about these three little pigs that you mentioned very quickly, John?

Yeah, does anyone have information on that?

Because I can't really remember it, but there was definitely a big fight between three pigs and one other mascot.

And I can't remember who the other.

I don't think it was a swan.

I think Bristol City were involved, but I think.

I'm sure it would have been a wolf.

If it wasn't a wolf mascot.

Yeah, who blew down three stadiums.

You're so right.

It must have been.

I'm sorry.

I can't remember.

Do you know who won?

Because presumably that's three adult men in the pig costumes.

So that's a three-on-one situation.

I've got to Google it.

Okay, so

it was

a wolf.

You're right.

So you must be able to guess which football team it was.

Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Yeah, so it was Wolverhampton Wanderers mascot Wolfie.

And Bristol City happened to have three mascots called the Three Little Pigs.

But actually, no, the Three Little Pigs were only there on that day to promote a local double glazing firm.

Just happened to be on the day that the wolf turned up on.

That's bad luck, isn't it?

That is good.

That's bad luck.

Promoting glass houses, horrible.

And all four mascots were sent off in disgrace.

Oh, my goodness.

That is hilarious.

That's so funny.

What was the second house built out of?

I know there was one out of bricks.

Oh, there was sticks.

One of sticks, one of bricks, and one of ostrich feathers.

Dust-free.

The first mascot ever was, by some accounts, a virgin woman called Bettina.

This is where the word mascot came from.

So it was popularized by this play called Mascot in 1880.

And at the time, it was a French mascot, it was a French word for like bewitchment or a spell.

And mascot was about this virgin called Bettina who turned up to a farm and sort of said to this farmer, look, I'm blessed.

As long as no one shags me and I remain a virgin, then your farm will be really lucrative.

And it was basically this play about this woman having to remain a virgin so that the crops would all grow and it actually ends with her losing her virginity guys

and as a result no women have ever been allowed to be a serial mascot again

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

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

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

Check them out.

We got links to bits of merchandise as well.

And we hope you're well, guys.

We hope your family's safe.

And we are going to be back again next week with another episode.

So we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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