322: No Such Thing As A Crown Of Willie Thornes

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But there's so much nature.

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So, what do this animal

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Taczinski, and James Harkin.

and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with James.

My fact this week is that hagfish can eat by sitting inside their dinner and absorbing the nutrients through their skin.

Isn't that amazing?

Wouldn't that be incredible if you could just sit inside your curry and just eat the food like that?

There will be some foods that would be worse for or messier for.

Go on.

What if you had to get inside a sausage before eating it?

Do you think a very big sausage?

I think it's going to be messy almost whatever food you're climbing inside.

I think with a sausage, you might just rub it against your skin rather than climbing inside.

Just trying to strap the sausage to yourself.

I think so.

And then slowly absorb it.

That's what I would do if I was a hackfish.

That's a good idea.

I'd like to see a hackfish eating a sausage because they look a bit like a long sausage.

So it would be like watching a sausage eat a sausage.

You wouldn't know what it was going to eat what.

I should probably explain what a hackfish is, shouldn't I?

Oh, yeah.

Well, it kind of looks like an eel, and it is most famous among people on the internet for creating loads and loads of slime.

That's what they do, basically.

When they're threatened, they create this incredible amount of slime, and it stops them from being able to be eaten.

But the way that they eat, they have a few different ways of eating.

They can rasp things with their tongue.

They've got extremely hard tongues that can rub against some meat and bring it into their digestive system, or they can actually just absorb it through their skin.

And actually, weirdly enough, the skin one is a slightly better way of them getting nutrients.

Really?

It's bizarre.

That it's better for them to absorb food, or they can do it faster or more effectively.

They can do it more efficiently, yeah.

And you know what I thought?

I was thinking about this.

Why don't we all just absorb food through our skin?

Why do we have it through our stomach?

And I don't know if this is right, but I did wonder if maybe if you eat a sandwich and it goes inside your stomach, then no one else can get at it.

Once it's in your stomach, you're new to eating it.

But if you a taped it to your face, then someone might be able to come and steal it off you.

So maybe that's one reason why it's better to eat stuff.

That's what I was thinking.

If you were sort of sat next to them, you could just stick your finger in it and like a straw just suck at it.

Yeah.

I don't think that's the reason.

Can I just say, James, I don't think that's the reason the stomach evolved.

Is it that?

That's because people...

No.

I think it is a size thing.

And that...

Size thing.

So, for example, some very small organisms can absorb oxygen directly through their skin, even some tiny frogs.

But larger animals have such a large volume in relation to the skin area they have that it's inefficient for them to do that.

It wouldn't be possible to absorb all the...

So I think humans might need so many calories a day that you couldn't absorb, you know, 20 sausages a day through your skin.

You know what?

I'm going to email Ed Young and ask him because I read this fact in an article in The Atlantic written by Ed Young.

And by the way, if you have like a few hours or a day or a week to spare, go on the internet and search for Ed Young and read everything that he's ever written because he's a brilliant science writer.

Oh, it's heaven to read his articles.

Yeah, so true.

Such a good shout.

Go and read that.

What do they eat, by the way?

Is it dead sharks or is it seed?

In this case, yeah.

They can eat lots of different things, but in this case, where they're sitting inside something, it has to be something a lot bigger than them.

And so it'll be, yeah, like Anna says, probably whale carcasses or something like that.

So they don't have a lower jaw.

That's the other thing about them.

They've only got upper teeth because they're quite badly put together animals.

And the only way they can bite something is they can tie themselves in knots really easily and they tie a knot at their tail and then they work the the knot all the way along their body until it gets to where the lower jaw would be and that provides a lower surface for them to squeeze their upper jaw against.

I mean they're really so awkward.

Poor thing.

They also use the knots actually for scraping themselves free of slime don't they when they eject all their slime they knot themselves up and they've got a knot at their head and they'll pull the knot down to the tail to lose the slime.

So, multi-purpose knots.

The slime is the real headline.

I mean, the absorbing stuff is good, but the amount of slime that they make is incredible.

It's amazing.

And the slime that they produce, the way that it expands at the rate it expands, is just insane.

So, Jong puts in the article that it can expand by 10,000 times in the fraction of a second.

And there's been cases of that very famous photo actually online of a truck of hagfish overturning and covering an entire car in slime, the entire road, just slime everywhere in a second.

We should say that it's not, although the main purpose of their slime is so that they can go viral on the internet, it has a sub-purpose of being a very useful protective device.

So basically, not a single predator with gills is able to consume them because they would be quite easily consumable otherwise, because they eject this slime and immediately it clogs up all of a predator's gills.

So if you're a shark or something, your gills are suddenly clogged up, you can't breathe anymore.

And we don't know, there's a lot we don't know about hagfish, but we don't know if this actually kills them because we've seen videos of them get clogged up and they swim away.

And then we don't really know how they'll get the slime off.

So, they're safe from any predators with gills.

It's mostly water, the slime, isn't it?

It's 99.996% water.

And each time they release a bucket's worth of slime or a jug of slime, it's only 40 milligrams of actual stuff that they are giving off from their body, mucus and proteins.

There's almost none, but it reacts so quickly with the water that it generates this massive amount.

Otherwise, it would be the slime, they would have to have this massive slime tank inside them.

Yeah.

The amount they have inside them is extraordinary in terms of the fibers that then turn into the slime.

So it's sort of two-tone slime production equipment.

They've got these lengths of fibers in their body, and then they've got some mucus.

And the length of fibre in their body, the total length, is 20,000 kilometers of fibre.

Wow.

So, and it comes in these 15-centimetre-long threads.

So, it's lots of these little threads coiled up in these tiny little storage boxes inside their body.

So, that means that the threads are essentially 10 million times longer than they are wide, I think, and just coiled up.

I read one explanation of this.

You might have read the same thing, Anna, which is it's the same as stuffing one kilometer of Christmas lights into a shoebox without having a single knot or tangle.

That's because the slime glands are so small, and these threads are so numerous.

Well, they're big generally, the skin on them.

So there was a study that was done that was showing that in a lot of cases, the slime that they release to predators, let's say to clog their gills, is actually released after they're bitten.

And they try to work out how they survive after they're bitten.

And it turns out that the metaphor they use is basically their skin is like really loose pajamas.

Like they're just so flabby with extra skin that if you injected them with the same volume of stuff that's in them, you could get 40% more of them into them before their skin starts to stretch they're like how sausage they are yeah they're like a sausage with a very massive skin

and it's only attached in a few places as well as again so that they can avoid being bitten if they get bitten the shark is mostly biting skin really yeah and they've also they're the bloodiest animals on the planet or close to it so there's 17 milliliters of blood per hundred grams of mass which is a lot at least twice as much as any other fish i think and also also, apparently they maybe have the blood because they need something to fill the space between their flesh and their skin.

They've just got to put some liquid in there.

So they're like, well, I guess I'll make more blood to fill myself up.

That's so weird.

It seems so inefficient as a fish to have a loose set of pajamas on.

Very handy.

What's going on with their name, I wonder?

Hagfish, because they're not.

They're not witches, no.

No, I just wonder if there's any link between that and hag-rid, which is a, you know, that's a word for bedeviled by witches, isn't it?

Or that was the origin of the name hag-rid.

Yeah.

I think it's just, it goes back to the, I think it's 1603 or something.

It's really quite a long time.

And it is just because they thought they were ugly.

Although it would have been a worse series of books if a giant hagfish had turned up and slimed Harry Potter.

Are you joking?

I don't know.

Come on.

A hagfish in Harry Potter would absolutely turn the thing alight, wouldn't it?

It would be brilliant.

It does seem like a missed opportunity for a great superhero.

The hagfish.

I can't believe.

I mean, it's amazing that this is the one fish that nothing can eat.

Well, no, no, anything without gills can eat it.

Yeah, of course it's going to eat it.

South Koreans can eat it.

Famously, lack gills.

It's one of the first things everyone knows about people from South Korea.

Yeah, they're hugely popular there.

They eat about, is it five million pounds of hagfish meat every year?

Wow.

And you get hagfish wallets?

You do, don't you?

Those have a very useful adaptation because obviously if someone tries to mug you, it immediately sweats this gloop and the mugger is unable to actually grip your wallet.

It's called it's eel leather, isn't it, I think?

Eel skin leather.

That's right.

So if you've got anything that's eel skin leather, it's actually hagfish.

And apparently I read somewhere that it's sort of as a more ethical alternative to actual leather.

I think on the ethical hierarchy maybe, it's sort of as more ethical to get some hagfish than some cow or whatever.

But there you go.

If you think that's more ethical, you should have a hagfish wallet.

It sounds like you don't think it's more ethical.

I haven't made up my mind, Andy.

I don't have an opinion.

We just present the facts and we let other people draw their conclusions.

Does anyone know how hagfish have sex?

Do they tie themselves in knots?

Actually, Anna's right.

Nobody knows.

So that was the question.

Does anyone know how long hagfish live?

No.

Seven years.

No, again, again, nobody knows how long hagfish live.

Does anyone know why 90% of them appear to be female?

Another no.

It's a no.

It's a no, it's a no, yeah.

But isn't that interesting?

Like, of all the hadfish that we've caught, 90% of them are female, and we don't really know why.

It might be that 90% of them are female, or it might be that the females are easier to catch.

We don't really know.

Or that they're all hermaphrodites, but when they sense they're about to be caught, they throw away their penises.

That's equally, well...

I mean, it's all, you know.

It's not equally likely.

So supposedly, is it really hard to find their eggs?

And I think this is a bit like, do you remember we talked about eels and how hard it is to find their gonads?

But

supposedly, in the 20th century, scientists found a total of three hagfish embryos, and that was it, because they live really deep down.

Before that, there was one man called Bashford Dean, and in 1896, he found 800 eggs, including 150 embryos.

And he is the kind of hero of hagfish research.

But he had two main interests in life.

One of them was hagfish and zoology, and the other was armor, military armor.

And when he wasn't collecting hagfish embryos, he was obsessed with collecting medieval armor.

He started bidding in auctions aged nine

for medieval stuff.

And anyway, he became a bidder.

He was getting too much pocket money, if that was the age of bidding in auctions.

He did get outbid.

He got outbid in his first few.

But

he became a museum curator and was immensely well-regarded in his field.

And then the First World War happened, and it absolutely all the work he'd done over his life paid off because he started designing helmets based on medieval military armor because the US Army needed a metal helmet basically that would stop bullets.

And he designed several prototypes.

One of them was designed exactly on a 15th-century Italian knight's helmet.

So it looks like a proper full-face visor with a tiny slit for the eyes.

And that was being built in the 20th century because of Bashford Dean.

So we used medieval helmet designs for the First World War because I thought we'd moved on from then.

Well, it was for people, that particular one was for people who were in a forward position, say they were in an extremely dangerous environment and they needed lots of protection for a short space of time because it was so heavy, this helmet, that the helmet weighed six kilos alone.

Sorry, can I just ask, when you say he found his 10 million embryos or whatever, and we've only ever found three, where are we finding them?

Was it not at Sotheby's when he was 10 years old?

The story is that he collected them from fishermen who had been dangling lines with bait on them.

And I don't know why that couldn't then be just done again.

But we think maybe they hide their eggs on the floor of the ocean or that.

Yeah, so there are lots of theories.

Do you guys know the US Navy's been experimenting with hagfish in warfare?

Well, for the slime thing or for they getting nutrients?

For the slime thing.

So they're not getting the soldiers to climb inside a whale corpse.

No, not that yet.

I'm sure that's on the cards, though.

They have been trying to use the slime as a non-lethal way of stopping these boats and destroying them by chucking it at the propellers of the boats.

So if you can slime up the propellers, you would stop their rotors from turning and you would disable the ship entirely.

And are they going to extract the slime from hagfish separately, or do you just get a big tub of hagfish and then chuck it at the end of the when they come?

Yeah, you feel like that could be just that, right?

Like it's they produce so much, but no, I think they're synthesizing it.

I think they're turning it into something different.

Yeah, what they do is they put the genes that create hagfish slime into E.

coli bacteria, and then the bacteria can create the slime themselves, so you can do it on a larger sort of manufacturing scale.

Seriously, yeah, nice.

That feels good.

And without scraping thousands of hagfish off the floor of the ocean, I suppose.

It's more ethical, I would say.

It's probably more ethical, yeah.

The bacteria don't think so, James.

No, you're right.

Who will speak for the bacteria if not Anna Toszhinsky, the bacteria's friend?

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows?

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

My fact this week is that 1982's Time Person of the Year was the personal computer.

The article announcing it was written on a typewriter.

Very bizarre.

Yeah, so this is, obviously, Time had the tradition of doing person of the year.

And this was the first year in which they did Machine of the Year.

They stepped away from person of the year and they gave it to the computer.

But the Time offices...

in 1982 were still running almost entirely on typewriters.

They wouldn't upgrade their systems for another year.

So they were behind the times with their own person of the year.

Was it do we think it was a hint to the owners, you know, making it the first couple of the year to say, guys, we still don't have one of these fuckers, okay?

Foolk out.

The article was quite interesting because it referenced Apple's first personal computer, which was called Lisa.

But Steve Jobs was really annoyed about it.

And that's because he expected to be named person of the year that year.

And so he was really annoyed that the computer got his title.

And he was also annoyed because it said that he had a daughter named Lisa, but he denied paternity of that daughter.

So he was just ultra-pissed off with that.

He was really bad in that article.

Steve Jobs, the way he denied the paternity, he said that 28% of the male population of the United States could be the father of this child.

Seems unlikely, though.

It does seem unlikely, yeah.

Why did he say that?

He took a paternity test, which showed that there was 94% chance that it was his kid.

Oh, I see.

Because the way that you said it sounded like he was being unbelievably misogynistic about his ex-partner saying that

he slept with

pretty much every sexually active man in the entire country?

That's what I'm saying.

That's so true.

I should have, yeah, I should have qualified that.

That's absolutely what I took it as.

But that's not necessarily a negative.

That's actually incredibly impressive, if that's what he meant.

So, Time Person of the Year is an interesting concept and also has not been Time Person of the Year for very long.

So, in fact, at this time when it was Time Computer of the Year, it wasn't replacing the Time Person of the Year tradition.

It was Time Man of the Year.

So, it only got changed to Time Person of the Year, I think, in 1999.

Before that, it was always Time Man of the Year, except we should say three crucial occasions since the 1920s when an individual woman got Time Woman of the Year.

So Wallace Simpson got it, 1936, and that was obviously because she's

shagged.

And then in 1981, it was that woman who had sex with 100 million men in America, wasn't it?

It was.

We were just so impressed.

Between 1927 and 1999, when they changed it to Person of the Year, individual women won it the same number of times as Franklin D.

Roosevelt, the U.S.

president.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

It was three.

What was it?

It was Queen Elizabeth, as you say, Wallace Simpson, and the President of the Philippines.

But it's not always good to get, you know, if you get it, it doesn't mean it's a mark of high standards.

No, no, and I think the point is, because I think people have said this is a sexist award, and it's not.

Time magazine is just reflecting who has power and influence.

And what it reflected was that women had no power and influence.

And shamefully, the third person who got it was Corazon Aquino, who was president of the Philippines, who I knew nothing about, but who was a definite good guy in what she did.

She overthrew Ferdinand Marcos, established kind of democracy in the Philippines, or tried to, and she got it in 1986.

But it is a bad thing in that it shows what a, I guess, still male-led

world we live in.

Yeah.

So 1998, which is, I guess, the final year where it was man of the year, it was given to two men, which was Bill Clinton and Ken Starr.

And Clinton, not for good reasons, it was for his role in the Clinton impeachment.

But the thing is, is that in theory, it should have gone to someone very different that year because they held their first online poll where they asked members of the public, who do you think should be the man of the year?

And the winner with over 50% of the votes was a WWF wrestler called Mick Foley, who plays a character called Mankind, who wears Mr.

Socco, a sock puppet on his hand and throws himself off high cages.

He got 50% of the vote, but he was then pulled from the poll and they gave it to someone else.

But it turns out that the poll doesn't reflect who they give it to anyway.

It's a useless poll.

Sure, that's what they claimed after the poll when he won it.

We were never going to make this decide.

Yeah.

That's so funny.

That should have been the warning about Donald Trump, shouldn't it?

That long ago, and democracy, the inevitable decline of democracy that we're seeing today.

When people are voting for a WWF wrestler, no offense, I I know you like WWF dad.

Yeah, Nick Foley's amazing.

I think it was when Bell and Sebastian won a Brit Award for best newcomer instead of steps, and that was done by the public.

I think that was when it all went wrong.

Well, look, we've all got our moments where the rot's set in, in our opinion.

We can all just agree it's bad.

Weirdly,

you mentioned Donald Trump, because he's obviously got loads of history with Time magazine.

So he was told off by Time Magazine for making up his own Time magazine cover and putting it on the wall of his golf club.

The magazine pointed out: look, the date that you've put on this fake magazine, Kate Winslet was actually on the cover.

And Trump has also claimed that he's been on the cover more times than anybody else, which is not true.

This is not Person of the Year, it's just the cover of the magazine.

But it is a U.S.

president who's been on the front more than anyone else.

Do you know who?

Obama.

Oh, Nixon.

It's Nixon, it's Richard Nixon.

He's been on about 55 times.

Something crazy like that.

Yeah.

Actually, it was Nixon's successor, of course, who was one of the only three presidents, U.S.

presidents, who haven't been Time Person of the year or time man of the year since it started.

So embarrassing.

And the first two were very early on.

So the first two were Coolidge and Hoover.

And we've talked about how irrelevant Coolidge was before.

And I think one of my favourite Dorothy Parker quotes when she was told that he died and she said something like, how can they tell?

And so Coolidge and Hoover were pretty crap.

And then the other person, the other poor president who didn't get on there ever, was Gerald Ford.

And I hadn't realized about Gerald Ford that so famously he never won a US election, of course.

He just stepped in as the replacement when Nixon had to go but he stepped in because he was VP I hadn't realized that he hadn't even won the election as VP the only reason he was vice president was that in 1973 Spirit Agnew who had been vice president had to resign on completely different um fraud and bribery related charges and so he stepped in as the default replacement as vice president and then found himself as the default replacement as president wow and really it's no surprise that he never quite made it to Time Person of the Year.

I think the biggest slam in the Time Person of the Year is from 2006 when the winner was you, which basically means everyone was the winner.

And it was because people were, you know, making lots of content on the internet.

But then the runner-up was President Ahbadinejad of Iran.

So what I think that means is he doesn't count of the you part.

So everyone else in the world came first and he came second.

So

the you, the only people who qualify to be part of the you are people who were content providers before 2006.

So that means if you had a MySpace account for example and you uploaded anything then you qualify.

So I know that definitely three of us must qualify.

Anna have you even heard of the internet in 2006?

Look, I was joined with Aquadilajad for second place and I'm comfortable with that.

Okay?

Do you know it started off as a mistake the time

man of the year?

Or it started off to rectify a mistake the magazine had made.

They were really embarrassed because in 1927 Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, flew across it, a very big deal, first time, and they didn't put it on the cover.

They just completely flubbed it.

They put a picture of King George V and his wife in costume on the cover instead that week.

Huge editorial blunder.

And they thought at the end of the year, hey, you know what we could do?

We could just say we've been saving him up to call him the man of the year.

And that was how they started.

And the profile of him is hilarious in that magazine because obviously they were still working out the form.

So the profile had, you know, word colon.

So they had feet large

because when he arrived at the embassy in France, there were no shoes big enough for him.

Oh, I thought he went feet as an F-E-A-T, as in what he did was an extremely large feet.

No.

They listed his habits.

They said, smokes not, drinks not, does not gamble, eats a thoroughgoing breakfast, avoids rich dishes.

And it just went on like this.

These don't feel like the leading elements of Charles Lindbergh's character, do they?

Large feet, non-smoker.

They also described him as a very taciturn person.

All the adjectives were things like modesty, taciturnity, diffidence.

Women made him blush, apparently, singleness of purpose, occasional curtness, and phlegm.

Which, although we do refer to being phlegmatic these days, we very rarely say that someone has a week's mouth.

He was part man, part hackfish, wasn't he?

Just back on computers for a second.

I was reading about the Lisa.

So this was the computer that was given as part of the machine of the year.

And Lisa had a problem.

So you know the Y2K problem?

Yeah.

Have you guys heard of the Y1995 problem?

Y 1995.

So this was Lisa, for the same reasons that all computers had the problem with Y2K, the Lisa computer only had a 15-year time limit.

So it was launched in 1981.

For some reason, they backdated its time limit to 1980, and it only had 15 years to run before the clock freaked out and so that was a big problem for the liter computers it's not like apple to create a product that becomes obsolete after a certain amount of time is it that's true and that's why it wasn't a problem in the end that's why we haven't heard of the white in 1995.

1982 as well the first computer virus that went through personal computers from one to another to another.

There were a few viruses before that, but this was the big one.

It was called the Elk Cloner and it was invented by Rich Screnter, who was a 15-year-old student.

And it spread by floppy disks.

So he would put a game on a floppy disk, give it to his friend, and they would put it into their computer.

And after 50 times they played the game, they get a blank screen, and then a poem would come up saying, it will get on all your disks, it will infiltrate your chips.

Yes, it's the cloner.

And then it found itself a little place to live in your computer.

And then the next time you put another floppy disk on, it would go on there.

And it spread by floppy.

Oh, wow.

Think about 15-year-olds is.

They're very good with computers, but often they don't have a way with words.

What do you mean?

I haven't told you the second stanza yet.

Because

it will stick to you like glue.

It will modify RAM too.

Send in the cloner.

I think we can all agree he was the W.A.

Jordan of the 1980s.

Just one other thing that I found on computers, specifically in 1982, for the first time ever, a movie, Tron, had used computers to do CGI.

But they weren't nominated for an Oscar at that year's Oscars because the Academy saw it as cheating to have used a computer.

So no nomination.

And the best special effects went to E.T.

for that bicycling across the moon.

Wow.

That was pretty.

That was pretty good.

And because they didn't use special effects, they did manage to actually get someone to bicycle across the moon and then film it, didn't they?

Yeah, they fired them out of a massive cannon, didn't they?

Yeah.

That small child.

What they did was that was a real moonshot that they'd taken.

And they used a load of charts and stuff to work out exactly when the best shot of a moon would be and where they had to go to America.

And they shot this amazing real scene.

And then they cut green screen to put someone, like a model of a bike going in front of it.

Wait, hang on, because when you say moonshot, moonshot has a different meaning, doesn't it?

Does it?

Doesn't it?

Doesn't moonshot is, oh, this is a real moonshot.

You know, it's a sort of one in a million attempt to do something.

I assumed you meant it was a bare bottom.

I haven't seen E.T., but I don't think it's a massive bare bottom that's at the.

You haven't seen E.T.?

You just told us an amazing story about the most famous shot in the entire film.

Yeah, well, I know all about it.

Why would I watch it?

No, I'm joking.

I haven't seen it, obviously.

Like, no.

That is criminal.

I'm just still shocked sometimes when you say that you haven't, because I know you watched lots of films recently.

I've watched all modern films, yeah, but I haven't watched anything old, really.

I haven't seen either.

I feel like I'm too old.

You haven't seen E.T.

I have to give you fair traits.

I haven't seen it.

You haven't seen E.T., Dan.

I've seen it at least three times on Covering Us all.

Don't worry, Andy.

Nice.

I hope they don't give Time Purse of the Year for everyone who's watched E.T.

It's just me, Anna, and President Ahmedinejad.

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

My fact this week is that in order to decide which direction to go and preach every day, Franciscans spun round and round until they were so dizzy that they fell over and then went in whichever way their head was pointing.

This was just a group of early Franciscan preachers, so in the early 1200s, who got into this.

And I learned this.

This is kind of transgressing in a way that we haven't transgressed before.

I'm bringing the adverts into the podcast because I learned this on a great courses course.

Oh, oh, my God.

Are you getting separate advertising money than the rest of us do this?

I'm getting a huge amount in order to share this fact.

It's not even true.

No, look, I'm sorry.

I'm listening to this amazing lecture series.

It's by a guy called Philip Dyleder, who's a lecture series on the high middle ages.

And there was this bit about Franciscan monks, and they are fascinating.

So the reason that they preached in this way was because they didn't really believe in planning for the future.

They thought that was all very sinful, because God should decide what you do.

It's up to God, everything you do.

And planning from the future is like you saying, I know better than God.

And so, you know, they mustn't choose which direction they walk in.

They'll leave it to God.

And it was actually portrayed in a film, wasn't it?

Which I've never seen, but I really want to, called The Flowers of St.

Francis, Rossellini film where I think some Franciscans do it at some point I think St.

Francis does it and in that I'm not sure in that movie but the flowers of St.

Francis was like pretty much a biography of Saint Francis wasn't it yeah and so they say that he did it and that's why his followers did it right yeah yeah St.

Francis sounds like an interesting dude yeah apparently would sometimes strip to his pants while preaching his undergarments I'm not sure I don't think they had MNS Y fronts back in the day but he would give his clothes clothes away and he played.

I haven't been able to find out more information about this.

He played a kind of proto-guitar while preaching, which had been condemned by the authorities.

And he played his own songs on it.

And he encouraged

the red hot chili peppers, isn't he?

Getting down to his pants and playing a guitar

in front of a massive crowd.

Yeah, I never thought of him like that, but yes.

I don't think he thought of himself like that.

Yeah, he was strange.

He converted, according to one story, when a crucifix spoke to him.

He's just hanging out in a church.

A crucifix said, Hey, you need to go and rebuild this church roof.

So he thought, well, yeah, the crucifix has told me I'll do it.

And he went and begged for money and stones to do that.

And his parents were very embarrassed by his crazy behavior and his stripping down to his underwear.

And

he did a lot of weird stuff.

So when trying to work out what rules to include in the Franciscan order for his monks, he just got a Bible.

And again, because he loved the randomness, he just said, we'll randomly open the Bible on three pages.

And the first three things we see will have them as the rules.

Unfortunately, they were quite good things.

I think he must have done that a few times because the Bible is a very big book with a lot of crazy stuff.

Some weird shit, yeah.

Only ever owned 13 goats on a Tuesday.

Then we have to go and attack the Canaanites.

A lot of his early attempts failed.

That's really interesting.

He didn't used to just exclusively preach to humans either.

He would preach to animals.

He would preach to birds.

Yeah, that's what he's famous for, isn't it?

The most famous thing, really.

Well, glad to mention the most famous thing.

Get that out of the way.

I don't actually know much about this guy.

Yeah, he once persuaded a wolf to stop attacking some locals.

They came to an agreement whereby they would feed the wolf.

But that was due to his great communication skills with animals.

Literally all I knew about him before this research was sort of an image of a guy with a bird landing on his outstretched hand.

Yeah, he's sort of the patron site of all these animals.

Go on.

He went to the Middle East to try and stop the crusades from happening.

Very ballsy.

He visited Saladin's nephew, who was in charge of the defence against the Christian invaders, and they spent a week talking, and they had a really good summit about all sorts of stuff.

And Saladin's nephew was very impressed with him.

And then Francis went to speak to the cardinal who was in charge of the invasion effort, Cardinal Pallagius Galvani, and said, Look, I've had a great summit with this guy, and I think maybe you should call off this crusade.

And it did not work.

So he went to the wrong guy.

He just got pissed with a nephew, an irrelevant nephew for a week, and then

had his attempts rejected.

But he was a bit naive, I think.

He sent a bunch of Franciscan monks to go preaching in Germany.

So this was in Italy that the order started.

He sent 60 of his members to go preaching in Germany.

But because you weren't supposed to really plan for the future and you just had to trust to God, he said, you don't need to learn German because if God wants you to be able to communicate with him,

you will.

And so they turned up and they picked up that yeah was a thing that meant yes and that was it and so it was all fine while people were saying hey are you nice guys do you want to drink and they were like yeah yeah and then when they said are you guys heretics Are you guys criminals?

And they kept going, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they all ended up sort of being arrested and then having to return to Italy.

What they should have done is got a guidebook and then opened it up on a random page and just said whatever it said on the guidebook.

I don't think we've got any asthma medication, I'm afraid.

Favorite thing that I read about Francis.

So one of the things that we have actually mentioned before is that he's accredited with creating the first nativity scene, in case you missed that episode ages ago.

He's responsible for that, used live animals to do it.

But my favorite thing is that he once had to put a stop to something, which was the dead body of a dead Franciscan was performing too many miracles and it was causing traffic jams in the town, basically, where it was happening because just all these miracles kept happening, so people kept coming.

So he had to pray for the miracles to stop because it was too chaotic.

No, and they did.

Yeah.

What kind of miracles?

Was it just like a hippopotamus appears in the middle of the road?

I don't know.

I guess it's someone who could suddenly walk again.

You know, that kind of stuff when you go near something that's of religious importance.

And so this was a.

Anna, that's Jumanji you're thinking of.

You're right.

Yeah, so this isn't.

And James, Jumanji was a 1995 film, much like E.T.

I've watched Jumanji.

It came out last year.

Oh, my, a heretic.

Jumanji heretic.

Yeah, this was a Franciscan called Peter Catini, and this was in 1220.

What kind of traffic jams could you have in 1220?

I know.

Like a human traffic, I guess.

It was just, it was not good for the area.

You're going to have a cart jam.

There was actually, there was a cart filled with hagfish slime, three carts, which ruined everyone's day.

The Franciscans themselves, they got in trouble in 2001 for hiring a Milanese fashion designer to redesign their habit.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, really?

They said the old one is too heavy and it was clichéd.

That's fair, isn't it?

I mean, I guess whether you're clichéd or not shouldn't be a worry when you're a monk.

Yeah.

I think the point of Franciscans being entirely anti-materialist and, you know, you don't really want to have any physical possessions to deploy a Milanese fashion designer.

Well, the new one, they said it was meant to be simpler, cleaner, more dynamic, and professional.

And it also had a breast pocket for a mobile phone.

And the other orders were very envious of the Franciscans, but there was a bit of a kerfuffle about it.

Here's another cliché about monks is the tonsure, which is their haircut.

So they have like hair just going round the side of their head, don't they?

And then it's all bald on top.

And the reason that they have that is because they want to replicate the crown of thorns that Jesus wore.

But there's loads of different versions of it.

And the Roman Catholic one is the one that most people will recognize, like Friar Tuck had and stuff that goes around like a crown of thorns but before that in Britain they had a Celtic one and it was basically you shaved a triangle in the top of your head so you had a massive triangular bold patch at the top of your head and you had hair everywhere else and I just think that that sounds like that's the next thing in Milanese fashion houses isn't it

a triangular bald patch I had no idea that that was a crown of thorns I thought it was to do with I thought it was just genetic male pattern boldness that affects monks

the same way it affects all of us.

Yeah, I mean, it might be, you know, like when your sights go bald and then you start shaving your head, it's like, no, no, it's a crown of thorns, honestly.

And another person with a haircut like that, Willie Thorne.

Interesting.

Willie, who's the snooker player?

It's a very niche reference for our listeners.

I'm not sure our demographic of listeners to know such things as a fish.

I'm not sure how many of them know who Willie Thorne is, but.

There are a couple of middle-aged men guffawing away in their armchairs right now.

now.

I found a few other bizarre people from that time.

So St.

Joseph of Cupertino, he's an interesting character.

Much like I was saying with the other guy, Peter, causing traffic with his constant miracles, Cupertino had a problem where he was constantly flying.

So he was known as the flying saint.

And people, if they'd mentioned Jesus, he would just start levitating up.

And this was a constant thing that would happen.

And it became a problem in his life.

I'm not surprised.

Because he is a preacher.

People are going to be mentioning Jesus all the time to him.

Even if someone just hits their thumb with a hammer and says, Jesus, does he start floating?

He starts floating.

It got even worse for him.

If you started mentioning saints, any saint, he would start flying.

So it became very disruptive to the point where people didn't like it.

And they ostracized him.

They got rid of him and said, you can't be part of this.

How did they do it?

Did they just keep going, Jesus, saint, Jesus, save, Jesus, saint, until he floated away so far they couldn't see him anymore?

Yeah, no, he ended up in a monastery and they kept him in a cell by himself.

So he must have done some other things wrong other than just floated.

But he's, yeah, so that was a problem.

Awful being kept in a cell as well.

He must have hit his head on the ceiling constantly.

And obviously once he hits it, it goes, Jesus, and then he re-hits it.

It's a horrible loop.

I like the fact that another one of the leading preachers at the time who actually ended up being labelled a heretic, even though he was basically the same as Francis of Assisi, was Waldo.

Oh, wow.

The Waldensians.

But there was a big search for him, wasn't there?

Afterwards.

There was, yeah.

He was always in crowds, though, right?

Because he attracted huge crowds.

Another guy, St.

Dennis.

Have you heard of St.

Dennis?

He had his head chopped off, but continued to walk and preach afterwards.

And he was made the patron saint of headaches.

If you had your head cut off, would you have phantom head syndrome?

No, I think you'd have phantom body syndrome, wouldn't you?

Yeah, because your mind is in the head part.

I don't think he lasted too long.

I think he picked up his head and walked for six kilometers and buried it and then fell down.

I think he did last quite a long time, if that's what he did.

I think that's much more impressive than I could handle.

That's true.

Twirling monks are still a thing to a certain extent.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, in 2019, last year, there was a Buddhist monk, she was called Master Hui Yen.

She was in Taiwan, and she was blessing a temple.

And you can see footage of her doing this online.

And she blesses the temple by going along the red carpet up towards it, twirling 150 times in a row.

Wow.

Unfortunately, she then throws up.

And it's a a less spiritual ending to the video than you would expect.

That would be an easier way of doing the Sam Francis thing, wouldn't it?

It's like whatever direction the vomit goes.

Follow it.

Follow.

Follow the channel.

Follow your chanda.

So there is a modern day follower of the Franciscan faith, and this is in Brazil.

It's a lady, she's a grandmother in Brazil, and she, as part of her faith, would pray to Saint Anthony of Padua.

Apart from her grandchildren, she realized that she wasn't praying to a figurine of St.

Anthony of Padua at all.

She was praying to a figure of Elrond, Lord of Riverdell, Lord of the Rings.

And she'd been praying to this elf every single day for a couple of years, and it turned out it was just an elf.

She had lovely pointy ears at the end of it.

We need to move on in a sec, guys.

I was just looking into other leading religious figures in this period, and someone who's particularly amazing is Hildegard of Bingen.

So I didn't know much about her, vaguely heard of her, but she was this very, very influential Christian mystic.

And she sort of traveled around a lot.

Very unusual for a woman to independently travel around and used to draw these huge crowds.

She was a rock star.

And she was a composer.

She's actually the only person really whose music we still play from the Middle Ages.

So it's still played and sung today.

And she was a philosopher.

She's like the founder of German natural history.

She was amazing.

And she was a very religious nun.

But she also invented her own language.

And I think it's the first person we have evidence of doing kind of what we did with Esperanto, which is trying to invent a perfect language, a new alphabet.

And we've got this whole glossary of her language that she wrote in.

It's over a thousand words.

And she just made up this language.

It's full of Zeds and it's really weird stuff.

Like she's got a specific word for great, great, great, great-grandfather.

And she's got, you know, drunkards, vaginas, urine.

She just made up her whole language.

Does she covered all the main subjects, didn't she?

My drunk, great, great, great, great-grandfather's got a vagina.

She could say that.

And it's full of urine.

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

My fact is that in 2004, a Canadian cheesemaker dropped $50,000 worth of cheese into a lake to make it taste better, but then lost the cheese.

Oh, no.

I know.

Oh, God.

So that could possibly be like the most tasty bit of cheese that's ever been made, and we'll never find it.

I know.

After 15 years in the lake, it's probably approaching its peak perfection now, I would say.

So this was a Canadian cheesemaker.

He ran a fromagerie called La Fromagerie Boivin.

He dropped 800 kilos of cheese into the water of this lake in 2004 and he let it sit there for a year.

And he was really confident that it would be delicious once it had had a bit of lake treatment.

But they started looking for it.

It wasn't in the spot they left it in.

And then they ramped up the search a bit.

So they started sending in divers.

And then they sent in some tracking equipment.

After three dives, they still hadn't found the cheese.

And the cheesemaker, who was called Luc Boivin, he said it got too expensive.

At some point, you can't be crazy.

And they just called off the search.

So this is a phantom cheese that the world will never get to eat.

So the reason that they thought to put all this cheese in the water is actually because a fisherman had come to them a few years.

earlier and said that he'd found a bit of their cheese at the bottom of a lake.

Now, I don't know how that bit of cheese got there, but he'd found it.

And the first thing he thought when he got this cheese out of the lake is, I'll just try it and see what it's like.

And he said it was the most tasty cheese that he'd ever had.

And so, obviously, this fromaggery guy thought, well, I'll just put all the rest of my cheese in the water.

So, this is the complex science on which fromagios depend: it's just the random word of a crazy fisherman who eats cheese off the bottom of a lake.

Basically, yeah, he just rates the hagfish off.

And also, also, they should have seen it coming, right?

Because wasn't the lake called Bay de Ha Ha?

Yes, it's one of the few places in the world which has punctuation in the name of the place, because ha ha has exclamation marks after it.

Even if they had found the cheese, there is serious doubt over whether they would have been able to sell it because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are real sticklers about just dropping food in a lake and then selling it to the public.

And they said, yeah, we would have needed to check this throughout its aging process.

And then they interviewed afterwards one of the divers who was looking for the cheese, a guy called Mr.

Dafour.

And they said, oh, you know, are you not a bit sad that you didn't find the cheese?

He's like, nope, I'm really optimistic because the Titanic sank in 1912 and it was only found in 1985.

So

as far as he's concerned, there's still plenty of time to find this cheese.

I like the idea that the Oscar winning film in the year 2060 is going to be a film called Bravan's Cheese, where they finally dredge up the giant cheese from the bottom of the corner.

You know what?

I would have thought that would be better than Titanic because I haven't seen Titanic but

surprise, surprise.

You know what's going to happen at the end, don't you?

Whereas in this cheese, it's an actual mystery of what happens at the end.

And I read also an article.

This was in, was it in 2005, Andy?

And

obviously in 2005, it was quite a slow news year.

And so it was in the news a fair amount.

And then afterwards, they said that he was going to do it again.

And he was going to fit the cheddar with a tracking device.

So,

but then I couldn't find if he's actually done it.

And there's nothing on his website to say that he's done it.

So, I don't know.

Maybe he looked back to that quote that Andy gave us where he said, at a certain point of crazy, you've got to realize you've got to stop and turn around.

And he reflected a little bit on that.

They used a $1 million multi-beam sonar device to find this cheese.

What?

It's amazing.

It's absolutely amazing.

It's basically the Canadian Nessie is this cheese.

Yeah.

There is lots of, when you're probing cheese or when you're trying to do experiments on cheese.

So there has been a new method developed in the last year in Uruguay.

Uruguayan scientists developed a method to non-destructively probe Emental cheese, which is massive news for the industry.

Does Emmental have holes in it?

It does.

So surely it's easy to probe without destroying it.

You just go through one of the holes.

No,

there aren't holes on the outside because obviously it's right.

And I think you knew that and you were teasing me.

Basically, you need to measure when the eyes, as they call the holes, are big enough.

And when they're at the right size, the cheese is ripe.

And if it's too long, then the eyes all merge into each other and the cheese collapses.

Disaster.

So you make a batch of cheese.

And to measure it, normally you would need to sacrifice a wheel of cheese every time.

That's a lesser-known bit of the Bible, isn't it?

Where they sacrifice a wheel of cheese.

Abraham says to God, I won't give you my son.

But I will give you this baby bell.

Oh, very good.

So anyway, so normally you need to, as I say, sacrifice one of your precious cheeses every time you want to measure the bubble size.

But these Uruguay scientists have invented a kind of magic cheese hammer.

It's kind of a sonic electrical probe which allows you to tell from the sound.

It's like a tuning fork, if you'd like.

Okay.

For cheese.

But they're very specialist instruments, obviously, and you need a lot of training to tell from the sound whether a cheese is ripe.

But the new method is an electrical hammer, which allows any old schmo who doesn't have years of training and expertise to tell the ripeness of the cheese without destroying it.

So this is big news.

I was in a cheese shop the other day.

No, the other month in

France when we were allowed to go outside.

And they had like the back room.

You could look into the back room and they had all the massive wheels of cheese.

You know, like they're really, really expensive, aren't they?

And they use them as like loan collateral and stuff like that.

And it was just really amazing to see how big these massive wheels of cheese are because they're absolutely huge.

How big are we talking?

Give us an animal.

I would say 350 weasels.

Wow.

Thank you.

That's huge.

That's done nothing for me.

Is that an elephant?

What is that?

Could we not pick one animal?

It's kind of a big, really big pig.

Yeah.

Or a small pony?

Like a Shetland pony.

But if you squashed it down into a circle.

Yeah, are you cutting the legs off?

You're bending the legs into the body and then making it into a circle.

Either way, I think the authorities will be taking a close interest.

Actually, the most interesting Canadian cheese I could find was a giant cheese, the mammoth cheese.

This was prepared for the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, but it came from Canada, from Ontario, which is one of its biggest cheese-producing provinces, and it weighed 9,900 kilos, which I was trying to see what that was the equivalent of.

And it's the equivalent of 144 average-sized women.

How many is that in weasels?

You're gonna have to do the weasels to women conversion yourselves at home.

That's amazing.

It was an amazing undertaking.

They used milk from dairies all over the country, all over Canada, and they had a special railway car made because the first one they put it on, it just fell through the bottom.

So they had to transport it by this railway from Ontario to Chicago.

And they had a cheese timetable which they sent ahead to all the stations.

So everyone in the stations between the two places flocked to their station when they checked the timetable for when the cheese was pulling in so that they could come and see it.

And by the time it got to Chicago, it had so many thousands of signatures on it from the people who'd come to see it.

On the cheese.

On the blimmin' cheese.

They had to, it was on the rind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they repainted it.

But that's still pretty.

So, gross.

While the cheese was going on the train, people were running alongside it signing it.

It sounds like it must have stopped at the stations, but I don't think anyone was boarding and getting on and off.

It wouldn't have been a sold train just for the cheese.

You'd have a carriage for it, wouldn't you?

Would you?

No.

They probably just had a carriage.

You wouldn't send a whole train and just have all the other carriages empty and just one cheese in one carriage.

Also, equally, you wouldn't be like sat in carriage A or B of a train and have to climb around the massive cheese to get to the buffet cart.

That's true.

That's true.

That is the buffet cart, isn't it?

What year was this, Sanna?

1893.

1893.

Oh, okay, because I found another mammoth cheese from 1866, which was also shipped around to Toronto and New York.

And I only know about it because of a famous poem that was written about it.

Do you guys know the cheese poet of Canada?

No.

This is a guy called James McIntyre, acknowledged to be one of the worst poets ever.

He's born in the early 1800s, and he was a poet, but no one knew this until after he died.

He only got fame because he was included in collections with titles like Very Bad Poetry,

which got him famous.

And his most famous poem is called Ode to the Mammoth Cheese, Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds.

And as it is that James read some poetry, I'll give you a quick extract.

we have seen thee queen of cheese lying quietly at your ease gently fanned by evening breeze thy fair form no flies dare seize all gaily dressed soon you'll go to the provincial show to be admired by many a beau in the city of torontu

to the mammoth cheese weighing over seven thousand pounds that is brilliant yeah that's another one that should have started computer quiz

uh another canadian cheese craft, you know, craft cheese.

So cheese slices there.

Canadian.

The guy who invented craft cheese was Canadian.

He invented pasteurized cheese, which everyone wanted to call embalmed cheese when he first invented it, because all the cheesemakers thought you can't have this kind of industrial process making cheese.

It should only be our special cheeses that we make that you can sell.

And so you're going to have to call it embalmed cheese.

And then in the end, they had to call it processed cheese, of course.

But he fought against that.

And he had a business partner.

he was going to go out of business but he decided to have a business partner and he made jesus christ his business partner this is on the craft website if you go on there oh i didn't think jesus had a very good head for business did you not say jesus christ

i didn't say jesus christ but that's what he remarketed himself as

no it's on the website it says that basically he was doing really badly and then he decided to make jesus christ his business partner he gave 25 of his personal profits to the church, and suddenly everything picked up and he became really, really popular.

And then a few years later, he brought in his brothers, Charles, Herbert, Frederick, Norman, and John into the business.

Wow.

What a slam for the brothers to have been invited after Jesus Christ in this church.

We have God to thank for Kraft.

I was actually reading a, there was a book written by a random guy who visited the Kraft family a few years ago.

And the family tradition says, it's been passed down that the reason he got the inspiration to pair up with God/slash Jesus as his business partner was when he was just selling cheese in Canada, like while trotting around the streets in his cheese cart.

And the donkey that was pulling the wagon from which he was selling turned around to him and told him that he had to make things right with God and get him involved in the company.

And it was only after the donkey spoke to him that he went into this very lucrative business partnership.

Talking donkey.

It's basically Shrek.

Yeah.

I mean, I haven't seen Shrek, but I think there is a talking donkey in it, isn't there?

So annoying how you're beating me with all the film references.

That is amazing.

We're going to have to wrap up in a second.

Anyone got anything else they want to add before we do?

I like that the Cyclops in the Odyssey basically ran a cheese factory.

Did he?

Just sort of looking at old cheeses.

If you look at the Odyssey from a different angle, then Odysseus is really the villain here.

So he goes with all his men to the Cyclops' big caves.

And so you probably know that the Cyclops had a big sheep farm because the way they all escaped at the end is by clinging to the underside of these sheep as they cantered out of the caves.

But basically, all these men snuck into the Cyclops's caves and they found that the Cyclops has been milking all of his sheep and then keeping, storing the milk in his caves, kind of like rock forest is stored in order to mature into cheese.

And so they sort of stole the cheese from the caves and escaped.

But I just love the fact that the Cyclops was just a cheese farmer.

That story, honestly, the Cyclops is the good guy in that story, isn't he?

Because they blind him.

He's only got one eye to begin with, and they blind him, and then they steal all of his stuff.

I always hated that story.

You know, they blind him, so they hide underneath the sheep, so they can't feel him, because he feels the top of the sheep, doesn't he?

I don't know.

I think that's sneaky and not very nice.

He is going to eat them, isn't he?

He specifically says, when I come back, I'm going to kill you and eat them.

That's just nature.

But that's too sad.

That's because they've eaten all of his cheese.

He's got nothing left to put in his stages.

I think the theory is that it's feta.

Or that it's a kind of proto-fetter.

Is it now?

Is it sheep's cheese, fetter?

I think so.

Yeah.

I weirdly don't know the story.

We've talked about it on this podcast.

Don't read it.

I love that you do, though, James.

I love that there's a period where you stop taking stuff in, but then you go far back enough

and you pick it up again.

Yeah.

That's very true.

We've just told you the story in such a weird order now.

I wonder what your head is like trying to piece together.

This is like that movie Memento that I haven't seen where everything's in a weird order.

Oh my gosh.

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 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 a podcast at qi.com.

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

You'll find links up there to all of our previous episodes and bits of merchandise to buy as well.

As ever, we hope you're doing well.

We hope you're all healthy and safe.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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