296: No Such Thing As A Glowing Ballet Dancer

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Hello,

and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a Weekly Podcast.

This week, coming to you live from Philadelphia.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

My fact is that the star of the film Candyman, where a character has bees coming out of his mouth, negotiated a $1,000 bonus for every time he got stung.

He ended up with $23,000.

Wow.

Yeah.

How bad is it to be stung by a bee?

Do you think you'd be deliberately angering the bees so that you got a few more stings and a bit more money?

Or not?

I would.

But that says more about me than it does about.

Yeah.

Although in the mouth, I imagine it would be a lot more painful.

than normal.

So this is Candyman.

This is Tony Todd.

This is a kind of cult horror film.

And one of the inspirations was from the Johnny Carson show, where there was a man called Norman Gary, who was a B-based performer.

And

he had an act where he played the clarinet while covered in Bs.

And people loved this.

And he then became the B wrangler, the official B person on Candyman.

And I think it's him and Tony Todd.

They're the only two people to have done all three Candyman films, is the star and the B guy.

Wow.

Can you explain what Candyman is?

Because I haven't seen it.

Dan, you watched it as a child.

It's a horror film.

There's a guy who has a hook, and if you say his name into a mirror five times, he kills you.

So in theory, you shouldn't do that, but people they do.

How many times have we said it so far on the stage?

But it was written by Clive Barker, the great horror writer.

I think he did Hellraiser as well.

And the bees that they used, actually, there is a logic.

It wasn't bees that were just ready and furious and waiting to sting.

They made sure that the bees were only 12 hours old.

So imagine you've just been born and you're suddenly in a Hollywood movie.

It's it's incredible.

And uh so yeah, so they they went into the mouth and um the idea is that the stings wouldn't be sharp enough.

Even when he was stung, it wouldn't have the sting of a say 14 hour old beef.

And once uh they'd done each take the bees would be vacuumed up using a tiny bee vacuum.

Did you know that you can get a bee vacuum cleaner?

Yeah.

How's that different from a normal vacuum cleaner?

I think it's just a little bit kinder on the bees I would guess.

It was it was a mini one.

Like, it was, yeah, it's different because it's a bee size.

Not like a bee would use it as a vacuum cleaner.

And they'd be sucked up and then returned to their dressing room for the, you know, sort of to await the next take.

Wow.

They didn't have their own dressing room.

They do mean a bot, a wooden box.

Yeah.

Well, you've seen our dressing room tonight.

It's full of bees.

But actually, the main thing is with this bee bearding thing, which is what the clarinetists did.

Okay, so what you do is you get a queen bee and you put it in a little cage by your face and then all of the other bees kind of come along because they like the queen bee so much and they hang around your face.

And the way that you get them off normally is you spend maybe a couple of hours getting them on so you have a massive bee beard and then you just jump in the air and when you land all the bees just disappear.

No they don't disappear.

They just stop holding on to your face.

That's amazing.

And does that not irritate them?

A little bit.

You might get stung a few times.

But then you walk backwards and someone's kind of firing smoke in your face so that they're getting a bit sleepy, a little bit drowsy, and then you can get away.

That's so crafty.

That's so weird, because Virginia Madsen, who I think was the lead female character in the film, said it used to take ages for their bee rangers to sweep the bees up.

Well, yeah, because what they did with them is they kind of smeared their face in pheromone.

Yeah.

And so the bees just really did not want to leave them.

She said that it basically you have pheromones on them, so they're all in love with you.

All the bees.

That's nice, isn't it?

She was allergic to bees, I think.

She was very slightly, wasn't she?

The director said, No, you're not, you're just afraid.

This guy, Norman Gary, the bee wrangler, he has a Guinness World record that is obviously bee-related, but it is for most bees in a mouth.

Wow, really?

Yeah,

any guesses?

I would say about 14.

14, 14, one, four, fourteen, yes,

sixty-five,

Yeah.

66.

Okay.

By an incredibly dubious method, Dan wins.

But you're still out.

He had 109 live bees in his mouth at one time, and you have to, you get a sponge soaked in sugar, and they like that, obviously, so they always seek that out.

So that's to you can sort of train them to go where you want them to go with that sponge.

So then he put it in his mouth.

You have to close your mouth for 10 seconds for the record to be valid.

So they're all in there.

And then you put a mesh cage up to your lips.

You blow them all into the cage at the same time.

Then you close the bag.

And then you, to do the count, you have to allow them to escape one by one while you tally them.

Until then, you don't know if you've got the record, because you've just got a load of bees in your mouth.

It's easier to count them out than it is to count them in, I guess.

Yeah, I see that.

Hey, I was looking into horror movies generally because I I realize I just don't know much about sort of like the behind the scenes of movies.

I found this really fun fact which is the omen, the movie The Omen, so Damien, who is it's now the classic name for, yeah, so he wasn't meant to be called Damien.

Oh no, really?

Yeah, originally the screenwriter, David Seltzer, he wanted to name the Antichrist Domlin,

D-O-M-L-I-N.

And the reason he wanted to call him Domlin is because he knew a Domlin who was a totally obnoxious brat, he said.

It was a friend, it was the child of a friend of his, and it was his wife, the screenwriter's wife, who went, you can't fucking do this to Dom Lin.

Immortalize him as the Antichrist in a movie.

It's not, they're not gonna go, Well, it might be another Domlin.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's Damien, but yeah, it should have been Domlin.

Wow, but now all the Damiens get that.

It seems unfair.

But at least there are all the Damiens.

There's not just one Damien in the world who knows it's about him.

They used to have a lot of horror movies within Sexin, like this one Candyman with the Bees.

Between 1966 and 1978, there were six major films featuring bees as the main horror in that film.

One of them was called The Swarm and the Sunday Times has says it's the worst film ever made.

Richard Velt in the Wilmington Morning Star said, The Swarm may not be the worst movie ever made.

I'll have to see them all to be sure.

But it's certainly as bad as any I've ever seen.

All the actors involved in this fiasco should be ashamed.

Apparently it's absolutely awful.

It's got Michael Caine in it.

It costs them tons.

It was really expensive.

The budget was like 20 million.

It came out in the same year as Star Wars, which was made for a lot less money.

And it was basically about a load of killer bees.

Now, the American Bee Association decided to do a cease and desist to the swarm for defaming the American honey bee.

And as a result, at the end of the movie, there's a disclaimer saying that the killer bees in the film bear no resemblance to real crop-pollinating honeybees.

That is the same thing.

I thought they bore some resemblance.

I was reading about this one, too.

It does sound absolutely amazing.

It's two hours and 40 minutes long, which is hefty.

Michael Caine said that he only did it because his mother needed a house to live in.

It's quite sweet.

But also,

they kept finding all the way through the film, because they filmed it with nearly a million bees.

There was a big,

huge cast, basically.

Huge cut.

What, the credits at the end?

B1, B2, B3.

But the cast and the crew, they kept finding little yellow dots on their clothing because of all the bees.

And Michael Kane would eat that before eventually being informed that that was not honey he was eating, but that was just bee excrement that he'd casually been snacking on throughout the filming.

Wow.

That's when you do need a bee with a little vacuum cleaner, don't you?

The cleaner bee.

Another horror film which involves sort of animals going nuts was the birds.

And that, they had a bird trainer in the birds.

And in fact, he's a guy called Ray Beric, and he trained all birds in all films that you've seen with birds in for about 20 years so like the bird man of Alcatraz was the other big one and he had such cool tricks so you know if you I don't know if you've seen the birds but there are lots of scenes where the birds like fly towards the lens of the camera and attack it and they put meat in the lenses of the camera so the birds would fly at it

but if you read it was quite weird because there are no special effects in that so they just had these birds attacking them all the time and the lead actor in it said it was Rod Taylor who was the lead actor who said there was one particular raven who absolutely hated him.

And ravens do take against people.

We've discussed this before.

So he said he'd get up, go onto set every day.

This raven would immediately turn up next to him and go,

and then start just biting him manically.

And every day on set, he'd say, look, is Archie working today?

Archie being the raven.

And he'd always turn up.

And it was really sad because Tippy Hedrin, who was his co-star, also had a relationship with a raven, but she had a really nice one.

So a raven befriended her, loved her.

They couldn't actually use that raven in the film because it was too nice but imagine if you watch the movie and they're all attacking her but one of them is just kind of on her shoulder just

leave them alone leave them alone

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

My fact this week is that as well as using crash test dummies, Volvo tests its cars with a crash test moose.

They have a crash test moose, which as far as I can tell is called moosus.

So this is done in Sweden.

They have a 790-pound moose surrogate, and they make it from a stack of 114 rubber discs.

And the idea is that it's sort of sitting in front of a car.

So rather, it's not the moose inside the car as a crash test dummy.

It's sitting in a distance and they ram the car into it and it splays itself all over the car.

So it's just to show the damage that's being done to the car.

Actually,

it's really important, isn't it?

Because if you're driving along and there's an animal in the way, a lot of people say, really, the best thing to do is not to swerve out of the way because you might hit a tree or another car.

You basically should keep going.

But with a moose, you definitely shouldn't do that.

And the reason being, I'm the shop people here know, but basically they've got spindly legs and a massive big fuck-off body.

And so you go into those legs and they just, like matchsticks, just go and then the body just hits you at the right height to go right into you.

And it's really, really dangerous.

There is amazing footage of the crash tests happening, and it's, yeah, the top of the car just gets taken out, basically.

But there are, I think there are, yeah, did you say there are two of these?

No,

there are only two on the planet, but they are both in Sweden, basically.

Well, you do need it in Sweden because that's where they have a lot of moose, of course.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea.

I think, yeah, yeah, no, it's a very good idea.

I'm surprised there isn't one in Canada, to be honest.

Yeah, you think so.

But the thing with moose in Sweden is there are so many moose in Sweden that if you're traveling across a highway, you will pass within a thousand feet of a moose every 23 seconds on average.

Whoa!

But it's just one moose and he's really fast.

Isn't that amazing, actually?

That's incredible.

They do have really cool.

So there's a place in rural Virginia called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and it's their testing center.

And that's where they do a lot of crash testing for cars.

But they occasionally will have sort of fun derbies between different cars.

Oh, what do you mean?

I've really oversold that.

Basically,

I wasn't that excited about 50 stars back.

Well, for their 50th birthday, they had a grudge match between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu.

And what do you mean they just crash into each other?

Yeah, yeah.

It was to show how much safer cars are these days, because the beautiful old 1950s car, the whole front just really crumples, and the other one doesn't.

Wow.

It's a good news story in many ways.

It's a very good style, haven't you, in that nice old car?

I guess so.

But they really had to persuade people that safety was a good idea for cars.

Like,

deaths in car accidents kept creeping up and up and up, and the car industry kept saying, God, yeah, it's awful, but what are we going to do about it?

And they really had to persuade them.

So Ford introduced a car in 1956 which had a steering wheel where the steering wheel, if you hit something, the steering wheel column would deform on impact.

This is a good thing because it means you don't get hit in the middle of the chest by a spike of metal, basically.

The car was not popular.

Despite being sold with that, it was very much outsold by other cars which had very dangerous steering columns.

Do you know the first crash test dummies were live humans?

So they so there was this this happened a few times actually, but from like the 1950s they started testing like the crash impact on human bodies and there was a researcher called Lawrence Patrick and he basically volunteered himself and he made the point that actually that you know people have been talking about using inanimate objects or things like the dummies we have today.

But you can crash a dummy into a car as many times as you like and go, oh, look, it's really dented here, and its head's exploded, and its foot fell off.

But you don't actually know what that would mean if it was a live human.

You don't actually know if the dummy's dead.

So, but would this kill a human?

And so,

he, um, so this guy from 1960 to 1975 was a human crash test dummy, and he used to do things like he took a 50-pound metal pendulum to the chest repeatedly, and that was to test the steering column.

So he used to break ribs and things like that.

God.

Part of his job was hurling his knee repeatedly against a metal bar.

That's amazing.

Yeah, he took over 400 deceleration rides to that, and that's where you sort of simulate the feeling of a crash.

And yeah, it sounds horrendous.

And him and his students would lie down.

They'd have stuff like what's called a gravity impactor, where you'd have to be lying down, and you had kind of this metal rod suspended above your cheek, and then it would just jab you in the cheek.

It would be like a robot jab you repeatedly and harder and harder in the cheek to see how much you could take.

And once you said he couldn't take it anymore, they went, Well, let's make cars that don't inflict more than that.

But let's bring it right up to that point.

And he was that guy, was Lawrence Patrick, you say?

Yeah.

And it was one of his students called Harold Mertz who went on to develop the first, or the standard crash test dummy, right?

So it was based on all that kind of stuff.

Oh, wow, because he had such a traumatic experience here.

Dummies are, they are getting older.

We're all getting older, aren't we?

Who are we getting older?

The dummies.

They're being made to be older now.

Oh, they're made older, as in when they're first.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Because how does that work?

As in the bones aren't a stronger.

They're a bit more fragile, basically, because people are getting older.

Again, back to your point, James.

We're all getting older.

But

drivers.

Drivers are getting

society's aging, so the crash test dummies which simulate

a strapping young person in their prime are not a realistic way of simulating what's happening if you're driving and you're 120 years old.

No.

You know.

And fatter as well, they're getting, aren't they?

Because we're getting fatter.

Or and sort of more varied.

There's this problem with dummies, and it happens with all technology, where it says this standard dummy's been made for the average man, and so then we've proven that that's how strong this car is.

And it's always a man, and it's always a Western man.

And they've finally clocked onto the fact that not everyone on earth is a Western man.

And so obviously, like, women tend to be lighter, different parts of their body, a bit weaker.

And And so now they've finally started making dummies that vary in size.

But one of the things is they've had to get fatter.

I think the average American has put on just over two stone in the last 20 years, 25 years.

And so the dummies have had to follow suit.

28 pounds?

28 pounds, sorry.

28 pounds.

Yeah.

Well, that's not much weight to put on over 25 years.

You're actually keeping quite fit if that's all you put on in that period.

You don't gradually put on more and more weight each year.

That's not how it's, but that's not like a healthy weight.

Sorry, as a man in his 40s, yes, you do.

I've got something that you might like, Den.

Oh, yeah.

There is a theory that crash test dummies explain the Roswell landings.

Jesus.

What?

So.

This is a claim that was made about crash test dummies that people might have mistaken crash test dummies being used in parachute drops.

If you're testing a parachute and you want to see how hard someone hits the ground with that particular parachute.

So maybe the Air Force were collecting in crash test dummies and mistook them for alien bodies being collected in.

Right.

Because that's where a lot of military testing might happen.

And these were six foot long things and they were hairless and they were made of a weird rubbery substance.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's not a widely adhered to theory.

No.

It's obviously aliens, but

I can't believe you thought that would excite me.

What I wanted you to say is aliens are real.

That's the.

Speaking of theories and adhering,

this is actually

tenuous.

Very tenuous, let's go with that.

Google has invented a new thing which is human fly paper.

And the idea is if you have a self-driving car, you put this fly paper on the front of your car, and one of the problems or one of the main ways that people get injured if they get hit by cars is not even the first impact, it's where you get thrown and you end up hitting your head on the floor or stuff like that, or you get run over.

And so they think that what might happen is you drive along, you hit pedestrian, instead of throwing them over, they stick to the car.

Oh wow.

And then you can slow down and then they can just unstick themselves.

There must be so many situations, though, where you're late to somewhere and you're like, I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to go.

And you're on passing cars on the highway with a dude stuck to the front.

Oh, I found a great moose-related headline because I was looking up some moose facts as well.

This is a headline from South Dakota.

Is it Kilo Land or Kello Land?

All right.

No one knows and I think it's fair to say no one here cares.

Okay.

Let's say Kiloland news.

This is a genuine local news headline in South Dakota.

Moose moves from one field into another field.

This is a real local news story.

It goes on.

Be on alert driving near the Marion Road exit on Interstate 90.

A little after five Thursday night, a combine scared the moose.

Clearly just one moose involved in this whole state.

Scared the moose out of one field and into another.

This is the same moose that's been hanging out in the area north of southwestern Sioux Falls since Monday.

So maybe there's a reason that nobody here has been to South Dakota is all I'm trying to say.

Should we move on?

Let's move on to our next bag.

It is time for fact number three and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Americans used to make their slippers radioactive so they could find them in the dark.

Now, I must say, probably not many Americans did this,

but I think definitely some of them did.

So there is an advert online for this product, which you could buy in the 1930s called Undark.

Okay, and it's like a paint, and it contains radium, which is radium.

I'm sorry, can we just clarify that it wasn't online in the 1940s, was it?

You're absolutely right.

It wasn't online in the 1930s.

It was a different medium back then, and it's been put online now.

Got it, just checking.

I saw it online in the last few days.

But yeah, I think it was in magazines and things like this, and it was called Undark.

And it says, the advert says, does Undark really contain radium?

Most assuredly.

So it's real radioactive stuff, and the whole point of it is you would put it on things so you could find them in the dark.

So they said that you would put it on watches and clocks, on push buttons, on the buckles of your bedroom slippers, on house numbers, flashlights, compasses.

Well, flashlights, I don't know why, because you can turn them.

Well, you need to find it in the dark.

You need to find it in the dark.

You're absolutely right.

And basically, in the 1930s, they were putting radium on everything.

Even though, not realizing, perhaps that it was killing people.

Yeah, they were obsessed.

It was a craze.

And like the newspapers constantly contained it.

I think George Bernard Shaw said the world has run raving mad on the subject of radium.

And of course, there was very famously the radium girls, who are the people who worked in sort of 19s.

And the radium girls were there, and they had to paint radium onto clocks to make their hands glow in the dark, and they would lick the paintbrushes, and so they would swallow a little bit of radium every single time they did that, which was extremely bad for them, it turned out.

And worse still, they would paint like little messages on the teeth for their boyfriends, and their clothes would glow in the dark.

So, when they went out clubbing or whatever they did in the 1920s,

they would always wear their work clothes because it meant they shined in the night clothes.

They were like human glow sticks dancing in the clubs.

Wow.

They were properly glowers in one, so it was a big scandal by the 1920s.

They started dying, and people realized it was probably because of all this radium.

And when they exhumed their bodies years later, they were still glowing from all this radium.

It was amazing.

And they'd open their cupboards in the morning, yeah, and all their clothes are just glowing.

Absolutely bizarre.

And then, of course, because they were getting very sick, there were lawsuits.

And it was due to a guy called Leonard Grossman, who was a lawyer who worked pro bono for the whole time.

And it was after eight appeals that they managed to get the companies to admit that they were wrong and managed to get something back.

Although the last one, the last radium girl, died at the age of 107, not so long ago, only in the last 20 years, I think.

But she quit within a week of working there because she hated the taste of the paint.

Yes.

And

she was counting herself lucky, age 107 in 2014.

But like they weren't to know, I suppose, and it must have been so exciting.

And also uranium had the same thing when uraniums then became a thing and this was this other very, very dangerous nuclear substance people got very into.

There was a time when hamburgers came with free shares in uranium mines.

Like a little happy meal, but it was a share in uranium.

Really?

What?

There were some, right?

You know, is it pronounced bougie?

You know, B-O-U-G-I-E, the sort of things.

Bougie.

Bougie.

Sorry.

They were radioactive bougies, which were wax-covered rods to be inserted into into the penis.

Sorry, I didn't know this word bougie until now.

Is that what it is?

Bougie, yeah.

Well, there's a modern meaning of bougie, which is a bit different to that.

Is that what bougie nights, that movie's about?

That's right, yeah.

It basically is about that, isn't it?

Wow.

Some people said that if you fed your chickens radium, then their eggs would incubate themselves.

Wow.

Not true.

We have, weirdly, you mentioned the Curies earlier.

So

Mary Curie,

she was in the news this year.

She's in our book, our new book.

Is she?

Yeah, because someone, it was her birthday, and the cake arrived, surprise cake, and they opened it up, and on the cake was a drawing of Mary Curie.

And she was confused because she had no idea who it was.

It turns out that there was a mishearing over the phone.

What the parent had actually asked for was a cake of Mariah Carey.

And

as a result,

had this Nobel Prize winner on her cake with no idea who it was.

All I want for Christmas is uranium.

Marie Curie,

Pierre, her husband, died in a traffic accident.

And then years later,

she started dating again.

And she had an affair with a married man, which was very scandalous at the time.

And it led to this huge corps celebrate.

There were either two or five armed duels over this affair that she had and the wife of the man she was having the affair with her name was Madame Longvin she had someone break into Curie's house and steal the love letters and all of this about Mary Curie Nobel Prize winning you know and the letters were stolen and then they were leaked to the press so suddenly this is a huge story and her lover Paul Longvin had a duel between him and a journalist who had insulted him and

there's a letter from Einstein to Mary Curie saying, Don't worry about all this, this is irrelevant.

Really?

It's really cool.

Because it was just before she won the Nobel Prize.

So her Nobel Prize was slightly overshadowed by this huge story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Three days before she was due to go and collect it, the story broke.

And they were saying, oh, maybe don't come and collect a Nobel Prize because this is scandalous.

But then Einstein wrote her a letter saying, forget all that.

You've got the award.

Get the award.

Wow.

Yeah.

She used to be always called on to test the radium products.

You know, you were saying at the start, James, that a lot of products called themselves radioactive, but they didn't take all those radium.

They didn't put it in, is that right?

Yeah, they very often just pretended and then put a bit of different glow-in-the-dark stuff in it.

She would be called to verify that stuff contained radium, that it definitely was deadly, basically.

It'd be like, my child's toy says it's radioactive.

Can you just check, Mary Curie, that it is?

She'd be like, yep, definitely got lots of radium in it.

Good luck to that kid.

Wow.

She actually fell on a little bit of hard times after a while and she didn't have enough radium to continue her research because radium was really, really expensive.

There's not much of it in the ground, ground, so it's really hard to get.

And so there was a fundraising campaign led by American women, and Curie traveled to the United States, and she was presented with one gram of radium by President Warren Harding in 1921.

A single gram.

Okay, and

it doesn't sound like a lot, that right?

But it cost them $100,000 for a single gram of radium.

And that, at the time, in 1921, was about the average budget of a Hollywood movie.

So, for one gram of radium, you could make a whole movie.

That's so cool.

Isn't that amazing?

They did, because when they were trying to refine it in the foot, like before they'd even discovered it, they were using a thing called pitch blend, which is a kind of uranium ore, and it's got the

radium in it, but it needs to be refined a lot.

They went through seven tons of pitch blend, and they ended up with one gram of radium after all of that refining.

That's incredible.

This is why there was a ballet dancer and choreographer called Loe Fuller, who in 1904 created the Radium Dance, which was a really famous dance at the time.

And she wanted all the ballerinas to be wearing head-to-toe costumes made entirely of radium.

And she was sort of mates with Mary Curie, and she wrote to her and said, Can you mend me a bunch of ballerinas dresses made entirely of radium?

And thank God, Mary Curie said, I'd absolutely love to.

It sounds like a great idea, but it's just too expensive.

And so she had to make do with a sort of slightly less glow-in-the-dark other material.

And the ballerinas lived just the other day.

Have you heard of Magic Radium Massage?

No.

This was a 30s product, which is curious because if the Radium Girls were dying in the 1920s, they were not.

Well, we still used a lot of radium until the sort of 40s and 50s, I think.

Well, so.

The Magic Radium Massage, this ointment, when massaged into the sex parts, this is the abbot, acts as a healthy tonic and stimulant, tending to give firmness and strength to the organs.

It is especially effective for improving the circulation in the genital organs when they feel cold, clammy, and lifeless.

I mean,

that is useful.

if you need to get up to go to the toilet in the night you just follow your cutscenes.

Where did I leave that penis?

Yeah.

Sups!

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

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

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

Suffs.

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

It's time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that the man who introduced chewing gum to the world had already been President of Mexico 11 times.

It's crazy.

It's a very strange career trajectory.

This, of course, is probably

the most famous of Mexican ever, General Santa Ana, in the 19th century.

He was president constantly.

He's got a bat, he's sort of hated in three different, very specific places.

So the US hate him, the Mexicans hate him, and Texans hate him.

And I know Texas is part of the US, but some people say that they pretend they aren't.

But yeah,

so he was at the Battle of of Alamo and he was disgraced there because he was very, very brutal.

And then that was what led to the cries of remember the Alamo, which led to

him and his troops being defeated at Jacinta later.

But anyway, he had lots of sort of military defeats, and somehow they kept on making him president again.

He kept on being exiled from the country.

And when he was finally exiled from Mexico permanently in 1869, he went to New Jersey, and all he brought with him.

That's not the joke.

The joke is not.

That's what you do when you hit rock bottom.

Wow, you can just say New Jersey in an anger and you'll laugh.

It's good to know.

So he went to New Jersey and he brought with him as insurance a ton of this chickle gum, which they all chewed in Mexico.

And the bloke he was living with said, oh, what's that gum?

Can I try and make something out of it?

I'm going to try and sell it.

And he tried to make sort of tires out of it and toys out of it and masks and Wellington boots.

None of it stuck, as it were.

And so eventually he saw Santa Ana chewing it one day.

And so he thought, okay, soda, I'll try and sell that to people and tell them to chew on it.

And they loved it.

And their chewing gum was born, or popularized at least, in the West.

He was quite amazing, wasn't he, Santa Ana?

So

after the independence from Spain in 1821, basically a whole country just kept having these coups and counter-coups and whatever.

And he just kept reinventing himself to whoever was taking over.

He said, oh, I'm with these guys.

And then they would would make him president.

So at one stage he was, he started off as conservative, and then he became liberal, then he became Democrat, and then he became a dictator.

And at all those times, each time he became the president.

And by way of comparison, Donald Trump started off as a Republican, became a member of the Independence Party, then was a Democrat, and then was a Republican again.

Hasn't been a dictator.

Yet.

But yeah, he's like, he just kept reinventing himself so he could get the power.

Yeah, it's really amazing.

This is interesting.

He didn't go to either of his own weddings.

He

just couldn't be bothered to turn up, basically, or he was traveling or busy or whatever, so he just deputized someone by...

Can I just say, you are about to get married.

Certainly am.

It doesn't work that way.

Hold on.

So he married twice, mostly for, we think, for money both times, because the women he was marrying had very large estates and he was in need of cash.

So,

the first wedding he had, he empowered his father-in-law to be as his proxy.

So, basically,

her dad would walk her

up the aisle.

He gave her away to himself.

Basically, yeah.

Wow.

Do we know if he sort of jumped round the other side of her at the crucial moment?

Just put a different hat on.

He actually lost Texas to the US, possibly because he was having sex in a tent.

No.

No, no, this is the tale: is that at the Battle of Jacinto, he was distracted by a Texan woman who, so it was a ploy on her part.

She's sort of this folk hero.

And this is reported at the time by an English journalist.

And apparently, this Texan woman snuck into his tent and seduced him and shagged away.

And then he lost the battle while he was in the tent, not in charge of his troops, and then had to leg it.

How long was that sex session that he lost?

The battle famously only took 18 minutes.

He always lost.

That's not too bad, isn't it?

In In my house.

My wife will be going, you know, that 18 minutes.

He can do 18 minutes.

Dad, you can always use a proxy if you have to.

So it's okay, honey, your dad's on his way over.

Did he still have his leg at the time that that happened?

He did have his original legs at that time, yeah.

Because he...

One of the other things he was famous for was losing a leg in a conflict called the Pastry War, which was against French forces who had invaded Mexico.

I think that's why it's called that.

So he was wounded and he had his leg amputated.

And then four years later, as a kind of political move, he he had it disinterred and he held a state funeral for his leg.

So he got to attend and it was a really fancy funeral.

So the leg got taken to the capital in a coach and there was a beautiful monument constructed and there was cannon fire and poems were read and then the leg was eventually reburied.

Yeah.

How shit is that for his wife, that he shows up to a funeral for his leg, but not

to his own wedding?

But then, on the bright side for her, two years after he'd done that, it was exhumed again by his opponents and dragged through the streets with people chanting death to the cripple.

So,

yeah, he was obsessed with this leg.

He used to sort of like before he'd even done the big state funeral, he used to carry it around waving it above him in parade.

Really?

And he even gave it two funerals.

He gave it a small funeral on his little hacienda before the big one, when it first got lost.

He was always reminding people, like one of these really annoying, you couldn't, he'd always let it drop into conversation.

But the pastry war, do you know why it was called that specifically?

No, I don't.

It is related to the French thing, but it's specifically because there was one French pastry cafe in Mexico and it was owed a big debt by the government and it wasn't being paid.

And so this pastry chef called the French government and said, Mexico owes me all this money, it's not paying.

And so it got a bit out of hand and war happened.

Oh, man.

Because of that.

The French ended up really overreacting.

So they.

I think he rang them up and said, they owe me an arm and a leg.

They negotiated down to half of that.

You know, you can visit his leg in Illinois.

Well, his fake leg.

It's in a museum in Illinois.

And

there's like a chicken dinner there as well because supposedly he was eating chicken at the time, so it sort of like sets the scene.

So when you say his fake leg, you mean this prosthesis.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yes, someone galloped off away when he wasn't looking, took his leg, and it's now in Illinois.

It's been there for years.

Yes, so this was another fight.

This was a later battle that he actually lost, wasn't it?

Yeah.

When he had the prosthetic leg, and as you say, he was eating a chicken dinner in his tent, and

the battle was lost again.

He really lingered over it.

He spent about 20 minutes eating the chicken

disaster.

This guy needs to stay out of tents.

I always think it's really weird, though, because in that thing where the soldiers came along and they took his leg and they also took $18,000 and the chicken dinner.

But everyone always talks about the chicken dinner.

It's so weird.

And then he got another leg, didn't he?

He got a peg leg.

So just a piece of wood for a prosthesis.

And then that got stolen as well.

Yeah, it got stolen and was reportedly later used by Lieutenant Abner Doubleday as a baseball bat.

Wow.

Hey, so this fact was also about the fact that he introduced chewing gum to the world.

Can I mention a couple of chewing gum things I found?

So chewing gum, obviously we had chewing gum that was around for a while and then bubblegum arrived and bubblegum was invented in Philadelphia.

Yeah.

How cool is that?

Did you guys know that?

Probably you didn't know that.

Okay, so bubblegum was invented here.

It was by a guy called Frank H.

Fleer, although he didn't invent bubblegum itself.

So double bubble was the first ever bubblegum that came out.

You guys, yeah.

There was no bubble before.

No, chewing gum was just chewed, and then he was like, let's double gung.

But he went straight to double bubble.

There was no single bubble to the gun.

Oh, I see.

Well, no, no, there was a prototype which

didn't work.

So he's not the inventor of double bubble.

He is the inventor of its prototype, blibber blubber.

Stop.

Absolutely true.

Blibber blubber

was the original bubble gum that he invented, but unfortunately, it didn't quite work out.

So the problem was, is when you blew the bubble gum.

No one could say it for a start.

Blibber blubber.

Blubber blubber.

Blibber blubber.

So yeah, so Frank H.

Fleer.

So the problem was that you would blow the bubble, it would pop, and it would go all over your face, but the stickiness of it was too much that you needed a solvent to actually take it off your face.

So when he was marketing it initially, it was with this little product that would make sure that would come off.

So it it didn't work out.

Never sold, never made it actually to shops.

But instead, then someone who was working for him said, let's take it differently, and that's how we have double bubble.

Whoa.

So when was that?

This was 1906 that he first did this, yeah.

Because there was one other claimant to the invention of bubble gum who is Waldo Seaman.

Wow.

What did he call his?

And it didn't go down very well.

With chewing gum, make sure you never swallow.

That's what I'm saying.

So,

Mr.

Seaman was

working for a tire company.

Where's Waldo?

Which Waldo?

That's a much more difficult and more adult version of the book, isn't it?

He's easier to spot, though.

You turn the lights off, you shine and do all the glows in the dark.

That's the best UV Seaman Wes Wally bubblegum joke that's ever been made.

That's the only one.

No.

Top ten.

Anyway, he was a very serious guy, wanted to be taken seriously.

His business was in making plastics and rubber and polymers.

And he worked for a tire company.

And so when he made this thing that blew bubbles, the tyre company thought, well, that's a huge defect.

We don't want tires that are bubbles.

So to stop making it.

And so he had to stop making it.

But interestingly, did you know that tyre manufacturers, Goodyear tyre and rubber, for instance, are the biggest provider of the rubber core of chewing gum today?

Is it?

Yeah, it's a bit of tire and because it's not made out of that chickly stuff anymore.

It's made out of like petrochemicals, basically.

Chewing gum is.

Yeah, essentially, yeah.

It's like made out of kind of rubber in the middle.

That's amazing.

So actually, when like cars drive over the road, they should be able to just pick up the chewing gum and just become part of the tyre.

Oh, yeah.

Eventually, you just have a massively high car.

The ancient Greeks had chewing gum.

A kind of chewing gum, yeah.

So, as you say, it was popularized when it became nice, but the ancient Greeks were going around chewing mastic gum sometimes.

That was a thing.

And it was really horrible back in the old days because it used to be made with paraffin.

So it's very bitter and very brittle and unwholesome.

The one thing that you might do if you had some paraffin chewing gum is you'd have a plate of sugar next to you and you'd just have to repeatedly take it out out of your mouth, dip it in the sugar, and put it back in.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

Sounds all right.

No, not like.

I've explained it wrong.

We're going to have to move on in a second.

One more thing about chewing gum.

The University of Copenhagen is currently working on fertility chewing gum.

So.

Is this another Waldo Seaman invention?

That's the second best Waldo Seaman, bubble based.

No, it's it's for it's for women to chew so that you know where you are in your menstrual cycle.

So if you chew it, it reacts with the, I guess, the enzymes in your saliva and it turns a particular colour depending on how far along you are and whether you're in the perfect time to consume it.

So then do you have to keep pulling it out of your mouth and looking at it and then putting it back in again?

Um I think there's a well, you have to take it out at least once, yeah.

But

that is cool.

If it happens, that's going to be great.

In 1904, they had a big craze in America of chewing gum parties.

Cool.

And the idea of what you would do there is you would, each guest would come along with a big pack of chewing gum, actually lots of packs, and then everyone would sit around and chew their chewing gum until it was soft.

And then they put it on a plate and they would sculpt it.

into things.

Cool.

And that was the game.

That's kind of fun.

I thought you were going going to say.

This audience doesn't seem to think as much of it.

Wow.

Philadelphia is a bit too good for that, apparently.

Okay, let's wrap up.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

So I'm on at Shriverland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter Epp.

Yep, and James.

At James Harkin.

And Jaczynski.

You can email email podcast at qi.com.

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

You can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

You have everything up there.

There's future tour dates, there's all of our previous episodes, there's links to things like our book.

And the last thing to say is: guys, thank you so much.

That was so much fun.

We'll see you again.

Good night.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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