284: No Such Thing As Salty Yeti Bones

Transcript

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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 Paris.

I am sitting here with Annie Binski, Andrew Hanzamari and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James.
Okay, my fact this week is that North American porcupines sometimes fall out of trees and impale themselves on their own spikes.

So it gets pushed into them? Like, so it's they're already in. That's what impaled means.

Do they die?

We all die, Andy.

We're in Paris. I should have realised the philosophy would come earlier than normal.

They can, well, actually, not usually. And the reason that we know about this, for a few reasons, but it's kind of a report that came out by a guy called Aldous Rose and his colleagues.

And they noticed that quills have antibiotics on them. And they worked out that the reason that they have antibiotics on them is because they do impale themselves quite often.

And it means they won't kind of get infected and it won't kill them. It is weird that they spend so much time up trees.
And this is North American porcupines, isn't it?

They absolutely love climbing trees. Yeah, actually, a female porcupine is only interested in sex once a year.
And she signals that by climbing the tree, urinating, and screaming.

Sexy, bro. We've all tried.

But the males have urination as well well in their mating. So the males,

they can sometimes make the females receptive to mating, and the way they do that is urinating on them. And they have special high-velocity urine, which can go six feet.

So even if a female is on a completely different branch,

the male can spray her, and then she will sort of become fertile. That's incredible.

Is it true? I might have this wrong, but is it true that there's a fight that happens between two males who are courting the one?

So the urination thing, as well as being an exciting thing for the mating ritual, is also in the same way that a dog might pee on a fire hydrant to mark it as its territory.

It's a territory marking thing, I think, as well. That feels likely.
Possible, yeah, they're not really sure. They think, yeah, it could be pheromones to attract them.

But they do have this massive fight. So lots of males can get involved because they're very solitary porcupines and they have this very narrow window of fertility, the females.

And so they're on their own, middle of nowhere.

They're suddenly like, oh, fucking fertile, so they have to do this whole screaming, weeing thing to dispel urine into the air and hope the males smell it.

So then a bunch of males flock to them, and then they do have this huge fight.

And so it's very normal if you see a male porcupine mating, he'll usually be doing it with a bunch of someone else's, some other porcupine's quills sticking out of him,

covered in other men's quills.

Wow. Yeah, not comfortable.
No.

So female porcupines are pregnant or lactating for 11 11 months of the year and they can be pregnant for all of their lives and they live for 20 to 30 years.

So they basically spend their entire lives pregnant or breastfeeding. Why wonder they're screaming so much?

Why are there not more porcupines then?

They're just good at hiding from you.

I think there are quite a lot. If you're in America, I think you hear it quite a lot.

So

they have lots of quills. Actually, they have spines all over their penis as well, the males.
Yes. It's covered in what they call horny material, which is very clever.

But

the problem for humans is that they can stab us with their quills. And there was a paper from 1955, which is all about being quilled by porcupines.
And this is our friends at Improbable Research.

So the guys who do the Ig Nobel Awards, which we've mentioned before.

There was a paper in 1955 written by Albert R. Schaeble.

And in it, he wrote, Many hundreds of quills have penetrated various parts of the author's own body in numbers of one or two to as many as 40 at one time.

On one occasion, 40 were driven into the forehead and the bridge of the nose by one stroke of a porcupine's tail.

They added, the penetration of porcupine quills into the human body is never a pleasant sensation.

This last science speak.

Just in case you were thinking of trying it out. They have really interesting sex organs, don't they? Porcupines.
The males have interesting sex organs, so they keep their testes inside inside them.

They don't let their testes into their scrotal sac for most of the year, they're just sitting in their stomach somewhere, not their stomach, their abdomen.

And then they just plop them down into the scrotal sac once they're going to mate, and then they suck them back up again when they're not mating.

But then they've got, as you say, their penis is spined, but also it's usually pointing backwards, so it's in sort of a sheath that points backwards towards them.

So when they mate with the female, it flips out like a penknife. Oh, wow.

That's amazing. Yeah.

No wonder they keep their testes inside. They'd probably be stabbing themselves otherwise the whole way around.
That's probably just, yeah, protection. There was a

politician from Florida called Bobby Bean and he wanted to become a senator and he ran with the promise that he would make sex with porcupines legal.

And how did he... He's now president.

Did he win? No. No, he didn't win.
Actually, it wasn't quite as stupid as you might think. His idea was he wanted to erase kind of useless flaws that exist.

So it currently is illegal explicitly to have sex with porcupines in Florida. And he's like, you know, they have a penknife, spiky penis.
We're probably not going to do that.

And it's spiky on the outside. We probably don't need this law.

And there was like other things like there was a rule against men wearing strapless gowns that he wanted to get rid of as well.

Strapless gowns. Yeah, yeah.
Well, how is he going to seduce the porcupine?

They eat people's toilets sometimes.

Porcupines. No they don't.
They do.

They genuinely do. What do you mean? Well okay let's let's have some qualification here.

So what they do they love sodium so it's salt basically and they need a lot of it they crave salt all the time and some people in the territory still have outdoor wooden toilets and a lot of the wood you know if your aim is poor has urine soaked into it.

Okay, so the urine contains salt.

And you know, people, there are toilets which have been eaten away at by porcupines. So they don't eat the porcelain, but they do eat the surrounding wood.
So they eat the hut.

Yeah, they really do eat the hut. Yeah.

So Boy Scouts, I think on Boy Scout camps, they often say you'll go to the loo and you're surrounded by porcupines chewing through the hut to death to try and access your urine, which sounds like a really frightening experience.

But the salt love gets them into all sorts of trouble, so they chew through cars a lot. So, cars are quite salty.

They genuinely do. No, they don't, coming from our toilet board over here.

You'll draw the line at cars, very weird. They actually chew through cars mostly in winter.

Can you guess why? Salt on the roads. Salt on the roads.
Did you read that as well?

Oh, great stuff. And if you drive, it must be on the tires when you're driving along.

It gets on the tires, flicks up onto the engine, and then they climb and they'll eat your engine out from the inside. Wow, wow.

Another thing that, Dan, you might be interested in is

Yeti bones.

What?

Jesus Christ. Am I in some kind of weird fever dream?

So they eat toilets, they eat colours, and they eat Yetis. Yeah, we're just seeing how far we could push it.

There's a theory that's prevalent among people who believe in the Sasquatch, which is the same as a Yeti, right? In the

stars,

absolutely not.

It's like calling a hedgehog and a porcupine the same thing.

It's salty. I'm sorry to the Sasquatch and Yeti communities.
So if people don't believe in a Sasquatch, people often say to them, Well, why aren't there any bones? Why do we never find any bones?

And they say, well, it's obviously because they're very salty and porcupines have eating them. Yes.

Yes, but some of you believe that. Yeah, it's a true, that's a true fact that they believe it.

It's true. And also they say that in Canada they don't actually put salt on the roads anymore, speaking of salt, because Bigfoot keeps eating it all.

So they think we've got to stop, we're losing too much salt. Really? Yeah we should probably move on.

Anything before we do? Should we just talk about other tree climbers? Oh shall I just do one more thing on podcast just really quickly because it's that French person.

There was a 19th century French explorer called Jules Gerard who reported on a group of people called the Hachichea. They were from Algeria and all they ever did was smoke hashish and kill porcupines.

I came here to smoke hashish and kill porcupines and I've just finished my hashish.

But now I'm quite sleepy.

And we do need to move on to our next act. Just quick, just really quickly, did you know that fish can climb trees? What? Yeah.

Fish climb trees and loads of different types of fish.

So one of them is the mangrove killie fish in mangrove forests and that exists in like lots of America, Florida and Brazil, lives in puddles and then the puddles dry up.

At which point, they actually climb up the nearest tree.

So it looks like a normal fish, climbs its way up a tree, and then it climbs into a hole in the tree that an insect's made, or a natural hole in a tree, and it just waits it out in the hole until it rains again, and it can wait in a tree for months.

So sometimes you're just walking across the tree and there's a fish halfway up it.

Weird hanging out with a urinating porcupine.

It's very weird in the upper canopy.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that scientists are developing a t-shirt which tells you when you smell.

This is really cool. So,

there is a British microchip maker, and the firm is called ARM, and they are working on putting AI devices in clothes, basically.

So, the idea is that you will have a microchip in your armpit, effectively, in your shirt, and it will inform you on a scale of one to five how bad your body odour is and whether maybe it's time to have a shower or change your clothes.

But if you change your clothes and you've lost the shirt that tells you if you're smelling, I guess you have to change for another microchip t-shirt.

Yeah, it's going to be quite an expensive endeavour.

Will the washing the clothes not make the microchip obsolete?

This is the key problem that they are trying to overcome. It's making a microchip which will withstand repeated washing in a washing machine.

So you have no choice but to wear that one shirt over and over

and be permanently on number five. Yeah, so I'll shirt.

I'm not saying it's free of problems, alright, but I do think it's a good idea. There is a way actually to make clothes clean themselves.

You can put certain nanoparticles in clothes and then they'll kind of clean themselves. And scientists are using this to make robotic trousers for old people.

Okay, so old people have trouble walking and they think if they can make these robotic trousers, it will kind of help them to walk. Okay, that's a nice thing.
Yeah.

Sounds dangerous to me, I've seen the wrong trousers, but go on.

Well, the thing is, they've put these nanoparticles in, which means they don't have to be washed, so that's good for the electronics.

But the problem is, all the old people they've given them to said they would just wash them anyway.

That's the hard thing to get around, isn't it?

Yeah.

There will be, just while we're on the smart clothes thing,

there will perhaps one day soon be underpants that you can use to control your home.

So, this is really cool. So,

this is not too far away. What do you mean, like turning lights up and stuff?

I was once lying in bed and I rolled up one of my socks and threw it at a light switch and turned the lights off. So,

my wife is not nearly as impressed as you guys.

James has been trying to get this story into the podcast for five years. He's finally managed it.
It is very impressive, a rolled-up sock. And you were on the other side of the room.

So it wasn't like it was here. No.
Your socks must be rock hard.

If only you had microchips in your socks to tell you, please wash me.

So you will be able to get underpants that control your hope. Okay, I'm determined to tell you about this.
So it's basically just more putting sensors in clothes.

So you will have sensors which measure your heart rate, your temperature, your body temperature, or the temperature of your body inside your pants,

the pressure, the hydration. What do you need that for? Well, okay, well, here we go.
So

you could connect your thermostat in your house, you could link it up with your body temperature. And when you're at home, it could notice, oh, Dan's feeling

pants are a bit hot.

I want to turn the heating down a little bit. And then you could think it's fair that we all have to live in a permanently cold house because Dan's got a hot crutch.

Very true.

You know, you can buy a machine that folds your clothes for you.

Well, there's it's was a Kickstarter, I think. It's called a Foldy Mate.

And I was watching videos, so it's a massive machine, it's about as big as a person. It's about the size of a fridge.
And so I don't know where you're going to put it, but to be next to your fridge.

Next to the fridge. You don't want to confuse them, though.
No, true.

No, it's folded the pasta.

And I've eaten my pants.

And that's how Fuzili was invented.

No, so you... I was watching a video of them doing it and they're trying to advertise it like it's this unbelievably convenient thing.

But you have to put your clothes in one by one and you have to attach them to these clips and you have to lay them down quite flat, like perfectly flat, and in exactly the right arrangement for it to suck it in and then spend about 10 seconds folding it up and spit it out and then do the next one.

So it probably quadruples the the time it takes to put your turns away.

I read about this, it is actually quite an old invention. I think it's from 2006 and I don't think it's taken off, but it's a cool idea.

It's a shirt that was designed by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The idea is that the shirt has fibre sensors inside it.

That means that it goes to our wireless transmitter when they're activated. And what it's designed for is people who love to play air guitar.

So as soon as an air guitar player goes and strums, there can be a brown noise. But surely that'll happen every time they make this movement.

Yes.

And I'm not saying there's any particular times where you might make that movement,

but there might be some where you don't want to hear a big

Dan's been in his room a long time playing the guitar.

So that exists.

That's good.

Well,

this is slightly different, but Ford, I don't think we've mentioned this before, Ford, the car firm, has a robot bottom called the Robot. And it's

to test seats in cars, and it mimics the action of a person getting into a car.

And they've just had a recent innovation in, which is now the robot sweats.

So, because car seats, you have to, you know, they have to last years and years and years.

So it can, it can, um, get in and out of a car, the robot, 25,000 times in a few weeks and it bounces around and it sweats.

And this is really good because it simulates a decades use of the car, presumably by a naked, sweating person,

just really to test it to destruction. That's the thing, that's a very specific niche of driver that they're appealing to there.

My underpants and trousers are designed to stop any sweat from leaving them to get to a seat. They're the barriers, right? Well, not all of us have such high-tech clothes.

Some of my trousers have holes in the buttocks.

It's stress sweat that comes out of your buttocks, isn't it? Isn't it?

Well, yeah, there are like two different types of sweat. One of them's oh no, it's not stress sweat.
Sorry, apocryane sweat is stress sweat and that comes out of your armpits.

Yeah, the buttock sweat is fine.

Well, I'm glad we cleared that one up.

So, this is on sweat and body odor, these facts. And we do have these two different kinds of sweat.

So, ekrine or ekrine is the one you get on, basically, the one that's not your armpits and your crotch, and that

actually comes from your blood. So, when your hands start sweating, for instance, they're actually bleeding in a way.

It comes from blood plasma, and that's why it tastes quite salty is because it's the electrolytes, all the minerals and stuff in your blood.

That's why porcupines are coming over and licking me in the hole.

That's it.

That's right.

We need to move on to our next fact very soon. Yeah, I know.
I know.

I'm cats and dogs have sweat on their paws so they can get that attraction on the floor. Is that why? Holding onto it.
Because you'd think it would make it slippy, wouldn't you?

It increases the friction. If it's just at a sticky level, you don't want kind of gushing, I don't think.

Sticky.

And I'm like.

There's something really wrong with my cat

spraying water out of all four paws.

I also find it so weird that the smelly sweat, right, the bits that you excrete it from are, yeah, your arm bits and your groin, which kind of we know, and then the other two bits are your eyelids and your ear canal.

So if you've got really stinking eyelids, then apply some

dog.

You'll be fine.

Just on smells,

I read that, so this fact was about the smell.

There was an anthropologist who was called Lewis Leakey. He was a very famous anthropologist.

He was responsible for bringing people like Jane Goodall

into research and making her name Diane Fossey as well. He has a theory, or had a theory, which claimed that we survived as humans largely because of our body odor.
We were too smelly to eat.

Really?

Yeah, he thinks that people would, you know, people or other animals would want to kill us at the time, you know, Neanderthals, but they'd be like, oh, geez, mate, and then just not go near us.

That's why we're here. Whereas Neanderthals smell stunning.
They had that amazing, um, those amazing clothes, didn't they? Those Neanderthals that would tell you when you were sweating.

That's what I'm thinking. If we if we manage to get rid of the smell thing, then surely we're losing one of our weapons against being killed.
Yes. Yeah.

Suddenly the whole animal kingdom will be around us.

The only slight flaw is that quite a lot of deadly animals live in Asia and a lot of people in Asia don't smell at all.

So most Koreans for instance don't have the gene that makes their sweat smell at all, do they? So how have they avoided all the lions over the ages?

It's time to be undone.

Okay, we need to move on to our next fact. Time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the best astrophysicists in the world just failed to save New York from a fake asteroid.

It's pretty scary stuff. This is

a genuine simulation that a whole bunch of astrophysicists from all over the world do and it happened a few weeks ago. It happens at a conference.

So it's a conference called the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference and every year they have this gathering where they're set a task where an asteroid is coming to the earth and they have to work out how to deflect it and they bugged it up and knew it was destroyed.

It's so exciting though so it lasts for five days but in the simulation that's years and years.

So this year a few weeks ago they got this alert there was a fake press release was sent out saying that a 100 to 300 meter wide asteroid had been detected at a 1% chance of striking the planet in 2027.

And then, you know, as the days went by, they keep on getting updates saying, okay, it's now 100% chance. We're all going to die.
Sort it out.

And what they eventually managed to do was nudge it off course. So I think it was going to hit Denver.
And they nudged it off course and it struck New York. And everybody has to do it.

Do you know one way that this is better than nuking an asteroid? This is one theory that if there's an asteroid on its way, we could do.

Sorry, what's better than that? The...

Well, this idea that I'm about to send you. Oh, great.
Yeah. I said it sent you.

Basically, if an asteroid's on its way, one plan is to nudge it out of the way, one plan is to blow it up, but the best plan, maybe, is to just paint it on one side. Okay, okay.

So that would change the thermal properties of the asteroid, and it would mean that it moved in a different trajectory. And how do you suggest that we paint this asteroid?

Well the UN's Space Advisory Council ran a competition, a move an asteroid competition and it awarded the first prize to an idea to make a giant paintball gun.

You can fire it at the asteroid.

That's amazing.

You know the movie Armageddon?

So there's been some research recently done by some scientists where they did a simulation to see how well that would have worked if Bruce Willis had actually nuked it like he does in the movie and it splits apart.

And what they discovered in the simulation was that it would break apart like it does in the movie.

Unfortunately, the gravity is so great that it would just be pulled back together in this one solid asteroid and just wipe us out. That's how the movie should have ended.

And this is a new discovery, isn't it?

Because last year when they ran the simulation, and this really is the top people that NASA and all its other organizations had, last year when they ran it, they did save Tokyo from the asteroid by doing a nuclear explosion which blew it apart.

But since then, yeah, they've discovered, well, they'll just suck themselves back together and keep coming at us. So, but there are all sorts of other weird ways of diverting asteroids.

So, I really like the mass driver way, which basically is the idea that you would, it's quite slow working, so you'd need to know that the asteroid was going to hit you in about 100 years' time.

Right. Yeah.

You've got to pass the knowledge on to your grandchildren.

But the idea basically is that you get onto the surface of the asteroid, you get some like landing objects onto it, and they pick up rocks from the asteroid and they just throw them at the Earth.

And the motion of that pushes the asteroid away from the earth. So it's kind of like imagine if you're sitting on a swing, I guess, and you've got a tennis ball.

And then, if you throw the tennis ball away, you'll kind of go backwards on the swing, right? It's the opposite, even the opposite reaction force.

So, if enough bits of rock are thrown at the earth from the asteroid, it'll sort of slow it down. But then, if too many are thrown at us, then we die anyway from the things you've thrown at us.

Yeah, you have to make sure they're not too big, those bits of rock. Yeah, well, and you need a hundred years.
You do need a hundred years, yes.

I think previously, Dan said that the warning we would have have is about one second.

We have said that.

It's not true.

Well,

we know about loads. This is a really cool thing.
So NASA currently knows about 795,000 asteroids.

So can I just say, like, for instance, the Chelyabinsk meteor, we didn't know about that at all until it landed. So it might be that we have no seconds.
Yeah. So I was wrong by one second.

But this is the amazing thing.

The problem is, it's really hard to keep track of them once you've spotted them.

So scientists have lost more than 900 near-Earth asteroids, as in they were spotted once, we thought, oh, that's a bit worrying, and then we don't know where they've gone. Wow, really?

Yeah, so we saw them once, and because sometimes it takes 20 hours to confirm that what you're seeing is right.

Sometimes the weather is bad, so you can't see it again from a ground-based observatory, so you just sort of say, oh, well, there. So there you go.

Fingers crossed. Yeah.
Don't come back.

We're going to have to move on to our final facts or not. Some things killed by asteroids might might have been the dinosaurs.

Again, I didn't really say that sentence very well, but I think all the points were there.

But there is one guy who doesn't think that. There's a guy called Professor Brian J.
Ford, and he thinks that the dinosaurs actually died out because of a lack of sex legs.

Sex legs. Sex likes.
Sex likes. Sex likes.

Danny, how's your crotch feeling? Getting any hotter?

What is a sex leg? It's exactly what it sounds like. Cool.
So his theory is that because dinosaurs were so big, they wouldn't be able to have sex because they would just crush each other.

And so the only way they could do it is by using the lakes to be buoyant in it. Do you know what I mean? They could only have sex with lakes.

And he says that as the continents drifted, there were loads of shallow... There used to be loads of shallow lakes and there weren't shallow lakes anymore, which is true.

And so he thinks because of those lack of shallow lakes, all the dinosaurs died out. But surely this would mean that all the fossils we find would be crushed dinosaurs underneath their crushing mate.

Yeah, you're right. It might not be true.

It's just the theory. It's a great literary, I love it.

Can I just, one thing about asteroid names? Oh, yeah.

So, asteroids, it used to be the near-Earth objects, and most of which are asteroids, had to be named after mythical creatures, but there have been loads and loads found since that was decided, I think, about 50 years ago.

So, it also used to be that they had to be named after things from mythology, but they couldn't have creation or underworld themes because they're reserved for other bits of space.

So, you have to really do your research into your mythological creature. Anyway, so these rules were kind of loosened because there are like tens of thousands of them that have names now.

So if you I was looking at the name of the massive list of asteroid names, and you have these really grand ones like Pallas and Juno and Achilles, and then you have Bill Smith and Sarah Jenkins,

Donna Anderson, Brandy Peterson, and I was looking for our names in them. So there are a lot of Annas.

So there's an Anna, just Anna on her own, and then like, like, you know, Anna loves it. That's the one that's going to get us, isn't it?

Fingers crossed. I'm rooting for her.

There's also a James on his own and a Daniel on his own, but there is no Andrew or Andy. Right, thanks a lot.
So

I think the next asteroid name, you should claim it. Or we could name a sex lake after you.
Yes.

That's how I'd like to be remembered.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

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Time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that until the 1840s, there was no maximum size for a rugby team, so matches were sometimes played with up to 300 players on the bench at the same time.

So is that an 150 against 150?

No, 299 against one.

Yeah, but he's very good.

There was, we do have an example of it. So

the game of rugby was said to have been invented in a school called rugby, hence where it gets this name from, in 1823.

There was a match played in 1839 where Rugby School House had 75 players, so that was their team, and they played a team that was called The Rest. And that was 225 people.

Wow, yeah. That's amazing.
Do we know who won? I don't actually know who won. I couldn't find out.
I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

And it was obviously, it was a very chaotic game, as you can imagine.

They hadn't really got any rules to begin with. Rules slowly kind of.

It just used to be like basically a load of guys in a field just trying to get the ball from one end to the other, but with no rules, right? Yes. It's just basically one big scrub.

Strangling and throttling were outlawed in 1862.

That's when I went right off the game.

That's just health and safety gone mad in the end, isn't it?

But this is this is, yeah, because these go back hundreds of years, don't they? It all comes from games which were called folk football.

So there's one that's still played in England, in Derbyshire, in Ashburn, where you keep playing until you score a goal or until 10pm.

Whichever comes sooner, you just knock off. Because people would die quite often.

And there are lots of records of people dying playing rugby, partly because people used to carry knives in sheaths on their belts, and so you might just run into someone else's knife by mistake.

That happened. That's a foul.
It is a foul.

But this is the other thing.

The game of rugby is problematic because it lets people take revenge on each other

because there are no rules. So if you've got a village of people basically having a big fight, you could just say, oh, yeah, he ran onto my knife.
Right. Where was this that this happened?

This is in the sort of 14th, 15th centuries. So this is before proper rugby.
Yeah, yeah. Because there is one called, I wonder if this is what you're talking about, Calchio Sorico.

Well, that's a very similar game, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that, like, like what Andy's saying, it's a rugby game, but the idea is to play rugby, but also just kick each other's ass really badly.

Like

you're allowed to punch, kick, headbutt, elbow, choking is permitted. There's no gloves allowed, you know, to soften the punch.

And the amazing thing, and there would be deaths and they would just carry on and so on.

But the main thing was, if the game was going a bit too slow and they wanted the fans to sort of have a bit more of a fast experience and get the game done, they'd just let some bulls come in.

Suddenly just random bulls running around attacking humans. I mean, it sounds incredible.
Yeah, that's Italy, isn't it? Yes. Calcio, yeah.
This presumably wasn't recently.

This happens now. Yeah.
You all got to do everything except kick people in the head.

And who's telling the bulls not to do that?

Well even in rugby, kicking used to be, shin kicking specifically, used to be massively part of the game.

So this is one of the biggest controversies rugby ever saw was when they were drawing out the rules. It was like in the 1870s.

And hacking was really part of rugby, which is basically really, really vigorously kicking someone else's shins.

And some people wanted to outlaw it, and some people said that's going to ruin the game, it's part of it.

But it was the case that, like, after a squirm had broken up, everyone else had left the board at the other end of the pitch.

You'd still have, apparently, just you'd have two players left over kicking each other in the shin really hard at the other end of the pitch.

So, people used to wear sharpened boots with spikes on them to really get that shin kick as good as it can be.

And then they would wear white trousers to show off the blood. This was a mark of

this is the English school system at its best, basically. Although, actually, so, and then rugby moved to France and to other countries.
And in the late 19th century in France, once we did have rules,

rugby was seen not so much as a team game, but more of an individual game. There was still a team, but you were trying to see how well you could do yourself.

And so it was like one athlete against the group. and you were trying to get around them.

So basically players were reluctant to get dirty, reluctant to find themselves on the ground, and they thought it was less glamorous to get involved in scrubs.

And this only was challenged when France played England in 1906 and found out that the English were not playing by those rules at all.

Actually, one of the objections to getting rid of the shin kicking was: I read, and I look, I don't know what this means, and just don't shoot the messenger, but so this was hacking when it was going to be banned.

And the Secretary of Blackheath FC said, we can't ban the practice of kicking each other in the shins because it will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game and bring over a lot of Frenchmen.

Wow.

You really know your audience so well.

So when it took off,

they eventually, I think it was the 1870s give or take, whole football club said, you're okay fine, we'll stop each other kicking in the shins with sharpened boots, but you are still allowed to trip up the man who's running.

That was just a nice little innovation that they thought they'd throw in. Nice.
Yeah. Oh, do you know that rugby balls could kill you as well? Could they? Yeah, but not the way you would think.

Oh, I didn't have a thought in my head.

Nice thing. Okay, so, like, they hit you in the head so hard that you die.
Brilliant, that's not the way that you would think. Good.
Okay, it's not that way.

So, rugby balls, the first person to make a uniform oval rugby ball was a guy called Richard Linden. And his wife actually was involved in the manufacturing too.

so what it was was you would have a pig's bladder and you had to blow that up and then surround it in leather that's just how you made the ball but Linden's wife Rebecca was the one who did the actual blowing up and she contracted a lung disease and she died from it because there was an unexpectedly you know there was an infected bladder and she had had 17 children for him as well by him you know this is a very sad story and so that determined him to make a rubber bladder it basically prompted the innovation of um and he also invented the modern pump.

He saw an ear syringe and he thought, well, I could take that from an ear and put it into a football and then put it on that way.

But who was looking after all those kids? Well, he was inventing these silly rugby ball-based things. That's my question.
The book I've read about rugby does not relate.

Probably should do.

Just a tiny little nugget about

how influential this little rugby school in England has been on global sporting. Outside of inventing rugby itself, there was a student there who was from Australia called Thomas Wills.

He went back to Australia and he invented Aussie Rules, which back in Australia is a huge sport. It's not gone global.

In fact,

Australia have an all-star Aussie Rules team that they announce every year, but because no one is good enough to play them, they've never played a match.

So we've got this like super group who would just get announced and they'd meet up, but that's it, ceremonial.

They should play the rest. Yes, they will.

Such a good point. So, Robbie's known for having really hardcore players playing it, I guess.
And I think, so my favourite story is Wayne Shelford, who is quite famous for him, particularly Harkour.

He was a captain of the All Blacks in the 80s. And he and one of his felt got a fan in, or maybe that's him, I don't know.

Sounded like him based on what I'm about to tell you.

So he was captain of the All Blacks, very Harkour.

In one of his very first games, he was super young, a French, he was playing France and a French boot ripped open his scrotum and left a testicle hanging free.

Hanging free. He also had four teeth knocked out in the same incident.

He didn't want to leave the pitch. Anyone else has just been sucked up like a pork ass.

Also, that's a hell of a kick that gets your testicles and your teeth.

Unless they're kicked up with such force if they come into your mouth.

It doesn't have tentacles for that long.

But yeah, he just said of the video, quick, sew it up, sew it up. He sewed it up right there and then and he kept on playing the game.

Yeah? Until in fact he was knocked unconscious later on.

We're gonna have to wrap up shortly. I'm probably gonna have to stitch that stitch fantastic

podcast back into the scrotum of the

microphone box.

I thought that metaphor was never going to end.

Anything else before we wrap up? I just have my favourite rugby story, aside from the testicle ripping, maybe,

is the story of the Dorchester Gladiators.

I don't know if you know this one, so the Dorchester Gladiators were a team in the year 2000 and they were an amateur over 40s, very unfit rugby team who just played sort of amateur games for fun.

And then they thought they were mate, mate, so they thought they'd go to Romania for kind of a big booze-up and play some rugby over there.

And they went, and they were giving some toys to an orphanage, actually, to be fair.

Anyway, they were in Romania, and the Romanians got aware that there was a rugby team there, and they were invited to play a game.

And so they were like, oh, we're playing a game with the local Romanians in the local park.

And there'd been some sort of mistranslation, and so Romania thought that they were basically a national-level team.

And so when they turned up, they realized it was in their national stadium, it was being broadcast on television.

There were thousands of spectators there, and they were playing against the Romanian nationality.

They did say, we did get a bit suspicious when they offered us a training session the night before and we refused to do that as we do our pre-match warm-up in the bar.

I think before the match, apparently, the Romanians were all training and the Brits were there looking at them and smoking on the sidelines.

The Romanians took pity and only beat them 60-17 out of sympathy in the end.

Okay, that is it, that is all of our facts. Thank you so much for watching.

James at James, How James,

you can contact

which is that no such thing. Or a website, music thing as a fish.com.
We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates to bits of merchandise. Thank you so much.

Paris has been absolutely

awesome.

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