276: No Such Thing As A Ninja With A Cat

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to

Speaker 2 another episode of Non-Spectre Fish

Speaker 2 League of the Procedure. This week, coming to you live from Goku.

Speaker 2 My name is Dan Schreimer. I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 My fact is that Sweden's public art body has just commissioned an artwork which will hire someone to do nothing at Gothenburg's Korswagen train station for the next 120 years.

Speaker 2 120 years. 120 years.
So that can't be the same person for 120 years. It might be.
We don't know about medical advances in the next century.

Speaker 2 So it could be.

Speaker 2 So this is a thing. It's called Eternal Employment.
And Gothenburg has a new train station called Korswagen. And I don't know if you can tell at home, but people here are very excited about it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was a competition to provide a public artwork, and there were two artists who won called Simon Golden and Jakob Seneby.

Speaker 2 And they have half a million pounds to spend, and they spent it on hiring an employee to do whatever they like forever.

Speaker 2 As long as you check in and check out of your work each day, you will get 21,600 kroner a month, which is enough to buy five beers here.

Speaker 2 But then the application, you can still go for this, by the way. The application deadline is the 15th of December 2025.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah. Yeah, and their duties will be taken up.
Well, the lack of duties will be taken up on the 15th of March 2026. Okay.

Speaker 2 So if you're bad with deadlines like me, you can put that off for another six years.

Speaker 2 And there's a job description online which is quite poetic. It goes, there's a scent.
Do you smell it? The scent of something. We smell it.
It's seaweed.

Speaker 2 You're seaweed.

Speaker 2 You want to be seaweed. You shall be seaweed.
You know that. Thank you for knowing.
Thank you for seaweed.

Speaker 2 You're standing there, right there. Standing like what? Like a prawn.

Speaker 2 A positive prawn. A flexible prawn.
An unpretentious prawn. A goal-oriented prawn.
Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 So, I think that tells you everything that you have to do for this show. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Any questions?

Speaker 2 Does that sound more normal in Swedish? Yeah, Google translates the hell of a job in that.

Speaker 2 So, I like that. The way it's going to be as well is once the station is open, the applicant has been chosen and he's got or she has residency of the job.

Speaker 2 There's going to be fluorescent lights that go on on the station level or the platform levels to let all passengers know that the the person doing nothing is at work they're they're here either doing something or absolutely nothing and you can't tell who they are if they're on the platforms but there's going to be two rooms that they can go to one is a glass room where you can see what they're doing and the other is just a closed off room yeah which they can just choose to sit in and you never see but actually they don't have to stay on in the train station at all as long as they clock in and clock out they could bugger off all day that's it but the there are things you can't do, so you can't go and get another job.

Speaker 2 That is seen as not playing the game.

Speaker 2 But the job does come with a pension and with holiday.

Speaker 2 So you get a holiday from doing nothing.

Speaker 2 It's not actually a brilliantly paid job. It's fine, but the salary is pretty below average.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I reckon in 120 years, it's going to be worth literally nothing. Well, it's going up.
It's going up with. It increases by 3% a year.

Speaker 2 And if you die,

Speaker 2 they will just give the job to someone else.

Speaker 2 I think that's how jobs work, generally.

Speaker 2 Every company folds when everybody dies.

Speaker 2 I guess we need to retire that role of person serving at the counter of McDonald's. It's just going to have to be an empty counter now.

Speaker 2 We should see what its purpose is, really, which they are making a point.

Speaker 2 So it's inspired by Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, that very trendy book for anyone claiming to be academic, yeah, got some cheers.

Speaker 2 So, which is about the return on capital being higher than the average increase in wages.

Speaker 2 So, it's basically there's this art prize money, which was seven million kroner, I think, and the idea is that they're going to invest that, and the return on that investment is going to yield that personal salary for 120 years.

Speaker 2 So, the idea is money makes more money than humans do, which is depressing, but still fun for that person who's doing it.

Speaker 2 Can I say a very very quick thing about, so this is art meets train station.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 the most ambitious crossover in movie history.

Speaker 2 And so I was looking into sort of entertainy art sort of things that were going on with train stations.

Speaker 2 And I read this fact, which is in London, in our underground station, we have the very famous iconic Mind the Gap.

Speaker 2 Mind the Gap, which is set.

Speaker 2 So when that was initially recorded, it was recorded by a sound engineer called Peter Lodge and he got an actor who was a well-known actor of the time and he got him to record it and he recorded mind the gap and stand clear of the doors

Speaker 2 and after it was recorded and they were sort of getting ready to send it out the guy suddenly said I want royalties for every time

Speaker 2 yeah and they went you can't have that that's insane and he said no that's that's my deal so they cut him off and they were gonna re-record it but they listened to the recording of the sound engineer Peter Lodge who was testing the microphones going mind the gap and they went, that's good enough.

Speaker 2 And he became

Speaker 2 the original voice of the London Underground, the sound engineer testing the microphones. That's great.

Speaker 2 Because we have quite a famous thing in London about the Mind the Gap announcement, or maybe the station announcement at one station, I can't remember which, which was recorded by a guy who died a few years ago.

Speaker 2 And then they changed the recording because, you know, someone else got it. They thought they jazzed up the station.
And the widow of the guy who died wrote to the station, didn't she?

Speaker 2 And said, Please, can you change that back? That's you know, the only time I hear my husband's voice. Yeah, his name was Oswald Lawrence.

Speaker 2 It was in Bankman Station, it was on the Northern Line, and they changed it back so she could always hear his voice saying it. Yeah, that's really nice.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 speaking of London,

Speaker 2 so there's

Speaker 2 Captain Practical.

Speaker 2 You're not even gonna like where this goes, I'm gonna say.

Speaker 2 So, if you live in London, there's another job you can get which seems quite cushy. It is to become a luxury product tester.

Speaker 2 And for that, you get a £75,000 salary, which is about $100,000.

Speaker 2 And you get to test supercars, yachts, and private islands. Wow.
Okay, so this morning I applied for this job.

Speaker 2 See, this is where you look up jobs testing luxury islands. I found out there is a man whose job is to watch paint drying.
This is a real job.

Speaker 2 And he's a real person. He's called Keith Jackson.
And he works for an industrial paint firm. And a big part of his job is assessing the drying time of industrial paint.

Speaker 2 And that doesn't sound important, does it?

Speaker 2 He mustn't be watching it the whole time. Has he? He might have a break.
He'll probably have a break. Imagine if he has a break for 15 minutes and he comes back and it's already drying.

Speaker 2 That's a bad thing in the office, isn't it? Oh, for fuck's sake. Do you think paint is like a watch pot? Do you think it boils as soon as your back is touched?

Speaker 2 But no,

Speaker 2 the reason it's important that it happens is because sometimes you paint things and then you need to know how long the paint will take to be dry.

Speaker 2 So for example, London Underground, they can only be painted at stations between 3 o'clock and 5 o'clock in the morning. And then it has to be dry enough to walk on.

Speaker 2 So this is a very high-stakes situation. Wow.

Speaker 2 It's quite high-stakes. The stakes are medium, low to medium, the medium.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 he said, people do laugh and find it amusing when I tell them what I do.

Speaker 2 He said, it could be described as the most boring job in the world, but it is a very important one. Watching paint dry sounds quite easy, but it can be stressful at times.

Speaker 2 So also, while you're looking at jobs of watching paint dry, I was looking at jobs of watching pornography.

Speaker 2 And apparently, there's a nightclub in Denmark that's hiring someone to watch 20 hours of pornographic films for £2,500

Speaker 2 equivalent. And the reason is they want to select select the best parts of the soundtrack that they'll make a playlist of that they'll play in the nightclub bathroom.

Speaker 2 Sure, that's the reason.

Speaker 2 I've been looking at some kind of jobs that sound

Speaker 2 some people who are kind of lazy at work.

Speaker 2 So, this obviously would suit this job at the train station would suit someone who's quite lazy at work. There have been some good people who have been in the past.

Speaker 2 So, there was a civil servant called Carlos Rechio. He was a Spanish civil servant.
He skipped work for a decade.

Speaker 2 He used to clock in at 7.30 in the morning and then he'd return to work to clock out at 4 in the afternoon. So he's perfect for this station job.

Speaker 2 He took home a 50 grand salary and he then, when he was caught and it was discovered that he'd just been skipping work for over 10 years, he then admitted to it fine.

Speaker 2 And then there was an art exhibition put on in the town that used a council venue and the exhibition was called Love for Valencia, The Works of a Man Who Never Worked and it was booked under what turned out to be a fake name.

Speaker 2 And they discovered later it was put on by him, this man who'd skipped work the whole time, as kind of a peon to his own glory at having skipped work.

Speaker 2 And there were paintings, there were sculptures, and there were bronze busts of this man talking about how he'd succeeded in not working.

Speaker 2 The council discovered that it was him who'd booked it and they cancelled it. But they discovered that he got no charges, he got no big fine, he was suspended from work, not even fired.

Speaker 2 Speaking of doing nothing, there is a hotel with a, or the was,

Speaker 2 the hotel still exists, but they used to have a suite called the checkout suite. And if you did nothing and you used no internet, then you would get the suite for free.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it worked out how much internet you were using and how much work you were doing and if you used the time to just relax and do nothing, they gave it you for free.

Speaker 2 This was the Hotel Ballora, which is in Gothenburg,

Speaker 2 which is the hotel we're staying in at the moment. Yes!

Speaker 2 So I spoke to the receptionist this afternoon and she said it ran for three months and every single person who went there managed to get it for free.

Speaker 2 There must be something to the people of Gothenburg that are just quite happy sitting around going, you know what? We're just going to chill. You know what?

Speaker 2 If you've got a few sheets of slightly damp paint, the time flies by.

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Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chaczinski.

Speaker 2 Yes, my fact this week is that ninja's sword sheaths had removable tips so that if they ever had to hide underwater, they could use them like a snorkel to breathe.

Speaker 2 That's so cool. It's so great.
So they brought the sword with them as well, right? Yeah, yeah, you do bring the sword. That's the main thing.

Speaker 2 But it's basically being a ninja was all about kind of adapting to your environment. It was like being a sort of 15th and 17th century Japanese James Bond.
It really was.

Speaker 2 They had all these gadgets and one of them was the sword and the scabbard. They would use it like a snorkel because hiding underwater was a major part of being a ninja.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 2 I find it hard to put this into words, but what?

Speaker 2 So, why would you need to be underwater?

Speaker 2 So, basically,

Speaker 2 what a ninja was, was it was sort of like the flip side of a samurai. So, samurai in Japan were very well-respected, honourable, noble fighters, and the ninja was the sneaky mercenary agent.

Speaker 2 They were very very looked down upon at the time they were around which and they were they had their heyday the 15th or 17th century in Japan and their function was basically espionage so they were spies and deception and surprise attack and covert methods and they did a lot of hiding and running away and one of their main ways of hiding was using the water so certain ninja texts from the time advised that in daytime hide underwater so as not to be seen you just spent the whole day underwater

Speaker 2 and so you need this snorkel-like thing on the end of your sword. And so, the scabbard end can double as a breathing tube.

Speaker 2 Um, one of the texts that I read, Advising Ninjas, said that the end of your scabbard, if you had the removable tip taken off, could also be a hearing aid or a megaphone.

Speaker 2 Cool, wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 It could also be used as a stepladder for climbing over fences. Oh, yeah.
Or you'd sort of jab it into the wall.

Speaker 2 I think it might be what I imagine, and this might be wrong because this just came out of my imagination but um you know like with a sword you have that like cross bit that yeah that kind of hides your hand i thought if you turned it upside down you could just step on it oh that's cool i thought you meant if you stabbed it into the wall you could bounce off the sword yes can i tell you a cool thing that uh ninjas could do so ninjas had incredible abilities according to the old text one of the thing they could do is they could tell the time of day by looking at a cat's eye.

Speaker 2 So if you asked a ninja what time is it and a cat was was around they could look at the cat and they would study the pupil of the eye which changes during the day according to the sun and if they can't see the cat it's night time.

Speaker 2 Yeah?

Speaker 2 What that didn't happen did it? Because it happened. You would have to have a cat on you at all times.

Speaker 2 It's more difficult to carry a cat around to know the time than it is to just guess the

Speaker 2 But it would be a party trick, as you would say... Well, then everyone at the party knows you're a ninja, don't they?

Speaker 2 They didn't go to parties. Their whole raison d'etre was concealing their identity.
Oh, you just call it the James Bond of...

Speaker 2 That's what James Bond did.

Speaker 2 You can't keep a cat underwater.

Speaker 2 They hate the water.

Speaker 2 They can do that.

Speaker 2 So patronised by these guys sometimes.

Speaker 2 They could read cats' eyes. And also,

Speaker 2 sorry, can we just. Do cat's eyes actually change according to the

Speaker 2 they do very slightly because of the amount of lights on the representation. Yeah, but that's not a reliable indicator of time, is it? Because

Speaker 2 if you're in a dark room but it's midday and you look at the cat and the cat's eyes are massive, you think, oh great, it's nighttime, I can leave my darkened room.

Speaker 2 It's not, it's midday, you're going to be spotted immediately. No, but this is a completely unworkable system.
It's not a system.

Speaker 2 I'm so angry. Why baby?

Speaker 2 It's like saying they have an ability. Oh, they don't do it 24 hours a day.
It must be a lie. You know, they do it when a cat's around.
Like, that's...

Speaker 2 You know, I can do stuff when a cat's around that I won't need to do when it's not around. We don't need to know about your private life.

Speaker 2 This might be a good moment to mention that it's very difficult to study ninjas because there's little solid evidence and a lot of rumor about what they could do.

Speaker 2 So there are a few really, really good texts like the book of ninja which i'm sure dan is drawing from here uh but a lot of people sort of claimed that ninjas could fly or that they could read minds or that they could go invisible and that was all bullshit but they could do a lot of narrowest at noon when you see their eyes narrow at noon do you know what's 12 p.m one way they could tell the time which i thought was quite cool that was in one of the books and this was written in like the 1630s i think was they said a way to see if time is passing if you're hiding at night to ambush is work out which nostril you're breathing out of because your nostrils, so you know how you're only ever breathing out of one nostril at a time and this swaps around sporadically.

Speaker 2 And the rule was that it swaps around roughly every hour. And so, if you're aware that your nostrils have just swapped, then an hour's gone by.

Speaker 2 All right, all right, ninjas, synchronize your noses now.

Speaker 2 Can I just say, yeah, there are some people who think that ninjas weren't really a thing.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 they didn't exist nearly as much as is now believed by popular culture, and that because there's so little evidence of it.

Speaker 2 So, there was a Japan expert from the University of Leeds who said that ninjas factively didn't exist in the way of the world. That's what the ninjas want you to think.

Speaker 2 They're so good at hiding.

Speaker 2 They're all just underwater.

Speaker 2 So, the kind of thing of someone, basically, the idea of someone running around in black pajamas is not coherent as an idea because it would be very obvious.

Speaker 2 It's mostly agricultural land at this time in history. So you'd be dressed as a farmer if you were a ninja.
If you see a guy running around in black, soaking wet pajamas with a cat under his arm,

Speaker 2 he's going to stick up.

Speaker 2 But I mean, so there is lots of...

Speaker 2 So he gave an example actually.

Speaker 2 So the year is 1600. Two of your enemies are fighting a battle.

Speaker 2 So you send a couple of guys dressed as farmers to the area to watch the battle and report back about what's happening that's ninja work so that's the kind of a lot of it was more i think observation than you know nunchucks and throws stuff but it was extremely surreptitious so like historians that people tend to think are very trustworthy from that period recorded it there's a guy called Fujibayashi who recorded a lot of the ninjas methods and they were bound by a sort of spirituality which was ruled by five elements and these elements were wood, fire, earth, metal and water and these all represented different ways of fighting or hiding or getting away.

Speaker 2 And they're really funny. So he recorded like the ways you'd use these different elements.

Speaker 2 So in the water, one it would be, for instance, you'd use your sword as the breathing tube, or you would have to be trained to throw large quantities of duckweed on water that you think you might escape through later, so that you could then hide among its leaves and float with them to safety.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah. Very clever.
I found one that might be an earth method, if that's one of the elements.

Speaker 2 So there's apparently a skill called Uzura Gakure, which is curling oneself into a ball to look like a rock.

Speaker 2 So you believe that one? No,

Speaker 2 I actually don't.

Speaker 2 But then there's someone who comes disguised as some paper and they can just beat this out.

Speaker 2 Wit's just saying that they don't carry animals with them, cats with them, but they did supposedly carry crickets with them, boxes of crickets.

Speaker 2 And the idea was if they needed to go somewhere but they were a bit noisy, they could then release the crickets and the crickets would make crickety noises and then they could quickly shuffle over to where they need to be.

Speaker 2 Okay. How do they keep the crickets quiet?

Speaker 2 They keep them in a jar or a box.

Speaker 2 This is much more plausible than the cat thing so far. So I'm.
They also used to wear fake children's feet.

Speaker 2 What do you mean? The crickets. Oh, yeah.
No, the ninjas. So it is said, I need to say, it is said, it is rumored,

Speaker 2 that the ninjas used to wear on the soles of their shoes, sort of either children's feet or an elderly woman's foot. I don't know what that looks like.

Speaker 2 So the footprints in, let's say, the sand would, or like, you know, their soggy feet coming out of the river be like, oh, a child must have been swimming in that. So they wouldn't be deceiving to us.

Speaker 2 Well, it's true that American cattle rustlers used to wear shoes which had like cow hooves on the bottom of them. So you would think that it was cows that had gone past or horses rather than yes

Speaker 2 and in Bhutan it's said that yetis can take their feet off and put them on backwards so it looks like they've gone that way when in fact they're gone that way. I was really trying to help.

Speaker 2 Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact.

Speaker 2 My fact this week is that one month before the French Spider-Man successfully climbed the second tallest building in the world, he was hospitalized after falling from a seven-foot tall traffic light.

Speaker 2 Now, this was to promote his climb of the second, what was at the time actually, the tallest building in the world,

Speaker 2 which was in Taiwan. And he was climbing this traffic light.
The photographer was there. He slipped, fell, got 40 stitches, was hospitalized, and it jeopardized the actual climb itself.

Speaker 2 They thought he might not be able to do it, but he did pull through.

Speaker 2 And he is an urban climber. He is.
Yeah, his name is Alain Roberts. And he is online.

Speaker 2 I don't know the community that well, but when you see online, he's sort of regarded as the greatest urban climber of our day. I mean, he's in his mid-50s now.
I think he's about 56.

Speaker 2 And he's still climbing extremely tall buildings.

Speaker 2 It's amazing. Although he's banned from climbing in Britain.
We don't like him. He was, I feel kind of banned for him.
So he climbed the Heron Tower in London, very tall skyscraper.

Speaker 2 And he was arrested the moment he reached the top. I just feel, so it took him over half an hour.
And they just waited for him at the top.

Speaker 2 What else are they going to do? They're not going to climb down the thing, are they?

Speaker 2 He's only wasted half an hour. I think that's okay.
You're right. And then he's wasted the 20 weeks suspended jail sentence that he got and

Speaker 2 £500.

Speaker 2 Well, he also, in 2012, he was spotted inside the Shard building in London. And the building's owners subsequently obtained an injunction preventing him from ever returning to their building.

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say he realised, I'm on the wrong side.

Speaker 2 He's voicing up the stairs going this is easy.

Speaker 2 So he's climbed over 150 skyscrapers and one thing he says is that the first two meters are almost the most important

Speaker 2 because after that the police can't grab your feet.

Speaker 2 As Anna was saying, the police are often there waiting for him when he gets to the top of a building and I've read in interviews that the only thing he has on him is chalk for his hands as he's climbing and he wears special shoes but that's not quite true because I think what he also carries on him is a cat so he knows what time it is.

Speaker 2 Box of crickets so no one can hear him coming.

Speaker 2 His climbing shoes are actually the shape of an old woman's feet.

Speaker 2 Well, it looks like the old woman climbed the south face of the building.

Speaker 2 No, what he actually does carry with him is his passport and his lawyer's number. And he just hands that to the police as soon as he gets there.

Speaker 2 But it's quite a surprisingly common thing, like urban climbing. It's something that there are quite a few heroes of urban climbing.

Speaker 2 In 2016 there was a guy who got in trouble because he tried to scale Trump Tower and he spent three hours doing it and he was using suction cups on his hands, like his hands and feet in fact.

Speaker 2 So it was massive suction cups and he reached the 21st floor but NYPD were desperately trying to catch him. It was bizarre to watch.

Speaker 2 So they kept on sort of smashing windows up the building to try and reach out to grab him and they couldn't get him um they kept trying to impede his progress by climbing through air vents and stuff i think and they just couldn't do it and eventually they set up two massive airbags like mattresses in case he fell down just below him and on the pavement and he was asked afterwards why he'd done it so there was this huge rigmarole took three hours reached the 21st floor and then the police sort of sprung out of the window and grabbed him and pulled him in said why on earth have you done that and he said look i'm just a political researcher and i really wanted to meet donald trump

Speaker 2 you know just we were talking about Alain Robert yeah he has vertigo really he suffers from vertigo and vertigo is sort of feeling the urge to throw yourself off a great height isn't it it's not fear of height no it's a small

Speaker 2 inner ear problem which makes you dizzy and stuff oh I thought then you've got the urge to you felt like the ground was coming towards you I think you feel very I think you feel very dizzy and you feel a bit unstable.

Speaker 2 And he's had that since 1982 and he's still done it.

Speaker 2 He had it after he was showing students how to climb with his hands behind his back and then fell 26 feet off the wall. Yeah, oh,

Speaker 2 he's married with three kids. And I read an interview with his wife because they said, You must be, you know, you know, freaked out every single time he goes and climbs a building.

Speaker 2 How are you feeling? And she sort of kind of said, Well, I knew what I was getting into, really, because when she first met him, both of his arms were in plaster casts from a fall.

Speaker 2 The one thing that defeated him in London in

Speaker 2 2002 was the weather.

Speaker 2 He got three quarters up the way of number one Canada Square in Canary Wharf and it was so cold, wet and windy he just got completely stuck and had to be rescued by a window cleaning lift.

Speaker 2 It's embarrassing. But it's got a long and illustrious history, urban climbing, which, by the way, is called, well, it's got a number of names.
It could be called edificering or stegophilae.

Speaker 2 So that's the official term for it. And I really like the etymology of this.
So the Greek stegos is roof, so it's lover of roof, so it's like climbing up onto roofs.

Speaker 2 It's from the same root as what's like the other word that you'd assume was stegosaurus yeah it's from the same root as stegosaurus because that means roofed lizard because when they first found the stegosaurus they thought people climbing up it

Speaker 2 it had a roof on top no it was uh so they thought that the plates on top of a stegosaurus would be horizontal rather than vertical so they thought that it had a roof over it so it's called roofed lizard.

Speaker 2 That's so cool. It is cool.
But an urban climbing ostegophili has a long history in Oxford and Cambridge University.

Speaker 2 So the first urban climber was a guy called Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who published a book called The Roof Climber's Guide to Trinity at College at Cambridge.

Speaker 2 And it gave really detailed instructions on which routes to take up. And then there was another guy called Noel Howard Symmington, who wrote one in 1937, again, Night Climber's Guide to Cambridge.

Speaker 2 And his pseudonym was Whipplesnaith.

Speaker 2 And this is so weird. The person who reviewed his book and wrote about the details of climbing up Cambridge buildings was also called Whipple.
He was called Tom Whipple.

Speaker 2 So the modern-day Cambridge building climber is called Tom Whipple. I know Tom Whipple.
No way. Well, I don't know if it's the same Tom Whipple.
I'm sure it will be. I know the circles you move in.

Speaker 2 Nice kid.

Speaker 2 Have you guys heard of the human fly? Hang on, there's no anecdote to know Tom.

Speaker 2 Well, he's a journalist. Yeah, he is.
He's a very nice guy. Tell us about the human fly.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 His name is Tom Whipple.

Speaker 2 So... Okay, we need to move on.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. So the human fly was a guy called Henry Gardiner, and he was one of the first really impressive building climbers.
He was in the 1910s and 20s.

Speaker 2 He climbed 700 buildings without gear, frequently wearing a suit.

Speaker 2 And he was paid to do it by companies to promote their offices in the new skyscrapers.

Speaker 2 So in 1916, he climbed to the ninth floor window of a skyscraper, climbed into the window of a bank branch, and opened an account at the bank. Those are all the stunts he did.

Speaker 2 Or he would do the, you know, he opened an insurance thing, and he was really, really famous. We don't know what happened to him.
He went missing in 1925. Oh, really?

Speaker 2 He probably fell off a building, didn't he? If you were to guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm afraid he might. That Robert guy does it for money now, doesn't he?

Speaker 2 He basically does it sponsored, and he usually uses actual climbing gear and stuff like that. But actually, a lot of people do die.
So

Speaker 2 this Harry Gardner, who was, actually, it was Grover Cleveland, the president who nicknamed him the human fly, apparently.

Speaker 2 And he said that 120 of those who've sought to imitate me in this hazardous profession have fallen to death. So, he was saying that that happened.

Speaker 2 And people have looked into this, scientists have looked into it. There's been a study in 2006, and they said in every country there is an excess of male deaths due to potentially avoidable reasons.

Speaker 2 And according to their theory, this is what they quoted as saying: men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.

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Speaker 2 And on that note, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Speaker 2 Okay, my fact this week is that in the early Eurovision song contests, songs could not be performed in public before the event.

Speaker 2 One Danish song was banned after the composer whistled it in a TV broadcaster's canteen.

Speaker 2 Wow! This is incredible.

Speaker 2 So yeah, this was in the bit where you had to become the Danish entry and there were six different songs and this guy was just in the canteen having his lunch and he was just kind of whistling it to himself and then they did the actual thing where they performed it and the people were there going, This sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 And then they got banned. No way.

Speaker 2 Was he maybe secretly doing it to try and seed the tune in people's minds or is there no suggestion of that? You know what, I hadn't thought of that but yeah, I mean probably not.

Speaker 2 I think that's a very cynical take. What an amazing song that they were like, wait, that's the song I heard in that canteen a week ago.
Like what a shame it couldn't enter. Yeah that's true.

Speaker 2 What a great whistler he must be. Whistling,

Speaker 2 everyone is a better whistler than they are a singer. Well, it's easier to match a tune that you've heard whistling than it is singing.
There are some people who can't whistle, right?

Speaker 2 I've met a few people who can't whistle. Right.

Speaker 2 So, yeah. Well, okay.

Speaker 2 Hang on. If you can whistle,

Speaker 2 you are a better whistler, probably, than you are.

Speaker 2 It's much weaker. Tell me about Tom Whipple.

Speaker 2 That's interesting, really. What they've looked at, that's not just your opinion.
It's not just my opinion.

Speaker 2 This isn't an opinion.

Speaker 2 They've done studies to test the pitch of whistling. They're not a lot of students

Speaker 2 asking people, can you repeat this tune sung

Speaker 2 And it's because, I mean, you know, it's obviously much easier to make a tune on a musical instrument because they're specifically designed to match specific notes, but muscles are just a bit less precise.

Speaker 2 They get closer to whistling. In your opinion.

Speaker 2 You know, when the Eurovision Song Contest first started, Britain decided we didn't want to take part in this Eurovision song contest.

Speaker 2 So we decided to have our own British song contest of British popular songs, which was won won by Dennis Lotus, who was born in South Africa.

Speaker 2 The thing that I don't really understand about Eurovision, and I think it is bigger here than it is in Britain, but is the constant insistence every year that it's not political, it should never be political, and it's just about the music.

Speaker 2 But it is so patently political, I don't understand why everyone doesn't embrace that. So they're a bit like everything about the history of Eurovision.

Speaker 2 In 2009, it was just after the Russia-Georgia conflict, and Georgia had to withdraw its entry because the organisers told them they had to change their lyrics and the title of their entry song, which was We Don't Wanna Put In, which is a very unveiled reference to Putin.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, and then it's back and forth all the time. Yeah, there was,

Speaker 2 when it first came, it was supposed to bring Europe together.

Speaker 2 But Turkey pulled out in 1976 because Greece was taking part. But then Greece pulled out in 1975 because Turkey were taking part.

Speaker 2 Greece censored Ireland in in 2008 because they mentioned Macedonia, and they censored Finland in 2007 for being satanic.

Speaker 2 But then Finland censored Israel in the same year for mentioning nuclear weapons. And this year, Israel's embassy complained to the Netherlands after they parodied their Eurovision winner.

Speaker 2 And Iran moved all of its diplomats from Azerbaijan in 2012 in protest at it hosting the contest, even though Iran's nothing to do with Eurovision.

Speaker 2 And when Israel won in 1978, the TV show in Jordan told viewers that Belgium had won.

Speaker 2 And in 1973, Portugal arrested the writer of its own song because they thought it wasn't fascist enough.

Speaker 2 Very cool.

Speaker 2 So glad, I'm so glad we're all friends together.

Speaker 2 Do you know Salvador Dali was involved with the revision song?

Speaker 2 Yeah, in 1969, the stage, so it was in Madrid, and the stage had this giant sculpture, a metal sculpture on stage, and that was designed by Salvador Dali.

Speaker 2 But not only that, he also designed their press material, all the press packages and stuff. That sounds like an early job.
It does, doesn't it? Now, he was a man who had trouble telling a time.

Speaker 2 Let's face it.

Speaker 2 The 1978 one was particularly controversial. So 1978 was the one that Israel won, I think.
And during the contest, it became obvious that Israel was going to win.

Speaker 2 And most Arabic countries were transmitting it on their TV stations. And they cancelled the transmission as soon as it became obvious.

Speaker 2 So they would just quickly flick to another channel with no explanation.

Speaker 2 And actually, you say that Jordan said that Belgium had won, and they just replaced their transmission with a bunch of daffodils.

Speaker 2 Very cool. Subtle.

Speaker 2 There was a... You mentioned the British equivalent.
Yes. There was a Soviet Union.
equivalent as well which was called Intervision, the Intervision Zone Contest, and it only happened four times.

Speaker 2 And we've spoken about this before, is this was the way that you voted. It was that

Speaker 2 a lot of people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union, so you had to turn on your lights if you liked the song, and you had to turn them off if you didn't like the song, and they just measured the load on each country's electricity network.

Speaker 2 And that determined how many points you got. Nice.
That's clever, isn't it?

Speaker 2 And it was amazing. It was like the wild west of songs, of song contests.
So for example, one entrant in those four years stayed on stage for 45 minutes.

Speaker 2 Just kept going until they were removed.

Speaker 2 The thing about that is that you had to, I think someone else pointed this out in an article I was reading, you had to sit in pitch dark for all of the songs you didn't like.

Speaker 2 You can't turn your lights on. How miserable you don't like the song anyway.
Also, Bizarrely Canada was an entrant in two of the, I think, four years that that was going.

Speaker 2 They have weird entrants like the fact that Australia is in Eurovision is obviously a bit weird and also a bit painful because they have the highest score on average, the Australians. I'm an Aussie.

Speaker 2 Fuck you!

Speaker 2 So good. We've been in five times and in three of those five we've made it to the top ten.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 I believe you were.

Speaker 2 What did you come this year?

Speaker 2 I feel we're all on a loser against Sweden.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Do you know, if you actually go to the Eurovision Song Contest,

Speaker 2 what you have to do is adhere to very strict rules about what can go in with you. So like most places you go to, there's a list of things that are not allowed to be taken into a venue.

Speaker 2 But with the European Song Contest, it's things like helmets, adhesive tape, golf balls are not allowed, and shopping trolleys. They specify shopping trolleys.

Speaker 2 It just feels like each year they're responding to one disastrous entry.

Speaker 2 So I think about within the the last decade the Greek team performed on a trampoline. Did they? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So that I don't know if trampolines are on the list. No, I mean no.
This is for the people coming. It's not for the people.
Sorry, it's for audience people. Sorry.

Speaker 2 There hasn't been someone in the Eurovision subcatest just singing and hitting golf balls into the audience.

Speaker 2 It would be so unsurprising.

Speaker 2 So unsurprising. There was the Russians who came second, I think, a few years ago with that team of grannies who baked bread on stage.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is a strange contest. There was, in 1985, the contest was held in Gothenburg.

Speaker 2 Cool. Such an easy way of getting a chair, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Shameless.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was very popular amongst British viewers, and a lot of people tuned in where you wouldn't really think they would do. And that's because the Swedish entry was entitled Bra Vibrationai.

Speaker 2 Well, well,

Speaker 2 is that some kind of milking tool?

Speaker 2 Well, for the people who aren't in this room, I believe it means good vibrations.

Speaker 2 Ah, right.

Speaker 2 Bra vibration.

Speaker 2 In 1997, Denmark's entry was a rap in Danish about a guy who had fallen in love with a woman from directory inquiries.

Speaker 2 In 1980, Norway's entry was a song about the construction of a hydroelectric power plant.

Speaker 2 Estonia in 2013 had a song which repeatedly just said the phrase, a local man called Korsakov went to Latvia yesterday.

Speaker 2 In 2006, Lithuania had a song called We Are the Winners, which just said we are the winners again and again and again and again, and they came sixth.

Speaker 2 I want to know if they ever found the local man called Corsico.

Speaker 2 We're going to have to wrap up, guys. Well, okay, one more thing.

Speaker 2 The first person to get nil pois, as in No Pints in Eurovision, was a guy called Jan Tigen from Norway.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 But he became a national hero because he got no points. And his song was number one for two months and remained in the top ten for three more months afterwards.

Speaker 2 And he also had a number one album called This This Year's Loser.

Speaker 2 Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 2 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

Speaker 2 I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Honduran, James, at James Harkin, and Czechinsky. You can email our podcast, at qi.com.
Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

Speaker 2 You can also go to our website, no such thingasofish.com. We have everything up there, all of our previous episodes, all of our upcoming tour dates.
That's the end of our show, everyone.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much, Gothenburg. You've been amazing.
We'll see you again. Good morning.

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