271: No Such Thing As A Safe Robot

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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 Birmingham.

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 fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Hitchbot was a robot invented to see how far human kindness would take a mechanical hitchhiker.

In 2015, he was left on the side of the road in Boston and was found dismembered in a ditch 17 days later.

Yeah, and found in Philadelphia, which is a city of brotherly love.

I read a headline about it which said, innocent hitchhiking robot murdered by America.

And there's CCTV footage, isn't there?

They don't know who the guy is, but he was wearing a backwards baseball cap.

They saw him starting to beat the robot.

He then rips the arm off the robot and he he beats the robot with the arm.

I mean it's a proper savaging.

Yeah.

So actually this these there was a few of these robots made.

It started in 2014 and it was by a guy called David Harris Smith of McMaster University and Fro Kazella of Ryerson University and the earlier ones had gone through Canada, Germany and the Netherlands with no problems at all.

They'd gone and seen some amazing things.

But yeah, this guy, they left him off the side of the road in Boston and it did not end well.

The Canadian adventures were amazing.

Well, it just,

I mean, for a start, the thing itself was made really cheap.

It was made for less than $1,000, so it was not a very good robot.

As in the arms that Dan mentioned were swimming pool noodles.

Yeah, you could only get about three or four good hits with them.

And it had a cake saver over its face.

What's a cake saver?

Like one of those plastic lids that you put over a cake to save it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The little see-through see-through so you can still see the cake.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Is that like a helmet?

Yeah, it was designed for it.

It was reused as a helmet for a robot.

And it had a car seat.

It was sitting on a children's car seat, so people could put it in their cars.

Well, it did have some good things, though.

It had a camera that took regular photos, which I think maybe is where we got this CCTV that Dan was talking about.

It had a voice box that would explain where it wanted to go.

And it had solar panels, but it could also be charged by plugging it into the car's cigarette lighter socket.

Brilliant.

Wow.

it was very popular at the time, so you could follow it on Twitter.

And there was a thing where it had GPS in it, so people know where it was.

And they had to work out how to turn that off because when people collected the Hitchbot and brought it home, fans would flock to the house of this person and they would be inundated.

And the adventures were great.

He was picked up by a band called The Wild,

who I've not heard, but their members are called Dylan Villain, The Kid, Boozus, and Rhys Lightning.

So they sound...

They sound great.

They sound like the guys who chopped him to pieces.

We've got a strong history of

abusing robots, haven't we?

It's going to be awful when they become sentient because we give them a rough time.

There are loads of examples.

In 2017, in Silicon Valley, in fact, a drunk man was arrested after knocking over an egg-shaped five-foot-tall security robot called Nightscope.

It was really sad, but the Nightscope, it was called Nightscope K5, actually, and it had previously been in the news for running over a toddler's foot.

So there was some.

Oh, okay.

So there's...

There was some speculation it was sort of payback.

Harm done on both sides.

Yeah.

Well, people get very weird about robots because when we were talking about the murder of Hitchbot, everyone in the room felt quite tense.

So there's a robot.

And if people are told to hit a dinosaur robot with a mallet, they get a bit freaked out.

They don't like doing it.

And roboticists, proper roboticists, are quite annoyed by this, and they say this is just crazy anthropomorphizing.

So there's a guy called Noel Sharkey, and he thinks that we need to get over over this obsession with treating machines like they've got feelings.

And I read this account of him.

To prove his point, at one conference he attended recently, he picked up an extremely cute robotic seal designed for elderly care and started banging its head against a table.

Oh my gosh.

It's just a robot.

It is weird though.

There was someone I think writing in that article saying, it's bizarre that if you're sitting around a table with someone and there's a teddy nearby and they seize a teddy and tear its head off, you'll think they're a psycho.

But if they swat a fly, which is a living creature that's relatively harmless to any of you, then it's perfectly normal behavior.

That's quite a good point.

That's true.

In 2018, some German researchers asked 89 students to turn off a cute-looking robot called Now.

But they asked it questions first, but when they tried to turn it off, it was programmed to say, no, please don't switch me off.

And every and sorry, a third of the humans took twice as long as normal to turn off the robots and 13 of the group refused to turn it off at all.

Wow.

Wow.

It said it was afraid of the dark.

It's not real.

Guys, it's like the end of Blade Runner.

I've got a thing about how polite humans are to robots.

So this is in a restaurant setting.

People were given the chance to order food from a robot.

Researchers from Tuft University, they made a waiter bot and they asked humans in the restaurant to order from the robot, but they also programmed it not to handle indirect speech very well, okay?

So it needed to be ordered from, but people are so reluctant to say, you know, they order something.

So I just want to try a little kind of role play.

James, if you play the participants, James is the human and I'm the robot here.

Okay.

Can I have one water?

Yes, that is permissible.

Great.

Please tell me your order.

Can I have one water?

Yes, that is permissible.

Great.

I'll take one water.

Thank you for sharing that interesting prediction.

Please tell me your order.

Can I order one water?

Yes, that is permissible.

Okay,

can you bring me one water?

Yes, I am able to do that.

Please tell me your order.

I would like to have one water.

Thank you for sharing that interesting fact.

Please tell me your order.

Then there's a 16 second pause.

Can you bring me one water?

Yes, I am able able to do that.

Please tell me your order.

May you please bring me one water?

Yes, I am able to do that.

So can you do it?

Yes.

Please tell me your order.

Can you go inside and get the water for me?

Yes, I am able to do that.

Please tell me your order.

Because people will not say, I order one water.

They just won't do it.

I don't think that used my entire range of acting ability on a single.

We're going to have to move on shortly, unless there's more dialogue.

Oh, well, just on humanoid robots.

Oh, yeah.

They've been around for way longer than I thought.

So, Japan loves robots now, it's probably the pioneer of robots, but has done for ages.

So, in the 17th century, they invented a humanoid robot, and they're called karakuri dolls.

And I'd never heard of these guys, but they're dolls that were basically there to carry tea to you.

So, they worked with quite a simple mechanism, but basically, you you got a cup of tea, you had a guest round, you wanted to impress them, you got out your robot, you popped a tea on the tray that the robot's carrying, and this triggered a mechanism that caused it to turn around and walk over to your guest, offer them the tea, and then stand beside your guest while they drink the tea in probably quite an intimidating manner.

And then, when you finished the tea, you pop it back on the tray, and the robot turned around and walked back again.

No way.

Isn't that amazing?

And how long is that from?

That's the 17th century.

They were really probably from the 17th to the 19th century in Japan.

And there were lots of others, there were some that acted out sort of medieval scenes, Japanese scenes, old mythical scenes and stuff.

I have another robot in Japan, actually.

It's called Robovi 2.

And they programmed it to go around a shopping center.

And whenever it bumped into a human, it would be programmed to politely ask the humans to step aside.

And if they didn't move out the way, it would kind of go in a different direction.

That was all it did.

But then what happened was a load of children worked out what was happening and started making a circle around it,

and then they started shaking it, punching it, and kicking it.

And the bullying got so bad that the researchers had to put an abuse-evading algorithm in the robot.

So the robot would scan the area, and if it saw anyone that was under four foot six, as in a child, then it would quickly run in the other direction.

I do this in chopping sensors.

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

My fact this week is that a Hungarian entrepreneur has been fined for not building an underwater treadmill for dogs.

Confusing.

Oh, shit, I haven't done that either.

You expect the police at your door any moment now.

I hope we have all done this, because this person got in trouble.

They got a fine of 140,000 euros, this person.

And it's because years ago in 2008, this this business one said that he needed 140,000 euros of funding from the EU's Rural Development Fund to develop a hydrotherapy treadmill system for dogs.

Now, this is a genuinely important thing for animals that have been wounded.

Don't laugh, it's crucial for dog recovery.

The only thing is, he never did any of that.

The offices were investigated, they were overrun with weeds, no one was using them.

Six months after the EU payments were made, this investigation opened, and he's finally been investigated and given a suspended prison sentence for never building that treadmill and a fine which is actually a very lenient fine really can't be essential for dog healing otherwise no dog would ever have survived any injury before the invention of the underwater dog treadmill

you gotta do it um so hungry at the moment is run by uh victor orban um he has taken money to make a 4 000 seater football stadium in his home village where he grew up called felkschoot and the population of that town is about a thousand

So it's four times bigger than the number of people who live there.

He's also made a vintage railway between his two childhood villages.

He took two million euros of EU funding for this railway and they claimed that there would be 2,500 to 7,000 passengers using it every single day.

And in the first month, there were 30 passengers.

That is just him going back and forth.

I think it might be.

He is football obsessed, Auburn, isn't he?

So this railway line was connecting the football stadium that he loved to this other little village.

But he played semi-professional football while he was doing his first stint as prime minister in the fourth division of the league tables, but still decent.

He's said to watch six football games a day, which is a lot for someone who's running a country.

And his first trip abroad when he was prime minister was to see the World Cup in Paris.

And people say that he has not missed a World Cup or Champions League final since.

He's been in the news recently, or rather his government has, because they have a new campaign about having lots of children, and it's a sort of pro-fertility campaign to get the population numbers up.

But unfortunately, the stock models that they used for this campaign, you may have seen this in the news, were the two people involved in the distracted boyfriend meme online.

No way.

So they were trying to present a couple who were very happily in love with each other, but really, we knew the truth, which is that he was a distracted boyfriend.

And it has no idea what we're talking about.

Not on social media.

So it's not a happy couple.

A meme is kind of an image or a video that goes online.

Okay.

It all goes back to the 1980s.

I'll look it up afterwards.

Yeah.

So treadmills.

Yeah.

Treadmills, it turns out animals are always using treadmills.

They've been used.

Treadmills were used for animals before they were used for humans even.

And actually, they were really important for horses in farming.

They have been for hundreds of years.

So in the 19th century, especially,

before

things were properly mechanized, then farm machinery was basically horse-operated.

So you you had threshing machines, which would be these big machines which kind of separated the grain from the corn, and they'd go round and round in one building.

And the way they go round and round is you just have two horses on a treadmill trotting along it all day long.

So they're pushing it.

They're operating the mechanism.

So they're on this treadmill, it's connected to a bunch of pulleys and cogs and stuff, and then that's turning the wheels around.

It just feels very hard, the idea of in a gym pushing a treadmill along with your feet.

It is very hard.

Like if the treadmill's off, for you to push it along.

No, no, I was, yeah, sorry, I was thinking the first proper use for humans of it was in jails, obviously, back in Oscar Wilde, famously, when he was in jail, had to do the step treadmill, which they used to employ to have no purpose other than for hard labor.

And Oscar Wilde suffered so much from it, he died two years after he got out of jail, which they think is largely to do with the treadmill.

It is quite amazing, though, isn't it?

That it was basically the hardest kind of punishment you could get apart from being killed for probably about 100 years.

And now people do it for fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were massive as well.

The prison treadmills, they started in Brixton.

That's what Brixton was famous for 200 years ago, was having a treadmill which could fit 24 people on it at the same time, side by side.

Wow.

Sorry, it was kind of like a game of...

Did you guys ever play 10 green bottles?

Did anyone ever play that?

I know the songs.

God, maybe it's not a thing, except in my family.

Ten Green Bottles, and you all lie in a bed, 10 of you, and then one green bottle accidentally falls and you fall out of the bed.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway, it was kind of like a less fun version of that because...

We were kind of like 10 in the bed, and the little one said roll over.

Roll over.

Yes, same idea.

Yeah.

So this treadmill was like that.

All these families that you guys have got.

Bottles in the bed.

I can see where the alcohol is in the scale.

But the way they would take breaks is the person, there would be, what, 12 people on the treadmill or something?

And the way you take a break is you'd nudge the guy off who was on the furthest left, and the person to the far right would jump on again, and they'd get to walk around the other side of the treadmill, and that would be their sort of few minutes of break.

Yeah, so it would be 60 minutes that you would be, and you'd get 12 minutes per 60 minutes of break.

Just on horse treadmills, quickly.

Oh, yeah.

So, one of the first ever trains was powered by a horse on a treadmill.

What?

So, this was a

can I just ask, why do they have why are they not horses not just pulling these things rather than being on treadmills?

So, what you mean the trains or the trains?

Because

you don't need a smooth road for the horse.

Okay.

I mean, you do need a rail for the railway, but.

But.

Yeah, so.

Yeah.

Was that?

Was that an answer?

Well,

it's an answer.

It's not the best possible answer.

I guess your train just can't suddenly just take a left and disappear to someone, some other bit of England.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's a control thing.

It's very good.

Good answer, Darren.

Never thought I'd say this, but thank God Darren was here for you.

So it was called the Cycloped, and only two of them were ever built, unsurprisingly.

And it was at the same time as Stevenson's rocket, which was the train that we did end up using, was developed.

It was in the same set of trials where everyone brought their own train and they said, let's see what works.

I read it could go faster than Stevenson's rocket.

Really?

I read it could go at five miles an hour.

I think Stevenson's rocket went really slow as well.

I thought it went at six miles an hour, maybe Stevenson's rocket.

So maybe they were really close in the race.

But I don't understand.

So the horse is on a treadmill, and then what's that powering to make the train move?

It's like your plow thing.

No, but the plow thing stays in one place, which is how that works, because the cogs are all attached to it.

It's a threshing machine, so it's...

It doesn't stay in one place.

It's a threshing machine, so it's in one room.

Whereas the train is going to run away from you, and then you're just on a treadmill, and the train's at the other end of the treadmill's on the train.

It's on the train.

Oh, it's on the track.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Dan, to the rescue.

That makes perfect sense.

Well, they did this exact same thing with boats, didn't they?

With ferries in the 19th century.

And these were very popular.

They started in 1791.

A guy called John Fitch built the first one.

And it was basically before ferries were steam-powered.

They would look a bit like a catamaran, but with those two shelves on either side, but on those shelves, there would be two or three horses on each side and they would trot along powering this treadmill which turned the pedals around, which turned the paddles round, which powered the boat.

And the only problem with them was that it was a real issue if the horses on the left side went faster than the horses on the right side because your boat just went around in circles.

That's amazing.

So there was a study in 2015 that looked at people having treadmills in the office.

This is a new thing, isn't it?

So the idea is that being sitting down in the office all day is not good for you.

So what if you had a treadmill?

And it found that people who used a treadmill desk for two hours every day had significantly better blood pressure and slept better at night, which is quite good.

Unfortunately, they performed worse on almost all aspects of their job,

including the ability to concentrate and the ability to type.

They were substantially slower in all tasks and more error-prone.

Wow.

We know someone who does that for their job.

They've all just been fine, haven't they?

Roger Highfield.

Oh, does he?

He was the editor of New Scientist for many years, and he used to edit New Scientists on a treadmill.

And yes, he is no longer there.

No, he works for the Science Museum now.

But yeah, for many years, New Scientist was edited on a treadmill.

You know, there's a treadmill for ants?

Is there?

Yeah.

Scientists have invented a treadmill for ants to test, I don't know, something or other.

Is it like, so just a really, really tiny thing?

It's a little plastic ball, and you put them on top of the ball, and you have to tether them to a thing above so that they, you know, they don't wander off.

Yeah.

Like Mission Impossible.

They get lowered down, and then they start.

Yeah.

And it's to test how they navigate and where they stop and where they try and find their way.

Yeah.

We need to move on in a second.

On corruption.

Some quick thing on corruption.

In Nepal,

they have invented some bribe-proof trousers,

which they're handing out to all officials.

How does it all work?

They just don't have any pockets.

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

My fact this week is that the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who was notorious for always being late, arranged to arrive at her own funeral 15 minutes late.

That was in the sort of the arrangements that she did with her PA.

She said,

this is my thing, and I want to make sure that I keep that even in death.

Were people pissed off?

Did they leave?

Were they like when she turned up, sort of checking their watches and sighing?

Do we know?

No, I think they were.

Did they know?

I think it was probably everyone knew.

They were like, this will start 15 minutes late.

It's on the sheet.

Yeah.

She was, so she was a late one.

She was also, another thing that she did wrong in her life was she was a shoplifter.

Was she?

Elizabeth Taylor.

Really?

She was a one-time shoplifter.

She once shoplifted a copy of A.E.

Hausman's A Shropshire Lad from Foils.

So

time criminal.

The reason she did it is because, as probably you all know, she's married to Richard Burton twice, and Burton boasted to her about how good he was at stealing from Foils.

And so he said, I do this amazing thing, it's so clever.

I go into the bookshop and I go up to the till and I buy one book and I get the receipt and I ostentatiously leave it poking out of the book.

And then I pick up six or seven more books on my way out.

And because I'm walking out with the receipt poking out of the first, they just assume that I've bought them all.

And so she thought, I'm gonna fucking try that.

And so she stole Houseman's Astropshin Adam, but was really pissed off with her and said, why did you bloody well do that?

And then he said, that was the last thing she ever stole, except husbands.

She died in 2011.

And when she died, the New York Times ran an obituary for her, as they would.

But it was written by a guy called Mel Gusso, who was a theatre critic.

And he had himself died six years earlier.

But it was so good that they ran it anyway.

And I think there wasn't many events of her life to update on in those six years, they thought.

Wait, so he'd written the obituary before she died?

Before he died.

Well, he'd written it before she died.

Obviously, before he died.

Before he died.

At the start of the obituary writing process, no one was dead.

By the end of publication, everyone involved was dead.

I suppose the thing I'm trying to emphasise is that it's interesting people write obituaries six years before the person whose obituary it is is dead.

Yes.

That's quite common, isn't it?

That's common, isn't it?

It does happen, yes.

So I was just saying a very obvious fact that we all knew, and that's...

Let's press on.

Um, but they thought you had your moment in the sun about ten minutes ago.

The view was going to come crashing down, it's always

um, funeral requests.

So, there are various funeral requests that people have made, sort of things they wanted to happen.

Um, Heinrich Hein, the writer, he left his estate to his wife on the condition that she should get married again, and he said, So there will be at least one man to regret my death.

Yeah,

slam.

Gosh.

How did he die?

Was it with a bread knife in the back?

George Bernard Shaw, he had the best last request I've ever heard.

He left money in his will and he said, right, I'm leaving a parcel of money and I want it to go towards reforming the English alphabet into one that is phonetic and has minimum 40 letters.

Which is the biggest.

Imagine getting that task from George Bernard Shaw.

Yeah, he was massively committed to that, wasn't he?

His new alphabet.

And it did not work.

I was reading about Bruce Lee's funeral.

Oh, yeah.

So Bruce Lee, obviously, he died very young.

And his funeral, the pallbearers at his funeral who carried the coffin were Chuck Norris Steve McQueen James Coburn George Lazenby how cool is that that is that is well I mean he's the fifth best Bond come on

none of the other four replied to the invitation hey it's funny that's embarrassing quite frankly

he was the best bond

that's very cool but check this out so while they were filming sorry when Bruce Lee died they were filming Game of Death which eventually became his final movie.

But he'd only made about 30 minutes of footage that was usable for the film, and they were largely fights, an iconic fight with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball player, is one of those

who fights a basketball player

who plays a kung fu guy.

Oh, I see.

He's not just beating up a random basketball player.

It seems like

plucking low-hanging fruit.

I think if you're fighting a basketball player, you mostly go for the low-hanging fruit, don't you?

But so, as a result, they had to scrape around for extra footage to use, and bits of the footage included Bruce Lee's funeral itself.

So, they used the actual footage to help the plot line go along.

How did that help the plotline go along?

Actually, I haven't seen the movie yet.

There's a suggestion in what I've read that they've actually used a picture of him passed away in the open casket as well in the film, yeah.

But then for the rest of it, they had a few stunt doubles, but they obviously needed his face, so they just had paper cutouts of him, sort of cardboard cardboard cutouts that were slightly nudged so you could see his head moving a bit and largely the movie is just a cardboard cutout of him wow um just on celebrity funerals yes a very famous celebrity funeral back in the day was that of rudolph valentino so the huge silent movie star he died in 1926 when he was 31 and a hundred thousand people went to his funeral uh there were these massive riots outside the funeral parlour and people were struggling climbing over each other to get a glimpse of him it was an open casket And there were these four guards who looked, there was this claim at the time that Mussolini had sent four fascist guards.

And remember, it was 1926, they didn't have the connotations they do now.

Four fascist guards.

They were widely seen as friendly and good guys back then, I believe.

But actually, they'd been hired as actors by the funeral parlour to make it seem more dramatic.

But his girlfriend, Valentino's girlfriend, was a woman called Pola Negri.

And she really hammed it up.

So she fainted on his coffin during the funeral, just fainted on top of it.

Came around, said, the sad thing is he just proposed to me, and therefore I'm actually, he's basically his widow.

And then she fainted again.

She fainted multiple times.

The coffin made this five-day trip

from New York to California, and she accompanied it the whole time, just constantly fainting.

Dozens of times in five days.

Yeah, I read that because there were so many fans going to the casket, they were worried that it might damage the body.

And so the people who were in charge of

the funeral, there was a company called Campbell's, they put a wax model in its place because they thought that it would get damaged.

Really?

Wow.

Something quickly on lateness, maybe.

So, people who are chronically late, according to a new report,

have better mental and physical health.

They live longer and they're more successful.

Really?

Apparently, this is because late people tend to be both optimistic and unrealistic.

And having especially an optimistic outlook can give you a better mental health and a better physical health and lower your rate of death.

That's nice.

Wow.

I do find lateness across cultures quite interesting because people get so angry.

I was because

I'm chronically late and I think it's going to shorten my life because it's so anxiety inducing.

But people get so angry about it in our culture.

They're like, you're a selfish, evil bastard who doesn't care about other people.

Oh look, guys.

Guys, guys, I said those words in the heat of the moment and I regret them.

But then, if you go to Brazil, for instance, the culture is completely different.

So, there was a blog by a writer who lived in Brazil for a few years, and she said she was invited to her first party.

She turned up about five minutes after the time the party started, and the host was like she knocked on the door and had to get the host out of the shower.

And it was extremely awkward, and she sat around for about two hours thinking, What's going on?

And everyone turned up about three, four hours later.

And then she spoke to a professor about it afterwards.

And the professor said, In Brazil, turning up on time for a party is almost as awkward as turning up to a party where you haven't been invited at all.

It's a massive faux pas.

And they have a thing in Brazil called hora englaza, which is which means turning up on time and it means keeping the English hour, as in you fucking turned up at the hora englaza.

We need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that Mexico has a national championship of double entendres,

yeah, and it's a big one.

So,

buckle up.

So, there is this thing in Mexico called Alber, which is a play on words, and it's almost always sexual.

And there are lots and lots of different ways that you can make things sound slightly rude, and you combine words to make new meanings, or you use words with similar sounds.

And they have a competition every year to find the best alburos or word playmasters in the country.

Can I give you an example of an

albura?

What are they called?

What is the difference between a chair and an octopus?

The octopus has tentacles and the chair touches backsides.

Actually, it works better in Spanish.

No, it does it.

Because

touching backsides or touching bums is tentaculos and tentacles is tentac.

I've really fucked this up.

Yeah.

That's great.

I don't know if you'd win that championship.

It's really intense.

So you have,

someone gives you an Albre, and then you have five seconds to come up with another one in return, playing off what they've said to you, or you get knocked out.

Like time chess, do you hit like a...

It is like time chess, exactly.

That's so cool.

And so for many, many years, it was dominated completely by men.

And then suddenly, this one lady, Lourdes Ruiz, came along, and she's been the reigning champion for years and years.

No one can do anything to outdo her.

Yeah, like over 20 years, isn't it?

Yeah, she's the queen of Albre.

Yeah, which is amazing because it's a massively male thing, quite misogynistic thing.

Women were kind of excluded from it.

It's like lots of men making incredibly crude jokes, often at women's expense.

And yeah, she's penetrated that circle.

So,

but yeah, it has quite a long history, doesn't it?

This sort of word battles and battles of wits.

So, there's a thing called flighting, which I don't know if people know about, but basically, this is traditional battles of wits, which have been going on since at least the fifth century.

And these were basically an exchange of insults, and it was a form of entertainment historically.

It was largely a Scottish thing and very famous, lasted a thousand years from the fifth to the 16th century, so over a millennium.

And one of the famous flighting incidents was this event called the flighting of Dunbar and Kennedy.

And this is in the 16th century, and it was a court flighting, so it was done for James IV, I think, to entertain him.

And it was these two characters insulting each other, and it was the first time anyone ever called someone else a shit.

Really?

Surely the first time we have on record.

First on record called a shit without a wit.

It's brilliant.

That's good.

I've got a few more lines from it.

So this is one, just this is one little verse that one person would say:

Grey-visaged gallows bird, out of your wits gone wild, loathsome and lousy, as wet as a cress, since you with worship would so fain be styled.

Hail, Monsignor, your balls droop below your dress.

It's good, isn't it?

There are some other examples of this kind of flighting and rap battle and kind of stuff like that.

So

the iwi people in Ghana, they had a type of poetry called halo.

And again, it's a way of judging disputes and it's a way of insulting each other.

But you said that you had five seconds in this other one.

In this one, you have a couple of weeks in between insults.

And instead of just kind of coming up with ideas off the top of your head, you actually do actual research into the family history of your enemy.

And you look into what their grandparents did and their great-grandparents did and find the best nuggets that you could use against them.

Would you go around sort of interviewing their best friends going, would you say he's a bit of a dick?

I've been looking up Innuendo in general.

And

so there was a thing about a butcher in Staffordshire.

He was asked by the, this is this year, I think, he was asked by the police to remove signs outside his butcher's shop because he said he advertised a big fresh cock, which is like it's basically a single entendre this guy's got.

And he also offered on a sign the chance to have your rump tenderized before you leave.

And

the Guardian reported that arguably more offensive was his flagrant use of the green grocer's apostrophe.

So police appear unwilling to take action over that.

And they had this whole thing about, you know,

innuendo.

So there's a comedian called Stephen Bailey, and it's all about context and who's making the joke.

So Stephen Bailey is a stand-up who has a lot of explicit material.

He's gay himself.

And The Guardian reported that Bailey's show contains explicit sexual material.

But again, it's all about context.

The same jokes told by Roy Chubby Brown or the late Bernard Manning would sound aggressive, whereas Bailey's ejaculations are far easier to swallow.

Superb.

So bad.

There's a book actually called Away with Words, which is written by a guy called Joe Berkowitz, who, and these are basically puns that we're talking about.

And he traveled around the world visiting pun contests.

And the biggest one is the O.

Henry pun-off in Austin, Texas.

Started in 1978, and it's the World Championship of Punning.

And so they have on-stage referees during this, and referees can immediately disqualify someone if they use what they consider sub-par wordplay.

So I think something like that would be, you know, if you use like eggs, if you're talking about an omelette or something, I imagine that would get booed off stage.

What?

Because you're slightly tweaking.

No, I think it's just like you think that's really shit.

That's like not up to the standards.

It's like if someone does an underarm serve or something in tennis.

But he said he was going through the best puns he heard in the contest.

And sadly for this pun to work, you have to know there's a kind of cherry called a bing cherry, which I didn't know.

What kind of cherry?

A bing.

It's enchandler bing.

Okay, yes.

Okay, bing cherry.

He said the best pun he heard was, I went to go shopping for cherries and microphones the other day.

Boda bing, boda boom.

Yeah.

I mean, you still did have to explain it before we started.

You always said, well, the economist did a thing where they said actually that some of the best puns you do have to explain because they're quite complex and layered.

And it used the example of the one about Mahatma Gandhi who walked barefoot a lot and often fasted, which led to bad breath, thus making him a super calloused, fragile mystic hex by halitosis.

Sometimes it's worth the build-up.

We're going to have to wrap up very shortly, guys.

Oh, I found a couple of weird fiestas.

This is a Mexican fiesta.

So they've got incredible fiestas over there.

But I did find a British equivalent, which I think is one of, I would like to go to this.

There's a Sussex pub called the Lewis Arms, and it hosts every year the World Pea Throwing Championships.

And the record at the time of recording is 44 meters for throwing a single pee and I think that's amazing that's incredible not with your bare arm yeah with your bare arm throwing a pee because obviously they you know they

there's a lot of air resistance

it's not that they're heavy or hard to throw um but um so the winner the 2015 winner Graham Butterworth he said you've got to make sure you pick a pee that has few indents because that affects its aerodynamic qualities but I think it's really impressive because it's impossible to tell where they land So that's the real challenge in the pea throwing championships.

And they have pea spotters all the way along the route assessing where the peas land.

Wow.

That's so good.

That does not sound like a full-time job.

One of the competitors said, I was the first to throw, so I was briefly the world champion, although it did not last long, but it was nice while it lasted.

Basically, fundamentally failing to understand what being the world champion means.

I found a guy who, well, I found a competition which is the French pig squealing championship.

And the idea is that you just have to squeal as, well, it's kind of on the tin, isn't it?

It's the French pig squealing championship.

So you're making the squeal, you're not making a pig squeal, right?

No, yeah, you yourself are making the squeal.

So people come up and they start squealing.

And there's a guy called Noel Jamat, and he has won it twice

for his excellent pig squeals.

He comes dressed as a pig as well to sort of

make a method, very nice.

And he's, yeah, he's won it twice.

He's won twice as well the international championships for the pig grunter at the agricultural shows in 2007 to 2008.

And it's a big thing.

In France, I say it's big.

It's not big.

There's also the

weird festival that I like, championship that I like, is the Naki Sumo Baby Crying Festival in Japan.

So we didn't know about this.

This is in Tokyo.

It takes place in a temple, although there are other versions around Japan.

And the idea is that you bring your baby as a parent, you bring your baby to this festival, and it will get paired up with a sumo wrestler who tries to make it cry.

And and the one who makes the baby cry the most is the winner and the sumo wrestler

the sumo wrestler has various tactics so one thing they might do is they might wear a scary mask to make the baby cry although apparently often they just repeatedly shout the word cry in its face

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

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Thank you so much, Birmingham, and we'll see you again.

Goodbye.