225: No Such Thing As An Interesting Riddle

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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 the Sydney Opera House.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that the BBC has sound effects including indisposed chicken, more or less normal chicken,

standard orgy

and comedy orgy.

Now

it would be very remiss if we weren't to play for you some of these tonight

Have you got the clips?

I've got clips, all right.

So uh yeah, they've got a sound archive of 16,000 effects and so here here's indisposed chicken

What how often are the BBC playing out sitcoms where enter indisposed chicken?

And indisposed to do what?

It's just I don't know, it's sounding pretty distressed though.

Yeah.

So there's also, no, we've got standard orgy here just as a baseline.

I think I can hear a few chickens in there.

There's definitely a cock and ball somewhere.

Terrible.

And here, because I know we all want to hear it, is comedy orgy.

The BBC, ladies and gentlemen.

And the amazing thing is, they've made this open to the public.

This whole archive, 16,000 effects, and you can download them, and for non-commercial reasons, you can use them.

And

it's a fantastic archive.

It's got such funny stuff.

Just on those orgy clips, the legend at the BBC is that they were recorded by a studio manager in the 1970s who was...

That sounds about right now on the GBC.

And it was colleagues during their lunch breaks.

He'd say, come on, come on, have to make some Audrey sounds during a lunch break.

Is that right?

Supposedly so, yeah.

God, lunch breaks are more fun in the olden days.

Yeah, it's very cool though.

So these are all now

free to use for anyone, right?

Hence the reason we're allowed to do that right here, right now.

I think you asked that special permission, didn't you?

I did ask special permission, yeah.

In case we had wanted to use thirsty budgery guards in shed

or two Siamese cats, one coughing occasionally.

And if you want to play a fight sound effect, they've got three people brawling, they've got six people brawling, and if those aren't enough, you can do 36 people brawling.

Wow.

Yeah, I spent a long time reading this list.

They have Riot in Belfast, don't they?

Riot in Belfast with breaking glass, rubber bullets, distant cries and chants.

And then they also have Riot in Belfast, more subdued.

We're going to go for another take on the riot, guys.

Could you just keep it down a bit this time, please?

They're so specific, though.

They've, like, so they've got Belgian post office brackets busy, I think.

Which is,

if you want a French post office brackets busy, do you think that's a disaster?

Are you like they've only got the Belgian one?

There's nothing we can do.

Well, some it's a really weird mix of things that were recorded specially, like for example, comedy orgy, or things that are recording history.

So, they've got an air raid on Battersea from 1940 during the Battle of Britain.

That obviously is not going to happen again.

So, it's very.

You're not going to have a comedy air raid on Battersea, are you?

But doying.

It's amazing, isn't it, when you look into the stories behind where sounds come from?

As you said, they were lunch break and they would come and do a comedy orgy.

So there's that famous one, I think it's quite famous, that in Jurassic Park, the sound of the Velociraptors barking, that's a

was turtles having sex.

That's a...

I don't know if you know that, but you can see footage, and there's a lot of it online, of turtles having sex, which I highly recommend.

as they're going at it,

there's this like

kind of

noise.

And that's genuinely what they sampled for the...

How did that turtle get on stage?

Where is it?

It's a bit, I didn't even do it right.

It's such a lovely tone.

But I think you've got to be in the mood, you know.

But so the T-Rexes in Jurassic Park, when you see a T-Rex, it's a mixture of a bunch of different animal sounds.

So the voice itself, for the breathing, they used the sound of a whale.

They used lions, alligators, and tigers for the low frequency of the roaring that was going on.

But for the heavy breathing, the sort of of the T-Rex, that's a koala.

Hello!

And Aussie, yeah, made it into Jurassic Park.

An Aussie legend.

This was so weird today, by the way.

So I was thinking about this fact and the fact I needed to do some research for it on the walk to the Sydney Opera House.

And

walked, and I was thinking about Foley artists.

So, this is obviously about Foley artists, and it's Jack Foley, the guy who kind of invented sound effects and made a lot of the sound effects from our films.

And I walked past a street called Foley Street as I was thinking about Foley Artists.

Isn't that insane?

That's just a personal story.

But

what a story.

Thank you.

That was such a.

I didn't do my homework, but woe do I have an excuse.

I was doing some reading on Foley.

No, he used to, uh, so he is the sound of the walk of a lot of your favourite actors,

if you're born in the 1940s, actually.

But um, so

he's the sound of the walks of Laurence Olivier, of James Cagney, of Marlon Brando, um, because he used to watch these people walk, because you couldn't get the sounds recorded sort of live because the cameras weren't recording that close up, and he would watch them really carefully and imitate their walks, and then the sound of his feet hitting the ground were that.

And they still do that today in nature documentaries a lot.

So, actually, while I was on this walk, I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible podcast, and very good show.

And there was a guy I interviewed, Richard Hinton, who does the sound effects for animals in a lot of nature documentaries.

And he says, For walking animals, you always use your hands because you have much more control over your hands.

And so, if you're a lion, then you sort of do it quite lightly.

And then, if you're an elephant,

or if you're a turtle having sex,

yeah, it's still in the hands.

So, speaking of walking, Orson Welles wanted a specific sound of people walking on sand.

So, he had an entire truckload of sand dumped onto the studio floor for people to walk on.

Unfortunately, it just dampened it, you couldn't hear anything.

And they used to get amazing things that they were asked.

So, they were asked to do the sounds of snowflakes falling on snow or the sound of a nude woman sitting on a marble bench.

Was that necessary?

necessary?

It's all in the hands.

This is amazing.

Bacon sizzling in a pan sounds identical to rain falling.

What?

No, you don't think it does, but I did a video on the internet and I was tricked two times out of four, which is

exactly no better than average.

It's incredible.

You think you know and you don't.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, we're full of anecdotes tonight, aren't we?

Do you know

the big boulder in Indiana Jones, the one that rolls after India at the beginning of the first film?

The noise of that is a Honda Civic set in neutral going down a gravel road on a very slight slope.

But it works, it's amazing how yours can be directed.

In Fight Club, all of the punches are the smacking of slabs of meat with pigs' feet.

But David Fincher thought that this sounded exactly right, but he was another one who took it really seriously.

In fact, in one of the things in Fight Club, he asked a stuntman to fall down the stairs 12 times for one scene, and then he used the first take.

Did he know after the first take that he was using the first take and the other 11 were just.

I paid for an hour, might as well.

We're gonna have to move on fairly soon-ish to the next fact.

Oh, all my research is about Augies.

Really?

Okay, on the Wikipedia for orgies, they have a section on Roman orgies.

And apparently this did happen.

It was an ecstatic form of worship that some cults had.

Sounds alright, actually.

It involved drinking wine.

It doesn't seem to be much sex involved, in fairness.

It involved drinking wine and dancing, which sounds okay.

As well as eating raw meat, which is not quite as good, and self-castration, which is much less good.

Of course, the self-castration does provide fodder for the raw meat, so it's sort of two birds, one stone, isn't it?

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

My fact this week is that in the first Olympic marathon in 1896, the same stopwatch was used at the start and finish line, so it had to be carried from one to the other ahead of the runners by bicycle.

It's very cool.

This is so.

This is at the first modern Olympics, obviously, in Greece.

And yeah, it was held by a judge, the stopwatch.

It was started by this judge who clicked it, shoved it in the hand of a bicycle, and the cyclist had to ride along in foul weather.

It was really awful weather that day, and the road was very rough, and then cycle really fast to the finish line so that the same stopwatch could be there.

Also, presumably cycle without accidentally pressing any of the buttons on the stopwatch during the process of cycling.

But you could just have given it to the guy in front front and said

if anyone overtakes you please I'll chuck it over, yeah.

Like kind of a relay for each other.

That's a great idea.

I was thinking you could do it by car, but then obviously not back then.

And actually probably not now, certainly at the London Marathon, because the average speed in central London at the moment for cars is 7.6 miles an hour, whereas the average speed for runners in the marathon is 12 miles an hour.

In fairness, the London Marathon is on a Sunday, so the traffic won't be so bad.

That's true.

But bad news, they close all the roads because the marathon's on.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

This was obviously the first modern Olympics.

It was very exciting.

This marathon was emulating the great marathon of history that they wanted to do.

Of history.

Of history.

You could at least narrow it down to the country.

Not Australia.

But what was very exciting about it, I think, particularly for the room that we're in, is that entering that Olympics that year, there was an Australian team.

And it was the very first Olympics,

consisted of one person.

He was a guy called Edwin Flack, and he actually ran in this marathon.

Was quite far at the front at one point, but then he unfortunately had never run that far before.

So

while he was doing really well, he suddenly got really delirious, collapsed down, and one of the spectators came up to help him, got him up, and then Edwin Flack punched him.

Yeah,

the first

punching of a spectator by an Aussie

or any country.

Do you know?

He was, sorry, just on Edwin Flack.

He was one of, I think there were 17 people running, and 13 were Greek, and so he was one of the remainder that were foreigners, and none of them knew how to long-distance run and so they all started out ahead and all the Greeks had had lots of practice and so they all started out behind and they all thought they were winning and when Flax started winning I think he overtook a French guy and again the cyclist was crucial because the cyclist cycled to the finish line to the big stadium and said the Aussie's winning the Aussie's winning and then they were all devastated because they were all Greeks and that's what they thought because there was no way of relaying this information except to have a bloody cyclist there who'd already pedaled the stopwatch up to the front line.

So yeah, they really thought he was going to going to win.

The guy who it was eventually won by a Greek.

And so the main medical check for this race was being tapped on the knee by a doctor and then given two beers.

That was it.

So everyone was a couple of beers in by the time they started.

So the guy who eventually won.

This explains why the Australian did so well.

The guy who eventually won, halfway through, he bumped into his stepfather who was waiting along the route at a little inn who gave him some wine.

And then he was getting really tired, this guy, and he asked someone who was accompanying him for water.

He said, Please, have you got any water?

So he was given cognac instead.

So he finished the race completely half-cut.

He was.

I think he spat out the cognac in disgust.

So, the next Olympics, which was in 1900, the course markings were so poor in the marathon that confused athletes could be seen running randomly through the streets of central Paris.

And the absolute worst thing about it for me is that the winner was a guy called Michel Teatro of France, but in second place was a guy called Emile Champion,

and in third place was Ernst Fast.

Wow.

So sad.

That's very sad.

It was really Teatro's responsibility to give that game away, wasn't it?

Please change his name.

Yeah.

To winner or something.

Well, in 1904, the marathon competitor who finished ninth, he should have done better, but he was chased a mile off course by dogs.

Was that 1904?

Yeah.

Okay, in that same race, there was a Cuban postman called Andarin Carvajal,

and he arrived at the last minute, and he'd lost all of his money in New Orleans, so he had to hitchhike to St.

Louis, and he'd hardly eaten anything, so he stopped off at an orchard en route to have a snack on some apples, which turned out to be rotten.

And so, despite having strong stomach cramps throughout the whole of the race, he ended up finishing fourth.

I like this.

This is many years later.

There was a marathon runner called Kanakuri who he started the marathon and then he went missing.

And no one ever saw him again.

And yeah, they just lost

so fast.

Yeah, he was missing.

He was missing.

And then it turned out that what happened is that he lost consciousness and he was rescued by a family on the side of the track.

they brought him back to a house he regained consciousness later and was nursed to health but was so embarrassed about it he didn't tell anyone

and so he was listed as missing by swedish authorities for over 50 years

before he finally admitted that that's what happened that he had that he had he should have just sneaked back into the end of one of the marathons they were doing well well he did you're not going to tell me he did that he went back on the 55th anniversary of the 1912 games to finish the race and he holds the longest ever official marathon time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds.

I've got a fact about a marathon, which I don't know if you guys have heard of.

Oh, yeah.

This is called the Barclay Marathon.

This is the toughest marathon.

Have you guys done it?

Has anyone competed?

No.

No, exactly.

Exactly.

You think you're tough enough.

Oh my goodness, guys!

Okay, get this.

It's in Tennessee.

You have to do five 20-mile loops all over a mountain, okay?

And you have to finish within 60 hours.

So that's 100%.

It's very hard.

You have to do the equivalent of running up and down Mount Everest twice.

It only costs $1.60 to enter.

Thousands of people have entered since it was started.

Four times.

Sorry.

And a t-shirt?

So you have to play loud

for the organiser, whatever please you're not afraid of.

Yes, I yeah.

You're absolutely bang on, but it's more efficient if I do it.

But you're right, no, you're right, you're right, you're right.

The guy who set it up, he requests that you bring him t-shirts because he doesn't like shopping for clothes.

So

it might be socks or t-shirts, whatever.

Sorry.

You have to get in.

To get in, you have to email a secret email address on the right minute at the right day with an essay titled Why I Should Be Allowed to Run in the Barclay.

There's no path, so they leave 13 books trailed around the course.

And as you go around, you have to take a page from each book to finish each loop.

You have to sign a disclaimer saying, If I'm stupid enough to attempt the Barclay, I deserve to be held responsible for any result of that attempt, be it financial, physical, mental, or anything else.

You don't get a medal, by the way, if you finish.

It's horrific.

Do you get a t-shirt?

You get nothing.

It started in 1986.

Nobody finished it until 1995.

Wow.

And so

just back on timers,

in the 2012 Olympics in London, they invented a timer which can measure accuracy to a millionth of a second.

But no one really figured out what to do with it.

Because obviously that is such a small amount of time.

In that amount of time, Usain Bolts can travel 0.0001 meters, which is about the size of a bacteria.

Yeah, this is so more accurate timing devices are useless at Olympics, and this is a serious problem.

People keep having ties because you only measure them to one hundredth of a second, and after that, it's kind of unfair.

So, I think there have been a lot of ties in the swimming since 1984, because in 1972, there was a tie when they measured it to hundredths of a second.

So, they went to thousandths, and one guy beat the other by two-thousandths of a second, which is much, much faster than the blink of an eye.

And the thickness of coat on the swimming pool could easily, massively override that by a long, long way.

And so they realized it was completely unfair.

So they just have loads of ties these days.

In 2012, there was one where it went down to a coin toss or a runoff.

Wow.

And then one of them just seemed to be.

Runoff into swimming.

That was a sprinting race.

You're just going to have to wait for this to freeze.

Could you let your fingernails grow enough until you would win that race?

Yeah, that's a really good idea.

I think if your fingers were 50 meters long,

you could just go...

I'd bet you'd have bigger problems, wouldn't you?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in first century Denmark, if you were really rich, you were buried with a chicken.

If you were really, really rich, you were buried with a goose.

Wow.

So, this is a thing that happened.

Basically, it was the Romans had started to get up to there in Scandinavia, and gooses were extremely rare.

I think we say geese, just FYI.

And I'm the editor of this podcast and

geese were really rare.

And also geese, they represented the goddess Juno and they found that not only have these people who are buried with chicken and geese, they're obviously kind of of high status because they have loads of other Roman goods as well.

So yeah, that's the thing that happened.

That's very cool.

Just wondering, what...

You said that some people were buried with a chicken.

Do we have any idea what it might sound like if

the chicken was, say, indisposed before.

I have a feeling we're going to.

Thought I might.

On being buried with things.

Oh, yeah.

There are ancient Peruvian shark fishermen graves which have been excavated recently, and it turns out that they were buried with extra legs.

What?

Sorry?

What?

So...

Are we sure that they just didn't have extra legs?

I suppose we're not 100% sure.

They had extra legs buried with them, so that two extra legs were left in one grave.

I'm pretty sure this guy.

Has anyone guessed why that might have been the case?

Or whose legs they were?

I think they were the legs of, I suppose, other Peruvian shark fishermen who hadn't had quite as long and happy a career

as the main guys in the grave.

Are there a lot of legless torsos buried nearby?

I don't think we've found any yet.

Again, this is research in its early stages, so.

I really like that in America

there were incidences of corpses being stolen for scientific purposes from graveyards

during the US Civil War times by quite a lot.

So someone invented a coffin torpedo and yeah, so the coffin torpedo was if you were digging a grave, it would it would lob, it would blow up basically from the inside of the coffin when you were trying to steal the body and kill the person who was trying to steal you or steal the person, yeah.

And then there was one that was put on top of the coffin as well, so it didn't harm the actual interior of the coffin as well.

And that was a big thing.

They used to do things like put cages on top of graves to make sure that no one could steal.

Uh, there was also, and this sounds really weird to me, um, the graveyards used to at one point have at the bottom of the, the

so you have the tombstone and then right at the bottom there would be a shotgun just pointed up and if anyone came and you might just be visiting so I don't know how

it worked but you'd be killed and

yeah

yeah that is harsh.

You might just want to say one last goodbye.

Yeah.

Although if it's a family grave just plop them in I guess.

This is so that would go down extremely badly in Madagascar where they have a tradition of disinterring the dead every few years.

So, this is this, I think, really cool Malagasy tradition.

It's in the Famadihana people, and it's called the turning of bones.

It happens every five to seven years.

And you go to where your ancestors are buried, or where your grandma's buried, and you dig them up in order that you can change their clothes because they've been wearing the same clothes for ages.

And you then walk them around the village, sort of give them a tour of the village,

show them what's changed.

Between your shoulders, pretending they're still fine.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you do.

You walk around here, you go, oh, look, there's a co-op there, didn't used to be there, that kind of thing.

You won't remember that.

They dance with them, so they dance around the graveyard within the cemetery.

They hold the bodies above their heads, and then they spray them with perfume, and they bathe them in wine.

And they often rearrange the bodies into more human shapes when sometimes time has taken its toll.

And they just have it's a really fun banquet, really, with the dead.

If you're into that kind of thing,

so in China it is illegal to be buried with a picture of a supergirl

a supergirl

I will come to that thank you

so I think it's I think people mostly probably know that in China they do this thing where they have like paper offerings so they might put bits of fake money in your tomb or whatever and it's like things that you loved in life or whatever money I mean that would be so annoying in the afterlife if you got to the counter and you wanted to to buy all your stuff in the afterlife and they were like, this is all fake sir.

I'm sorry.

Yeah but this is all counterfeit.

If you're a fan of playing Monopoly in the afterlife that stuff will be very handy.

You can't bring your own fake money to a monopoly board.

Oh I've got a new currency I'd just like to pop in.

That shows me I want a lot of games with that extra stack.

The Murray Millions.

I'll take everything.

So as well as they do have this kind of money but they banned the practice of vulgar offerings.

So that's such things as luxury villas, sedan cars, Viagra you're not allowed to, and then simulated models of supergirls.

And that is based on the hit TV contest, Mongolian Cow Yogurt Supergirl.

Please don't give away the ending of the latest series because I'm only halfway through.

I've actually heard of Supergirl now that I think about it.

That was the TV show.

It's kind of like X Factor where it was all about singing.

Yeah, and I think they said,

this is what I read in a newspaper, but I've not double-checked to verify it.

And it was a big British tabloid.

It said that

in China, so many people voted for the winner of the first series of Supergirl.

that if you took all those votes and applied it to every other voting that has happened on planet Earth, it is the biggest collection of single votes for one thing that the Earth has ever witnessed.

Wow.

More than any election, more than anything else.

Because they don't really have elections there.

They...

Dan, how dare you?

The elections in China are free and fair and extremely concentrated on a single result.

Sorry, just on China quickly as well.

Not so much burials, but funerals.

Just very recently, the Chinese Ministry of Culture have announced that they're planning to eliminate strippers from going to funerals.

And this is a custom that happens in China and Taiwan, whereby they like to make it a big party.

And again, go online, you can see this.

And and dignitaries will have this it will be girls on the top of cars Pole dancing and stripping it's a big thing in some cases.

There will be 50 car processions all of which will have a pole dancing Stripper on top of it.

Yeah, and they're trying to get that out although you should specify that strippers aren't not allowed to go to funerals It's not like if your job happens to be a stripper but your mum dies you're not allowed to attend a funeral.

Yeah.

You're just not supposed to strip asses.

You just can't take your clothes off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's a thing that genuinely happens.

That's the purpose of it.

It's just a celebration thing, and I think they tied it in with

the fake money, where you put it in the...

I was looking at animals being buried.

Because pets being buried is more and more of a talked about and written about thing and pets, cemeteries and stuff, and people really want to be buried with their pets now.

And there are actually a couple of really bizarre cases where people who are dying request that their pets be put down so that they can be buried together.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

An American and his Yorkshire Terrier.

Look it up.

So

it's very weird.

But there's this debate in the US.

So in New York, for instance, you are now allowed to bury animal remains in human cemeteries with the human, but only if they're buried at the same time.

So you're not allowed to sort of just have a pet funeral.

But yeah,

it's a big deal.

That's amazing, because I remember reading somewhere ages ago that the first pet cemeteries were opened in Paris, I think at the turn of the century, because they explicitly made it illegal to throw dead animals into the river.

And so they were like, well, now we need something else to do with them.

When will the cult of health and safety let go of poor innocent Parisians?

Well, Frederick the Great of Prussia wanted to be buried with his dogs because he was obsessed with them.

And

the court said, you should be buried next to your wife and father in the royal cemetery.

And so he was.

They disobeyed his wishes.

That was

in the 1780s.

And in the 1990s,

they respected his wishes and buried him with his greyhounds instead.

So that's quite happy.

I'm sure that, yeah.

You know, fellow Lugosi, who played Dracula?

Yeah.

He was buried in his Dracula cape.

Cool.

Yeah, which would be a hell of a shock, wouldn't it?

If you were

digging him up, you know.

But

there was a report in 1930, a few years before he died, saying he hopes to escape the shackles of the role, and clearly he did not.

It's quite sad, actually.

Yeah.

That's bad.

That sounds like it was an argument with his wife last minute.

He also had a guest book at his funeral, which I rather like.

I think that's a cool thing to have.

Yeah.

I found a really odd thing, which is King Richard III is buried in a casket that was made by his great great great great great great great grandnephew

yeah

great

so he was he was found and I should add I wasn't sure how many greats it was so I kept going and you can edit in the relevant amount

I'm gonna put so many in that

and you're just gonna sound like you're having a stroke just then.

Wow, the podcast is two and a half hours long this week.

How would all that have been?

Is that so?

How did that occur?

Is that someone enough grace to get up to the present day?

And this is when he was reburied?

He was, remember, he was, King Richard III was found underneath a car park.

In fact, it was in our very first episode, one of the headline facts that we mentioned.

And they had to prove who he was using the DNA via a living relative.

And there was one guy called Michael Ibsen who they were able to track it down.

I've met him, really nice guy.

He was, he was, they used his DNA, they proved it and he happened to be a carpenter and so he said, can I make the coffin that he's going to be reburied in?

That's really nice.

Yeah.

Although, of course, after a certain distance, we are genuinely all related to certain people.

So it's about at the Genghis Khan level.

We are all directly descended from them.

And he's not far from that.

So it's not very, we're probably all his great-great-great-great-great.

So are you telling me I'm Genghis Khan's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great great

and then you can use the rest.

In case I didn't do enough, early.

I've got a riddle for you guys.

Okay,

my mother abandoned me.

Oh, I'm sorry, it's a hit.

Okay.

No,

that's the beginning.

Let's go to the riddle.

Let's go to the riddle, buddy.

Strange time to bring it up.

Mum, if you're listening, listening, and I know you don't,

I don't feel abandoned by you.

Here's the riddle.

My mother abandoned me.

I was found by a man who cut off my head, scooped out my heart, and gave me something to drink.

Then I began speaking.

What am I?

Okay,

so anyone?

It's got to be something to do with burials.

Something to do with the main fact, actually.

Are you a goose?

Are you a chicken?

I'm a goose.

Are you from Denmark?

I'm a bit of a goose.

Are you foie gras?

I am not foie gras.

I'm a quill pen.

Okay.

My mother abandoned me.

I was found by a man who cut off my head, scooped out my heart, and gave me something to drink.

Then I began speaking.

It's very clever.

I'm not surprised your bum doesn't speak to you anymore.

Don't invite him over for Christmas, honey.

He's going to do his fucking riddles again.

It's going to be.

I think we found the answer tonight to the question of why did riddles go out in the 16th century?

Why did its mother abandon it?

Because the mother is the goose that gave it up when the man plucked the feather out.

Right, okay, it's the feather, not the goose.

Yeah, it's the quill pen.

Yeah, sorry.

Okay,

still, room for a few hundred more grates where that bit was.

We need to move on very shortly.

I've got one last thing, actually, which I quite like.

There is a company, should you, because when you're buried, you can decide either you go in a coffin or you have many other options, cremation and so on.

There's a company that actually will take the ashes of someone and they will grind them and heat them down to a sort of diamond, which they then put in a ring.

So that is an option that you can get, and their tagline is diamonds and grandma are forever.

So if you want that, that's.

I mean, I guess if you're proposing to someone, you could say, my granny would have wanted you to have this ring.

It was her.

Don't you mean it was hers?

No.

Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that before magician P.T.

Selbet invented the famous sawing a woman in half illusion, his big trick was called the mighty cheese,

which saw him daring members of the audience onto the stage to try and push over his massive block of cheese.

That was this is the guy who became a legend.

That was his initial trick.

Good trick.

Yeah, he so what it was is he would walk on stage and he would have a giant wheel of cheese and

it was red and it was covered in wax.

So it was like a big baby bell basically that he had.

And he would say, who would dare come onto stage and push over my cheese?

Who has the might?

And it was a great illusion because inside this big block of cheese, this big wheel of cheese, there was a sort of gyroscope thing.

So it made it impossible to actually do it.

So I guess like all magic, it was...

Yeah, every time you tried to push it or pull it, it would kind of jerk off in another direction and throw you to the ground.

Yes.

And he had a couple of stooges who would kind of deliberately fall over and whatever, and he would always find the strongest-looking people in the audience and then try and make fun of them about how weak they were, and then get them to try and do it, and they'd be thrown everywhere.

Yeah.

It sounds awesome to me.

Yeah, it sounds like the cutting the lady in half is fine, but we've seen that a million times.

But apparently it was not at all awesome.

No one liked it.

It was he and he sold it to people and they kept reporting back going, I've lost all my audiences.

I don't know why I thought pushing over a cheese would be interesting, but...

Did we say who this guy was?

P.T.

Selbit.

He was born Percy Thomas Tibbles.

But he took the name Selbit by reversing his surname and subtracting one of the B's.

You know, Penn and Teller, the famous modern Malmagicians, they tried the same trick.

They did a version of it on stage, and they got a mixed martial arts fighter to try and wrestle the cheese.

And because it is a trick cheese, he failed.

Connor McGregor's getting desperate these days, isn't he?

After he failed, the martial arts fighter said, I'm going to go home and cry now.

I can't beat a cheese.

This thing of selling tricks, though, I didn't quite realize this was a thing, even amongst the great legends.

So P.T.

Selbert himself had a big argument with Houdini at the time because Houdini said that he'd stolen his walking through the wall trick.

Oh, no, he said Houdini had stolen his walking through the wall trick.

And Selbert said he'd actually bought the trick from another magician.

But they were just buying tricks from each other.

Houdini was buying tricks from people.

Yeah.

He wasn't coming up with anything.

And just to put P.T.

Selbert in context, this was a person who his name has disappeared

to the layman, but magic.

I'm going to make my name disappear.

We can all perform that kind of trick in our term.

I think after tonight's show we might have done that.

But yeah, he was a hugely important,

interesting guy.

So the big cheese was sort of a minor bit of his career.

The sawing a woman in half absolutely revolutionized, it's still used to this day to the standard that he did it.

He effectively introduced the magician's assistant when he had his assistant, Betty, I think her name was, come and do the sawing in half for the first time.

That revolutionized, it's still going today.

He did a trick in front of Arthur Conan Doyle, which convinced Arthur Conan Doyle of the spirit world.

Spirit was a massive thing to Arthur Conan Doyle that believed in the afterlife and fairies and so on.

And that was P.T.

Selbert.

Yeah, so he was.

He always believed in the spirit world.

He was the most gullible man we've ever researched.

People have believed in Donkey who told him the spirit world was a thing.

But yeah, he did show him his answer, his relations, didn't he?

His dead relations.

Yeah.

P.T.

Selbert.

Did he dig them up and carry them around?

This is your great, great, great, great, great.

And then Selbit struggled, didn't he, after the to kind of do anything after the sawing the lady in half.

His latest tricks were known as destroying a girl, stretching a lady, and crushing a woman.

So he really had a time to be.

Yeah, one of the things he did to promote the show was to have stagehands pour buckets of blood into the gutters outside the theatre.

Wow.

Yeah.

And it was all so 1920s-ish,

1910s and 20s.

It was all kind of due to anxiety over suffragettes and women's liberation.

And he once invited Christabel Pankhurst to be sawn in half on stage for £20 a week.

She said no.

But just the thing you said, Dan, of inventing the magician's assistant, it was kind of only made possible by the change of women's fashion.

Because before that, you had very bulky clothes, you had a lot of petticoats, it would have been very hard to fit the woman into the box in the first place because of what she was wearing.

And even then, she's running so many courses that it's unlikely you could saw her in half, even if you wanted to.

And then there was like, I guess, flapper fashion, was it?

Yeah, and then

flapper fashion comes in, and suddenly people fit in the box.

Although, I do have bad news for you, Andy.

What?

I don't think that they were actually sawing the woman in half.

Don't spoiler it for me.

I've got tickets to the circus next week.

Do you know that in Queensland,

Australia,

that you're not allowed to own pet rabbits?

There's obviously huge problems with rabbits in the country.

So in Queensland, you're not allowed to own it unless you're a magician.

Yeah, there's a magician called Mr.

Britt.

There's only 34 magicians in Queensland who are permitted to have this thing where they're allowed a rabbit.

And Mr.

Britt is one.

The rabbit's called Mr.

Fluffy Bum.

And Mr.

Fluffy Bum is one of the only privately owned rabbits in Queensland.

Wow.

I have a fact about pulling rabbits out of hats, which is the guy who...

It's pretty vague who actually invented pulling a rabbit out out of a hat, but a lot of people think it was a magician called Louis Comte, who was I think a French magician.

He did so in 1814, but I believe the first time he did it, sources are pretty few on this, the first time he did it, he also simultaneously pulled his infant son out of the hat.

At the same time, was he holding the rabbit?

I don't think he was holding the rabbit, he said, what have we got in here?

Oh, we've got a rabbit and a baby.

It's weird that the rabbit one stuck around, isn't it?

Do you know what I think?

I think

it's more impressive to pull a baby out of that.

I think it's not impressive, but it's harder to get a baby.

That's why it's more impressive.

Oh, yeah, it's such a.

Yeah.

Do you know the original pulling a rabbit out of a hat?

I think is pulling an omelette out of a hat.

So I was looking for this because it is very controversial what it is.

And most people say, we definitely know the 1840s is the first time we pulled a rabbit out of a hat collectively.

But I did find something in the Leeds Intelligenza in 1823.

It was this court case.

It was a report from a court case.

A man was suing a magician for the cost of a new hat because he said that he'd spoken to the magician, and the magician had said, if you imitate me and break an egg into your hat, then you'll get an omelette out of it.

Just imitate my movements exactly.

And so he'd upturned his top hat, as had the magician, and the magician had broken an egg into his hat, flipped it up, and an omelette had come straight out of it.

Whereas the guy had done it, flipped it up, and he'd got his entire suit covered in raw egg.

That's a bit of an asshole's trick, isn't it?

That's pretty bad.

It's like, right, if you do exactly what I do, I'm going to saw this lady in half.

You saw your wife in half.

Guys, we're going to have to wrap up shortly.

I've got a fact about magic tricks going wrong.

Yeah.

Do you remember when Secretum Roy, who did the Magic with the Tigers?

Roy, Roy Horne of Secretum Roy, he was grabbed by the throat by a tiger in 2003.

Now, the good news is he made a great recovery, and doctors said he would never walk or talk again.

He absolutely did.

He made a fantastic recovery, but I didn't know the story that they have agreed on for the version of events, which is this.

Both Breut and Siegfried insisted that the tiger had sensed that Horn was having a stroke and was dragging him to safety.

Like, where could the tiger go that it would think would be safe?

Horn, now 74, said, I will forever believe it was his concern for my safety and well-being that caused him to act as he did.

That's amazing.

Just one little thing on magic words.

Yeah.

So the magic word expelliamus is from Harry Potter, I think.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it comes from the Latin expeller, meaning to drive or force out, and armour, which means weapon.

But unfortunately, armour was also a euphemism for penis.

So Harry Potter is probably saying something like, penis begone!

Does that mean the first line of Virgil's Aeneid is, I sing of penis and the man?

I think a lot more people got the Harry Potter reference.

I'm trying to get why your mum is not interested in that.

Oh, come on, mate.

Okay, that's 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 account.

So I'm on at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Jaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Just put no such thing as a fish on the internet.

You'll find us.

We will be back again next week with another episode, guys.

Thank you so much.

Good night.