120: No Such Thing As HMS Kevin

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certapro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the Utter Belly in London Southbank.

My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage.

It is Anna Chasinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Hergan.

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

Here we go.

Starting with my fact this week.

My fact is that the way to defeat the British Royal Navy's most advanced destroyer ship is to put it in warm water.

So the British have spent a billion on six massive destroyer ships.

These are ships that

in their press release said this is the most advanced technology.

These are the most advanced ships of all time going into the oceans.

It turns out that their engines can't take warm water.

And so if they go to the Persian Gulf, for example, the whole ship just breaks.

It just completely breaks.

Would we ever want to go to the Persian Gulf?

It's dangerous there.

We should just start wars in Iceland.

The defense was that they weren't anticipating having to go somewhere like the Gulf.

So John Hudson, who's a managing director of BAE Systems, said the operating profile at the time was that there would not be continuous operations in the Gulf.

As if that was just out of the question at the time that we'd end up there.

So yeah, they didn't expect to have to go anywhere.

There was a response from the MOD.

They said, this is a quote from the CFT article, the MOD added that the ships remained one of the most capable warships on the planet.

But only parts of the planet.

The Rolls-Royce spokesman said, this is not the fault of Rolls-Royce.

It is the laws of physics.

Can't do anything about those.

That's insane.

Yep.

That's amazing.

Is it the fault of Rolls-Royce and so on for making the engines better, or is it the fault of the MOD for not telling them that?

Rolls-Royce certainly claims it's the fault of the MOD.

Yeah.

And the MOD probably says it's Rolls-Royce's fault, and everyone says it's Isaac Newson's fault.

Yeah, to fix these ships, actually, when they do replace the engines, they're going to have to drill a huge hole in the underside of the boats, I think.

So, you've really got to tear the whole thing apart at this point.

Wow.

And it's a billion pounds each, I think.

Yeah.

But that is, of course, only three months of the money that we're going to get back from Europe.

Did you know there's one vertical shipwreck in the world, which is just sticking up completely vertically at a 90-degree angle to the seabed?

Wow.

And this is HMS Victoria, and it's a really interesting story.

So

this was a battleship in the late 19th century, and it was one of the biggest battleship wrecks that the UK suffered.

And it was because of this guy, Admiral Tryon, which feels like a.

He just turned up at the Admiralty one day.

Just trying that on, and it did not go well for him.

So

he gave this bizarre order in 1893.

He was a really well-decorated admiral in the Royal Navy, and he was just off the coast of Lebanon, and there were two main ships leading this big fleet, the HMS Victoria and HMS Camperdown.

And he suddenly, via semaphore, gave the instruction to Camperdown that those two ships that were running parallel to each other had to turn inwards towards each other and do a full circle in order to come back.

And the turning circle of those ships was collectively two kilometers, and there was one kilometer between them.

So it was physically impossible.

Again, it's a law of physics issue.

It was physically impossible for them not to crash into each other.

So the captain of HMS Camperdown ignored that the first time around.

But when he gave the order a second time, he just had to obey, because that was what you did in the 1890s.

And so they did this turn and lo and behold these two ships both just captained by the same guy crashed straight into each other and one of them like plummeted to the bottom of the ocean yeah his last words were it's all my fault Whoa,

yeah.

His last words were what on his deathbed or on his

shipwreck.

A lot of people died.

So

bizarrely, 357 people were rescued, but sadly, 358 people were drowned.

And so it just tipped it over the edge.

And so as he was going down, he said, It's all my fault, to which I guess everyone on board his ship replied, Yes, it is.

Wow,

and his name was Tryon, wasn't it?

Tryon, Admiral Tryon.

Yeah, my favourite kind of nominatively determined captain of a ship was Captain Schlitt.

And he was a captain of a German U-boat.

It was U-1206, and it sank off the coast of Scotland because the toilets flooded.

Really?

I don't know what caused the original blockage, but um what happened was there was um they flushed it a couple of times and it overflowed, but the batteries were underneath the toilet, so it wasn't a very well-designed submarine.

Uh and so the water went into the batteries, that released a load of chlorine gas, and then they were like, Oh shit, there's chlorine gas everywhere, so they had to go to the surface, and then when they got to the surface, the British just went, Oh, there's a submarine, let's shoot it.

Here's the thing, really early submarines, um, they were basically at the surface almost all the time.

They were pretty much surface ships that had the capacity to dive.

But the really odd thing is that even in the Second World War, to have extra observation, a German U-boat would surface, and then it would send up a kite with a man in a little seat, and he would look around.

This truly happened.

This is within living memory.

He would look around, and he could, because obviously you can see dozens of miles in any direction you can see any ships.

And then 53 kilometers, apparently, was the maximum you could see.

And the only disadvantage was obviously it immediately gave away your position.

And you would then have to dive really quickly once you've seen who's in the area.

And the guy is still attached to the submarine being pulled down, is he?

I think they

get him back on board.

And they're going to be.

Deep breath.

We're going to yonder.

When the battleship arrives, when the British warship arrives, it's just a bloke in a kite.

Submarine?

No.

I don't think so.

I'm sure I've noticed that.

So, the US Navy's most advanced new battleship is called the USS Zumvolt, and it is so advanced, it is so stealthy, that in fact it's too stealthy, and it's going to have to carry big reflective pads so other things don't bump into it.

It's about 400 feet long, and it can make itself look on radar like a 50-foot-long fishing boat.

One quick last thing.

You know, the ceremony, the launching launching ceremonies of boats.

So every time a new royal boat is launched then we smash a champagne bottle or a woman customarily smashes a champagne bottle into it.

And I didn't realize the first instance in this was in the 18th century and the person who first smashed a champagne bottle onto a ship's hull was the Princess of Hanover

and she according to reports at the time threw the bottle at it.

So now we smash it but she threw the bottle at it with more energy than accuracy missing the ship entirely and injuring one of the spectators who

who put in a claim for damages against the Admiralty.

Does that mean that he was technically the ship?

Is that how it works?

Does the Navy have to use him?

Yep.

This is HMS Destroyer.

This is HMS Arrogant, HMS Kevin,

HMS

Bloodface.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certopro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each CertaPro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Okay, it's time for our second fact, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1988, Singapore held a beauty contest where 60% of the judging marks were awarded for how good a contestant's website was.

So this was a way to promote the internet in Singapore in the 90s, and it was their leading internet service provider called SingNet.

They had a competition to find intellectual beauty.

And 60% of the marks were awarded for internet knowledge, which was producing your own homepage and also sitting at a laptop answering internet trivia questions.

Yeah.

Wow.

And designing, like it was just a laptop on stage, and they came out and designed a website.

Also, do they have to design it on the spot?

Yeah.

Doesn't it take days?

Not if you use squarespace.com.

So obviously beauty contests, we probably all think they're a little bit sexist.

But according to Miss America organization, they claim to be the largest scholarship organization solely for women in the whole of America.

I think that's been debunked

by John Oliver.

It's a shame because they got such a rigorous round of support from the audience.

I think they do give out some scholarships, but they don't give out nearly as many as were originally claimed.

So modern beauty contests were invented by Petey Barnum, who we must all know, he is the guy who kind of started circuses.

He was a big kind of circus king of America.

And he started them in Delaware in 1880 and it was a panel of judges who chose and one of the judges was Thomas Edison.

Really?

Yeah.

And it was to promote a beach resort outside of the normal kind of time that people would go to beaches.

In 1955, America had a sausage queen.

That was a competition.

There was a huge rash in the fifties especially of really, really heavily sponsored competitions.

If you Google image search, I've done this and it's safe, so don't worry.

Took a risk.

If you Google image search, Sausage Queen, you'll find

a picture of this poor woman.

She's she's wearing a bikini, but she's also covered in sausages.

Well, there are in Colombia, there are loads and loads of beauty pageants.

So I think the BBC worked out that Colombia holds 3,794 beauty pageants a day a year.

A year.

Calm down.

You're all beautiful.

But there's more than 10 a day.

And so they've had to branch out.

So they have Miss Onion and that's where you have to prove your extensive knowledge of onions.

They have the International Coffee Pageant, which similarly Miss Coffee is someone from Japan, bizarrely, who proved her knowledge of Colombian coffee well enough.

They have donkey pageants, which are really popular, which is where you dress up donkeys.

And this takes place

in rural Colombia, and it's where you dress up your donkeys as political or famous figures and you prance them around.

So at the last donkey pageant, I think one of them was Barack Obama.

He was draped in an American flag, so he was wearing an American flag as sort of a dress, and he had a USA tie on him.

And in the end, the prize actually went to a donkey dressed as a Colombian preacher.

And Barack Obama's handler apparently was seen storming off in outrage.

I would have, I'd put a bag of oats on my donkey's nose, and then it would be Don Quixote.

Are they ready?

Mech, mix, mix.

Mix.

On the flip side, I was reading about, and it's terrible that this exists, but this does exist.

In Zimbabwe, there's an annual Mr.

Ugly competition.

And it's been going for four years.

This will be the fifth year, 2016.

Last year, they had a situation, a huge controversy, because

the person who was awarded the top prize of Mr.

Ugly in the country was deemed too handsome by most of the people who were in it.

Mainly, it was the guy who's won it three years in a row, who was like, This guy's not ugly, he's just missing teeth.

Apparently, he just can't believe the contest got ugly.

They really stuck to their guns.

The guy, one of the main judges, said

Sierra made a tremendous effort.

This is the guy who won.

Sierra made a tremendous tremendous effort to enhance his ugliness by pulling facial stunts.

Masvenu, who was the former champion, thought he's so ugly that he didn't even need to try hard.

That cost him the crown.

And so, yeah, he's.

So none of the judging panel said, oh, I just thought voting him would be a protest.

I didn't think he'd actually win.

Yeah, this is a satirical show we did.

This is the most satirical we've ever made.

So um a thing about the internet in Singapore.

Yeah.

Okay, so in two thousand one Singapore banned campaigning on the internet during its election.

So Minister for Information and Arts Lee Yok Swan said a free-for-all internet campaigning environment without rules is not advisable.

On the internet, once a false story or rumour is started, it's like water that has been spilled.

It's almost impossible to rein in the matters, especially in the limited period of an election campaign.

I think we can all agree he was way off the mark there.

They said they were quite into promoting the internet around that period, weren't they?

Because they had an internet festival in the year 2000.

And that was so the centrepiece of this festival was this guy called Nicholas Ng, who was a computer engineer who'd founded this company called Wave New World.

And this was all the talk of the millennial Singaporean Internet Festival.

And as the BBC reported, he said that the internet and this new media explosion in the year 2000 have brought us email, e-commerce, DVD movies, interactive games, but something is missing.

The sense of smell.

And

he was starting up a company called DigiSense, which allowed you to use the internet but smell as you were doing it, all the scents that would be appropriate to the website that you were searching.

I think you don't always want to smell the thing that you're looking up.

If it's Sausage Queen, you know what we have to do.

If you Google the phrase, smell the sausage queen, we cannot guarantee that I'm safe.

It is crazy, though, because I remember the internet in 1998, which was pretty basic.

So the idea that there would be a massive competition at that time seems ridiculous.

I went to Jodrell Bank, which is in Cheshire.

It's a big sort of, what is it, a big telescope?

They look for aliens, a big telescope.

So it was in the 90s, and we didn't, no one had the internet.

We didn't have it in our school, so we all went there to kind of look at the internet.

And I remember going in there.

I know, it's amazing.

But I went in there and kind of searched for fantasy football, which I was into at the time.

And it kind of just picked up the word fantasy and gave me lots of things that, as a young teenage boy, I'd never really seen before.

Whoa!

But you've met a Jodrell bank, yeah.

That's ironic considering the rhyming slang that Jodrell Bank is,

guys.

We need to move on in a sec.

We ought to, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I have one little thing about contests in Singapore.

So, in 2009,

men's sport in Singapore was so bad that they couldn't find a sportsman of the year.

So, 2008 was an Olympic year as well.

The president of their Olympic Council said, unfortunately, it was a bad year.

None of them really achieved anything noteworthy.

So, I had a look at what they did in the Olympics.

And the table tennis team went out in the group stage.

None of the sailors made the top 20.

Their only track athlete went out in the first round.

Their only shooter lost in the first round.

Their only swimmer lost in the first round.

And their only male badminton player lost in the second round.

So you think he might have won, but he had a bay in the first round.

Time for fact number three, and that is Anna Chasinski.

My fact this week is that there is a network of fully furnished fake apartments in the UK whose sole purpose is to get burgled.

Wow.

It's amazing.

That's amazing.

How many, when you say a network, how many

so bizarre that that's your first question?

Who owns them?

So they are owned by the government.

So this is, there are a lot, to answer your question, apparently.

That helps.

They exist in every major city in the UK.

There are a few of these.

And I found this out in a new book that's just come out this year called A Burglar's Guide to the City.

It's by Jeff Manau, and it's so good.

And yeah, it's this capture house program that the government runs, which is where you build a completely fake apartment that's totally kitted out with a lot of nice technology, with some furniture that's often donated by the local police force, apparently, that they didn't want.

And you build this apartment in a way that will hopefully lure burglars to burgle it.

And unbeknownst to them, they're all covered in this chemical agent, which can only be seen under UV light.

So, whenever the burglar who's burgling it touches a handle or walks across the floor, then he's covering himself in this chemical agent, which then leaves a trace of where he's been.

And also, they're full of cameras.

So, basically, they're there as traps so that burglars come in and then the police follow immediately afterwards.

And they're all over the place, and you wouldn't know if there was one in your apartment building.

They're everywhere, yeah.

So you can say you wouldn't know if what was your home was one of these.

If you've been burgled, maybe it is.

I want to know how they lure burglars to burgle them.

Do they have people sort of ostentatiously carrying in

really nice tellies and stuff?

Yeah.

Saying, oh, I must get a second lock for this door one of these days.

As soon as I get back from that long holiday,

thank God we got rid of the dog.

Yeah, it's basically that.

No, they're often targeting one specific burglar.

So they'll be away.

It's amazing.

It's genuinely incredible.

They target that particular burglar's motor shopper Andy.

So if he only robs first floor flats, for example, they'll try and make sure that one of the capture houses is a first-floor flat, if they can.

And then they walk around outside of shouting, Marjorie, can you remind me to open all the windows?

It's so warm.

And then they'll leave a window open and they'll try and, you know, gear them in.

It's true, it's that police thing where

you pick up so many clues for the way a burglar operates, and you really can rig up a house or a flat so that it is going to attract that one burglar in the area.

And one burglar can raise the crime rates of one area massively because he and his gang or she and her gang will just be operating on lots of houses every day of the week.

I was looking into so police having to fake things in order to get results.

Confessions.

Yes.

So one of the things I read about is that

bomb and drug sniffing dogs, when they go around looking for any, you know, there are airports trying to sniff out drugs and so on.

Apparently, if they don't get a win, if they don't manage to smell out some drugs, they get quite depressed.

Psychologically, sniffer dogs actually get depressed that they don't have a sort of, they've done a good job.

So, what the police will do is they'll fake a situation.

Yeah, yeah, honestly, where the dog can then sniff at someone and be like, oh, and they

just get members of the public, they pay them to do it, and they basically.

They pay members of the public.

I don't know if they pay them, but they've set up fake drug bus for dogs so that dogs can feel better.

It's a great fact.

These guys always have to tell me what I've actually got a good fact that I think you've done very well.

Have a biscuit.

Do you want to hear about a couple of the

cool devices that you can get if you don't want to be burgled?

Yes, please.

Sure thing.

A lock.

A lock, yeah.

So you can get a thing called fake TV, which is very cool, and it's this panel which is just flashing LED lights, but from the outside, it looks exactly like someone's indoors and watching tele.

Oh, why don't you just leave your TV on?

Good point.

Great.

That's stuff their business model.

No,

I think the idea is it uses a lot less energy than just leaving your telly on all the time.

Did someone watch Home Alone and see the Christmas seed and they're like, that's a business model.

That is a thing you can buy.

It's called fake T V.

And it l and I've seen it.

It looks right.

I didn't burgle the house.

And there's another thing you can get.

You can get an anti-theft security smog jet machine.

This is for things like banks and things like that.

But it's if there's a break-in, it just floods the entire room with smog.

Wow.

Yeah.

And that's very cool.

And the burglar goes in and goes, oh, I'm in the 19th century.

Just on the subject of fake, I was looking for fake things and police, and I just found a story that I rather like from last year.

This is from Sutton, so not too far from here.

And it's that in June of last year, police in Sutton turned up to a house because they'd had a tip-off from the RSPCA and they had a standoff over a snake which was loose in someone's garden.

And they had a reasonably long standoff until it was pointed out to them that it was a garden ornament snake.

But they were standing really still watching it, and it wasn't moving, and they weren't moving.

And then a resident told them

it's not real.

And I just love the quote: the neighbor was called Gary Hollins, a 43-year-old who lived nearby.

And he said, I could have told you it was a fake snake because the paint is peeling off it.

Hey, snakes shed their skin.

That's true.

True, good point.

We need to move on to the final fact.

Okay, maybe we should do some hilarious burglary stories.

Sure.

Shall we?

So I went on the internet and looked for some burglar headlines from the last few months.

So a burglar was caught after knocking over a tin of white paint during a break-in and leaving footsteps leading all the way to his door.

Oh, man.

There was another one who was caught by police after having a bite out of a cucumber and leaving his DNA inside the cucumber?

There was a post office burglar who was caught after he tried to buy a car with £1,000 in one pound coins.

And there was a Kentucky burglar who was arrested after accidentally dialing his phone 911

while he was talking to an accomplice about the burglary that he was just about to do.

Oh my God.

What?

And they just overheard him saying what he was going to do and then they caught him.

Wow.

Do you remember there was that story about there was a couple who were downstairs and they'd arrived back home and some two people were in their house robbing the house.

Sorry, no, it was one person.

One person was in the house.

So he quickly ran upstairs and hid and was trying to plan his escape route.

And according to this story, the burglar is upstairs and he's just sitting there, kind of going, okay, what do I do?

They're downstairs and one of the couple says, oh, I heard a hilarious joke today.

Told the joke.

Delivered the punchline.

The recipient just didn't laugh.

And then they just heard this.

And the burglar couldn't help but go, I wonder what happens at that knock-knock-jerk.

Pisses himself, and then they bust over.

They called the cops.

So we're gonna go.

That's a true story.

We need to move on to the final fact.

Okay.

Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

Washable sofas.com has your back, featuring the Anibay collection, the only designer sofa that's machine-washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

That's right, sofas started just $699.

Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabrics.

Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.

The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Check out washable sofas.com and get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

No return shipping or restocking fees.

Every penny back.

Upgrade now at washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Dig into precious metal returns with the Sprat Active Gold and Silver Miners ETF, GBUG.

G-Bug ETF provides convenient access to gold and silver mining equities, all while being actively managed by a team with over 100 years of collective investment experience.

Visit sprotetfs.com or call 1-888-622-1813 for disclosure and prospectus information.

Containing investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses, which should be read carefully.

Alps Distributors Inc.

is the distributor for the Sprot ETFs.

Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin.

Um, I don't think James has done this.

It's my favorite.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Adder Chair.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

Thank you, Dan.

My fact is that the world's biggest skywriting firm recently turned down a request to draw the largest ever penis in the sky.

That was worth waiting for.

So skywriting, we all know, is where planes loop the loop and they release smoke in various patterns to make letters or shapes or whatever it is.

And the really cool thing is there are only five full-time sky writers on the planet.

Only five people who make a full-time living.

A lot of sort of freelancer people do it part-time.

There's an amazing article on the website Quartz about this, because there's a family firm of people who do it, and they have various rules.

So they turn down swear words.

They won't write really rude things in the sky.

And they've also turned down someone who wanted to get the largest ever penis drawn in the sky.

But they did, earlier this year, write over California the words, Trump is disgusting.

so

But they're now they now regret it and they say they wish they hadn't taken it because they want to be kind of aplus by writing the word Trump they did kind of have the world's biggest penis in the sky

Yeah, so and the other cool thing is that there are two I didn't know there are two main ways of making Letters in the sky you can either do it with one plane Which is where you have and you have a sort of smoke jet basically as an adapted exhaust out of the back of the plane and you can either have one plane but it takes ages and you can only write about 12 letters maximum.

And it takes a couple of minutes to write a single letter.

Because the letters are huge.

Each of the letters is as tall as the Empire State Building.

Whoa!

Yeah, they're massive.

And a single message is at least five miles long in the sky.

This is very exciting, because there's now a new thing you can do called sky typing, which is where you have five planes next to each other, right, and they're all flying in formation, and they have a computer-controlled system which releases puffs of smoke at exactly the right moment.

So they're all writing either on or off in the sky, and that produces

an inkjet printer kind of thing.

Like an inkjet printer, yeah, yeah.

And it slowly produces the word like that as they fly across.

So you can do longer messages now using sky typing.

And that's the old new divide in skywriting.

That's amazing.

My favorite one was from a few years ago, and it just suddenly appeared in the air.

How do I land?

And it was a comedian who did that.

It was a Kickstarter.

He decided he wanted to help skywriting come back.

He thought it'd be a great place to put a joke up.

And so he did a Kickstarter and they raised $4,000 American dollars.

That's how much it costs to have something like,

How do I land?

Question mark.

Do you know that actually it was a really windy day?

And so they did the H, and then by the time they'd done the O, the H had already gone.

Oh!

And then by the time they did the W, the H and the O had already gone.

And he said, if you watch the sky for 20 minutes, you could probably piece it together.

Oh, no, no.

This is a guy called.

He was a comedian called Kurt Braunola yeah he still is a comedian called Kurt Braun

and he's he's just just so people know who he is Kirsten Schull Kristen Scholl sorry who is in flight the Concords and and so on it's her comedy partner so he's very big in the sense

but when he did this unless you really really watched and saw each letter go you couldn't really tell what was happening so what he did was he took a photo of each letter before it blew away and then he put them all together in a composite photo and then put it online saying this is what it would have looked like.

Of course, he could have just photoshopped the whole thing, it would have been interesting.

I really like so back in the sort of 60s, it was used.

There were so many plans that skywriting was going to be the main way that you would advertise with companies.

I think you're right, and pretty much it was when TV came in, and suddenly we could get advertising into everyone's homes immediately.

And that was when skywriting's like, oh, we don't really need this anymore.

And it didn't need to be a cloudless, sunny day for the advertising to reach your home, which it did.

But there was a lot of um alarmism about skywriting in the early days of it, that it was just going to be this like all new technologies, it was going to be this awful thing.

Um so I was looking in the newspaper archives and uh things were writing people were writing things about it like in nineteen thirty two there was a debate in the House of Commons as to whether we should allow advertisers free use of the sky to do this skywriting.

And those MPs who were against it said it was a desecration of the sky so monstrous it should be completely completely prohibited.

And it was decided the inventor would promise not to do it in their cathedrals or monuments and would

agree not to vulgarize the sky.

But people thought it was going to ruin it.

People thought it would just spiral out of control and the entire sky would be occupied by constant adverts.

Well, they kept saying, yeah, in New York, they were worried that people living in high-rise buildings would be pummeled by the smoke that was coming down.

So they were recommending close your windows so that you don't die, effectively, which was not true at all.

And it was a a sloppy business as well 1961 I read this amazing report where someone went up did the message came back down looked up saw that they did it wrong it was because it's very hard to do made a mistake went back up put a cross through it

and redid the whole thing again do you want do you know what the first ever skywriting message said no it said daily mail it was an advert for the daily mail it was in 1922 and um it was invented skywriting was invented by this guy called john savage

who was a pilot, and the war was over, and he sort of started experimenting.

So, this is cool.

He had been an agent to a chap called B.C.

Hux, who was the first Englishman to do a loop-the-loop in a plane.

Oh, wow.

What?

Yeah.

That was cool.

He had a flying agent, apparently.

And then, so, after he'd experimented with this daily mail advert, he went to the USA and he wrote in the sky above New York, Hello, USA, but no explanation.

Nothing.

Then the next day, he sent someone else else back up, another pilot, and the message he wrote in the sky was, Call Vanderbilt 7100, which is the hotel he was staying at.

As soon as people saw that, they started phoning the hotel by the hundreds saying, I must buy this as an advert.

That was his only advertising method.

I think he was proving the effectiveness, wasn't he?

So I think 47,000 people called within three hours, and it was sort of it proves the effectiveness of this advertising that they all called.

But someone I like this, in 1961,

there was a guy who was one of the very few people who was employed as a skywriter, and he had hated his maths teacher at school, he said.

And so he did the skywriting with the advertisement that he'd been employed to write in the sky.

And then he had some spare ink in his tank.

And so at the end of his working day, he scrolled 4 plus 1 equals 6 in the sky as revenge against his high school maths teacher.

Isn't that nice?

That's amazing.

How is that revenge?

Yeah, it relies on a lot of things.

The maths teacher seeing it, the mass teacher knowing it's him, the maths teacher giving a shit about him anyway.

And also, it's not a revenge to still be enumerate.

I'll show my English teacher by unlearning reading.

I was reading a few years ago, and I can't read out the whole passage, but it's really worth reading this person's account about how when in, I think it was around 2008, they were doing a

someone hired a skywriting team to write Peace Now across the sky.

So there was a protest going because Obama was doing some sort of talk and they just wanted to say, we want peace, no more war, all that sort of stuff.

So the big problem that the pilot had is that they misjudged the size of the words.

And as they were finishing up the words, they were heading directly into territory that the military said this is not an airspace you're allowed into because we have the president down there and you will be shot down.

Someone in the plane going, we need to turn around, we need to turn around.

They were going, I need to get there so I can make the turn up to finish the W on the nil.

So in the end, did they read peace?

No.

We need to wrap up really soon.

Can I quickly tell you about a chap in Melbourne who this was a couple of years ago?

He wrote, he proposed to his girlfriend in the sky with sky writing.

He wrote, Marie, that was her name, marry me, across the sky, and she said no when she saw it.

No.

Did she also send the plane up to say no?

Because they'd been together for years and years and years, and and then they'd broken up, and then they were getting back together, and he was thinking, I think this will clinch it.

And

he said, at least I know I've tried my best.

Do you know that was so weird?

Because there's another guy in Melbourne recently who got involved in sky writing because he had a girlfriend called Prue, and he wanted to send her a Valentine's Day message in the sky saying, Happy Valentine's Day, Prue, but couldn't afford it.

So he started a Kickstarter for everyone else who had a girlfriend called Prue in the world and said, if you will contribute to this, then we'll put the message, Happy Valentine's Day, Prue.

Love me.

So no one knows which one it was.

Oh, there was a guy who wrote, Sorry, in the sky above, I was in American city, and no one knows who it was, but I imagine a lot of people will have been using that.

That's for me to you.

I am sorry.

Boris Johnson's already got a second one on the go.

Okay, okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shate, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Czaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And you can go to no suchthingasafish.com.

We've got all our previous episodes up there.

You can also go to no suchthingasthenews.com because we have a TV show and you can watch all of our previous episodes there too.

We will see you again next week, guys.

Thank you so much for being here in the South Bank of London.

Thank you for listening at home.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

From wine country weekends to scenic drives through the Sierra foothills, fall is the perfect time to explore California.

And there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

With 17 fuel-efficient options like the stylish all-hybrid Camry, the Adventure-Ready RAV4 hybrid, or the spacious Grand Highlander hybrid, Toyota has the perfect ride for any adventure.

Every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complementary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and of course, Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Visit your local Toyota dealer and test drive one today so you can be prepared for wherever the road takes you this fall.

Toyota, let's go places.

See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.