41: No Such Thing As Reginald The Red-Nosed Reindeer

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We ran it on QI a few years ago,

which was there's no such thing as a fish.

And there's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week from the Aces and Eights Bar in Tuffnor Park.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

This is our Christmas special.

And once again, we've gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

We begin with my fact.

My fact this week is that before going on stage to read a Christmas carol, Charles Dickens had a warm-up routine of drinking a pint of champagne.

In the morning when he woke up, he'd have two tablespoons of rum, he would have the pint of champagne at lunch, and then just before he went on stage, he would have sherry, which he would mix raw egg into.

Wow, the interesting thing is that you would think, okay, Charles Dickens, he probably did one or two readings of a Christmas Carol.

If you look into his biography, you could almost claim that he was as much a performer as a writer.

He spent years as a performer, he would go on massive tours.

He was like Michael McIntyre, he was like properly always on tours.

One of his tours in America got him $2.3 million.

That's how much in today's money, that is.

Oh, in today's money.

Another thing he used to do at his tours is hypnotise his wife.

And also with the warm-up act, I think.

Okay, so that was his warm-up routine, the warm-up act.

Hypnotise his wife, he was really into hypnosis.

And so he'd bring his wife on stage and show off.

Wow.

Yeah.

What would he make his wife do?

I think he just made her be able to obey him in every way, which maybe she was doing already.

Yeah, but it was the 19th century.

So he was really into mesmerism, which I mentioned because you like people whose names are directly related to the thing that they created.

And Anton Mesmer came up with mesmerism, which is hypnotism.

You know, Mesmer had a big tree in his garden that people would come and hug.

And that's where tree hugging came from, Horedo.

So he claimed that he had mesmerized it and made it, given it some of his hypnotic power.

He called it animal magnetism, didn't he?

Yes, he did.

And

he also claimed he had mesmerized the sun.

Again, remotely.

And he just said, Yeah, if you get any sunlight, you're getting some of my mesmeric power now.

I mean, he was a charlatan.

Wow.

Charles Dickens and a Christmas Carol.

So he made no money from it, in spite of the fact that it was incredibly popular.

So within maybe six weeks, there were five different performances of it on the stage in London, all over London at different theatres.

But they had not very good copyright laws, and basically pirates stole pirates.

Wow.

19th century is the right time for pirates.

No, actual book pirates.

What am I saying?

Copyright pirate.

It was pirated.

That's what I'm looking for.

And then he sued the pirates, and I'm going to keep using the word pirates.

And they declared themselves bankrupt.

So he was left to pay the equivalent of £56,000 in modern-day money in his own legal fees, because they just folded immediately.

So it's quite sad for him.

He did have, speaking of pirates, cowboy connections.

Pirates and cowboys are kind of connected, right, in people's minds?

So.

What?

They're kind of cool, murderous figures from history.

So Butch Cassidy's grandfather was the basis for Oliver Twist, it is thought.

So Butch Cassidy's great-grandfather went into business with Charles Dickens' father, and it ended up falling apart.

They both ended up in prison together.

And Charles Dickens grew up seeing Butch Cassidy's grandfather being a beggar on the streets, and Oliver Twist, it's thought he based it on Butch Cassidy's grandfather.

That's amazing.

For a second, I thought you said he was the bassist for Oliver Twist.

Not a band, no, not a band in that.

Do you know who Scrooge was based on?

One person they thought it might have been based on Scrooge was a guy called Jemmy Wood, and he was a very famous miser back in the day.

He was such a miser that his coffin was said to be stoned when he died.

They all threw stones at him because they hated him so much.

He once went to Gloucester to Tewkesbury and jumped on the back of a hearse because he didn't want to pay for a carriage.

He chose to die because there was a coffin passing by.

And he thought, now would be a good time to save money.

also if you're stoning somebody's coffin that's too late

stone them while they're stone them while they're living oh don't stone them at all yeah yeah let's not advocate yeah but he also would walk down the docks and there would be coal ships going past and he would just grab small bits of coal that came off these ships just so they didn't have to pay for them to pay for the coal himself.

So he was a real miser and they reckon that's and he was quite famous for it at the time as well.

Right, okay.

Did Dickens actually base Scrooge on a person though?

It might be on him.

There's a few other people as well.

Right, okay.

There's a good good person called Jasper Pachelmurton who's in the old curiosity shop and he killed his 14 wives by tickling them to death.

And apparently he's based on a real person, amazingly, based on an article in the Illustrated Police News of 1869 entitled A Wife Driven Insane by a Husband Tickling Her Feet.

And this guy had fooled his wife into thinking that being tied to a plank would help her bad back.

And then once she she was secured she would drive her to insanity with a feather to the feet.

Oh my god.

You can't fool that twice though.

No.

Can you?

Well you're insane by the end of the first time.

Yeah it's true yeah.

I was looking into rituals because I just love the idea that that was a thing that as I say Dickens did this.

He would tour like a stand-up comedian and so he would do that every day.

It's not like this was a random thing.

He would get up and have the rum and the champagne and the sherry every single day day while he was on tour.

And I don't know how you can sustain doing that.

But it turns out that every great writer had some kind of quirk of a ritual that they would stick to.

And I was looking into a few of those.

There's some really fun ones.

Tom Wolfe.

We all know Tom Wolfe.

Bonfire of the Vanities.

His thing was he one day had the most amazing, what he said was the most inspired burst of writing that he's had in a very long time.

He was standing by his window.

He had this burst of writing, and he loved it so much that he just thought, I need to recreate whatever I did to lead me to this moment of great writing.

And he couldn't work it out, so he kept retracing the steps, and then he worked out what it was.

It was that night that he did this great burst of writing.

He was standing by his window looking outside, and he was fondling his genitals, and he was like, oh my god, that was it.

Fondling my genitals is what has made me come up with these great ideas.

So that's now how Tom Wolf writes.

And we know this as well because it was in a letter to his editor where he wrote that his penis remained limp and unaroused.

Like he told his editor, I've worked out what makes me a great great writer.

And that's what it is.

Tons of writers have relied on alcohol, haven't they?

Throughout the ages.

So Tennessee Williams, the playwright Tennessee Williams, entry from his diary in 1957, reads: Two scotches at the bar, then three drinks later in the morning,

a daiquiri at Dirty Dicks, three glasses of red wine at lunch, three of wine at dinner, also a green tranquilizer whose name I do not know, and a yellow one I think is called Reserpine or something like that.

And the bad thing about that is when he wrote it, he was was in rehab at the time.

Genuinely.

JG Ballad used to have scotch as well.

And that was because he thought that it changed the microclimate of his brain.

People justify it in whatever way they need to.

They've discovered, speaking of alcohol, that alcohol, so A, scientists have recently discovered with paleogenetics, which uses a kind of gene sequencing, that humans develop the capacity to digest alcohol successfully way before we thought they did.

So we thought we did in about 7,000 BC, and it it turns out was about 10 million years ago.

That's when we got this gene.

And that's the reason that we've survived.

So our ability to properly digest alcohol, because all the fruit that was falling from the trees at the time that we needed to eat to survive was rotting and fermenting, and there was a mutation in our ancestors' genes, which meant that we could eat it, not die.

That's like with Neanderthals and milk.

Apparently milk is a new thing to us.

Apparently we've only been able to.

That's why I always offer people milk, because I'm like, uh, Neanderthal in disguise

and when they pass the test I know

that's and milk intolerance increases as you get closer to the equator what yeah yeah Britain is the most lactose tolerant country in the world yeah most lactose tolerant lactose tolerance is a mutation and it it spreads in prevalence if as you get towards the poles of the earth because I think isn't there something to do about milk going off I mean in hot temperatures that sounds stupid but I think it's true so they just don't have fridges they're just leaving their their milk to go off.

Well, we didn't have fridges until very recently.

Yeah.

Surely.

And they've got them at the equator now.

It's not that far from the middle.

No, right.

I know, but what I'm saying is that 500 years ago, you wouldn't have,

it wouldn't be as easy to keep milk cold, and there's less of a reason to have the mutation because milk is drunk less.

And there's less farming pasture.

Okay.

We need to wrap up on the fact.

Does anyone else have anything they want to add?

All I have to add is that Ernest Hemingway, he was an alcoholic, another writer, alcoholic, and his friend George Plimpton said that by the time he was dying, his liver protruded from his belly like a long fat leech.

Which made me think that if you don't have that, you're probably okay.

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Move on to fact number two.

Fact number two is from James.

Okay, my fact this week is that crap Christmas jumpers date back to the Romans.

Um, what do you mean by that?

Well, I genuinely don't know actually.

Didn't research this at all.

Yeah, so not Christmas, because there wasn't a Christmas there, but they did have a similar festival called Saturnalia.

And part of it was a festival called Sigalaria on the twenty-third of December.

And there was a writer called Marshall who wrote about the gifts that you would get around that time.

And he said that you would get fish sauce, jars of honey, bottles of wine, toothpicks, a few other things.

And then one of the things was a shaggy nursling of a weaver on the Seine, a barbarian garment, a thing uncouth, but not to be despised in cold December.

So basically, he was saying that in that time of year, people would get really horrible jumpers, but they would be happy of them because the weather was so bad.

It's a bit more poetic, isn't it?

Yeah.

Oh, another shaggy nursling of a weaver.

Guys, it's going to be shaggy nursing of a weaver day on Friday, so do wear your shaggy nursling of a weaver to the office and make a donation.

And also, at Saturnalia, aristocrats would wear brightly coloured fabrics and not necessarily matching ones.

They would wear unusual combinations of clothes.

And the outfit was called the synthesis, which means things being put together.

So I think that's the other strand of the Christmas jumper theory.

No, that's right.

This comes actually from a press release from the University of Reading that I read, and they've gone into all this.

They also said that people then drank raisin wine, wine flavoured with pitch, honeyed wine, which does sound nice, and also a special wine for loosening the bowels.

Who is accepting that at dinner?

Can I get the bowel loosening?

What were their toilets like?

It's like, would you like red, white, or bowel loosening?

Yeah, exactly.

But we're brown, effectively.

The toilets were okay.

Were they?

Yeah, we found.

We, I mean, I mean, the four of us have found a perfectly preserved Roman toilet seat on Hadrian's wall.

Oh.

We haven't, but they have.

They were okay.

They were shitting off walls.

But

they had latrines.

Did they go over the edge of the wall?

Because there are barbarians on one side of the wall.

Well, so it was like an attack strategy as well as.

But that's the thing, actually, about you know like medieval towns?

Yeah.

The idea is that you would throw boiling oil on the people attacking you.

But of course they would never do that because oil is a really precious thing that you

need to keep.

And so what they would throw is urine and feces.

Okay.

Or sometimes boiling water, but never oil.

That's one of the best ever cartoons from Private Eye.

There's a castle being attacked and the defenders are pouring a huge cauldron of oil over the side, and there's a guy in chef's wise next to them saying, Drizzle, for God's sake, Drizzila.

Maybe you were pour boiling oil to show how rich you were, though, in the same way that people have, you know, in Elizabethan times they used to blacken their teeth, didn't they?

Because it showed if you had really rotting teeth that you were eating lots of rich food.

Maybe it was that kind of, yeah, I think that was why people did that.

It's a mark of status.

There's another weird style that happened in America when TV became a massive thing, when people started owning their own personal TV in their houses.

I got this from a Bill Bryson book.

There used to be a type of clothing called videos.

This was before videos.

And you would buy your video to wear to someone's house to watch TV.

And everyone would be wearing the same thing because it was such an event to watch TV in a house.

Did it look like a bit like a black rectangular thing with two circular diets in it?

Do you know who the patron saint of television is?

This is going forward.

There's a patron saint of the patron.

That is Saint Claire of Assisi, who is one of the followers of Saint Francis of Assisi.

And she was sick in bed, and there was a mass going on in the other room, and she could somehow see the mass happening on the wall.

And that miracle then made her the patron saint of television.

Wow.

Wow.

What did she see?

She saw the mass happening.

Oh, that was it?

Yeah, it's like songs of praise.

You changed the channel.

Come on, that's

was it a glass wall?

There was another saint from Assisi called Saint Vitalis of Assisi, and he is the patron saint of genital diseases.

Okay?

And don't need to tell me, mate.

Sorry.

There's a patron saint of STDs.

Yes.

Is it all STDs?

Because I know St.

George is the patron saint of syphilis.

We don't want to take it away from him.

No.

He's like a junior minister in the STD saint department.

department.

Obviously, he has a broader brief as well.

So, George is the patron saint of lepers, too.

Anyway, sorry.

Oh, yeah, so Saint Vitalis was the patron saint of STDs and diseases of the genitals.

In 2011, there was an auction house in Ireland that had his head in a jar, supposedly his head, a relic, and they sold it to

an American movie star, and we don't know which movie star it was.

Ooh, this is a fun guessing game, and a fun libel opportunity, too.

I say Julia Julia Roberts.

Speaking of heads and Christmas traditions,

there's a Welsh Christmas tradition that I'm not going to be able to pronounce, which I don't think happens as much now, and it happens still in Glamorgan, but nowhere else, which is called Marie Le Wood, which is where a group of drunken revellers would put a horse's skull on a stick, and then they'd go around to people's houses and bang on their doors at Christmas, and they'd sing them a carol, and then you had to have a sing-off with the people in the house, and it was like a competition, and then they had to let you in with your horse's skull, and they had to feed you, and then you had to sing a goodbye carol, and then you would leave with your horse's skull and go to the next house.

It just sounds like a really weird version of carol singing.

Another tradition is this is an old English tradition, cake tossing.

Do you know that one?

No, no, it's not much to it, you just get a perfectly good cake and throw it against a wall.

Against a wall?

Not even seeing how far you can throw it.

No, no, you stand next to the wall, throw it, and it's supposed to give you a year without any hunger.

Oh, really?

There's another sorry, go on.

Oh, just wanted to share this, which is the theory of when the sweater began, because it's quite a vague thing.

Did it begin with the Romans or did it begin before that?

One website I found says it began with 19th-century British fishermen, because they needed something chunky and heavy to repel water and keep them warm.

And that is from a website called Dances with Wools.

Nice.

They would make Christmas jumpers for penguins, didn't they, for a while?

Do you remember that?

Really?

Yeah, there was like an oil spill in New Zealand.

Yeah, do you remember?

And then what they wanted was little jumpers to pot on the penguins so they wouldn't preen themselves and get the oil in their mouth.

And then they get the oil in their mouth if they preen themselves.

They thought they might get about 100, but they ended up getting 15,000.

And actually, they're no good at anyway.

If you put a sweater on a penguin, it's not really the best thing to do.

The best thing to do is just put it in cold water or warm water.

I guess that's how they've evolved over millions of years to be able to deal with cold weather.

Exactly.

So now, whenever you send them a jumper for a penguin, they just put it on like a a toy penguin and they sell it in the shop.

Great, thanks.

This is semi-unrelated, but they've done an experiment in the last few months where they've put lingerie on rats and it's to see how they always do it to rats.

And it's to see why men are attracted to women.

But it was no, they put like kind of sexy underwear on rats and then they got um them to go and have have sex with male rats and then if the same woman came back later then the guy didn't want to have sex with the female without her wearing the sexy lingerie.

So it's it's like as soon as you're programmed to believe that the sex is going to be good with the lingerie-wearing woman, then you don't enjoy it as much, or you don't want to do it with the non-lingerie-wearing woman.

Apparently, this proves why men are attracted to women.

But it's a terrible lingerie.

It's a terrible slogan for a Christmas trumper.

Rat experiments to find that stuff out is because we had a fact in a previous podcast, which was

what was it?

They were in polyester pants.

Yeah,

rats in polyester pants don't, God, what was it?

They can't get it up.

They can't get it in the right direction if they're wearing little trousers.

It's so interesting in rats' sex lives.

Wow.

Two male rats, like, no, honestly, you look really beautiful at the lingerie.

I just, I don't know what's going on down there.

I'll complain to the polyester company.

Yeah.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

Yeah, my fact is that male turkeys blush when they see female turkeys.

Which is quite sweet.

Especially if they're wearing lingerie.

Why?

Why do they blush?

So, turkeys generally have a weird anatomy, anyway, but some people think it's because when turkeys gobble, it actually takes up a lot of energy and they gobble as part of their strutting ritual to attract women because it's a sexy thing to do.

And when they gobble, it causes the blood to rise up and up into their face and they turn bright red and they really do go bright red.

But it's only business so they're snood.

You know the turkey's snood, which I find the like the weirdest.

The snood is that floppy bit of skin that dangles really far off a turkey's face and it's a secondary sexual organ because um so when a turkey's aroused it gets engorged with blood and it gets longer and female turkeys fancy male turkeys with longer snoods and so that snood goes bright red when it's trying to seduce wait so they have a thing on their face that when they're aroused

extends yeah and it's got no purpose nobody knows why it's there you also have a thing on your face that extends when you get aroused a few things actually but you have erectile tissue inside your nose Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But does it increase in size when you are aroused?

It can do sometimes, and there's a thing called honeymoon rhinitis, which you can get, which apparently, when you get aroused, it makes you sneeze.

And some people start sneezing when they're aroused.

Well, this puts a new perspective on the story of Pinocchio.

Well, this is why your nose does get longer when you lie, doesn't it?

Because you get tense.

And so they say your nose does expand as well.

Wait, what else?

What else?

The pupil gets ten times bigger when you're aroused as well.

Ten times?

Yeah, because it's only small.

No, hang on.

My people's not that small.

Yeah, you're right.

That doesn't sound right, does it?

Oh, it does it under the surface.

I think thinking of cartoons when their eyes go,

they get bigger, but not by ten times, obviously.

Right, okay.

But so I could be able to tell if someone.

I don't know if it's noticeable that knows things.

But then if you're a turkey, you can't really play it cool with your snoot, can you?

That's true, and if you blush as well.

Yeah, it's very awkward for them.

And because they've got, so the top of their head turns bright blue also when they're aroused or excited.

Their head turns bright blue.

They can

turn their head blue.

So it is actually quite obvious to a woman when they pass.

Hang on, sorry.

What?

So they've got, like, if you know, can picture what a turkey looks like, and they're kind of greyish-gray.

Yeah, they've like turkey head, yeah.

Yeah, and it goes like

they go bright, their head goes bright blue, like my jumper bright blue.

No, it's more paler than that.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

This is what, so turkeys are great, right?

And turkeys were.

Do we think they were nearly the official animal emblem of America or not?

This is a myth, apparently, but I think it's basically true.

The idea is that Benjamin Franklin liked them so much and he thought they were noble animals and he wanted them to be the official master

of the USA.

I don't know if it's true.

So when it was decided that they were going to make a bald eagle the emblem of the USA, then Franklin was outraged and he said it couldn't be a bald eagle because they have bad moral character.

He said you may wrote to his daughter saying you may have seen them perched in some dead tree where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk.

When that diligent bird has taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for his young, the bald eagle pursues him and steals it.

So he wrote that, and he said, a much more respectable bird and a true native of America is the turkey.

So I don't know why people keep debunking this.

Franklin wanted the bird to be.

Franklin wanted it to be, yeah.

I have a thing about.

And electrocuting them, right?

Yeah.

He wanted to,

he not only wanted to, he did electrocute turkeys.

And on one occasion, he got a crowd together to watch him doing it and then ended up electrocuting himself,

which is amazing.

He wrote to a friend, A turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock and roasted by the electrical jack.

And he practiced it lots and then got a crowd together.

And he was numb for the rest of the evening after he gave himself a huge shock.

And he wrote to his brothers saying, Two nights ago, being about to kill a turkey by the shock from two large glass jars, I inadvertently took the hole through my own arms and body.

Do not make this more public, for I am ashamed to have been guilty of so notorious a blunder.

So sorry, Franklin.

Your secret's out now.

The other thing, though, is that turkeys aren't that noble, are they?

Really?

I mean,

if you put a male turkey, apparently, in a room with a model of a female turkey, he'll mate with it just as eagerly as he would with the real thing.

Oh, yeah.

But he will also do it if you put a turkey head on a stick.

He'll also try and mate with that.

Really?

Yep.

And they did an experiment with all the different bits of a turkey, which will work and which won't work.

A freshly severed head on a stick was the most effective.

That's what it liked the most.

It was the most effective.

Most effective.

Well, I like you, but I don't know.

Could you maybe lose everything below your neck?

Yeah, well, yeah, you've got that one's the most effective, followed by a dried male head on a stick, followed by a two-year-old withered female head on a stick.

Is turkey porn just heads?

It's like breasts just cut out the body.

And then, last place, but still eliciting a sexual response, was a plain balsa wood model

of a head.

They're handy.

The snood just got very slightly bigger.

Wow.

So that's the best.

That's your emblem of the USA.

Turkeys never ask, are you a leg or a breast man?

They just say, are you a head or a head man?

I'm a head man.

Yeah, I love it.

When was this done?

Do you know?

It was done in the late 50s by some people at the University of Pennsylvania.

Oh, my God.

Perverts in the University of Pennsylvania.

You know, when they say they're cutting science budgets around the world,

you're just going, but we need to put these rats in Brazils.

And we've got trying to find out if he wants to shag that head.

I kind of get it now.

I've had this head decomposing for two years in my office.

We all think it's going to the moon in Mars, and it's so.

This is where the real budget's going.

Wow.

Turkeys are very breasty now, aren't they?

Much more than they're supposed to be.

Domestic turkeys.

I have noticed, yeah, we were chatting about this the other day.

Yeah, no, I saw your computer screens.

They've increased.

It was the Waitrose website.

She was.

Look at the head on that one.

Go on.

So, turkeys have gone much bigger.

They've increased by 57% in size since 1980, I think, because, oh no, since 1965, sorry.

Because we're obviously breeding them to have huge breasts because we like the taste of of turkey breasts.

And this is why, so wild turkeys are laughing in the face of domestic turkeys because they can fly.

They can fly 55 miles an hour, I think.

Wow.

And most domesticated turkeys can't fly at all because they're so top-heavy.

They can run 25 miles an hour.

Yeah, unbelievable.

Wild turkeys.

Yeah, wild turkeys.

Farmed turkeys can't have sex with each other anymore.

It's quite sad.

They're too heavy and they're sort of a bit distorted.

And

they have to be masturbated and then artificially inseminated and the people who is it not because they're all dubious now going that's it's probably just a head on a stick maybe I wouldn't argue

but the people who do it call it milking and it's not milking it's not milking

don't dress it up they then they then

all right they they sort of

can I read you a brief account of it it won't take long but the effects will last forever in your mind

so this is according to a journalist who went around and visited a turkey farmer he said I was complaining about the impossibility of a journalist getting to see the process when I heard a rustle of feathers beside me.

The turkey was already upside down in Paul's hands.

He swiftly uncovered a hole amidst the feathers, gave it a couple of tweaks, and there was the turkey semen, looking like a bit of crumbly old toothpaste.

We take this, said Paul, and suck it into a rubber tube.

It's then blown into the vagina.

So you have to suck it up with a rubber tube and then blow it up another turkey.

That's a job.

I hope this is a good idea.

That's a job that people today

have.

So, what makes you think you're qualified?

Well, I've always been interested in sucking animal semen up through tubes.

I hope

they didn't say the crumbly old toothpaste thing to its face, did they?

Because that can be quite afflictive in my experience.

Do you have any aquafresh?

Hey, I read that turkey poo.

Let's say you had two turkeys and you were like, oh, tell me the gender of these two turkeys.

You can tell which one is a male and which one is a female by their poo.

Because the poo of a male turkey comes out spiral, like a Mr.

Whippy ice cream.

It comes out just like a.

But it does.

That's the kind of way that it comes out.

And then a female poo comes out in the shape of a J.

Yeah, so that's how you know, because they have different.

Is this right, James?

They've got different analyses.

Clarkers, yeah.

They have different shape clarkers.

Another good turkey thing, which I actually discovered last year and is in our fact book, 1411FAX2, knock you sideways,

if you want to buy it, is that so in Turkey the word for turkey means Indian bird, in Indian the word for turkey means Peruvian bird, in Greece the word for turkey means French bird and in Malaysia the word for turkey means Dutch chicken.

So no one had a clue where it was coming from but it was definitely foreign.

Yeah.

It was a foreign bird.

Well there's a theory that they were called turkeys here because the merchants who sold them across Europe were Turkish.

Yeah.

But of course, they're all native to Mexico.

Because I was going to say the Native Americans, apparently,

the real origin of the name is Furkey.

So they should be Furkies, not Turkeys.

Oh, okay.

I didn't know that.

That's good as well.

Start calling them that.

Hashtag facts.

We should move on.

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Time to move on to our final fact of the evening, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the composer of the song Jingle Bells also wrote the Yuletide classic We Conquer or Die.

That was a genuine song written by the same man.

His name was James Lord Pierpont, and he was an American composer.

He was also the uncle of J.P.

Morgan, incidentally, the banker.

And

yeah, and he wrote this song and a number of others.

The lyrics to We Conquer or Die Die go, The war drum is beating, prepare for the fight.

The stern bigot Northman exults in his might.

Gird on your bright weapons, your foemen are nigh, and this be our watchword, We Conquer or Die.

So, there you go.

Jingle bells, jingle.

You can see where it led on.

Was that his difficult second song?

Which one came first?

Do we know?

I think jingle bells came first.

Some of them we don't know the dates for.

Oh, no, he's like someone who wanted to be taken more seriously, isn't it?

Yeah, it's one of those cases.

Did he write anything else?

Is that it for him?

Yeah, he wrote a load of songs.

Are they all in the Christmas theme or the aggressive military theme?

A lot of them are in the aggressive military theme.

He wrote Our Battle Flag and Strike for the South and Oh, Let Me Not Neglected Die.

Because

he was on the side of the South in the Civil War and he he lived in Boston, Massachusetts originally and then he moved down to Savannah, Georgia, wh which is where he spent the Civil War and he wrote a load of these songs on behalf of the South as a kind of adjut prop thing.

Jingle Bells was the first song to be played from space, wasn't it?

Was it?

Yeah, yeah, it was.

Really?

It was when Tom Stafford and Wally Shearer were in space.

It was in 1965,

I think.

And it was a prank.

So they said they'd seen a kind of floating asteroid or something.

They were talking to, you know, mission control or whatever on the ground.

Something floating, and they were going to get it and see what it was.

And it turned out to be this tiny harmonica.

It was three-eighths of an inch wide.

and then they launched into a rendition of jingle bells around christmas time from space they had originally planned to play we conquer or die

they couldn't get the rights

so they pretended they they pretended that they saw santa claus is that right did you say that no so that's what happened they they kind of went down to mission control and said we can see this this one guy with 12 other figures flying into the earth's atmosphere and they pretended that they could see father christmas was that what it was supposed to be i just saw them saying they thought they saw a satellite.

No, he said, I see a command module with eight smaller modules in front.

The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit.

There's a lot of sort of Christmassy elements to space travel.

Lying and lying from up there.

That makes me wonder about the whole moon landings conspiracy theory if they're claiming Santa Claus was there.

So some other carols.

The Saw Three Ships.

You know that song?

I saw three ships.

There's an extra verse of that that we don't really sing anymore, which talks about carrying the dead bodies of the three wise men on the ships.

No, how do they die?

Let's say natural causes.

Yeah, so the idea was that these three wise men were on the boats and they'd sailed all the way from Bethlehem.

Now the problem is that Bethlehem isn't on the coast, but people in Britain didn't really know where Bethlehem was, or in Europe they didn't know.

They just assumed it was like a seaside resort.

And so the part of the song goes, It sailed from Bethlehem to Cologne, I think it was.

But how could it do that?

Are they each on one ship?

Yeah, one in each ship.

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, was written by Sammy Kahn and Jules Stein, and they claimed they came up with the idea to cool themselves during a heat wave by writing the song.

I don't really see how that works, though, do you?

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas was written, I think, next to a swimming pool in LA.

Really?

I think so, yeah.

Do people find it?

So Irving Bullin wrote White Christmas, didn't he?

And he was Jewish, and he wrote it as a sort of an ironic song.

And they recently did a poll in America of people's top 25 favourite Christmas songs, and more than half of them are written by Jewish people.

And

these are the guys who are writing all the great Christmas songs.

You know that last year, it was either last year or the year before, Costa Coffee did a poll amongst their customers of what they think is the worst Christmas song that's been ever been written.

Do you know what came out on top?

Oh, I don't know.

It was Cliff Richardson Wine.

And they've now now banned it.

Yeah, worldwide.

They've not allowed any of

their coffee shops to play Cliff Richards' song anymore.

Well, Irving Berlin tried to get radio stations to ban Elvis Presley's version of White Christmas because he thought it was,

I think his exact words were, it's a profane parody of his cherished Yuletide standard.

He ordered staff in New York to

his own staff to phone radio stations and say, don't play this, because he thought it was so outrageously gross.

Why was it intelligence?

Why was it gross?

Was there too much?

He just thought it was a bit too sexy.

I don't know.

Elvis Presley, a lot of radio stations refused to play Elvis Presley's songs when he first became popular because they assumed that he was black and it was at the time when,

yeah.

Well, they also banned him.

I don't know if this is a myth, but it might be a myth.

Is it a myth?

No, I don't think it's not a myth.

They could only film him

sort of torso above.

They couldn't show his legs because his legs were too sexy in the dance moves.

He was just shaking too much.

Well, it's mostly mostly his hips.

Yeah, mostly his hips.

Their legs are not the problem.

You just got to cut out that.

Whereas online,

you can do below the knees, guys, or you can do above the waists.

Yeah, whereas on turkey top of the pops, they cut off the head.

Just see the body, that's all you get.

Rudolph Rednose Reindeer was nearly called Reginald.

Reginald?

Yeah, it doesn't scan as well.

But it wasn't the song originally.

It was a colouring book for children, and an advertising guy came up with it, and he very nearly called it Reginald, but then he crucially didn't.

And it sold two and a half million copies in its first year.

This little colouring book that's just a little bit of a change.

And which is quite nice about Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.

It was written by just a copywriter who worked for a Montgomery Award huge department store.

And they'd just been told they didn't want to spend loads of money buying in Christmas gifts to sell, so they told their staff to write a Christmas song.

So this guy, Robert May, wrote Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and it sold incredibly well, made loads of money.

I think it was remade into a song.

And the Montgomery Award, people in charge of Montgomery Award, gave him all the rights to it.

He had no rights to it at all.

And he was in trouble.

His wife had a terminal illness.

He was in massive debt.

And as soon as it was released as a song, they sold him all the rights to it, 100%.

And he lived off the proceeds of that until I think the 1970s when he died.

Wow.

So that's quite nice.

That is nice.

That's great.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

The tune is written by Mendelssohn, which possibly you know.

And Mendelssohn originally wrote the tune as a tribute to

Gutenberg's printing press.

It was How Awesome is the Printing Press song, which sounds How Awesome is the Printing Press?

Scan's the same as Hage Herald Agel sing.

Whether it actually went Gutenberg the Deutsche Mann, Zundette Diefkel An.

Or Dieflan.

I have no idea.

So, the weirdest thing for me about this fact is when you hear someone who's famous for something and then they've produced another bit of work that is just so, you know, jingle bells, we conquer or die.

It's just so different.

It's like when I found out that Barbara Cartland invented a glider that the military started using.

So what?

Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist who wrote a billion romance novels, also invented a glider that you could fly in.

That the military was like, that is so good, we're using it.

And that's one of her.

Yeah,

that's a thing that.

And Michael Jackson

invented the fax machine.

No, Michael Jackson,

Actually, I don't know if most people know this, but he wrote the song Do the Bart Man, the Michael Jacksons.

Everyone does know that.

But he wrote the Simpson song Do the Bart Man.

And he invented those shoes that let you kind of stand on a slant as well, didn't he?

Yeah, he did actually.

He was a part of the...

When he slants forward, there's a patent taken out where it's weighted boots, and he was one of the people.

He's not going to act like this is the kind of shoe that's really caught on since then.

What are you talking about?

We're all wearing them.

We're all wearing them now.

That's why everyone walks over like that.

This is connected, because I wanted to mention this earlier.

The person who made Christmas carols cool again was Saint Francis of Assisi.

Was it?

I believe.

Yes, so it was at a time when, it was in the 13th century, at a time when it was all like

very serious and very somber.

And he tried to make Christmas celebrations fun again.

And he

made it so that, for instance, drinking songs that were sung in taverns, like fun drinking songs, he made them be rewritten with Christmas lyrics.

And so so much fun songs.

A few years ago, the Pope said that he was a playboy, Francis of Assisi.

What do you mean?

Well, he started off his life, he was a drinker and he was a partier, and then he gave away all his stuff to a leper, and the Pope actually said that he was one of the original playboys.

Fun guy.

Crazy the Nativity, I think.

He turned Nativity into a fun theatrical event, so he decided that the birth of Jesus should be something that we all go and enjoy watching.

You know, the Vatican didn't have a Christmas tree until 1982.

To deny, no.

I think they associated it still with being the old heathen thing.

Wow.

Yeah.

There's a thing in America where you call them holiday trees.

I just went I read this really random report where there was a guy who he was a politician who died.

He had a previous career.

I can't quite remember what his previous career was.

And when he died, apparently it was just such a big thing in his life that he hated the idea that things were called holiday trees and he wanted to be called Christmas trees that when Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke at his funeral he said I swear I will make the Christmas tree return it was the report that came out Arnold Schwarzenegger promises Christmas trees to return in funeral eulogy.

We need to wrap up.

Do you guys have any more?

Jingle Bells was originally a bit of a saucy song.

I just wanted to tell you that.

The second verse, it goes: A day or two ago, I thought I'd take a ride, and soon Miss Fanny Bright was seated by my side.

The horse was lean and lank, misfortune seemed his lot.

He got into a drifted bank, and then we got upsot.

Which

no one knows what it means.

But it sounds like it should be upset, but it didn't quite run in comments.

I think that's exactly what it means, actually.

Yeah.

And then it ended up like, now the ground is white, go it while you're young, take the girls tonight and sing this sleighing song.

Basically, a sleigh was like having a sweet ride in the 50s, and you'd go and sleigh everywhere, and you know, you'd go up into the hills, up to going to sleigh everywhere sounds a bit like some kind of gory horror film that you don't want to be involved with.

But you'd go sleigh riding, and you'd, you know, that was very impressive to a young lady.

You've got a sleigh.

I have just one more thing to add, which is more of a feminist mission statement about the holly and the ivy.

And the holly and the ivy, the song.

So it's always kind of bugged me how, you know, how that ends saying, of all the trees that are in the word, the holly bears the crown.

So in the holly and the ivy, the holly's one, and the holly's a bit of a dick because it's all spiky and nasty.

And actually, this dates back to medieval times when the holly represented the masculinity of the male form, and the ivy was a woman, and the ivy was this weak, gentle woman, and the holly was this strong, and it's very resilient, and it represented a man.

And in medieval villages, they would sing, the women would sing, have competitions against the men, and they would be the ivy, and the men would be the holly.

So every time, women, you sing the holly and the ivy, and you finish saying the holly bears the crown, you're saying the men have won.

That's what that means.

So we need to change it, don't we?

We need to change it.

Get Arnold Scholzeneger on the phone.

I swear to you, Anna,

the ivy will rise again.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts for this evening.

Thanks so much for listening at home.

Thanks so much for being here this evening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said during the course of this podcast, you can get us on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At egg-shaped.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

You can also go to at qi podcast on Twitter as well.

And we are going to be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll catch you later.

Goodbye.

And thanks to you guys.

Thanks so much.

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