Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Tim Joins ‘No Such Thing As A Fish'

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

‘No Such Thing as a Fish’ is one of Tim Harford’s favorite podcasts and he was recently invited on as a guest. So here’s a chance to listen to the host of Cautionary Tales chat vital vitamins, stinging schemes, and the practice of pyrography.Listen to more episodes from No Such Thing as a Fish wherever you get podcasts.Cautionary Tales will return with the story the greatest photographic hoax in history next Friday. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hello, Tim Hartford here, one of the most exciting things happened to me a few weeks ago. My friends at the podcast know such things as a fish, called me up and asked me if I'd be a guest on the podcast. Now if you don't know what no such thing as a fish is, and most of you will, because it's hugely popular, it's four nerds with obscure facts being very funny, or at least trying to be very funny,

the regular nerds, James Anna, Dan and Andy, make this look very easy. You are about to hear me trying to live up to their standards. A cautionary tale will be back. As always, next Friday, we're on every other Friday with our regular cautionary tales episodes. But this week, as a special treat, and no such thing as a fish, have allowed us to release their episode featuring yours truly, Tim Haafard, desperately trying to keep pace. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things I Fish, the weekly podcast coming to you

this week from four top secret underground undisclosed locations. My name is Anna Toshinsky, and I am sitting here today with James Harkin and Johan Tamari and our very special guest, Tim Hauffert. And once again, we've gathered around our microphones with our four favorite frats from the last seven days and in no particular order. Here we go, starting with you, Tim. My fact is that in 1939, the young doctor at Boston City Hospital went on a

scurvy-producing diet to see what would happen. In May 1940, his fellow doctors staged an intervention after his skin started to bleed from his follicles and an old post-operative scar re-opened. Now, lovely. Why did, because people sort of knew what happened when you got scurvy at that point? Right? Why was it doing this? They did. So he survived, by the way. So I read the medical paper that he and a colleague wrote after this experiment. So the puzzle was, I mean, people have been suffering from scurvy and worrying about scurvy for hundreds of years, and kind of discovering cures and then forgetting cures. It's all very fascinating, but by

the 1930s, they'd figured out that scurvy's caused by not having enough vitamin C. But the puzzle was, if you deprive people of vitamin C, it very quickly leaves the body. So after a week or so, you've got no vitamin C, but then everything's fine. And people don't actually develop any symptoms for weeks, for even months. And so this guy, his name was John Crandon and his colleagues, we're just trying to figure out, well, how long can you go? And what happens? And what order do these terrible symptoms appear in? And he said, well, no one else is going to do it. So I'm going to do it. And so he did. And yeah, he was absolutely fine for two or three months.

And then I read the description of what happened. He started October the 19th, 1939. His scurvy producing diet was, actually it sounds okay, it's eggs, cheese, bread, butter, chocolate, and coffee. It gets a bit boring after a while. I'm a little bit worried, but it's fine for a while. Because genuinely that is my diet.

You can add some red wine in there and then that's basically it. After we've finished this, you're really going to start wanting some orange juice to add to that, James, I think. So he says, after about four and a half months, hyper-carototic papules have developed on the buttocks. Now, that doesn't sound good at all. I was going to Google hyper-carototic buttock papules, and then I decided I wasn't going to do that.

Don't worry, Tim, I've been eating nothing but chocolate and bread for the last six months. I can tell you exactly what they are. Oh, please don't. The listener, James, has just taken his trousers down and shown us his butto his glasses and it is disgusting. It's really, I'm not going to be able to take that image out of my mind now. And then after five months he started, yeah, I just started bleeding around the hair follicles

on his legs. He got incredibly tired. He did, he used to run on a treadmill and by the end of this he could do 50 meters on a treadmill. It took him 16 seconds to do 50 meters which is not very fast and then he that was that was too much. It was quite a young man and at six months they made a surgical incision basically just to see whether it would heal and it didn't and I think they probably shouldn't have been surprised at that because he had a scar from a 15 year old appendectomy that was reopening by this point. And then they said, all right, you've done enough. You've done enough. And they started giving him intravenous vitamin C, and he was fine.

That's so scientific to say, well, your scar has, your old scar has reopened. But just in case, we're going to have to make another scar and see if that also fails to hear. Like that's so impressive. the scientific method, I think. Is it? I think so. Yeah. I find that one of the most kind of morbid things about scurvy is the whole wounds reopening.

It takes you back in time, but in just a way that you really don't want to go back in time, the idea that these ancient and bone breaks re-break, don't they? Because I think you start making collagen, which basically holds your body together. And so I don't know, the idea of all these ancient wounds you'd completely forgotten about reopening, it's pretty far. All your exes ring up and break up with you all over again, another unknown symptom. It's really mad that it's two or three months that you're fine for, because I guess that explains why

in the age of sale, sailors got scurvy because it was just long enough to get really, really, really far away from the nearest lemon. As in, if you got it within a day of not having any vitamin C, then everyone would immediately come back to port and say, well, we die at sea, so we're not going to go. It's quite cool. It's almost like a lemon detector, isn't it? we die at sea, so we're not going to go. It's quite cool. It's almost like a lemon detector, isn't it? Tell how far away you are from a lemon just by how much blood is coming out of your paws. Not very well. You can only tell to within three months away. I mean, it's not that. There are easier ways to detect lemons. And actually, it's, are there? It's difficult. This is, I mean, the reason I got interested in this is because I discovered that Scott

of the Antarctic suffered from scurvy. It's controversial as to whether his final mission was affected by scurvy, but certainly early emissions were and some of the people he went to who tried to get to the South Pole with were affected by scurvy. And I thought, hang on a minute, he's a British Navy captain and didn't the British Navy figure all this out in 1747? James Lindt famously did this the first ever randomized controlled trial people say and discovered that you could prevent scurvy with lemons. And then they started calling British sailors lime is because they used to have lime juice.

And so what happened? How could the British Navy forget this? And it is partly because it's not a very good lemon detector. It turns out there's vitamin C in almost everything. You have to work quite hard when James is doing this. You have to work quite hard to completely deprive yourself of vitamin C. So people get confused to basically the signals

get very mixed. And what Andy was saying about these sea voyages, another reason the British Navy started getting confused is because they switched to steamships. And so they were still taking a remedy for scurvy that turns out wasn't working. But because they were all on steamships, steamships travel quite quickly.

They have to refuel. Every time you refuel, you take on fresh food. And so they were sticking to this cure for scurvy. They thought was working. It wasn't working. It didn't matter because there wasn't time to this cure for scurvy they thought was working, it wasn't working, it didn't matter because there wasn't time for anybody to develop scurvy. And then suddenly these Arctic and Antarctic explorers all started coming down with scurvy and everybody got monumentally confused at that point. So the lemons and limes don't really work that well, is that what we're saying? So that well there's two things, one is that limes, although they're

more acidic, have less vitamin sea in. So there's still work. They used to be using Sicilian lemons, and they're really juicing on loads of vitamin sea, and then they switched for geopolitical reasons to West Indian limes, and that they're less effective. But the other thing is vitamin C is destroyed really easily. It's destroyed by contact with copper, and a lot of these ships had copper vessels. It's destroyed by contact with sunlight. It's destroyed by contact with copper and a lot of these ships had copper vessels. It's destroyed by contact with sunlight, it's destroyed by heat. And so you had this sort of old lime juice

that was going a bit rancid and there wasn't any vitamin C in it anymore, but people were still taking it. And so then when they started taking lime juice on Arctic expeditions and it didn't work, they lost faith and they started there, and at the same time, there's germ theory being developed and they started going, oh, same time, there's germ theory being developed. And they started going, oh, maybe Scurvy's nothing to do with lemons and limes at all. Maybe it's to do with some kind of germ that we can't see, which of course was completely up the wrong tree. It's just crazy when you read about the history of Scurvy, how early on they suggested that

citrus was a cure and how many hundreds of years they skirt around it, skirt around it, and sort of just like, yeah, I think it is, and then go actually baby not. It's so frustrating because it's so easy to sort out once you definitely know. But I found, you know, it's really quick. You know, Scott, one of the people on his expedition to Got Skurvy was Shackleton, which I didn't know that they did an expedition together. But. Yeah, and there was a bit of bad blood, but they didn't like each other.

Well, it's quite a rival. Indeed, there seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theory that maybe Shackleton wasn't that ill and Scott sort of kicked him off the expedition because he wasn't really getting along with him. Shackleton was like the fun, spontaneous one, wasn't it? And Scott was a bit more of a serious bore. Really? Well, so Scott said, oh, you're definitely, you're far too, or you've definitely got scurvy.

And Shackleton was like, well, I haven't even gotten the hyper-kinetic papules. The point where Shackleton pulled down his pants to display his butt. That's when he got checked off the expedition. Yeah, and GiniPig gets scurvy. Yeah. Because if I eat GiniPig, then I would not get any vitamin C. I think if you eat a healthy Gini then I would not get any vitamin C. I think if you eat a healthy guinea pig, you'll be fine. Because I know James said as well as the diet you eat.

I have eaten a guinea pig. But you occasionally have guinea pig mints on your bread and with your coffee. No, because they can't make their own vitamin C. And we can't do that either. And there's this weird club of crap animals, including humans, which can't make their own vitamin C. So it's fruit bats, guinea pigs, some of the apes, and humans are the ones that can't do it.

Every other animal doesn't get scurvy, because they can just generate vitamin C, I guess, from internally, somehow they're generating it. Yeah, well, we basically want a vitamin is, is the things that we need for my diax, we can't generate them and everything else we can generate. And I suppose these animals can, but maybe we should form that club with those guys, like a really sad rejects club. Like what are those? What's that club called of sort of men who've decided that they've abandoned women who can sell, in cells,

this could be the new in cells. Ask route bats, guinea pigs. I'm just a bit worried the guinea pigs won't let me in because I've just admitted that I won't say it's some Guinea pig. It turned out to be really important. So people were being confused, as Anna says, just getting confused about, it's scurving and what causes it and how to cure it

for centuries and they keep sort of figuring it out and then not figuring it out and getting confused and forgetting. And then finally, in 1907, these two Norwegian scientists, Holst and Fröhlich, figure out that Guinea pigs also get scurvy, which is this absolute breakthrough moment. And then how can you tell that, Guinea pig has scurvy? Is it because it can only run 50 metres on its little ball?

That must be it. That and the papules. I think it's those two things. Once they figured that out, it was easy to clear up this massive confusion about whether Skirvy was caused by some kind of toxin or some kind of bacteria or whether it was a deficiency. And they figured it all out. And then they turned around and they told Fritchoff Nansen, who's a great Norwegian polar explorer, and a mentor to both Robert Scott and rolled Amanson. And Nansen said, yeah, no, I don't believe any of that.

You can't learn anything from Gide Pigs. Trust me, it's fresh sea on meat you need. And so he basically told him to bug her off. Both Amanson and Scott then went to the Antarctica a year later and Scott's whole crew probably got scurvy. If there was ever a lesson to listen to the scientists people, it's really as the history of Scurvy. It's wild. How much people ignored them. So the reason that this is all puzzling is because the story that Randomize Controlled Trials Nerds tell is that in 1747, this guy James Lind, who was a surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, figured it all out.

That's the story they tell. And he did sort of run a controlled trial. He gave two, he had a whole bunch of sailors who had scurvy. He gave two of them a quart of cider a day, which sounds quite nice, but it's not going to work. He gave two of them 75 drops a day of sulfuric acid. He gave two of them vinegar. He gave two of them a paste of garlic mustard horse radish and aromatic plant extracts, which sounds like it might be nice. But none of that worked,

but he gave the last two oranges and a lemon each day for six days, and at that point, they made a complete recovery. Unfortunately that was the ship's entire stock of lemons. So it was unfortunate for everybody else. But the weird thing is that even James Lindt, I mean you would have thought, okay brilliant, you ran a randomised trial, you figured it all out. Perfect, but then you published this book all about how to cure scurvy, which had this write-up of this trial, but had loads of other stuff about, oh like maybe it's excess sweating or maybe it's to do with ventilation or this or that. Who can say, I mean, it was bizarre what the conclusion he came to.

And in the end, he said, anyway, my cure for scurvy is lemon juice that's been boiled into a syrup preserved under olive oil. And it turns out that doesn't work because if you boil lemon juice into a syrup, you destroyed all of it and you see. So he runs this randomized trial. He doesn't understand what he's done. And then the conclusion he draws is this completely ineffective remedy.

And there you go, that's science 1747 style. I just can't believe that one of the groups was given sulfuric acid, which feels like, you know, you could naturally give the other group American cheese and white bread, and they're going to do better than the group he gave sulfuric're a gassard too. I yes.

Throatless Jimmy we call him. I really like the old theory about how to cure scurvy which was to bury yourself in soil. I think that was such a good idea. It really does make sense because you were getting scurvy when you were away from earth, right? You were on the water, you were thousands of miles from a lemon, you're going to get sick. And so what was obviously the thing that you were missing? You were missing dry land. And so they used to just bury people up to the neck in soil and think that this would make them better. It's so funny. It's such a good idea. And what they would do is they would take boxes of earth with them on the voyages.

And if someone got sick, they would bury them on the ship in the earth. There was one captain called Thomas Melville who found that it actually worked and it made people feel better. But he was feeding people vegetables while they were in the earth all the time. Oh no. Probably the earth thing though. It's so good because it means you can also, as well as getting vegetables, you can disguise your ship as a small island.

And so you can sneak up on other ships undetected because they just see a load of soil. Well, they see a load of soil, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. Clever. Get a donkey, a little windmill palm tree. Try to think. Maybe.

Yes. I just think my idea of, like, my idea of Des islands is more like palm trees and hammocks, not donkeys and windmills. Donkeys and windmills. And that famous cartoon trope of someone on a Des island. How can you tell that on a Des island? That's a donkey and a windmill. Yeah, it's a classic. Stop the podcast.

Gosh, I've always wanted to say that. This is a special episode of no such thing as a fish, featuring me, Tim Halford, as a special guest, presented by cautionary tales. On with the podcast. Okay, it is time for fat number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that there are more people alive today who have been World chess champion than there are people skillfully enough to carve a knight for use in a world championship chess match.

How, what are the numbers? What do we talk about? Well, the numbers are 10 who can do the night. This is according to a video which I saw which was posted by business insider called Why Championship Chess sets are so expensive. As part of that, they said there are only 10 people alive who can make the little horses that you use in chess. And so I thought, I wonder how that compares with people who have won the World Championship and I went onto the, um, onto Wikipedia and looks at the list of the people who are still alive and there's

more than 10. There's a dozen I think. How good do these things have to be? I mean, because I would have thought it's quite easy to carve a night most, uh, professional whittlers I know, which is a lot, um, could probably do a possible chest night. What's so special about these ones? Well, you take all of the whittlers, some of them can do it, some of them can't, and you go down and down and down, and eventually you get the 10. Yeah, you got it. You got it. No, they made these nights are made in a place called Amritzá which is in India. A very specific factory makes them. They only make 250 per year. One night to kind of

whittle it down takes two hours and it takes five to six years to learn how to make this night. All the other pieces take about four to five months to make. And so if you were to buy a very, very high end chest set, the nights are worth approximately 50% of the entire set, the value comes from just the nights. That's what this is. So funny. It's about $500 for one of these sets. They sound, I think I read the same piece, Jen.

It says this, that the blocks of wood that they use for the pieces were once large trunks dried for three to six months cut down a shape to the necessary size, which does make it sound like they're using one... Yes, three trunks. ...tree tree trunk. Knocked down a giant red word for one pond. They are really beautiful. To watch them being carved on the on the lay, then it's a little bit like watching pottery. It's that kind of beautiful sort of hypnotic

view of this thing taking shape, but I have to say it's all nonsense, isn't it? Because I saw this this short film and at one point they say, oh yeah, it helps these grandmasters to not make any mistakes. That's just nonsense. Grandmasters, they can play blindfold. You literally don't actually need the chess board or the chess pieces, they can play blindfold. What is this? I don't know why you're talking about that. The video I've drugged the Kool-Aid and I believe this.

They say that because if you don't make the chess pieces properly and the king isn't the tallest piece, then you might accidentally move one of the other pawns, maybe thinking it's the king. If they're not weighted correctly, they might fall over and you accidentally kind of resign your... No, it's true. No, the thing about chess players is that they're very stupid people. James, I, that's falling over thing. I've read that too. It's that if you accidentally knock your piece over and then you press, you know, because they're playing time against each other in some matches. So you knock a piece over and then you press the timer to move it onto your opponent's turn and then you pick your piece back up. You can be disqualified from the whole match because you're technically eating into your opponent's time there. And that has happened recently.

There was a game in 2016 where in Grandmaster, very good chess player lost because he dropped his queen and then did that. Really? Yeah. And we're claiming that these 10 people who can make the night, so the only people who can make a night that can successfully stand up. If you can't, if you can't feel the bridal on the night, is positioned correctly, it'll completely throw off your game.

That's why Casper has lost against deep blue. There's a slight discrepancy in the reins. I want to see the chess grandmasters rant when he likes to have a tennis play with a broken racket, when he sees his a knife waving at the umpire, what the hell is this shit? I would love to see these artisans, these craft people from Amrit's are. I would love to see them wrestle with classic, Prussian war game chess crossovers, because there are some

amazing kind of chess mutations from a few hundred years ago that I think would pose a real challenge. So any of you have heard of Gross's Connick's spiel, which is a 1664 chess variant. Well, I mean, you can play with a number of players, there's a six player variant. The board looks a bit like a snowflake, but the eight player variant, I think would give these. And it really gets very sensitive in that game, didn't it? Yeah, no one wins. It's just a tie at the end, regardless. The 8-player variant has 240 pieces. It has pieces including the King, the Marshall, the Colonel, the Captain, the Chancellor, the Herald, the Chaplin, the Knight, the Courier, the Agitante,

bodyguards, Albertieres, and there were private soldiers, and 240 pieces in total. But that is nothing. The Duke of Rutland's chess variant has the concubine, which is a Rook knight mix. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the game that was developed by Johann Christian Ludwig Helvig. He was alive in the late 1700s, early 1800s. He was a successful academic. He taught maths to Gauss, the most brilliant mathematician of all time, actually in fairness, he sort of said to Gauss to be honest, he didn't need to bother turning up to the lectures because he seemed to have it all sorted. He collected so many insects, it formed the heart of the University of Berlin's Museum

of Entomology. And his chess variant, which is called Creechbeel, which means war game, it includes the elephant, which is a Rook Knight combo, the jumping bishop, which is the bishop knight, the jumping queen, not to be confused with the dancing queen of Abaphane, that's a knight queen. It could taste 40 pawns, four rooks, four

bishops, 30 knights, work on that one in Amarita, six queens, five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops, thirty-nights, work on that one in Amarita, six queens, five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops, and seven elephants, and the board is up to two thousand squares. That's the partridge of the poetry, mate. That's the hardest to carve actually the partridge. That is absolutely amazing. Do you think he invented this amazingly complicated chess game because his main job was teaching Gals how to do maths. And he's like, I have so much spare time now. I might as well collect every single insect in the world. And I mean, it must take forever a game. I think it does. I mean, I suppose it's a before TV, wasn't it? But it feels like there's

no need to make chess more complicated. It's already quite challenging for most people. So there was this movement to make chess more like actual war. Because chess is quite stylized, really. I mean, it's you're not going to learn that much about military tactics from playing chess. So in, I mean, this is a Prussian thing. They're trying to teach their young officers how to make decisions on the battlefield. And so there's this tendency towards more and more complex versions of chess. And in the end, they kind of went to these war games or role-playing games, but you've got different PCs, you've got different terrains, and they're trying to train people how to make military decisions. It's good. It's really, I think it's really good, because

I do think that, you know, war game exercises are, like, they are good up to a point, but they're never enough concubines. It's not realistic without the concubines. Or elephants. It's the elephants and concubines that really make a war. Yeah, I thought Chancellor was a weird one as well. What does he do? Yeah. Like, he just does some photo-option and takes 20% of all your money. Well, the thing is about chess. Didn't used to be military at all. So, and I don't think it should be. I used to be sexy.

This was back. And actually the person who ruined it and turned it into a military game initially was the queen. Sadly, so we've talked before about how the queen was introduced at various moments in history in various different countries from about like 1400 on was 1300 onwards, but instead of a queen before that you had the Viseer as in the royal as in Jafar and the Viseer couldn't move as broadly and widely as the queen was more limited and it made Chess a much slower game. And so I was reading that back in Medieval times it was completely

gender equal game, women and men played equal amount, and it was more a thing you'd have and play throughout a day at a swore, a swore of a drinks and chats, and it became really associated with romance and sex, and because there were lots of stories of people falling in love over a game of chess, you know, opponents would fall in love. Oh, wow. In 1400, there was a famous book at the time called The Edifying Book of Eritic chess, which sort of talked about.

That's how I'm edifying. Yeah, is that why we call it porn? Yeah, that's correct. That's why they're all naked if you look closely at the forms. But yeah, then the Queen came on board and it became very martial and competitive and serious, and it was thought to be unsuitable for women. Do you know the rules, the 10 rules of whittling? Have you memorized those everyone? I've only got the first four, sorry. Well, you know, 40% is, it's just about a pass.

This is according to Master Carver Chris Loup-Kamann, who actually has the Guinness World Record. For what he describes as the smallest rooster in the world. What's another word for rooster? I think of any. Because I'm pretty sure I have that record. I wonder why I had to be over 18 to access that video. It's not the smallest rooster, it's not even a thing, it's the smallest wooden carved thing in the world, calling it Guinness. It's a tiny little rooster, an eighth of an inch tall. Anyway, he's an amazing wrestler. His ten rules, rule number one is actually make sure your knife is sharp. Rule number two, any guesses? Don't run with scissors. You're actually close. Your life must be really sharp.

It's rule number two. What? Is this fight club? Could I just check out the other eight rules also to do with sharp knives? I'm so glad that you've saved me. I was reading all of the other rules. There are all different ways of saying before starting to carve, check to see if your knife is sharp. If your knife is really sharp, it'll cut much better. Rule number 10 is refer back to rules one to nine, which are indeed different ways of saying, have a sharp knife. Very good. So whittlers out there, take note. Modern board games often have these little carved wooden pieces. They're quite simple. They look a little bit like if you carved the

sign for the gents toilets, the little man, if you carved those into wood and painted in different colours, that's what they look like. Does anybody know what they're called? There is a term of art for these things. Wait, for modern chess pieces. The modern board game pieces, not chess pieces, just board games in general. I didn't even know what they were, but no, go on. They're called meeples, which is a sort of shortening of my people. So meeples is a board game thing, and they're cafes based on meeples and meeples clubs and so on. There are tiny, tiny cafes that meeples attend.

I'm speaking to you from Oxford, and there's a cafe about two minutes walk away from me called thirsty meeples and you can go you can have your hot chocolate or you cup of coffee then you can play board games surrounded by my by meeples. But I I reckon this whole this whole kind of chess piece carving thing it's basically a conspiracy by Big Meeple because there is wait hang on Tim Tim big meevils are just people, aren't they? You could be right. You're absolutely right. You've caught me there. Anyway, it's a conspiracy. I'll figure out who's behind it sooner or later. Because there's a problem with a lot of games that if you're trying to make money selling the game, the game's actually quite cheap, and you know, you can buy a game like chess, it just cost a few

pounds, and then you can just play forever. So how do you make money? And so there's this increased focus on getting very, very fancy pieces, very expensive pieces. So these guys in Amara's are, this is an example of this, but I think the most striking example is a game's workshop. So game's workshop is this company that I remember from the 1980s when I was a young nerd, used to sell dungeons and dragons and used to sell all kinds of games. And then they basically got taken over by a division of the inside the company called Citadel Minatures, which just

made toy soldiers and miniature figures. And these miniature figures were so profitable that during lockdown, Games Workshop had a higher profit margin than Google. And Henry Cavalli, actor who plays Superman, described these little miniature figures as plastic crack. So that all the money is in the pieces. The money is not in the games. That's true. I mean, I used to collect those pieces, and there was some which was simply unaffordable

for me with my 14-year-olds budget. Really, I used to have, I used to collect them a little bit not much but I was always really scared that I was going to die of lead poisoning because there was lead in them and I don't know if someone had once told me that you could die of lead poisoning and these pieces had lead in them and I was convinced that I was going to die. No, I think you're eating them. No, but I was like, because I was painting them and stuff and I didn't want to lick my fingers and stuff.

And you're closing your half thing away, you know, half thing away. Well, the paint used to be water, well, the paint still are water based. So you could, you sort of paint and then you would kind of lick your paintbrush to get a fine point on the paintbrush. And the paint is non-toxic, but the, but your painting these lead figures, so they probably were very dangerous. But anyway, they're all made of plastic crack now as Henry Cavill puts it.

So, you're a bunch of crackheads. It's the least cool kind of being a crackhead. Being a crackhead isn't cool, I won't emphasize, but this is even less cool. So, now I want people to tell you that. Just like you were saying, James, with the lead and the paint and the danger thing, well, I always remember my friend Christopher when I was about, I don't know, 18, telling me that if I kept drawing on my hand, I'd die. with the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the I don't know, I think that explains something. It could be a John Crandon thing.

It could be just a matter of time. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine, and then suddenly, hustles and you drop in. Here's one thing on people who carve wood for a living. Oh yeah. You guys, I'm sure I've heard of Grindling Gibbons. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Who hasn't? So just for anyone who's... It's a horrible thing you do to great aches. She's been outlawed in most places. It's such a weird name. You're right. I think it was Dutch. Basically, it's the most famous woodcarver in history. And I know that he's quite an obscure figure now. But in the late 17th, early 18th centuries, he was catnip. He's all over the UK because he worked in England mostly. There are these incredible wood carvings.

I've seen some of them and they're amazing. He could do the fuzz on a peach, but carved in wood, you know? Wow. He's called the Michelangelo of Wood by some people. By some people. And why is mum? He lives with. Anyway, one of his crowning. That's really, he was extremely famous. It's not fair, why would somebody who whittles be regarded as less admirable than someone like Michael Angelou who works in stone, it doesn't make sense?

Exactly, exactly. Get this, could Michael Angelou do this? I bet he couldn't. In 1690, he made a wooden crevade. I have a wooden bow tie. It's completely different. Is that? You really need to flaky down do that.

Boat tie is designed to be stiff. Any chump can make a bow tie out of wood. Just two cross bits of wood now, like to get the fine. The crevade, the most flowing of all. I quite like I quite like how you just accepted that I have a wooden bow tie. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Sorry. There's a there's a much better point. What I just went to the place in Portugal where all the cock trees are and they sell a lot of merch and one of them is a bow tie. And I thought it'd be really cool. But I've never found the outfits I go with it. I must have done that. It's so weird. You need the full wooden suit

with it, don't you, really? Well James, if you, tell you what, if you, if you stand next to a donkey and you put on your wooden bowtie and you make it rotate, Anna will think you're a desert island. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in Ecuador, cleaners are people who rub you down with stinging nettles. And it's not a people pay for this service. Yeah, people I think people pay maybe even more than cleaners in the UK, which is not even more than cleaners in the UK. The highest paid bracket in the country. It's not possible, Adam. It's a travesty and the spinoff podcast, our cleaners paid too much.

I wish you all best. But these are limpia d'ores in Ecuador and they are spiritual cleaners. But limpia d'ore just means a cleaner, like it's just the word for a cleaner. But these are people who sort of cleanse your aura and it's a deep rooted tradition in traditional cultures, particularly up in the mountains. A lot of people have this service and it's you're rubbed up and down with stinging nettles and it removes all your bad energy and bad luck

and it hurts quite a lot and that just shows that it's working, apparently. Is it like cleaners in the UK where they come around, they sort of do an initial site visit of your aura and they say, well this aura probably is going to need about a couple of hours a week, I'd say, maybe two visits actually because it's prone to become disgusting quite fast. Is it like cleaners in the UK when they whip you with nettles, they sometimes miss the corners? And you're too embarrassed to say anything about it because you don't want to make a fuss, but so I just whip my own car.

Anyone else got any complaints about their cleaners? This very first world problems and little interaction we're having now. No, okay. So I think with these guys, they're professionals. The best ones, they don't miss any spots. And in fact, they have an extra service where if you're actually ill and you go to, again, Olympia service, then they have a diagnostic tool first where you get rubs with an egg and a dead black guinea pig and that did it

die of scurvy yeah what I can a dead black guinea pig yeah and somehow that diagnosis the problem then you sort of inspect the egg is weird obviously the guinea pig Well, that diagnosis is the problem. Then you sort of inspect the... The egg is weird. Obviously beginning to... Beginning to make sense. So this natal stuff might have... Could it have helped? Like, natals, are they good for you or not?

I don't not in this way. It's just a... It's a traditional herbal treatment, very popular. And it's... But it is still used quite widely. So even in hospitals in the big cities, in Ecuador, apparently doctors will let these limpia dores work alongside them. And you know, so the doctors will give the conventional

treatment and then we'll accept that the patient will also ask for a rub down with the nettles. I think it is good for you. I think a little bit. Yeah, I read something and if you rub nettles onto an arthritic thumb, the nettles will sting you, but you may get some relief from the arthritis. There are quite a lot of claims. Yeah, is that, I don't know how much has been scientifically proven, but that's not to say it doesn't work. There was a person who died of nettle stings, I've found one. This was a tree nettle in New Zealand called Ertica Ferrox.

Ertica is like the family of nettles. And apparently there was a lightly clad hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense patch of nettles. And apparently there was a lightly clad hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense patch of nettles. We don't really know what happened to her part from that. I guess it could be anaphylaxis so you can get that through nettles. But yeah. And apparently this nettle in New Zealand, according to Mary folklore, one of their kind of gods Coupé kind of used them to hinder pursuers when he stole their wives. So he would steal their wives, he would run away and he would throw down nettles so that people couldn't follow him. No, I'm feeling more guilty about something I did at primary school.

I've actually never confessed this to anybody, but just between the four of us. So a friend of mine, I've got very vague memories of this, but a friend of mine and I decided that for some reason we were going to set a nettle trap, which I now realise could have been fatal. And this nettle trap involved, we got some nettles and we just put them somewhere on the playground where somebody might find them. And then, I think my friends said, oh, they only sting you on the edge, I don't know if that's true or not.

And we thought, but maybe people won't, I don't know why we thought this was a good idea, but we thought, maybe people won't pick up the nettles and they won't be stung. So we then let it, we wrote a little note that said, please touch these leaves. And then my friend is like, but they only stick on the edge. So then we added, please touch these leaves on the edge. I don't know if they were any fatalities, but I'm burdened by guilt. What a genius, Ruth. You're a master criminal. I assume it's just no filth for it. Yeah, there's just no trick there, is there really? It's like, you're not trying to disguise them as anything,

or anything like that. It's like, literally straight on the nose, please engine yourself with our trap. Put hand in mouse trap. I love that. I'm sure in the course of your research you guys came across the world net all eating championships. No. Oh, it sounds really crazy. Well, they haven't in they haven't endorsed it. Of course. Very near Bridgeport, which we've mentioned before

on the podcast has the world's only thatched brewery. So we don't, there's no time to rake over that on-moon. So it's basically, it happened at a pub called The Bottle Inn until 2019, but the pub has been closed lots on and off. But it is happening this year. It's moving to a farm nearby. And the competition is closed because of nettle-based fatalities and it's shot down by health and safety at this point. So the farm is taking it over, taking the reins this year, which is great.

The measure is by length. That's how you measure whether you're successful at eating nettles or not, is how long in feed. It's tiring. Oh. Literally, how many feet of nettles you can eat. So it's the length of stalk that remains after you've stripped all the little little leaves off it and eat them.

Well, do you work your way down like a side of a road and just eat as many of the tools? I understand it's the stalk because I understand it was originally two farmers got into an argument about who had the biggest nettles and they said, if you can grow a longer nettle than I've got growing on my farm, I'll eat it. Yeah. And so I think the idea is you strip the leaves off and then you, it's the stalk that remains is your measure of nettles. I think that argument was about more than, I think that was about the length of the farmer's roosters. I mean, when I encountered this, I thought, oh, yeah, competitive net-leading, it's crazy, but it's like the competitive chili eating or the competitive hot dog eating or so on.

So it's like, oh, how many can you eat in one minute or how many can you eat in three minutes? But no, it's how many can you eat in an hour? You're just spending an hour eating nettles. It's too long. It doesn't count if you don't keep the nettles down. And there was one guy a few years ago who was way ahead and at 57 minutes he went to just threw up in the pub car park and he was disqualified. Can you imagine? It's the winner, the all-time record winner is called Philip Thorn.

Now, nettles don't have thorns, admittedly, but it's quite close. It's close. It's close. His record, 104 feet. So impressive. So impressive. Which is long. Do you know what's, I find most amazing about that, is what it says about human capacity to improve, because about 10 years before he got the record, which was in 2018, the winner of the same competition, eight, 48 feet nettles. Now, in just a decade,

Phil Thorn has more than doubled that. How a few men's got so much better at nettle eating in the space of 10 years? That's like, if in 10 years time we can do the 100 metres in four and a half seconds, isn't it? Yeah. What, get Phil Thorn in the 100 metres. So, it was in nettles at the end at the finish line. That'll add to a cook, then, I guess, right? You just have to eat them wrong. Yeah, they're raw, freshly picked. Your tongue goes black from all the iron,

and it's painful, apparently, almost immediately. Within 20 seconds, it's very painful. And you then only got another 3,580 seconds to get through. It's how terrific. I don't know how people do it. Yes, and you're not allowed to bring your own nettles, not allowed to bring any substances that like numb your mouth, although I'm sure some people have been tempted to try and

smear Vaseline on, I don't know. Yeah, because I just thought of a trick, but then I only thought of the trick after you told me the thing you're not allowed to do, so that's not going to work. But I think, from memory in Hawaii, I think the nettles don't have stings on them. I think. I might tell you turn it. You turn it. Where are you lay with your, with your sun hat on in your, in your tropical shirt? Where have you been? Just thanks for talking, you know? I think I have a thing. Or smuggling some broccoli or something and say, oh no, it's definitely nettles.

I think that they might have evolved to have no sting because they don't have any animals that eat them or something. Oh really? So they don't need to repel. That's amazing. What you can do at the Nettle Leading Championships is drink.

You can either drink water or you can drink beer. I don't know if it has to be beer sourced from a thatch brewery or not. I guess it's going to be cider now that it's a cider farm. Cider is allowed. Cider is allowed. Because I think that would help go on. So the one with the, in fact, as we're talking about,

incredible moments in the history of nettle eating in 2019, the women's winner, Lindy Rogers. I don't know why the competition is divided by sex. I have no idea. But there's a men's and a women's championship. The women's winner, Lindy Rogers, had an incredible Fosbury flop moment because she dipped her nettles inside her. Oh, inside her, Lauren. Sorry.

I mean, first of all, that's disgusting. Second of all, I feel like it would hurt just as much. In Apple cider. Oh, sorry. Exactly. And so that's a method that apparently helps to take a bit of the take out of it. That feels like a loophole. They've got to close that one. That should be. It's all, it's all loopholes. It's all loopholes. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So in the war, in the First World War, the Germans were encouraged to collect nettles. Can you guess why, maybe? Ammunition shortage is really biting. We're just going to have to thrash the British with our nettle bundles

with their kindness to steal everybody's wives and then throw the nettles down to boil the pursuers. Very good. Just possessing a nettle trap in the playground, taking literally a leaf out of tins, but bitter touch and see here. No, it was to make uniforms. So you can take the stocks off nettles and you can make like a kind of material with it, the month at university in Leicester, I've got a thing called the

sting project and they've been trying to find things that you can do with nettles. And one of their team, a designer called Alex Deer, has invented underwear that's made from nettles. They made a pink camisole top and pants made from nettles. And according to Alex Deer, they said, it is quite a hairy fiber. So you probably wouldn't want all of your underwear made of it. But we are trying to make a point of what is possible with this plant. I doxies want to dip them inside. I wouldn't. Or have sex with someone who wears dockleaf pouts.

Oh, James, come on. You know, that's a myth. Don't propagate it for the kids. Some myths and ice Anna some myths and it's good it takes your mind off the stinging agony when looking for a dog leaf so I maintain as a placebo effect. I go to the dockly feeding championships and I gotta say my record is pretty strong. Have you guys heard of the Hornet ordeal? This is the El Gaió people in Kenya do this. This was an article by a guy called FB Wellborne who underwent the initiation who's Kenyan.

And what it is is that boys are forced to crawl through tunnels made of stinging nettles. And then once you get out of this tunnel of stinging nettles, then you have the nettles rubbed on your genitals. And then you have live hornets dropped on your back. And the reason that they do all this is that the nettles are there to prepare you for the hornets. So like the pain is to prepare you for the hornet pain, and then the hornet pain is there to prepare you for the circumcision that comes straight afterwards. Wow. I think the world nettle eating championship should go for this.

So after meeting the nettles, then the hornets. And then that would explain why there's a separate category for men and women. How is the circumcision contest judged? Is that by length? How's that working? I've worked out all the details yet. Wow.

That sounds really horrible, James. Yeah, no, it is. What is the circumcision prepared for? Life, hasn't I? Oh, boy. It gets worse. Dealing with a bloody council. All right, it is time for our final fact,

and that is Andy's fact. My fact this week is that the people of the remote island of St. Kilda used to yell if they saw themselves in a visiting tourist's mirror. They actually had plenty of mirrors, they just wanted to keep the tourists coming. This is about the remote. Very remote island of St. Kilda, and it features in a new book called Shadowlands by Matthew Green, which is about various forgotten fascinating places. And St. Kilda had people on it for about a thousand years.

They lived there until 1930. The island was evacuated in 1930. In the 19th century, they started getting visitors by ship, Victorian tourists, not very many because it's so far away. But they played up to it massively. And they would do this thing. They would scream or pretend to be incredibly surprised if someone showed them a mirror. They would look behind the mirror saying, there's no one behind. What's going on? I mean, they were literally, they were clean shaven. They had

mirrors. They shaved that morning. I read this was in an article by Neil McKenzie, who was the person who was kind of in charge, who was like the Reverend who kind of went there and he was kind of in charge of anything and helped the islanders for quite a long time. And he said they would pick up pieces of coal and affect surprise at not being able to eat them. And when they came in front of a licking glass,

they would start and express great surprise at not being able to find the person who appeared behind it. It's so fun. It's hilarious. They really were cut. Oh, sometimes they would go on a border yacht visiting Taurus yacht, and they pretended that they thought all the brass on it was gold. I said, ah, you've got all this gold. You must be the richest man in the world.

They knew about brass. You know, they were hamming it up. Did it work? Were the tourists locking, disenquilded, to see these people be amazed at their own reflection? Because it's hard to get to. I don't know if I'd take a holiday. It didn't become a major tourist economy, which is why the island economy fell apart. The place was evacuated in 1930, but they were doing their best to keep some money coming in. Yeah, they apparently, according to Mackenzie, they would all the time when they were doing this, they'd be talking to each other in Gallic, and they'd be saying, if we seem to be paying great attention and make them

believe we are simple they will be sure before they go away to give us something even better. So they would just do this and they thought if they kind of make them think we're stupid then eventually we'll get some really awesome booty from them. Smart guys. Yeah. So I'm trying to work out what they were what they were pretending to be and and it so is it that they're pretending that they thought they were vampires and was surprised to realize that they weren't actually vampires. Well, the mirror. They were surprised. Oh, I thought I didn't leave a reflection in a mirror because I was a vampire. I realized I'm human after all that would surprise. I thought it was and that's actually why the island broke down. Everyone was scared off.

after all that would surprise me. That's what it was and that's actually why the island broke down everyone was scared off. Well, my favorite short poems is by John Heggley and it has the title of vampire considers buying a new mirror and the poem is simply on reflection. No. Really. Very nice. That's really nice. It's also a good one to be able to memorize. But I myself to remember that for the school, like the citation competition. Yeah. Yeah.

I was trying to look it up. I saw it about 25 years ago and I was trying to look it up somewhere and I can't find it on the internet. And then I thought, you know, I can actually remember that joke. That's fine. It's been, it's held fascination for people for hundreds of years, hasn't it, since Kilda people have been visiting it. And it is, it's over a hundred miles of the coast of Scotland. And it's a rocky ride to get there. And it's quite unclear when people have lived there and when they

haven't. But there was definitely a society established by the 16th century, wasn't there? That's when we know that there was like a community of people who were living there successfully. So it's not like it's been populated forever. And then people have traveled there ever since. There was the first proper account of the islanders was written in 1698, called a late voyage just in Kilda, which I still don't know what he meant by late. I don't know if he meant to go 10 years earlier. He died about five years earlier. I don't know if he'd meant to go 10 years earlier. He died about five years earlier. Anyway, this is a writer called Martin Martin. Brilliant.

I read his book, it's fascinating. One of the things he says is they're extremely good climbers. And so they live by hunting the birds, mostly the island birds. So they'll climb up and then they'll catch the birds. And he described a particularly very high rock called the thumb Which was as high as a tool steeple and he said that the only way that you could get to the top of the thumb is by at one point You swing your entire body sort of up onto a ledge by holding onto a protruding bit of rock

Which is only big enough to accommodate your thumb You've got a yeah your whole body bouncing on your thumb as you propel it up onto the next pit of rock. Quite impressive. And then the person who swung his way up there onto the thumb gets drops a rope down and hoist the others up. And then that person gets an extra four foul at the end of the day for his achievement. The birds, right?

Because that's what the people of St. Kildin mostly lived off birds and stuff. Yes, what birds and poo, of course. So it's left-hand big. Why wouldn't they just leave the rope up? It takes a lot of fun out of it, isn't it? It is such a fascinating place and it was unbelievably inhospitable and it's amazing that people managed to scratch out a living there at all. So sometimes it would just rain for three weeks without stopping, not once. It would just rain for three weeks without stopping, not once. It would just rain for three weeks on end. There was one storm. I mean, in the fairness in Bolton or even in Manchester.

I think I could survive. All right. All right. There was once a storm that was so fierce that everyone on the island was left deaf for a week. It was so... Like, I know, it's just not true. It can't be true, can it? It's not true.

I think it can. It was so windy that islanders. It can't be true, can it? It's not true. I think it can. It was so windy that Ireland's sheep would sometimes just be blown over the cliffs. I can understand. Yeah, that is understandable, but everyone on the island going deaf for a week. That doesn't make that can't be true. It's just not a thing. We should mention the amazing way that they used to communicate with the mainland, the

St. Kildens in the 19th century, which was via male boats. They didn't have a postal service until the early 20th century, and so they would just get a letter, write it, pop it on a homemade male boat, like a hollowed out bit of wood, with a little tin placed inside into which they'd put their letter, and then they'd burn onto the service of this tiny boat. The words please open and they'd inflate a sheep's bladder, attach it to the boat, send it off and hope that it got to land somewhere. And according to one report I read, two thirds of messages reach their destination. As in, they'd reach a destination, either the coast of Scotland or Scandinavia

sometimes. And then those people would open the message and find the actual address inside and post it on. That's very good. But it's roughly the same strike rate as the Royal Mail at the moment. So that's really cool. Pyrography, it's called when you burn words onto bits of wood. It's kind of a subsection of whittling.

I don't know if you can't look across it in your whittling research. Oh yeah. It used to be a very male dominated area and then in the turn of the 20th century, there's a Melbourne architect called Alfred Smart who invented a new way of pyrography, pyrography and you type of pyrography. And the way that he did that, he had a pencil with like some fuel attached to it. And so you could use it and you could change the amount of fuel that came in and out. So you could start doing shading and stuff like that and do amazing patterns.

And then it became a kind of a relatively not very common, but a relatively common hobby for women in the start, the 20th century. And I was reading about someone called Joe Schwartz, who's a wood burner, and she is the first person to ever teach wood burning in Antarctica. I mean, it's right down on the list of survivors of ability to go, isn't it? Especially in a continent with no trees.

But you know, she's got a record, so that's good. That's good. That's being the second person. Imagine going to Antart to going out and teach them wood burning. How does that harm? God, I'm not even the first one to do this. You arrive, you see the Schwartz panel being hung up over the tent and the nightmare. Can I tell you one quick thing about the evacuation of her, Sir Kilda?

Yes, please. Because life got harder and harder, and a lot of able-bodied young men went to the mainland, and as it was largely a subsistence economy, so hunting birds and farming sheep, that was a big problem for the islands survival. In fact, they got close to starving on several occasions. And so in 1930, they contacted the mainland and said, look, we're going to tap out. This is horrible, but we don't like it. We're all deaf. The government said, yeah, of course, we'll bring you over. By that point, two thirds of the population shared the same two surnames,

as in the diversity of families had really been whittled down over the years. At the end of it, in 1930, they ceremonially closed down the post office. I think it's amazing. They held one final church service and they drowned their dogs off the pier. Oh my gosh. I don't know why. I don't know why. No.

They must have been so. Well, that took such a horrible turn at the end of that sentence. Really? They must have been. Guys, there's rum on the boat for the dogs. But then when they got to the mainland, the government arranged for most of the men to be given jobs in the Forestry Commission. But unfortunately, most of them had never seen a tree because there are no trees on Sir

Kildar. We're just chopping everything down. Wouldn't they? They'd chop down lampposts, tulips. Oh, presumably they were going to get jobs at the RSPCA. Yes. Yes. Howardly rearranged.

All right. That's it. That's all ofanged. Alright, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much, everybody for listening. Thanks so much, Tim, for coming on. If you want to get in touch with any of us, you can find these guys on Twitter. I believe James, you're on. That's James Harkin.

Andy. And Tim, have you fallen prey to the scourge that is Twitter? I'm Tim Halfed on Twitter, but I don't really pay any attention. I think people should just listen to the cautionary tales podcast instead and not tweet me. Great. So if you want to be completely ignored, then tweets at Tim Harford about do definitely go and listen to the his cautionary tales podcast. It is brilliant. And if you want to know anything more about this podcast, no such thing as a fish, go to no such thingthingasaffish.com where you'll find all of our previous episodes and any other interesting news about us. Okay, that's all for this week. We will see you again next week with

another episode. Goodbye.