No Such Thing As A Fish - 225: No Such Thing As An Interesting Riddle
Episode Date: July 13, 2018Live from the Sydney Opera House, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss BBC stock orgies, being buried with a chicken and why you might cycle the Olympic marathon....
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this
week coming to you live from the Sydney Opera House!
My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray,
and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our
four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting
with you, Andy.
My fact is that the BBC has sound effects, including in-disposed chicken, more or less
normal chicken, standard orgy, and comedy orgy.
Now, it would be very remiss if we went to play for you some of these tonight.
Have you got the clips?
I've got clips all right, so yeah, they've got a sound off archive of 16,000 effects,
and so here's in-disposed chicken.
How often are the BBC playing out sitcoms where enter in-disposed chicken?
In-disposed to do what?
I don't know, it's sounding pretty distressed, though.
So there's also, no, we've got standard orgy here, just as a bass line.
I think I can hear a few chickens in there.
Oh yeah, there's definitely a cock and vell somewhere.
And here, because I know we all want to hear it, is comedy orgy.
The BBC, ladies and gentlemen, and the amazing thing is, they've made this open to the public,
this whole archive, 16,000 effects, and you can download them, and for non-commercial reasons
you can use them.
And it's a fantastic archive, it's got such funny stuff.
Just on those orgy clips, the legend at the BBC is that they were recorded by a studio
manager in the 1970s, who are...
That sounds about right, not the BBC.
And it was colleagues during their lunch breaks, he'd say, come on, you have to make some orgy
sounds during your lunch break.
Is that right?
Supposedly so, yeah.
God, lunch breaks are more fun in the olden days.
It's very cool though, so these are all now free to use for anyone, hence the reason we're
allowed to do that, right here, right now.
I think you asked for special permission.
I did ask for special permission, yeah.
In case we had wanted to use thirsty budgerigars in shed, or two Siamese cats, one coughing
occasionally.
And if you want to play a fight sound effect, they've got three people brawling, they've
got six people brawling, and if those aren't enough, you can do 36 people brawling.
Wow.
Yeah, I spent a long time reading this list.
They have riot in Belfast, don't they?
Riot in Belfast with breaking glass, rubber bullets, distant cries and chants.
And then they also have riot in Belfast, more subdued.
We're going to go for another take on the riot, guys.
Could you just keep it down a bit this time, please?
They're so specific, though.
They've got Belgian post office brackets busy, I think, which is...
If you want a French post office brackets busy, do you think that's a disaster?
Are you like, if I only got the Belgian one, there's nothing we can do.
It's a really weird mix of things that were recorded specially, like, for example, comedy
orgy, or things that are recording history.
So they've got an air raid on Battersea from 1940 during the Battle of Britain.
That, obviously, is not going to happen again.
You're not going to have a comedy air raid on Battersea, are you?
Badoing.
It's amazing, isn't it, when you look into the stories behind where sounds come from.
They were at lunch break, and they would come and do a comedy orgy.
So there's that famous one, I think it's quite famous, that in Jurassic Park,
the sound of the loss of raptors barking, that sort of, was turtles having sex.
I don't know if you know that, but you can see footage, and there's a lot of it online,
of turtles having sex, which I highly recommend.
And as they're going at it, there's this kind of noise.
And that's genuinely what they sampled for the...
Oh, how did that turtle get on stage? Where is it?
I didn't even do it right, it's such a lovely tone.
I think you've got to be in the mood, you know?
But so, the T-Rex is in Jurassic Park.
When you see a T-Rex, it's a mixture of a bunch of different animal sounds.
So, the voice itself, for the breathing, they use the sound of a whale.
They use lion's alligators and tigers for the low frequency of the roaring that was going on.
But for the heavy breathing, the sort of, of the T-Rex, that's a koala.
No, an Aussie, yeah, made it into Jurassic Park.
An Aussie legend.
This was so weird today, by the way, so I was thinking about this fact,
and the fact I needed to do some research for it on the walk to the Sydney Opera House.
And I was thinking about Foley Artists.
So, this is obviously about Foley Artists, and it's Jack Foley,
the guy who kind of invented sound effects and made a lot of sound effects from our films.
And I walked past a street called Foley Street.
As I was thinking about Foley Artists, isn't that insane?
That's just a personal story.
And what a story.
What a story.
That was such a, I didn't do my homework, but woe do I have an excuse.
I was doing some reading on Foley.
No, he used to, so he is the sound of the walk of a lot of your favourite actors,
if you're born in the 1940s actually.
He's the sound of the walks of Laurence Olivier, of James Cagley, of Marlon Brando,
because he used to watch these people walk,
because you couldn't get the sounds recorded, sort of live,
because the cameras weren't recording that close up.
And he would watch them really carefully and imitate their walks,
and then the sound of his feet hitting the ground were that.
And they still do that today in nature documentaries a lot.
So actually, while I was on this walk, I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible Podcast,
and very good show.
And there was a guy interviewed, Richard Hinton,
who does the sound effects for animals in a lot of nature documentaries.
And he says, for walking animals, you always use your hands,
because you have much more control over your hands.
And so if you're a lion, then you sort of do it quite lightly,
and then if you're an elephant, you're a turtle having sex.
Yeah, it's still in the hands.
So speaking of walking, Orson Welles, he wanted a specific sound of people walking on sand,
so he had an entire truckload of sand dumped onto the studio floor for people to walk on.
Unfortunately, it just dampened it, you couldn't hear anything.
And they used to get amazing things that they were asked,
so they were asked to do the sounds of snowflakes falling on snow,
or the sound of a nude woman sitting on a marble bench.
What was that necessary?
It's all in the hands.
This is amazing. Bacon sizzling in a pan sounds identical to rain falling.
Wow.
No, you don't think it does, but I did a video on the internet,
and I was tricked two times out of four, which is exactly no better than average.
It's incredible. You think you know it and you don't.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, we're full of anecdotes tonight, aren't we?
Do you know the big boulder in Indiana Jones,
the one that rolls after India at the beginning of the first film?
The noise of that is a Honda Civic set in neutral
going down a gravel road on a very slight slope.
But it works. It's amazing. How are yours going to be tricked?
In our fight club, all of the punches are the smacking of slabs of meat with pig's feet.
But David Fincher thought that this sounded exactly right,
but he was another one who took it really seriously.
In fact, in one of the things in fight club,
he asked a stuntman to fall down the stairs 12 times for one scene,
and then he used the first take.
Did he know after the first take that he was using the first take
and the other 11 were just for fun?
I paid for an hour.
We're going to have to move on fairly soonish to the next fact.
All my research is about orgies.
Move us on.
Okay, on the Wikipedia for orgies, they have a section on Roman orgies,
and apparently this did happen.
It was an ecstatic form of worship that some cults had.
Sounds alright, actually. It involved drinking wine.
It doesn't seem to be much sex involved in fairness.
It was involved drinking wine and dancing.
Oh, it sounds okay.
As well as eating raw meat, which is not quite as good,
and self-castration, which is much less good.
Of course, the self-castration does provide fodder for the raw meat,
so it's sort of two birds, one stone, isn't it?
Alright, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinsky.
My fact this week is that in the first Olympic marathon in 1896,
the same stopwatch was used at the start and finish line,
so it had to be carried from one to the other ahead of the runners by bicycle.
That's very cool.
So this is the first model of Olympics, obviously, in Greece,
and yeah, it was held by a judge,
but to stopwatch it was started by this judge who clicked it,
shoved it in the hand of a bicycle,
and the cyclist had to ride along in foul weather.
It was really awful weather that day, and the road was very rough,
and then cycled really fast to the finish line
so that the same stopwatch could be there.
Also presumably cycled without accidentally pressing any of the buttons on the stopwatch
during the process of cycling.
But you could just have given it to the guy in front,
and said, if anyone overtakes you, should we just self-track it over?
Yeah.
Like kind of a relay for each other.
That's a great idea.
I was thinking you could do it by car, but then obviously not back then,
and actually probably not now, certainly at the London Marathon,
because the average speed in central London at the moment for cars is 7.6 miles an hour,
whereas the average speed for runners in the marathon is 12 miles an hour.
In fairness, the London Marathon is on a Sunday,
so the traffic won't be so bad,
but bad news, they close all the roads because the marathon's on.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
This was obviously the first modern Olympics.
It was very exciting.
This marathon was emulating the great marathon of history that they wanted to do.
Of history.
Of history.
You could at least narrow it down to the country.
Not Australia.
So, but what was very exciting about it,
I think particularly for the room that we're in,
is that entering that Olympics that year,
there was an Australian team,
and it was the very first Olympics, yeah,
consisted of one person.
He was a guy called Edwin Flack,
and he actually ran in this marathon,
was quite far at the front at one point,
but then he unfortunately had never run that far before,
and got...
While he was doing really well,
he suddenly got really delirious, collapsed down,
and one of the spectators came up to help him,
got him up, and then Edwin Flack punched him.
The first, yeah, punching of a spectator by an Aussie,
or any country.
Sorry, just on Edwin Flack,
he was one of, I think there were 17 people running,
and 13 were Greek,
and he was one of the remainder that were foreigners,
and none of them knew how to long distance run,
and so they all started out ahead,
and all the Greeks had had lots of practice,
and so they all started out behind,
and they all thought they were winning,
and when Flack started winning, I think he overtook a French guy,
and again the cyclist was crucial,
because the cyclist cycled to the finish line,
to the big stadium, and said,
the Aussie's winning, the Aussie's winning,
and then they were all devastated,
because they were all Greeks, and that's what they thought,
because there was no way of relaying this information,
there was no cyclist there,
who'd already pedalled the stopwatch up to the front line,
so yeah, they really thought he was going to win.
The guy who was eventually won by a Greek,
and so the main medical check for this race,
was being tapped on the knee by a doctor,
and then given two beers,
that was it,
so everyone was a couple of beers in by the time they started,
then, so the guy who eventually won...
This explains why the Australian did so well.
The guy who eventually won halfway through,
he bumped into his stepfather,
who was waiting along the route at a little inn,
who gave him some wine,
and then he was getting really tired,
this guy, and he asked someone
who was accompanying him for water,
he said, please, have you got any water,
so he was given cognac instead.
So he finished the race completely half-cut,
he was...
I think he spat out the cognac,
in disgust.
So the next Olympics, which was in 1900,
the course markings
were so poor in the marathon,
that confused athletes could be seen running randomly
through the streets of central Paris.
And the absolutely worst thing about it,
for me, is that the winner was a guy
called Michel Theatro of France,
but in second place was a guy called
Emile Champion,
and in third place was Ernst Fast.
Wow. So sad.
Yeah.
It was really Teatro's responsibility
to give that game away, wasn't it?
It probably changes name.
To winner or something.
Well, in 1904, the marathon competitor
who finished ninth, he should have done better,
but he was chased a mile off course by dogs.
Was that 1904?
In that same race, there was a Cuban postman
called Andarin Carvajal,
and he arrived at the last minute,
and he'd lost all of his money in New Orleans,
so he had to hitchhike to St. Louis,
and he'd hardly eaten anything,
so he stopped off on an orchard on route
to have a snack on some apples,
which turned out to be rotten.
And so, despite having strong stomach cramps
throughout the whole of the race,
he ended up finishing fourth.
Wow.
I like this. This is many years later.
There was a marathon runner called Kanakuri,
who started the marathon
and then he went missing,
and no one ever saw him again.
What? Yeah.
They just lost Kanakuri.
He was so fast.
He was missing,
and then it turned out that what happened is
is that he lost consciousness,
and he was rescued by a family on the side of the track.
They brought him back to a house.
He regained consciousness later and was nursed to health,
but was so embarrassed about it, he didn't tell anyone.
And so, he was listed
as missing by Swedish authorities
for over 50 years.
Before he finally admitted
that that's what happened,
that he had done it.
He should have just sneaked back into the end
of one of the marathons they were doing.
Well, well, he did.
You're not going to tell me he did that.
He went back on the 55th anniversary of the 1912 games
to finish the race,
and he holds the longest ever official marathon time
of 54 years, eight months,
six days, five hours,
32 minutes, and 20.3 seconds.
APPLAUSE
I've got a fact about a marathon,
which I don't know if you guys have heard of.
This is called the Barclay Marathon.
This is the toughest marathon.
Have you guys done it?
Has anyone competed?
No. No, exactly.
Exactly.
You think you're tough enough.
Oh, my goodness, guys.
OK, get this. It's in Tennessee.
You have to do five 20-mile loops
all over a mountain, OK?
And you have to finish within 60 hours.
So it's very hard.
You have to do the equivalent of running up and down
Mount Everest twice.
It only costs $1.60 to enter.
LAUGHTER
Thousands of people have entered since it was started.
Four...
Sorry. And a T-shirt?
So...
You have to play well.
Organise or whatever, please.
Yes, I...
You absolutely bang on, but it's more efficient
if I do it.
LAUGHTER
But you're right. No, you're right.
You're right. The guy who set it up,
he requests that you bring him T-shirts,
because he doesn't like shopping for clothes.
So it might be socks or T-shirts, whatever.
You have to get in.
You have to email a secret email address
on the right minute, at the right day,
an essay titled,
Why I should be allowed to run in the Barclay.
There's no path, so they leave 13 books
trailed around the course.
And as you go around, you have to take a page
from each book to finish each loop.
You have to sign a disclaimer saying,
if I'm stupid enough to attempt the Barclay,
I deserve to be held responsible
for any result of that attempt,
be it financial, physical, mental, or anything else.
You don't get a medal, by the way, if you finish.
LAUGHTER
What do you get? Do you get a T-shirt?
It started in 1986.
Nobody finished it until 1995.
Wow.
So, just back on timers,
in the 2012 Olympics in London,
they invented a timer
which could measure accuracy
to a millionth of a second.
But no one really figured out what to do with it.
LAUGHTER
Because, obviously, that is such a small amount of time.
In that amount of time,
Usain Bolt can travel
0.000001 meters,
which is about the size of a bacteria.
LAUGHTER
Yeah, so, more accurate timing devices
are useless at Olympics.
And this is a serious problem.
People keep having ties,
because you only measure them to one-hundredth of a second.
And after that, it's kind of unfair.
So, I think there have been a lot of ties
in the swimming since 1984,
because in 1972,
there was a tie when they measured it to
one-hundredth of a second.
And one guy beat the other
by two-thousandths of a second,
which is much, much faster
than the blink of an eye.
And the thickness of coat on the swimming pool
could easily, massively override that
by a long, long way.
And so, they realised it was completely unfair.
So, they just have loads of ties these days.
In 2012, there was one where it went down
to a coin toss or a run-off.
And then one of them just seeded into the other.
A run-off in the swimming?
That was a sprinting race.
Just a freeze.
Could you let your fingernails grow enough
until you would win that race?
Yeah, that's a really good idea.
If your fingers were 50 metres long,
you could just go...
I bet you'd have bigger problems, wouldn't you?
OK, it is time
for fact number three,
and that is James.
OK, my fact this week
is that in first century Denmark,
if you were really rich,
you were buried with a chicken.
If you were really, really rich,
you were buried with a goose.
Wow. OK.
So, this is the thing that happened.
Basically, it was the Romans who had started
to get up to that in Scandinavia,
and goosees were extremely rare.
I think we said geese, just FYI.
Yeah.
And I'm the editor of this podcast,
and...
and geese were really rare.
And also, geese,
they represented the goddess Juno,
and they found that not only
have these people who are buried
with chicken and geese,
they're obviously kind of
of high status, because they have
loads of other Roman goods as well.
Yeah, that's the thing that happened.
That's very cool. Just wondering.
You said that some people were buried with a chicken.
Do we have any idea what it might sound like
if the chicken was, say,
indisposed before...
I have a feeling we're going to...
Thought I might...
I'll be buried with things. Oh, yeah.
There are ancient Peruvian
shark fisherman graves
which have been excavated recently,
and it turns out that they were buried
with extra legs.
What? Sorry?
Are we sure that they just didn't have
extra legs?
I suppose we're not 100% sure.
They had extra legs
buried with them, so two extra legs
were left in one grave.
I'm pretty sure this guy... Has anyone
guessed why that might have been the case?
I guess they were.
I think they were the legs of, I suppose,
other Peruvian shark fisherman
who hadn't had quite as long and happier career
as the main guys in the grave.
There are a lot of legless torsos
buried nearby.
I don't think we've found any yet.
Again, this is research in its early stages, so...
I really like that. In America,
the incidences
of corpses being stolen
for scientific purposes from graveyards
during the U.S.
Civil War times by quite a lot.
Someone invented a coffin
torpedo.
The coffin torpedo
was, if you were digging a grave,
it would blow
up, basically, from the inside
of the coffin when you were trying to steal
the body and kill the person who was trying to steal you.
What?
There was one that was put on top
of the coffin as well, so it didn't harm
the actual interior of the coffin as well,
and that was a big thing. They used to do things
like put cages on top of graves
to make sure that no one could steal.
There was also, and this sounds really weird
to me, the graveyards
used to, at one point, have at the bottom
of the...
so you have the tombstone, and right at the bottom
there would be a shotgun just pointed up.
And if anyone came
and you might just be visiting,
so I don't know how...
how it worked, but
you'd be killed, and...
Yeah, that is harsh.
You might just want to say one last goodbye.
Although, if it's a family grave, just
plop them in, I guess.
So that would go down
extremely badly in Madagascar,
where they have
a tradition of disinterring
the dead every few years.
So this is this, I think, really cool
Madagascar tradition.
It's in the Fama di Hanna
people, and it's called
The Turning of Bones. It happens every five to seven years.
And you go to where your ancestors
are buried, or where your grandma's buried,
and you dig them up, and you can change their clothes
because they've been wearing the same clothes for ages.
And you then
walk them around the village,
should have given them a tour of the village.
Not between your shoulders, pretending they're still fine.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you do.
You walk around and you go, oh, look, there's a co-op there.
It didn't used to be there, that kind of thing.
They...
You won't remember that.
They dance with them.
So they dance around the graveyard with them, the cemetery.
They hold the bodies above their heads,
and then they spray them with perfume, and they bathe them in wine.
And they often rearrange
the bodies into more human shapes
when sometimes time has taken its toll.
And they just have...
It's a really fun banquet, really, with the dead.
If you're into that kind of thing.
LAUGHTER
So in China,
it is illegal to be buried with a picture
of a super girl.
A super girl?
I will come to that. Thank you.
LAUGHTER
So I think people mostly
probably know that in China,
they do this thing where they have, like, paper offerings.
So they might pop bits of fake money
in your tomb or whatever,
and it's, like, things that you loved in life or whatever.
I mean, that would be so annoying in the afterlife
if you got to the counter
and you wanted to buy all your stuff for the afterlife,
and they were like, this is all fake, sir.
I'm sorry. Yeah, but...
If you're a fan of playing Monopoly
in the afterlife, that stuff will be very handy.
That's true.
You can't bring your own fake money to a Monopoly board.
LAUGHTER
You can't be at all. I've got a new currency
I'd just like to pop in.
Rules, mate.
I want a lot of games with that extra stack.
The Murray Millions.
I'll take everything.
So as well as
they do have this kind of money,
but they banned the price of folga offerings.
So that's such things as luxury villas,
sedan cars,
Viagra you're not allowed to,
and then simulated models of Supergirls.
And that is based
on the hit TV contest,
Mongolian cow-yogurt Supergirl.
LAUGHTER
Please don't give away the ending of the latest series,
because I'm only halfway through.
I've actually heard of Supergirl.
Now that I think about it, that was the TV show.
It's kind of like X Factor where it's all about singing.
Yeah, and I think they said
this is what I read in a newspaper,
but I've not double checked to verify it.
And it was a big British tabloid.
It said that
in China, so many people
voted for the winner of the first
series of Supergirl,
that if you took all those votes
and applied it to every other voting
that has happened on planet Earth,
it is the biggest collection of single votes
for one thing that the Earth has ever witnessed.
More than any election, more than anything else.
Because they don't really have elections there.
Dan, how dare you?
LAUGHTER
The elections in China are free and fair,
and extremely concentrated
on a single result.
Sorry, just on China quickly as well.
Not so much burials,
but funerals.
Just very recently, the Chinese Ministry of Culture
have announced that they're planning to eliminate
strippers from going to funerals.
And this is a custom that happens in China
and Taiwan, whereby
they like to make it a big party.
And again, go online, you can see this.
And dignitaries will have this.
It will be girls on the top
of cars, pole dancing
and stripping. It's a big thing.
In some cases, there will be 50 car processions,
all of which will have a pole dancing
stripper on top of it.
Yeah, and they're trying to
get that out. Although you should specify
that strippers are not allowed to go to funerals.
It's not like if your job happens to be a stripper,
but your mum dies,
you're not allowed to attend a funeral.
You're not supposed to strip at it.
You just can't take your clothes off, yeah.
Yeah.
But that's the thing that genuinely happens.
What's the purpose of it?
It's just a celebration thing, and I think they tied it in with...
With the fake money, where you put it in the...
I was looking at animals being buried.
Because pets being buried
is more and more of a talked about and written about thing
and pets, cemeteries and stuff.
And people really want to be buried with their pets now.
And there are actually a couple of really bizarre cases
where people who are dying
request that their pets be put down
so that they can be buried together.
What? Yeah. Yeah. An American.
And his Yorkshire Terrier.
Look it up.
So...
It's very weird, but there's this debate in the US.
So in New York, for instance,
you are now allowed to bury animal remains
in human cemeteries with the human,
but only if they're buried at the same time.
So you're not allowed to sort of
just have a pet funeral.
But...
Yeah, it's a big deal.
That's amazing, because I remember reading somewhere
ages ago that their first pet cemeteries
were open in Paris, I think at the turn
of the century, because they explicitly
made it illegal to throw dead animals
into the river. And so they were like,
well now we need something else to do with them.
When will the cult of health and safety
let go of poor innocent
Parisians?
Well, Frederick the Great of Prussia
wanted to be buried with his dogs, because he was obsessed
with them. And the
court said you should be buried next to your wife
and father in the royal cemetery.
And so he was. They disobeyed
his wishes. That was in 17...
in the 1780s.
And in the 1990s,
they respected
his wishes and buried him with his greyhounds
instead. So that's quite happy.
I'm sure that... Yeah.
You know
Bella Lugosi,
who played Dracula? Yeah.
He was buried in his Dracula cape. Cool.
Yeah. Which would be a hell of a shock,
wouldn't it, if you were
digging him up, you know.
But
there was a report
in 1930, a few years before he died, saying he hopes
to escape the shackles of the role.
And clearly he did not. It's quite sad, actually.
Yeah.
That's bad. That sounds like it was an argument with his wife
and father there.
He had a guest book at his funeral, which I rather like.
I think that's a cool thing to have.
Yeah. Okay.
I found a really odd thing, which is
King Richard III
is buried in a casket
that was made by his
great, great, great, great, great, great,
great grand-nephew.
Yeah.
Great.
So he was...
I should add, I wasn't sure how
many greats it was, so I kept going, and you can edit
in the relevant amount.
I'm going to put so many in.
And you're just going to sound like
you're having a stroke or something.
Wow. The podcast is two and a half
hours long this week. How would all that
could be?
Is that so hard to occur? Is that someone
enough great to get it to the present day?
And this is when he was reburied?
He was, remember, King Richard III was found
underneath a car park. In fact, it was in our very
first episode, one of the headline facts
that we mentioned, and they
had to prove who he was
using the DNA via
a living relative, and there was one guy
called Michael Ibsen, who they were able
to track it down. I've met him. Really nice guy.
He was...
They used his DNA, they proved it, and he
happened to be a carpenter, and so he said
can I make the coffin that he's
going to be reburied in. Wow, that's really nice.
Although, of course,
after a certain distance, we are
genuinely all related to
certain people, so it's about at the
Genghis Khan level,
we are all directly descended from them, and he's
not far from that, so it's not
very, we're probably all his great great great great great.
So are you telling me I'm Genghis Khan's
great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great
great great great great great
great great great great
great great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
here's the riddle
my mother abandoned me
I was found by a man
who cut off my head, scooped out my heart
and gave me something to drink
then I began speaking
what am I
okay, so
anyone? it's going to be something to do with
burials
are you a goose? are you a chicken?
I'm a goose
are you a foie gras?
I'm not foie gras, I'm a quill pen
okay
my mother abandoned me
I was found by a man who cut off my head
scooped out my heart and gave me something to drink
then I began speaking
it's very clever
I'm not surprised your buddy doesn't speak to you anymore
don't invite him over for Christmas honey
he's going to do his fucking riddles again
it's going to be
I think we found the answer tonight
why do riddles go out in the 16th century?
why did its mother abandon it?
because the mother is the goose
that gave it up when the man
plucked the feather out
right, okay, it's the feather not the goose
yeah, it's the quill pen
yeah, sorry
still room for a few hundred more
greats where that bit was
we need to move on
very shortly
I've got one last thing actually
which I quite like
there is a company
should you, because when you're buried
you can decide
either you go in a coffin or you have many other options
cremation and so on
there's a company that actually will take
the ashes of someone
and they will grind them and heat them down
to a sort of diamond
which they then put in a ring
so the only option that you can get
and their tagline is
diamonds and grandma are forever
so you want that
I mean, I guess if you're proposing to someone
you could say
my granny would have wanted you to have this ring
it was her
don't you mean it was hers?
no
okay, we need to move on
to our final fact of the show
and that is my fact
my fact this week is that
before magician P.T. Selbit
invented the famous
sawing a woman in half illusion
his big trick was called
the mighty cheese
which saw him daring
members of the audience onto the stage
to try and push over his massive
block of cheese
this is the guy who became a legend
that was his initial trick
good trick?
so what it was is he would walk on stage
and he would have a giant wheel of cheese
and it was
red and it was covered in wax
so it was like a big baby bell basically
that he had
and he would say who would dare come onto stage
and push over my cheese
who has the might?
and it was a great illusion because inside
this big block of cheese
there was a sort of gyroscope thing
to actually do it
so I guess like all magic it was
every time you tried to push it or pull it
it would kind of jerk off in another direction
and throw you to the ground
and he had a couple of stooges
who would kind of deliberately fall over
and he would always find the strongest
looking people in the audience
and then try and make fun of them about how weak they were
and then get them to try and do it
and maybe throw them everywhere
it sounds awesome to me
it sounds like the cut in the lady in half is fine
but apparently it was not at all awesome
no one liked it
and he sold it to people
and they kept reporting back going
I've lost all my audiences
I don't know why I thought pushing over a cheese
would be interesting but
did we say who this guy was?
P.T. Selbit
he was born Percy Thomas Tibbles
but he took the name Selbit
by reversing his surname
and subtracting one of the B's
that was quite cool
the famous modern now magicians
they tried the same trick
they did a version of it on stage
and they got a mixed martial arts fighter
to try and wrestle the cheese
and because it is a trick cheese
he failed
after he failed
the martial arts fighter said
I'm going to go home and cry now
I can't beat a cheese
this thing of selling tricks though
I didn't quite realise this was a thing
even amongst the great legends
Selbit himself had a big
argument with Houdini
at the time because Houdini said
that he'd stolen his walking through the wall trick
or no he said Houdini
had stolen his walking through the wall trick
and Selbit said he'd actually bought
the trick from another magician
but they were just buying tricks from each other
Houdini was buying tricks from people
he wasn't coming up with anything
and just to put P.T. Selbit in context
this was a person who his name
has disappeared to the layman
magic
I'm going to make my name disappear
we can all perform that kind of trick
in the long term
I think after tonight's show we might have done that
but yeah he was a hugely
important
interesting guy so the big cheese
was sort of a minor bit of his career
the sewing of a woman in half absolutely revolutionised
is still used to this day
to the standard that he did it
he effectively introduced the magician's
assistant when he had his assistant
Betty I think her name was
come and do the sewing in half for the first time
that revolutionised
it's still going today
he did a trick in front of Arthur Conan Doyle
which convinced Arthur Conan Doyle
of the spirit world
spirit was a massive thing to Arthur Conan Doyle
believed in the afterlife and fairies and so on
and that was P.T. Selbit
yeah so he was
he always believed in the spirit world
he was the most gullible man we've ever researched
he did a donkey who told him the spirit world was a thing
but yeah he did show him
his relations didn't he
his dead relations
did he dig them up and carry them around
this is your great
great
and then Selbit
struggled didn't he after
to kind of do anything after the
sewing the lady in half
his later tricks were known as destroying a girl
stretching a lady
and crushing a woman
so he really had a type
one of the things he did
to promote the show
was to have stage hands pour buckets of blood
into the gutters outside the theatre
and it was all
so 1920s-ish
1910s and 20s
it was all kind of due to anxiety over suffragettes
women's liberation
and he once invited
Christabel Pankhurst to be sewn in half
on stage for £20 a week
she said no
just the thing you said down of inventing
the magician's assistant
it was kind of only made possible
by the change of women's fashion
because before that
you had very bulky clothes
you had a lot of petticoats
it would have been very hard to fit the woman
into the box in the first place
because of what she was wearing
and even then she was wearing so many courses
that it's unlikely you could sew her in half
even if you wanted to
and then it was like I guess flapper fashion was it
like flapper fashion comes in
and suddenly people fit in the box
although I do have bad news for you Andy
what?
I don't think that they were actually
sewing the woman in half
don't spoiler it for me
I've got tickets to the circus next week
do you know that in Queensland
Australia
that you're not allowed
to own pet rabbits
there's obviously huge problems
with rabbits in other countries
but in Queensland you're not allowed to own it
unless you're a magician
yeah
there's a magician called Mr Brit
there's only 34 magicians
in Queensland who are permitted to have this
this thing where they're allowed a rabbit
and Mr Brit is one, the rabbit's called Mr Fluffy bum
and Mr Fluffy bum
is one of the only privately owned rabbits
in Queensland
I have a fact about pulling rabbits out of hats
which is the guy who, it's pretty vague
who actually invented pulling a rabbit out of a hat
I don't think it was a magician called Louis Comte
who was I think a French magician
he did so in 1814
but I believe the first time he did it
sources are pretty few on this
the first time he did it
he also simultaneously pulled his infant son
out of the hat
what? what was he holding the rabbit?
I don't think he was holding the rabbit
he said what have we got in here, ooh we've got a rabbit
and a baby
it's weird that the rabbit one
stuck around
do you not think? I think it's more
it's more impressive to pull a baby out of a hat
I think it's more impressive but it's harder to
get a baby
that's why it's more impressive
oh yeah it's something like that
yeah
do you know the original pulling a rabbit out of a hat
I think
is pulling an omelette out of a hat
I was looking for this because it's very controversial
what it is and most people say
we definitely know that the 1840s is the first time
we pulled a rabbit out of a hat collectively
but I did find something in the Leeds
Intelligencer in 1823
it was this court case
it was a report for court case
a man was suing a magician for the cost of a new hat
because he said that he spoke to the magician
and the magician has said
if you imitate me and break an egg into your hat
then you'll get an omelette out of it
just imitate my movements exactly
and so he'd upturned his top hat as of the magician
and the magician had broken an egg into his hat
flipped it up and an omelette
comes straight out of it
flipped it up and he got his entire suit
covered in raw egg
that's a bit of an asshole's trick, isn't it
that's pretty bad
it's like, right, if you do exactly what I do
I'm going to saw this lady in half
you saw your wife in half
guys we're going to have to wrap up shortly
I've got a fact about magic tricks going wrong
do you remember when
Secret of Roy who did the magic with the tigers
Roy, Roy Horne
of Secret of Roy but he was grabbed by the throat
by a tiger in 2003
now the good news is he made a great recovery
and doctors said he would never walk or talk again
he absolutely did, he made a fantastic recovery
but I didn't know the story
that they have agreed on for the version of events
which is this
both Roy and Secret insisted
that the tiger had sensed that Horne was having a stroke
and was dragging him to safety
where could the tiger go that it would think
would be safe
and now 74 said
I will forever believe it was his concern for my safety
and well-being that caused him to act
as he did
that's amazing
just one little thing on magic words
so the magic word expelliarmus
is from Harry Potter
I think, isn't it
according to the Oxford English dictionary
it comes from the Latin
expellare meaning to drive or force out
and armour which means
weapon but unfortunately
armour was also a euphemism for
penis
so Harry Potter is probably
saying something like, penis begun
does that mean the first line of Virgil's Aeneid
is I sing of penis and the man
I think a lot more people got the Harry Potter reference
sorry
starting to get why your mum is not interested
oh come on mate
okay that's it
that is all of our facts
thank you so much for listening
if you would like to get in contact
with any of us about the things that we have said
over the course of this podcast
we can be found on our twitter account
andy
james
james harkin
or you can go to our group account
which is at no such thing
or you can go to our facebook page
no such thing as a fish or a website
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to put no such thing as a fish on the internet
you'll find us we will be back again next week
with another episode guys thank you so much
good night
you