No Such Thing As A Fish - 259: No Such Thing As Flyagra

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

Live from Glasgow, Dan, James, Andrew and Anna discuss fly dating, 69ing on American roadways, and predicting the future with asparagus

Uh Oh No such thing as a fish a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Glasgow My name is Jan Schreimer, and I am sitting here with Anna Chasinski Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days And in no particular order here we go starting with you James Okay, my fact this week is that there is only one person in the world who can predict the future using asparagus The 2019 she has predicted extreme temperatures a recession in the US and an all-time high in asparagus sales

So When you say she can predict the future What's her success rate? Well, it was really hot last week 100% of so far Yeah, actually she claims to have a very high percentage, but these people always do don't they? Okay, let's see some of the other things that she says she says this year fears of Brexit will be unfounded Yeah, maybe The trade war between China and the US will end but there'll be a recession England's women's football team will win the World Cup fingers crossed

James look genuinely shocked, but he's not a bear. What's happened? Why do they hate women so much? Yeah, not cool That the hierarchy is nationalism then feminism Anyway, yes, so there's this lady and she does that stuff and it's obviously bullshit. She's well she Well hang on She she has a Twitter account I went on it today and one of the other predictions that she had is that she said at the Oscars this year a Star is born would have success, but British actors will also be in the mix

So she was correct about Olivia Colman and a star is born I think won the best song and she wrote a tweet just going got it, right? She's she's very proud. She said another great hit success rate for the old What she calls herself she calls herself mystic veg She's pretty strong. Yeah, she's an asparaman sir. It's cool. Yes You can just put months on the end of any word and it means you tell the future buyer Can't you and it's great and they've been doing this? It was in the medieval period

I think when they look back over classical text and they went God those old ancient Romans and Greeks told the future in weird ass ways Let's just call them all months are some things and so there are so many monsies as Tyra Mansi Which is one of my favorites, which is telling the future by how cheese coagulates and Yeah, I read one version of this Tyra Mansi Which is you get a cheese you wait for it to go moldy and then you look at the mold and that tells you the name of your husband. Oh I thought it yeah I read something similar to that which is it's the names of various suitors that you write on to the cheese and the bit That the mold grows over is who you're gonna

If it grows over all the names you're in for a lot of that How does it tell you the name of your do you say the name of your husband? Yeah, actually Unusually for this podcast what Dan said sounding a lot more sense Do you remember it's exactly like when we used to peel apples that everyone used to do this new peeled an apple And then you threw the peel in the air and what it is probably just what girls did in the pre-feminist world And the shape that apple peel landed in was the first letter of your future husband's name So everyone thought their future husband's name would start with S

This is quite a cool thing there's a there is a thing called allure romance see which is not about being alluring It's about baking messages into little balls of dough And this happened in ancient Greece and the balls would be mixed up They'd have different messages on them and then you would pick one and that is basically a fortune cookie Yeah, oh yeah the ancient Greeks have fortune cookies is what I'm trying to say. It's really cool. Yeah, there's also gyramancy Which is the idea of you just start walking in a circle and keep walking and around the perimeter of where you're walking They leave letters of the alphabet So you start spelling something out and the idea is you keep going until you start stumbling into these letters

And then you keep going until it starts spelling something out and then you keep going until finally you spell out a consistent sentence And if you don't do that, you just keep going until either you die or go mad And that's that's what they used to do back in the day back in the day It's not BC a bit an actual day. It's just back in the day I like this. I like this kind of telling the future from Iran It's called fall goose and it's the act of standing in a dark corner and listening to the conversations of passers-by There was a word for what I did That's great

In 2008 there was some research and the found that you can make someone like certain foods if you convince them that they loved It the first time they tried it So you say to them when you were a kid you had this and you absolutely loved it And you can make it so that they used to hate something and now they really like it and that work was funded by the asparagus industry There is this I didn't know this about asparagus asparagus can grow a centimeter an hour Wow, what it can you could watch that you if I had the day off work and I grew asparagus I'd probably try and see it move Is that how it is that how they do it? Do they just go boop in the space of 24 hours? Do we get them really quick?

Yeah, yeah, it grows fast. It literally you just pour water on it and it goes boop in 24 hours Doesn't make that noise. I probably what if you spit it up. It probably does make that noise That's incredible. I know what grows that fast asparagus Bamboo All the asparagus that we eat is male. No, good news for this woman-hating audience So those are asparagus have rocketed in Glasgow I don't know if that's a win. I think that's a win for women, isn't it?

So basically the the male stalks are a lot bigger and juicier than the female stalks, but that's because No, you're right in your own jokes now guys The reason is because the females and they create the berries and so they need to use all their energy to do at something Actually useful All the men have to do is just grow and be juicy We're gonna have to move on shortly to our next fact I've just got one or two things a if anyone by the way is thinking of going to the asparagus festival There is exciting stuff that goes on and the stuff that goes on afterwards

They had a 10-year anniversary not too long ago and you can do tours on buses. It's the asparagus bus tours And yeah, those are really fun But actually you got to make sure to pick the right year because a few years ago They had to cancel the festival due to lack of asparagus There wasn't enough there was a there was a flooding and it kind of ruined the crops that were growing. Yeah, but It turns out that asparagus played a very important role in the formation of Darwin coming up with the theory of evolution Yeah, it was part of the evolution of the theory of evolution what it was is Darwin kept wondering why things can be seen, you know, it's a certain type of lettuces can be seen in places

Halfway across the world. How do they get there? How do they travel? What goes on? So he had a butler called mr. Parslow and mr. Parslow in him filled a tub full of salt water to replicate the conditions of the ocean And they put a bunch of seeds in to see if the seeds would would float and how long they would float for So they had cabbage seeds radish seeds and so on they lasted for 42 days, which was really impressive However, asparagus seeds lasted for 85 days. They would float for that long But the important bit was they then took the seed out of the seawater tub and buried it and it grew into a asparagus like lit And so that meant that they could travel that they could still germinate once they were in the soil

So then they put the seeds inside a bird and then they killed the bird and they threw it in the bathtub The story the worst bedtime story Dan's child hasn't slept for three weeks Doing this story twinkle twinkle little star or shoot the bird with the asparagus seed in its tummy So then what they worked out was the bird still you could take the seed out of the bird all those days later And it would still grow so the asparagus seed helped Darwin to realize it could travel via bird or via ocean Do you know can I just make sure that you know that has nothing to do with evolution? What you just said

That is not bad you do you think evolution is the proof that stuff can travel long distances That sounds like just an idle side project the whole drowning a bird in the bath You let me tell that whole story He still did it can I just another famous person who looked into asparagus was Benjamin Franklin and He formed a theory based on the fact that it makes your we smell although Does everyone have that I because I don't think that asparagus makes your we smell You are wrong because it does People can detect it and some people can't well. It's not my fault. Not many people can't detect it

I think if you can't detect it. I'm special you have a thing. Yeah, you've got a thing called specific anosmia So that's where you can't smell a particular smell the asparagus we smell Yeah, but the asparagus does other people claim it makes your we smell and Ben Franklin wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels using asparagus as an example of how What we eat can impact the smell of what we excrete so he was saying asparagus makes your we smell kind of gross well How about we work on this because farts smell gross and if we know that stuff we eat can make what comes out Can change the smell of stuff that comes out of us Why don't we work out what we need to eat in order for farts to smell nice and it was actually a really thought

It was a really big idea because he was saying causes disease because well-bred people hold their farts in solely because They're gonna stink the place out if they let one rip and so he said if we could get a pill or something We could feed people to make your farts smell like perfume then people would actually want to do it and that's evolution Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Chasinski my fact this week is that the composer Haydn's wife cared so little about her husband's work That she used to tear up his scores to use as hair colors and pastry underlays I was this sort of before He sold them to anyone or before he was it just think it was just throughout his life

So actually he was very he wrote a lot and she just found them lying around and she knew nothing about music and did not care Haydn once said it makes not a blind bit of difference to my wife whether I'm a musician or a cobbler And so she'd find them and she'd be like all that looks handy. I'll put a pie on that Yeah, well, I mean he did he wrote 108 symphonies 20 operas 47 of sonatas 68 quartets 178 trios 14 masses and six oratorios. So I mean that's a lot of paper. Yeah It's recycling. It's recycling. Yeah, I she didn't like him very much either. I think she was doing it deliberately They had a very sad marriage So he basically he fell in love when he was very young

Joseph Haydn with a woman called Teresa and She couldn't marry him and so her father said she want to marry her older sister who's this really unpleasant woman called Maria Anna And he felt bad. So he was like, okay, cool. I'll marry her and said that sounds great And apparently she had a very domineering and unfriendly character She used to spend all of his money very freely So he went to great lengths to hide his income so she wouldn't know about it and when she died He was completely indifferent apparently. Well, they lived apart didn't they for twice the end. They did. Yeah Yeah, it's for 40 years. Well, the last 40 years

He was housed He had a job where he was housed this Princess Castle where she did live with him quite a lot of the time Then yet was the end he was in London and she sent him a letter saying she used to send him letters saying things like By the way, if you die tomorrow, there's no money to bury you Really nice love letters like that when he was away and she wrote him a letter in London saying I really need money because you're gonna die soon and I need a house to live in as a widow So can you please buy me one and he did I read with the letters That it got to the point where they were communicating just by sending each other's letters

But I didn't never open the letters that she sent and he was convinced that she didn't either So they were just sending each other these things that remain completely unopened. No idea what was being said. Yeah, no communication Yeah, pretty crazy. I don't was very influential. He's not very well known these days. I think unless you're a classical music fan He's less well known than like Beethoven and Mozart. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but he was great friends with Mozart BFS life. Yeah And I really like I've just been reading a tiny bit about Hyden's music So he wrote his string quartet in E flat is known as the joke because he put basically He practical jokes in this string quartet because it's got lots of false endings to catch the audience out

That's quite cool. Yeah, and he wrote something called the surprise symphony Which is he used to just turn up at people's houses and play that It's really really quiet apart from one very loud bit And then it never gets referred to again, it doesn't get repeated as a motif It's just really really quiet all the way through Like there's also one he wrote which is called the palindrome which starts one way And then it just goes back on itself as a musical piece Yeah, the first one the joke is amazing because it was he would literally the piece would finish and the audience to go

And then he'd play again and the whole thing just has the audience go He's like Les Dawson of his day was He was actually was a prankster I can't remember any of Les Dawson. I've got to say that is not exactly a 2019 reference He got kicked out of his choir when he was very young because he chopped off one of the choir boys pigtails Just as a fun prank He was very good natured apparently so he was known as Papa Hyden and yeah, as you say he was best friends with Mozart There's a really moving moment when he was called to move to London when he was about 60 by that point

And he suddenly got this invitation and Mozart walked into the coaching station to say goodbye And then they had a moment where Mozart said I suppose this is the last time we'll see each other in this life Because I'm you know in those days that was getting on a bit and I said, oh, don't you worry about me? I'm feeling pretty strong, but then actually Mozart obviously died at the age of 35 in that year So you're gonna say that Hyden got into the coach and drove off and then he came back a minute later with the surprise Have you heard did you guys read about his boss Hyden's boss? No, it's okay He spent 30 years working for a royal house because that was how you made your living as a musician. You didn't have You know, you didn't have really big mass concerts. You had a private patron

So his boss was Prince Paul Anton Esther has he or Esther has he Esther Hauser Esther Hauser, sorry and He had total control basically of Hyden's life so he could dictate how he dressed Hyden wasn't automatically allowed to send and what he knew works He had to they submit them all to his highness and he was partly paid in semolina beef cabbages and lard During his work, he wasn't allowed to eat and drink with the other musicians in case they stopped respecting him because he was the He was the boss and every morning and afternoon He had to go to the prince and say would you like to hear a concert or an opera tonight? And if the prince said yes, he had to go and prepare one. Wow

Yeah, he didn't insist on being paid partly in wine as well, which is along with that other nasty stuff but he did he lived in this place and Prince Esther Hauser had this weird castle that he built like a fantasy castle Which sounds awful in this big swamp where they had to spend about 10 months of the year and you built this huge opera house Well, Hyden had to compose these operas that burned down and he immediately built a new one And Hyden was still very popular there and he had this team of musicians around him And they all did indeed respect him a lot to the extent that they the musicians used to go to the tavern Which also the prince built on the land and they used to get really pissed and they won't allow their wives there

So everyone was getting a bit antsy Month number nine and there was a moment where the cellist punched an oboist in the face when they got a bit pissed And he and the trombonist went That's a really serious incident Really unappreciated that trombone moment he punched him in the face and he lost an eye because he was wearing this ring He was missing an eye and he was a bit pissed off but Hyden stepped in and managed to make them settle it amicably So this guy has removed the eye of his co-worker and they worked together happily for another seven years He took the other eye

Funny we should say should we say what happened to Hyden after he died? Oh, yeah, I think we should yeah, it was very bizarre So he died finally quite old and then as soon as he died his head was stolen and it was stolen by a guy He knew actually whose marriage he'd helped to set up So it was kind of a slap in the face this guy called Rosenbaum who was very interested in Phrenology which was the study of skulls and what that meant about your intelligence and so he stole his head with his mate And it used to be displayed in his mate's house in this little box Which had a little glass window and it sat on a cushion and imagine going to your friend's house

And they said oh do you should see something really cool? And then you've just got the the dead head of your former mate sitting in a display case Yeah, they didn't know about it until his patron who was a new prince by this time called Nicholas He decided you know the the burial we gave Hyden it wasn't good enough He needs a more dignified burial place so they wanted to reinter him somewhere grander They dug him up and they found his head was missing and it was incredibly obsessing so the authorities you know prompted by the prince they searched the home of Rosenbaum and He gave them a different skull. I don't know where he got that one from

He collected skulls and then and then they they they got wise to it because they looked at the skull They'd be given he said this is a young man's skull. It's not Hyden was very old when he died And he said all right you got me here's Hyden's skull. They gave him another fake skull So there were there are now three skulls in circulation one of which is Hyden. Do you know how they hid Hyden's skull? No, it's very cool So they had Hyden's skull in the house and they hid it inside the mattress And then he Rosenbaum made his wife lie on the mattress and pretend to be menstruating and everyone searching the house was too afraid to go near her Quick pretend to be menstruating

I know that's not what happens You're confusing menstruating with being on a ghost train I like the way that these guys looking for Hyden are basically playing hide and seek Okay, we need to move on did we get to the other side we did okay Let's move on it's time for fact number three and that is my fact My fact this week is that to stop people stealing American road signs with the number 69 on them Washington state has replaced many of them with signs that now read 68.9

I Was their big plan so this is a big problem in America. This is a thing called mile markers So when you're driving it tells you either how many miles you have to get to somewhere or how many are left and These keep getting stolen and it's not just 69 that gets stolen. There is also the 420 and yeah 420 is the police have been notified of everyone who just Yeah, so 420 is a is a drug reference for the 20th of April it's it's international Cannabis day, I believe it is so smokers day. Yeah

So those have been replaced as well. So those are now for 419.9 And this is a big problem in America because they have they've had 200 stolen over the last since about two 2012 they do cost a lot. There's a whole Wikipedia page on street sign theft So for instance, there's a big list of them Richard Bong states recreation area keep having their sign stolen Because has the word bong in there Ragged ass road in yellow knife

They had to keep changing their signs But whole road in England They had to keep losing that they eventually renamed it to archers way So this is happening all over the world in hilariously named places Do you guys know about a place called a burgles in the US? No, no No, you wouldn't cuz it's made up, but this is a place This is a pair of men called Mika and Mont who have been trying to redesign America's road signs And they finally confirmed that they'd redesigned them recently and they've invented a fictional town called burgles

BRG a you LTS because it involves some of the hardest letters to sign and That's all those of owls apparently they look really blurry They fill in a bit when you're far away. They're G always difficult Why does a G look completely different types than it does written and so they have that as their archetypal Amazing observation Wait till you find out about a it's only GM stuck on G So yeah, and they they would do it by they'd make signs saying burgles And then they'd lean them against fences and then they'd like walk up a hill or walk 500 meters away

And then they'd see how clearly they could see them compared to our normal signposts And in this manner they've convinced American out had changed all of its road sign fonts and they did that in 2004 but there's there's a lot of controversy about this Yeah, so that the original American fun on all American roads was called highway gothic That was a name which is pretty cool Wow, and then their font is called clear view. Yeah, and there were all these studies saying it was much clearer to read clear view And you could see it if you were driving at night and you saw a sign that was in clear view You could read it 74 feet further away than highway gothic

Wow, so that gives you a couple more seconds Let's say of reaction time so it will stop you having a crash perhaps and that could Actually save lives, you know more or fewer people could die on the roads depending on whether you choose clear view or highway gothic But there have now been more studies saying a highway gothic is better. So clear view has just had its approval removed The highway gothic factions have come out right But it's all in caps lock highway gothic it's so weird in America They have all their signs in capitals, which is terrible for signage because capitals you can't distinguish shapes It just looks like one big rectangle. So when you're far away, you can't tell as much whereas on our signs here

Then, you know, you see the little tails of the G or the Y or the other tailed letters. You all know what they are G Y P P is another good one and Q of course Anyway No, no, I think we're on the brink of something. No, sorry. Oh, I found out the fact Mice make signposts in the in their fields and they make them out of leaves and twigs so they don't get lost This is what would mice they they move objects like a leaf or a twig to mark a site that interests them And they regularly when they're exploring around it They rear up on their hind legs and they look to make sure they can still see their little street sign before they explore

One place which has problems with losing signs is thin glass in North Dublin And that is because that is where Bono was born And so a lot of you too fans go and steal the road sign from his road. So literally the streets have no name Is that it doesn't sound it sounds like I made it all up just for the punchline There were first designed for cyclists road signs in the 19th century to warning road signs But I want to test you guys because there was a study done recently that showed that Most people can't identify most road signs now and even actually this is gonna be hard because you've probably read it But there are three basic I don't want the circle where it's like a red circle with a white band in the middle of it

Yeah, that means shortcut There are three types of road signs. There's a circle the triangle in the rectangle. Oh, yeah Does anyone know the difference between what those things mean? Is it the circle was it circle triangle and Morning, yeah circle is Now whatever whatever it says you must bloody well do it and then the square is there's a nice castle over there Yeah, okay, that's sort of what one is very wrong, so I hope you're joking the circle is absolutely don't do it Please don't but there are people don't understand there's anything in a red circle means this is bad But I think it doesn't have a cross through it

No one realizes so there was this survey done that said what does this I mean that has a red circle and it shows It's known as the low-flying motorbike sign I think because it shows a car and then on top of it a little motorbike that means no vehicles It means no vehicles most people who did this survey said well It means only cars and motorbikes are allowed People have no idea that's the problem in Italy There's a town that has started they have a big problem in this one town where there's a lot of prostitutes on the side of the road And they're trying to not encourage people to stop and and do business with them

So they created signs again with a pictogram on it of what was a prostitute and it says underneath it Prostitutes, but most people didn't know if it was sort of saying Oh, no They actually increased traffic because most people were slowing down Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy my fact is that flies like to date the same sort of flies as their fly friends Even no words to start with that. Yeah, do you mean fly friends? They're really cool friends. No, I just made friends who are flies So this is really cool. It's all about how flies choose which other flies to court

So scientists they painted a load of male fruit flies different colors Okay, they painted some pink and some green and they set up a date between one female and the two males one pink and one green and Then behind some glass they had another female fly watching this date It sounds like a channel 5 show And so the female inside chose one of the males she chose pink or green to mate with and then the observer female flies Who've been watching this whole rigmarole were given the chance a day later, which is quite a long time in fly years That's like, you know, three years later they get the chance for a date of their own and

When they were given the chance they almost always picked the color that had the female before the day before had chosen so they remembered this and Even when they were presented with two male flies that were apparently hideous Yeah, I mean because they probably in real life don't see many flies painted pink and green Do they? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, it's very strange. Yeah, and so what is the you know, what does this tell us about flies? Okay, well I thought you did that's why I asked you So the idea is that because the flies are passing on behavioral traits between each other they might have some kind of Culture as in a culture is where someone does something and then they kind of talk everyone else into doing it

And then you become kind of everyone goes to Glastonbury Right, they then got female observers again behind the glass to watch a fly orgy between lots of males and lots of females and these flies really locked out didn't they Bragging to their friends. I've been involved in this study. You have no idea. I never need to pay for porn again Just interesting thing about fly sex because if they're having this big orgy the problem is is flies have sex while they're flying So they flies certain flies have a special kind of genitalia gonads that just have to just move around to wherever The female fly is fine. Yeah, so if she banks left and he's like, well, I gotta go his gonads can go And just they can go from anywhere from 90 to 360 degrees

Just around to just be making sure that the sex continues while all this very You know flying stuff is going on. That's very cool Yeah, because it's hard to seduce the woman as a male fruit fly. This is that you're talking about But they sing songs so the males chase the females and then they will extend just one wing So put like put one arm out and they vibrate it and it produces a song and the song has two modes So there's just like two types of sound they can make and you have to amplify it by more than a million times to hear it with human Ears, but we've done that obviously because scientists aboard so they've got the The sign and the pulse and the sign sounds like the wine of an approaching mosquito apparently and then the pulse sounds like a cat's

So if you're being seduced by a fly it's a combination of a buzzing mosquito and a purring cat But then once the male once the female has accepted the male the male licks the female for two minutes And then they mate for about 20 minutes and that's some scientists who I think were really bored They scrambled a fruit flies courtship neurons in its brain So that they tried to copulate lick and play the love song all at the same time and What would normally take for a four-minute quite delicate mating process was reduced to 10 seconds They have the only known aphrodisiac Fruit flies. Oh like a proven one you mean a proven one fly agra

And Now they've got their PR guy, which is good. He's gonna need a job after tonight They have the only aphrodisiac the scientists have ever proved exists is That actually makes you want to have sex only works on fruit flies and it's the scent of rotting fruit So if they smell the rotting fruit that actually turns on their bits of their brain pathways That are the courtship initiating so they send rotting fruit and they immediately want to have a shag And that is useful I think because rotting fruit is a good place to lay eggs as a woman

So if a man fancies you when you're near rotting fruit, that's handy Because then you can put your put your babies in fruit speaking of the chemicals If you have a fly that falls into your glass of wine One single fly is enough to ruin the whole glass of wine. Okay, but only if it's a female fly And it's because it's the pheromones in the fly that cause the wine to taste a bit skunky If the males go in actually it will still taste the same and they tested this by Getting the pheromones out of the flies and then putting it into some wine and getting people to taste it and they found that

Just 10 just one nanogram of a pheromone was enough for a small glass of wine for them to be able to taste the difference One nanogram, which is like, I don't know. I think it's like A thousandth of a millionth of a gram or something like that in a small glass of wine in a small glass of wine And a small glass of wine Is what you've got left Mines become small it always goes through the small phase So I worked out what the equivalent of this is and it's worth it's the equivalent of putting one pedal bins worth of ribena into lock nests And the whole lake tasting of black currant

Wow, that's great. These people must be wine snobs who are tasting that one tiny nanogram of female pheromone I think it asks the flavor of anything I stirred flies into this before I came on There was a study on flies response to carbonated beverages and their attraction to carbon dioxide And the sky report about it was headlined. Why do flies suddenly appear every time you open a beer? I We're gonna have to wrap up soon. Um, so before we do you guys got uh, I can tell you about dung beetle sex Yeah, please

That is an unbelievably niche porn subject What do they do you need to delete your history immediately, you remember that was Um, no, what's interesting about them is that they get std's But actually it's a good thing for them It's if you're a dung beetle and you get an std std This is really good for you because they get this kind of nematode worm And it helps to get the right kind of bacteria eats all the bad bacteria in their body Which means a good bacteria can come in and it means that then they can eat their food properly

It's like if you have sex with someone and feed them yackles at the same time Oh Another niche kind of That bit of advice, let's wrap it up Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts Thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this Podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts. I'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james That's james harkin and chasinski. You can email podcast at qi.com

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or you can go to our website No such thing as a fish.com. We have all of our upcoming tour dates for the tour that we're currently on and future tours All of our previous episodes. Uh, thank you so much. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye You