No Such Thing As A Fish - 384: No Such Thing As Jiminy's Cricket Shop

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the unsexiest striptease imaginable, the Michaelangelo of fake rocks, and a mysterious ascent of Mont Blanc. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting at a very comfortable distance from Anna Tyshensky, 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 fact number one, that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 1877 all able-bodied men in Nebraska were required by law to spend up to 12 days killing grasshoppers. Wow, wow. Wait a minute, I'm always looking for the loophole up to 12 days. It was, well it was, they had to spend two days, definitely,

so you can't get out of a weekend and then if there was further work needed then the government state government could call on you to do an extra 10 days. So it was up to 12 days because some people enjoyed it so much it started to look psychopathic and it's like alright we need to cut you off here. Yeah, exactly. You can't devote 365 to it. How many grasshoppers can there be that everyone, I mean no, Nebraska even though is quite sparsely populated but that's a lot of grasshoppers to kill, isn't it? Definitely more than one grasshopper per person so it was a lot. This was the Rocky Mountain Locust which is a grasshopper and it was this massive scourge in the 1870s and the 1860s. It basically ruined the kind

of Great Plains area so like Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, those kind of areas and it destroyed crops, it ruined people's livelihoods, it drove the population out and they had to do something so the states passed various laws saying get out and do your duty, murder grasshoppers. Wow, it's insane. There's a sighting in 1875 so two years before this law was put into place where it was estimated that there was 198,000 square miles of locusts swarming so that's larger than the size of California. In that area of 198,000 square miles which I reckon is just a little bit smaller than England and Scotland combined. There were 12.5 trillion insects. Okay and to put that into perspective, if you imagine taking a

normal keyboard on your computer and covering all of England and Scotland in keyboards so there's no gaps, each grasshopper would have one keyboard to sit on over the whole of England and Scotland. Why? Why are you putting grasshoppers on keyboards? Grasshoppers give an infinite keyboard so it would eventually... They actually write the works of Milton, don't they? The accounts are extraordinary, aren't they? I mean even every able-bodied man in Nebraska wouldn't have been able to do a huge amount about this because they ate the wool off sheep when they were passing by. They're just so desperate. They ate clothing off people's backs. I don't believe that. I mean it's probably true but like calm on. That is an unsexy striptease. There was a woman

who claimed it wasn't there who said that she was wearing a white and green stripy dress and she was descended on by these grasshoppers and they ate all the green stripes at which point I guess all the white stripes fall off but you know... That's where the white stripes got the name from actually, the van. They were walking past this woman and were like what's the rest of her dress? There were stories about how trains came to a halt because they were skidding on locusts. Oh yeah! There were just so many on the ground that they were just yeah wiping out. Laura Ingalls Wilder who wrote The Little House on the Prairie, she was there when this happened and one of her stories on the banks of Plum Creek they talk about this happening to her family and she said that

her father had to walk 300 miles to find work on a farm that didn't have the grasshoppers on it. If you can imagine that and that she would walk around and they would squish under her birth feet and she would hear the sound of millions of jaws biting and chewing. Wow! I guess I mean if you're faced with that actually what good can it do to spend 12 days? 12 days feels a bit underegged. Yeah you've got to devote the whole year to it. Wait how many how many did you say the word James? 12 trillion? 12.5 trillion. Okay so then again if every hang on no if the whole of Nebraska gets a trillion a day yes then it just needs one guy. If you have a million people in Nebraska say sorry they have to get a million each per day.

They are small though. It's a shame that we didn't just you know Nebraska didn't just allow this to just continue and there's just one spot on earth where humans are living just completely covered naked covered in locusts with no food to eat you know. That is a shame. We send care packages just as an experiment you know how sometimes big experiments happen? What are we experimenting on? Is there a symbiotic life with locusts that we're missing out on that they were trying to introduce us to? They actually only eat your clothes off you so they can become your clothes. Well some people did suggest that at the time a symbiotic relationship with them kind of so Missouri state entomologist who's called Charles Riley he just said that why don't we just eat

them? They could be turned into soup or prepared John the Baptist style and John the Baptist style is where you fry grasshoppers with honey because in Matthew first three chapter four in the Bible it says his meat was locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist when he goes into the desert. Not sure it's going to take off as the next hit restaurant concept is it? No. Yeah wild honey please. Oh no the portions are going to be massive. Have you guys eaten locusts? I haven't but I do know that in Australia they rebranded them as sky prawns you know to make them a bit more appealing. Very high in protein like the North American communities who lived in that area around the time so for instance the Shoshone people and they would eat them so they

would turn them into flour and they would make bread out of grasshoppers and stuff so that's how they dealt with it before it happened to the west. That's really clever. Although I don't think they ever had it quite as bad that we know. No I mean eating is not a solution to the 12 trillion is it? You can't just wander down your field with your mouth open. Well problem solved my crop's absolutely fine. So the Rocky Mountain locust which we're talking about which led to this plague crazy at the time and we did fight battle with them and the battle was won by the humans to the point that they're now an extinct species. Hang on hang on hang on you're you're giving us credit for that. No I'm saying long term they are no longer on earth. How did we win the battle? Well

might not be because of us. No no no I'm just saying history they're no longer here on our planet. Who writes the history books Anna? Okay I'll say it's because of us I think you're right Dan. What was largely because of us but also as animals and it was changing agricultural conditions it was yeah it was. Who changes the agricultural conditions? Thank you James. Who brings the animals? Mr Man. But we did do it on purpose. It was an accident. We absolutely didn't want to do it and that's horrible to to decimate a species to extinction but they can still be found despite being extinct in glaciers around there. There's this one place which is called the Grasshopper Glacier and it's in Wyoming where all of them have sort of just been frozen in time inside there

and you can see them when you look into it and people chip them out. Can they come back like cut to America or? There is a theory some scientists think there might be a few lurking around somewhere. Not ready to come back like the glacier melts and suddenly the grasshoppers take over. Not ready to mount the full counter attack but there are scientists who think they might still be out there somewhere. Well I thought as in not in the glaciers but actually out there. Yeah exactly I like it. Yeah because so we don't we've even though we've said like it's agriculture or environment or climate change but really we don't know right it's a massive mystery and they just vanished so it was 1877 it was still pretty bad pretty much by the 1880s they'd

gone. I think the last spotting was in the like the first eight 1901 or something or right at the start of the 20th century anyway and they vanished but it could just be that they stopped swarming because locusts just turned back into grasshoppers when they go out of a swarm and they could just be hiding as you say in plain sight waiting to regroup. When you say they turn into grasshoppers they don't change do they we just change our name for them. Yeah it's like literally one animal is called the grasshopper when it's with all its mates we call them locusts. You're kidding. Yeah it's not like Batman and suddenly it's a whole change of outfit. They kind of they do change outfit they definitely do because they get stronger,

they get darker, they get more mobile their color changes and in fact until the 1920s they were assumed to be different species. It's really weird there were two versions of this desert locust one one is in Hulk mode and one is not and they thought they were completely different. How quickly do they change though? That feels like that should take a while right? It's not as soon as they start swarming they just all turn blue. Kind of is it's really weird so basically they have wild populations which swell up after rains because there's lots of food so plants are growing so they can eat lots but then if the land gets parched they get pushed into a smaller and smaller area and then this chemical serotonin kicks in in their brain which we have

to which is associated with happiness for us I think but anyway not for them because the serotonin basically turns them into Hulk mode. We don't know that they're not happy. That's true they can be thrilled and they just set off and they go for it and it's very rare for them to switch out of swarm mode once they're in it because any offspring born during a swarm are also swarmers. Yes okay. I actually do know how you can turn them into a locust so the way you do that is you tickle them on the back of the legs. Is that right? So yeah and scientists tried this they had this theory that what happens is they are incredibly anti-social like grasshoppers hate each other usually but when they get hungry they go to the same bit of food and they start rubbing up against each other

and eventually that rubbing stimulates them to suddenly want to swarm. Do they become figmotactic? I think they become figmotactic yeah. Favorite word? Fish word? It's really the fish word which friend of the podcast. We should have her on. That's really cool so that explains the serotonin thing right because they become like more loving to their fellow grasshopper. Yes yeah or at least want to hang out with them although there's also a theory that the reason they're swarming is because they all want to eat each other so I don't know how much I love that. That's why I read that if they fall behind in the swarm whoever's behind will chew them up. I mean that is a terrible that happens in the Tour de France as well. So one really important thing of this locust swarm in the 1870s

and 1880s is what did the farmers do because basically all of their crops were taken they had no way of making any money but also they had no food because all the crops had been eaten by locusts and so they asked the state for money but the state couldn't give them enough because basically everyone was affected and so they went to the federal government and there was a real discussion about that because basically they thought that their farmers might be turned soft if they gave them any help any charity right and so they came up with these tests to make sure that you were worthy enough to get aid. As a farmer you had to pledge an oath that you possessed nothing of value that could be sold for food or clothing in order to get any charity at all. Sounds like is this where

Jacob Rees-Mogg started his career. But yeah I mean in the end though eventually the federal government did step in and kind of gave aid packages and food packages to everyone and that was the start of what is now the typical response to disasters in America. It was also a fire in Chicago a bit earlier that did a similar thing but yeah this was this was a big step for America as far as state aid was concerned. So they sort of did them a favor. Yeah a long run. Exactly good old locust. Another coping mechanism they had actually before that came in was in Minnesota they had huge vats of boiling water that they kept in the center of like some of the big cities there and there was a bounty of 50 cents a bushel on the locusts and apparently 130,000 grasshoppers

equals one bushel. So you've got to get quite a lot to get 50 cents and then you bring them to the city and you chuck them in this vat of boiling water. Right. Is that called like a cauldron? Yeah or just to kill them off? Yeah yeah. Not to make a soup. No. Otherwise you just got a big locust lolly. When they've tried that in various places around the world what often happens is people just start breeding the animal don't they? Yes exactly. The poor guys at Jimmy's cricket shop which breed crickets see this cloud on the horizon. Well bang goes business. Why is he not calling it Jimmy crickets? Yeah absolutely right. Yeah well it did almost bankrupt the state actually they had to cancel it almost straight away because everyone's bringing in so many locusts. Well the

bushel. The bushel offer. Well it's the 12 day thing yeah because too many business new businesses. Yeah can't afford it. If you guys heard of a megacolon. Oh I thought that was you impersonating one. Yeah it's not a punctuation. I think I involved her really made it's like I've been hypnotised to make that noise when I hear that. That's being sad. Very obscure. Darren Brown never thought that would come up in your life again. A megacolon is you would. Oh dear. Okay so this thing which I was talking about it's what happens if you get an infection in your colon and there was a mummy from 1000 years ago which had this infection and it was scanned with an electron microscope and what they found is that for the last few months of his life he'd been fed

solely on grasshoppers so that's all he'd eaten and what they'd done is we could tell from the microscope that they'd taken all the legs off the grasshoppers and just and the heads and just got the bodies which is really high in protein and just kind of squished them together and given them to this guy and this as far as we can tell is the earliest example of any kind of nursing or hospice care that we have direct evidence for. Wow but he had to prove that he'd sold off anything he had a value for before. That's awesome. A megacolon. Okay it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that when Henriette Don Javel held a reception to celebrate being the first woman to climb Mont Blanc one guest was

Maria Paradis who had been to the top of the mountain 30 years earlier riddle me that. Okay she didn't climb it she swam up because it was underwater. Oh yeah she was dropped on she from a plane. First of all Anna gets half a point because she didn't climb up allegedly but she wasn't dropped by a plane so you get minus 10. She was pretty heavy. She was born there. She had been to the top of the mountain 30 years earlier that's where her mom gave birth to her but then her mother would also have had to be there and so would have then been the first woman at the top. Yeah except she was dropped from a plane. What year was this James? So this was 1838 when Don Javel went up but Maria Paradis went up in 1808 and what happened was she was dragged up

kicking and screaming. Well not really doing anything because she kind of passed out halfway up the mountain. Is that a really fun drunk and night out prank kind of thing. It kind of will have her wake up at the top of Mont Blanc. You'd usually carry someone rather than drag that's very caveman isn't it. Yeah it was so basically what happened was in 1808 a few people had already gone at Mont Blanc and they kind of talked this 18 year old servant from Chamonix called Maria Paradis to go up Mont Blanc and they said if you do this you'll become kind of famous and you'll be able to make a load of money and maybe it will help the hotel that you're working in it will give them some publicity and so she's like yeah fine I mean what's the

worst that can happen. We know about what happened because she spoke to Alexander Dumas in 1811 and she told him that as she was almost to the top she felt her legs go to hell she said and then the people who were going up with her decided to take her each under one arm and drag her to the top. She was pulled, dragged and carried to the top of the mountain okay and then 30 years later this high society woman called Henriette Dongeville decided that she wanted to be the first person to really walk up Mont Blanc and she did that and then she invited this Maria Paradis to come to her party afterwards and there's a little bit of kind of classism because first of all Maria Paradis was like I can't believe that a real lady managed to get all the way up to a mountain I'm a peasant

woman I know the country I should be able to do it I can't believe you would but then Henriette was kind of dismissive of her and she's like well at least I went up by my own accord and stuff. She almost didn't get up on her own accord did she? She had exactly the same moment actually yeah Henriette she had the same where she suddenly buckled and she was on her back and and there were questions from the rest of the camp do we carry her up and she managed fortunately to sort of get her wits about her and she she said no I can do this I can do this but yeah always carried up as well. The person who went up with her was called Joseph Coutet or Coutet and when she kind of got near the top and she felt like falling asleep she felt really woozy Coutet said look at her

asleep again this is the last lady I take up Mont Blanc although that does sound like a euphemism when I read it doesn't it? Oh I took her up Mont Blanc. Oh what of this whole fact is a euphemism it's a really raunchy night. Oh my god. Well it was quite raunchy because Henriette Doncheville when she climbed up she was wearing a boa she was wearing a... Constrictor or feather? Feather or fur possibly but she because obviously climbing gear for women did not exist at the time because only mad aristocratic ladies who were starting it she was wearing a petticoat over men's trousers and then a bonnet with a veil and then a boa the whole thing weighed about six kilos so it was really heavy to be climbing up. She basically had to wear the men's clothes because obviously

that's the you know convenient way to get to the top but she still felt like she had to wear the women's stuff over the top. Yeah yeah and there is this amazing picture of her going over a crevasse with a ladder which I actually didn't realize was the thing that you did in climbing and it looks absolutely terrifying when she's doing it because you know it's this massive drop in the middle of it the ladders just going between these two cliff edges and she's there with these extremely heavy skirts which she would have sort of scrambling over which she would have thought is going to tip you over any minute. Yeah yeah and one of the reasons that she went up supposedly is that she was quite jealous of other well-known women that were kind of talking about going up Montblanc

so the writer Georges Sond who you all know I'm sure who's kind of mostly famous for wearing men's clothes but she was kind of a really famous writer who at the time was bigger than Victor Hugo and Bolzac and people like that but she was kind of doing a lot of walking in the foothills of Montblanc and she was talking about how she might soon go up and Henriette Donchaville decided no she was going to do it first. That's great. Was that a prank? That's what I would do if I was trying to trick someone into going up. Oh I might go tomorrow morning I know the weather looks a bit dodgy but yeah. The clothing I mean it is it is mad that women were made to wear dresses and there were sort of you know there were a few women who were supposedly threatened

with legal cases for the fact that they were wearing men's trousers it was so controversial at the time and there were systems where they did try to cheat it so I read about Aubry Leblond who climbed Rotorn which is a mountain about 2,000 meters high and so there was a sort of compromise which is that you would leave where you were staying let's say you're staying in a hotel wearing the dress or the skirt that you had with the trousers on and then you would take it off while you were doing the actual mountain climbing and maybe no one would tell each other but so she made it to the top and then on the way down realized she'd left her skirt up there so had to backtrack go back up re-ascend this giant mountain to get her. So she had to carry

her skirt to the top after drop she didn't just leave it in a bush or something where she took it off she carried it up with her. You would leave it somewhere safe like if you're going swimming or whatever. Yeah you don't swim holding your clothes up above the water when you do. My sister once was climbing off her hill in the Lake District and then went to the top and when she got to the bottom she realized she'd left her phone at the top and that's how the whole way back up the hill had gone to get her phone. Hey have you all heard of Annie Smith Peck? Annie Smith Peck is a mountaineer she climbed the Matterhorn in 1850 and it's just so interesting because she had to do it with total hatred from all the male companions who were taking on again because they just

didn't want women doing it she wore trousers they hated that scandalous so when she went up one thing that happened was they would constantly like the guys were just always having temper tantrums there would be strikes but at one point because they kind of just wanted to get rid of her as part of the party they said that well it said that when she was going across a crevasse field when she went out of view they cut the rope the support rope that was looking after her went back to camp and then she had to make her way back and found them all sitting there and they were like oh you're still here no did that actually happen that's according to the accounts yeah and I think her accounts um that was a lot of I mean she was she was really impressive she once hung a votes for

women sign off the peak of a mountain in Peru just to make a point who's gonna see that I mean no one after her companions cut the ropes from the sign you want to do in the middle of Trafalgar Square or somewhere where people walk past all the day that's a really good point um yep can't fault you on that um and then another time she climbed another mountain in Peru the north peak of Huascaran okay with some some swiss guides and it was renamed in her honor it was renamed Cumbre Ana Peck but at that point the record I think the highest altitude maybe for a woman or maybe for that peak but it was held by another lady mountaineer called Fanny Workman and legend well another legend but you know there was beef between them because Workman was so annoyed that Peck was

claiming this record that she paid for engineers to go and recalculate the altitude of the mountain and established that she had actually climbed 600 meters oh my god less than she had claimed to than Peck had claimed 600 meters so she was still on record it is a pretty big recalculation so the Workman would still have the record that's pretty yeah um so just while you're saying Annie Smith Peck having something named after her the Matterhorn not long after she went up that there was another explorer who had a bit of it named after her so this was a mountaineer called Felicite Carol and she unfortunately didn't make it to the summit when she was going she was with her father and it's because she was wearing a skirt and the skirt ballooned in the wind and

they thought this is too dangerous you can't go any higher your skirt's going to get in the way so the spot where that happened is named the Matterhorn's Coal of Felicite and yeah after her but she never got to make it to the top as a result because it could have blown her up there like that's true did you bring an umbrella as well have you heard of the book Mountaineering in Scotland no this is by an author called WH Murray William Hutchison Murray any relation no not as far as I know I wish because this is an amazing sounding book it was written on sheets of toilet paper in prisoner of war camps in Germany during the war so Murray had been sent by his mother the complete works of Shakespeare in the post and that was an earlier time of the war when the

Red Cross parcels were still getting through and and you could receive post and things like that there's a lot of postage that isn't it it's a lot of postage yeah but he noticed that the paper was lovely and soft and it was actually a lot better than the stuff that they were being given as toilet paper so it sounds like he used the complete works of Shakespeare's loo roll and he saved his loo roll and wrote his own book about Mountaineering on the loo paper oh my god I know but the worst thing was then he was moved he wrote for a year presumably getting along quite well with his first drive what kind of what was he writing with do we know no I don't know actually I don't know how he got a pen or a pencil yeah was it 2b or not 2b oh my god oh my god he walked straight

into that one but then he was moved he was moved to another camp called off lag 8f and it was a much stricter prison camp I mean I don't know how lenient the previous one was but basically the Gestapo searched everyone very carefully on the way in and his stash of toilet paper with a book on it was found and taken off him and he had to write an entire second draft on more toilet paper no yeah I know he claimed that the Gestapo had done him a favor because his first draft was a bit bit flabby he needs a bit of timely yeah the most generous prisoner of war you've ever I actually kind of liked the Gestapo do you think that when he only had the toilet paper left that he kind of would hold it in so that he didn't use it by the end he would have had a megacolon I reckon

okay it is time for fact number three and that is Andy my fact is that the queen in her garden has a collection of fake rocks she has a lot of gardens do we have a lot of gardens she has gardens at Buckingham Palace though uh specifically this is in the main garden her main garden I would say uh there is a fake rock called pullamite and she's got a lot of it is it sorry is that specific rock called does she name it pullamite like cause she's got Dave sitting next to it no no no no no sorry yeah this is a kind of rock invented by it's so weird that you can invent a rock there was a gardener called James Pullam and um he he invented this rock and it became a craze can you explain to us how you invent a rock yeah so he was a gardener and he noticed that

there was a bit of a trend going on for when people have been traveling and they might bring plants back with them and this relates to the Victorian fern craze as well this is a big craze for having ferns and collecting ferns so the problem is that ferns don't like growing on lawns you know and most gardens at the time were you know nice flat lawns of grass and he was a gardener and also he knew a bit about engineering and he started offering people their own personal ravines to put their alpine plants and ferns in and he made this material from his own recipe and he took the recipe to his grave and so he started offering people their own personal rocks that you could shape and build and mold into the exactly shapes that you wanted

and this became a craze people lots and lots of gardens had these fake rocks in environmentally friendly because you don't have to go and dig it out of a mountain or something yeah i guess so it takes a lot less transportation yeah and it was because it does sound like a thing that would be shunted by the rich as something you know we just want natural stuff but as you say you know the queen has it in Buckingham Palace um many famous family the Rothschilds and so on would we're all really keen on it so this was yeah it was a it was a big deal it was a big deal it's everywhere i no longer trust any rocks i see what if this is pulla mate there's a big list online isn't there of all the places you can find it including Las Vegas really yeah the Bellagio

there's like um i think there's a fountain that's made out wow well the first time that we properly i think outside of a show saw each other during the sort of first lockdown having ended was we were at st james's park weren't we we're sitting there and the rocks by the duck island cottage are also those kind of rocks are they right next to it exactly no rock is safe from pulla it's really insane even seaside towns like folkston ramsgate they went nuts for it they actually i think quite badly damaged the council finances by spending all their money on pulla mate um because they wanted extra rocks for the sea to make it more rocky okay this isn't rocky enough that just makes swimming in the sea more and more unpleasant i think it's not inside the sea so for example

folkston got paths and tunnels to get people down from the cliffs they wanted a gorgeous natural way to to show people down and so next time you see a rock check yeah check so how can you check can you give it a knock in it's hollow it's not right it's a rock most of the rocks you see day to day will be rocks oh sure absolutely yeah but that's that's just law of averages but do take a photo and send them to andy anytime you see a right i'll go through that i'll tell you if you're a bit lighter aren't they they're lighter than normal rocks and they'll just look faker they'll look a little bit like when you're queuing in a theme park you know the rockeries that you have not quite as plastic as that something towards that it's a more realistic version of that you're right they were

incredibly successful weren't they james pullum he set up this company which is james pullum and son and it was a company that just went on and on so when he retired he handed it over to his son james pullum and then when he retired he handed over to his son james pullum and then when he retired he handed over to his son james pullum i think it was the second james pullum who invented pulla mate wasn't it as opposed to the first one i think you're right i think so okay minus one of the james pullums from that list there he was helped by two of the other james pullums later in life but also helped by another brother called michael angelo pullum what a name he's not living up to that name it's so good everyone else in the family's called james and he's called michael angelo

but it's two names isn't it it's he's michael angelo pullum they've divided michael angelo into right you know to the untrained eye he's michael pullum and he did all the name angelo but he did all of the designing didn't he as well yeah so if you ever needed a rock but it needs to be in a certain shape you gave it to michael angelo pullum and he did the shaping for it that's brilliant if you ever want a cherub to be emerging from the arohawk so we should give a shout out to the book about this uh by claud hitching oh claud hitching what a man he is the man on pulla mate so he's written a book called the pullum legacy and um i mean he has spent i think decades tracking down bits of pulla mate because we still don't know where it all is that's why i'm saying you've

got a check yeah yeah it's all over the country but there weren't you know accurate records kept of everywhere this company worked so i mean it's not as urgent as like land mines and stuff is it nothing's gonna happen if we don't find it when he started looking into it he discovered that five of his direct ancestors all had worked for the pullum company at some point and so he had a personal connection yeah and so basically he has as andy says spent so long trying to track down where bits of missing pulla mate have gone sort of historically important bits in the pulla mate world where have they gone where pulla mate fans are like oh i can't believe we lost this and some of them have turned up in places like he found there was the q fountain which was made

for the international exhibition in 1862 it had disappeared and where is it now it's where james said earlier los vegas it found its way there oh that's the one of the belagio exactly wow that is that was a famous one in the uk pulla mate fans distressed that they couldn't find it anymore it disappeared that's incredible um one amazing pullum legacy uh one of the biggest projects of james pullum number three is the landscape garden at fryer park oh yeah um which is yeah and you don't know about this it's near henley and you'll see why dunn knows about this it's maintained by a woman called elivia harrison who is george harrison's widow and they bought it but it sounds incredible so originally it was sort of designed by its owner who's called frank crisp this really

eccentric guy who basically why are you looking at me so it's just a nice name it's a funny name he's a frank crisp by name he was a crispy eccentric man who designed his garden to look like an alpine landscape basically so full of these fake rocks that he got done by pullum and sorry just with the alpine thing he actually had a model of the matahorn made out of rocks so not actual size not actual size different scale yeah um but yeah the matahorn is there that's incredible yeah amazing um so it takes up like lots of acres that matahorn is pretty big and that's not pullum that was someone else but basically it got really overgrown i think some nuns moved into it for a while it got dilapidated and then george harrison uh bought it and said

i'm going to take this over and they cleared it and they found all this stuff like the matahorn was just sort of sticking out of a bunch of rubble they barely even knew it was there and it sounds like he had this incredible moment george there's some sort of fake lakes built there and at one point he lowered himself on a rope into this cavern that was below this lake so i guess the lake's on a yeah there's like a cave below the cavern club or yeah what the cavern club where the beetles played in liverpool i should know that even i know that yeah um actual beetle hater maybe that's what drew him to it that's how he knew because he lowered himself into this cavern and underneath was this whole grotto so like pulomite grotto with these um sparkling kind

of quartz and stuff on the walls this like crazy magical landscape wow and yeah and now you can kind of row through it and look at all these diamonds glistening on the walls and stuff and yeah it sounds incredible they do keep discovering these places so even recently in 2000 there was a couple who moved into a house uh dew stow house it was called and they started to notice all these weird rocks sticking out of the ground okay and they then started digging and they discovered this huge labyrinthine underground environment this massive rock garden magical caverns water flowing from one to another tunnel systems fountains fake stalactites the whole thing was this enormous mad pulomite project which uh a man called henry oakley had had commissioned he

was a railway director and he spent years having this incredible environment built for himself which just got buried it got buried under the the m4 as it were because there were all these mounds of earth that were excavated to build the m4 and they just got dumped on top of it okay um and the owners started to notice and they started excavating it and then a few years after that it won the award alan titchmarsh did a series on britain's best back gardens and it came in at number eight oh what a renaissance yeah that's a little bit of land right number eight yeah number eight yeah not not another top seven not top five yeah imagine how exciting it is i honestly think that all our listeners should go home now and dig up their entire gardens in case there's a pulomite

grotto under them this will ever try such a good idea you know pulomite obviously wasn't the first fake rock and the sort of the the only successful fake rock and the first of the 1700s was code stone so this was the 1770s it was basically invented and it was the fake rock to have and there were lots of startups lots of fake rock startups that tried to make their own nothing came anywhere close to code stone and it was this business that was run for 50 years by this amazing woman ellena code who just decided i think it was 1771 she met this guy who made some fake stone and she brought up this massive factory and said okay start making it and she fired him almost immediately because decided he wasn't good enough and brought on someone better at making fake rock and she was

amazing business woman so 50 years she made this stone which if you've seen the lion on the south bank that big lion that's made of code stone and that is hollow so you can tell by knocking on it and if you look inside code stone which usually you can't because it's like a statue if you drill inside you can see the fingerprints of the people who pushed it into the plaster molds on the inside code sounds awesome ellena code because she worked with her mum for decades also called ellena code and there's a lot of confusion about which code was which yeah and have you heard about her grandma no ellena code her grandma actually don't know first name of her grandma is there a thing about having being a person who makes rocks and having no imagination for names

and it's very much kept in the family the rock thing um yeah ellena code's grandmother obviously had the business mindset as well she ran a textile business in tibetan and she sent spies to norwich which was very good on textiles who would then steal all of their tricks then come back and be successful and she did things like she got carried around tibetan in a sedan chair all the time she was a good character wow sounds awesome yeah have you guys heard of gunite that's another fake rock can you guess how you make gunite fire from a gun correct no yes you um you get a gun it's not a like a small gun it's like a big sort of hose pipe gun and you fire out this dry sort of concretey material and then you have a little bit of water at the nozzle of the gun

which kind of goes into the concrete as it comes out and then you can fire it wherever you want to put a rock so it's almost like a 3d printer for rocks and it's used on bridges isn't it if you ever see a bridge really or a tunnel then it's probably gunite or shotcrete it also gets called the dry and wet versions shotcrete gets used in taxidermy i think yeah does it yeah it's because it's quite easy to shape yeah exactly and so is it kind of forgotten is it you're shaping and then you're putting the scale on top of it if well what you can do with concrete is you can make the shape of something out of iron and you can fire the concrete onto it and it'll yeah like a mold and it'll go on that yeah kind of thing you don't have to make

a mold but you can't fire it because what what's it landing on you can't just fire it into midair and it's like a spark of course of course that makes sense that's awesome um ugly rocks are sort of venerated in china um i didn't really know about this thing scholars rocks but you'd recognize them and since the eighth century confusions have confusion academics have basically said ugly uh jagged rocks are great for contemplation and the idea is that they represent confucianism they're uncompromising so from the eighth century there's been a trend for getting the ugliest what you can find or the most jagged or pitted or misshapen putting it in your garden and watching it see what happens i know anna i think i know this about you because i know it about me

you used to collect rocks when you were a kid right yeah i found in my gravel yeah yeah did you like look for the ugly ones or for the attractive ones i was very shallow i wasn't a philosopher i just went for the fit ones yeah something pink and sparkly are there competitions there actually should be ugly rock of the year there must be because they're judged on certain qualities so it must be for the sake of something there are four categories and these were determined by a guy called me foo in the 12th century who used to when he was in charge of the me food move yeah he was a great campaigner for his day and he used to bow to rocks so when he met royalty he'd walk in and bow to the rock instead of the emperor and people go instead of the emperor yeah

what a cavalier attitude he had to his own life maybe he was just short-sighted we don't know i met the queen the other um a couple of years ago but i only really talked to the palomite rocks anyway they're judged quit just to finish that they are judged on their thinness their openness their holes and their wrinkles you want to max out on all of that can't we all okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that following a theory that they wouldn't burn up on re-entry japanese scientists once planned to fly paper airplanes from the international space station back onto earth okay very cool now why does that mean therefore you'd do it because i understand that maybe you wouldn't burn up because you're

not going that fast but even so is it instead of something well it's i guess we are always trying to work out different ways of doing space travel uh constantly seeing you know who knows how important yeah space paper lightweight lightweight vehicles for re-entry would be immensely useful to have so if you can you're not gonna sit on the net paper aeroplane are you and go well no but you might sit inside a big paper aeroplane which are all treated card or something or you know chemical compounds testing they were they would have i mean that's what they said the justification was was lighter vehicles for re-entry you don't need a reason for science hannah you can do science for science's sake good point all right it discovers its own discoveries

is that what that's what scientists say isn't it yeah that's what that's the that's the line that's the official line cool in latin so how come they never did these happen well it's really hard thing to do it was a really nice idea so this was in 2008 and there were researchers at the university of tokyo who teamed up with japan's origami airplane association so this was going to be origami paper planes that were put together and put through and so they did all these tests and wind tunnels at the university and they managed to show that this plane could actually hold its own at huge speeds of wind passing through it so it all looked like it could possibly work the problem is is that if they did try it and it came back into the earth it's so tiny without any

gps device on it we would just know nothing it would be impossible to tell in 2008 i think another problem is i would say at least two-thirds of the paper airplanes that i ever make either kind of go straight up and stall and land where i threw them or go straight down and crash into the ground so you need to train your astronauts to be proper paper airplane makers don't you it's true and they've already got a lot on their plates they've got a lot of training today well origami is useful in space in other ways isn't it so i guess i can see where they're coming from is it i think it's been used by japan on solar panels and in fact by nasa more recently they certainly had a plan to and they use mirror folds and i think is that how you pronounce it we've done it on qi yeah

mirror folds are basically how you fold maps for instance you know when they fold up really small and flat and then you can spring them out so that they're really big it's almost like an accordion like you they're in a really small little square and then you pull them out and then you push them back in and pull them out and push them back in and then like a normal map you're always trying to find the folds and stuff but these just kind of go back where they should do that's really because it'd be so annoying if an accordion was like a normal map where every time you pushed it in you had to fold it exactly the right way what do you think is the world record for folding 1000 origami cranes um a thousand damn it but what time how long do you think it took the person so do you

remember i did this a few years ago yeah it took me about two months okay yeah you were you did it in the office as well because you're hiding it from your it was a present for your wife and yeah so i wasn't hiding it from my wife yeah the present for her so you were building it i was really embarrassed and i you know didn't want to tell her no it was a gift but um yeah how long do you reckon it takes to do a thousand eight hours eight hours that's a bit less than one a minute but this is going to be the record right so this is someone who's i i'm gonna say i'm gonna go as low as like two hours what just for this thousand yeah just because like how many seconds are there in an hour it's not going to take a second to do a great surely a minute to do a crane a bit

less maybe i think it'll take a couple of minutes i i don't know i think a couple of days a couple of days thank you andi because these two poor eveline cheer of colchester england henceforth known as the slacker what did she do then she is a teenager from colchester and she did it in nine hours and thirty one minutes well that's much more impressive than i would have thought dan and anna i think two hours how good do they have to be i mean can i just scrunch up lots of bits of paper and claim their cranes i'll be honest when i did it towards the end of the thousand they got less and less looking like that did you hide those cranes at the back of the crowd you really do yeah um but she did it as a fundraiser for nhs charities uh and in fact i gave

us some money for it because i was so impressed because it did take me literally two months to do it that's very cool um but yeah that's lovely i was reading the encyclopedia britannica article on origami and the origins of it uh and it's the first unequivocal document that talks about origami is a poem by ihara saikaku uh which was written in 1680 um which talks about these butterflies made from paper but this guy ihara saikaku he once composed 23 500 verses in a single day wow yeah does it have a chorus is it a cheek like half of the same i think they're on different subjects are there even that many subjects apparently in the 20th century origami was helped by the fact that it was used a lot in rudolf steiner's schools which dan you you went to one

of those i was a steiner yeah i'm a steiner kid did you learn how to make origami yeah we did but we did do japanese classes so i don't know if it was integrated like i don't we didn't have separate origami okay because apparently according to the article they emphasize kind of hands-on learning for kids as opposed to rote learning and so yeah origami was very popular especially in the german steiner schools okay yeah original no i mean we definitely did origami at school that's that's very interesting because i think germany kind of brought advanced origami to japan via kindergartens the kindergarten movement obviously started in germany it's a german word and this is the 1830s and this guy friedrich frohbill decided that origami would be a great way of educating

children in both maths and art because it's very mathematical and logical uh and like very difficult spatial reasoning but also quite artistic and he exported this around the world with his kindergarten movement and it was really taken up in japan where they were already doing quite a lot of slightly simpler origami but then they started making pigs and houses and sofas and cool was so germany exported origami to japan is what you're saying i'm saying japan had a kind of origami and then germany exported a more advanced kind we think probably invented in china uh origami because um paper was invented in china so figures um yeah probably the first people to fold paper were the first people to invent it but then went to japan and became big that then came over picked

up by germany improved sent back over to japan again and if there are for german japanese chinese listeners we are not denigrating any origami treatments of any countries okay please don't write in and if you do please don't fold it in such a way that we can't read the letters um the person who popularized origami in the west is a guy called gershon legman and yeah was he a breast man or a legman well it's funny you should ask he did a bunch of other things so the way he popularized it was he found this um origami prodigy called akira yoshizawa and he put on exhibitions of his work and stuff and it all spread but uh the other things he tried he tried lots of stuff gershon legman he collected vulgar limericks so he had a massive collection of um obscene limericks

he wrote the book the rationale of a dirty joke yes seminal set of books and it's by someone called legman well it's also called by what's his first name gershon but he uses g um so g spot legman wow yeah sorry g's oh doesn't g dot yeah so g spot legman was the name for his um that's a stretch so don't you don't call it a spotty you don't say can you put a spot at the end of that sentence please yeah yeah that was yeah that was his little gag wow cool wow this is so weird seeing the interests of dan intersect with what we're talking about not dirty jokes i just mean jokes in general i just know yeah these books are like cult classics yeah i had no idea is it yeah or and he wrote yeah because he wrote stuff about how to give good oral sex i think like the best oral sex and

gratification maybe that's where you know from that copy uh but yeah i've definitely got the joke books he invented the vibrating dildo got that got that okay well you can have a spin off gershon legman podcast but yeah cool guy wow the prodigy you just mentioned akira yoshi waza he does sound very interesting uh he pioneered wet folding before that i'm not sure what wet folding was a technique and can you explain what wet folding is absolutely wet folding is the main i'd say division in the origami world oh yeah wet folders dampen the paper so they can get the curves just right dry folders i don't need to explain don't do the the wetting and yeah so yoshi waza was the guy who um really he worked as an origami man from 1937 onwards i think when he was very young

yeah and he um he eliminated cutting from the procedure so you used to cut the paper i think before you were folding okay and that's another again you know fosbury flop moment in the development of origami where you know you're not cutting things because that's like making a snowflake when you're a kid you know you fold it up and you can't and then yeah yeah that feels like the anti fosbury flop moment that's like you've banned the fosbury flop and you're back stuck with a scissor kick again okay you're not allowed scissors reverse fosbury it's a reverse fosbury another very cool origami figure was this guy called robert lang did you guys read he's an origami figure is that a human in the origami world or was he made of paper

he's not made of paper he is just into paper got it and a bit like this guy andy he was a physicist he worked at nasa's jet propulsion lab and then he decided he preferred folding paper and he was this mass prodigy was doing very well in physics and it was 2001 he finally decided to give it all up because it was taking up so much of his time folding paper things and he's been very useful with his origami so for instance airbags are made based on origami principles now and that's because they went to robert lang and they said look we really like the way that you can fold something really small and then it can expand really big like he was able to do that on that note in 2013 there was a company which announced it was inventing an origami condom for bill gates

as he got such an unusually shaped penis that he has to have a special condom right bill and millenia gates foundation is what i mean i was using at a shorthand and i'm sorry i'm sorry please don't say there was a designer called danny resnick and he had been he'd worked out an origami condom which apparently was much more comfortable to put on you know it fit on more easily and it opened up like an accordion i can play the accordion a little bit and when you first open it up it makes quite a weird noise i don't know if it wheezed as it was opened up anyway it never happened because resnick himself was accused of fraud the next year and had to pay back the public fancy being granted so the world is still waiting for the origami condom it would be great if it did

play a tune as i don't think you can't get that little keyboard onto something that size of anything it's good it's gonna sound every time you have sex it's gonna sound like a sea shunting soon will the weather bag come well i hope it is soon okay that's 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 have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at shriverland james at james harken andy at andrew hunter m and anna you can email podcast at qi.com or you can go to at no such thing or go to our website no such thing as a fish dot com all of our previous episodes are there do check them out and

do look at our upcoming tour dates we are back on the road later this year hopefully we can see some of you there if not keep listening because we will be back next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye