No Such Thing As A Cat In A Muumuu

11:04Dan Schreiber:Do you think in the future they'll be looking at these ironing boards and saying, did you know these used to be used for ironing?

11:09Anna Ptaszynski:Before they became... When everyone's a DJ. On the DJ boards, yeah. There is actually a guy called DJ Ironing Board who built his rig that fits perfectly on a normal ironing board and he does festivals and stuff. That's awesome. Oh, wow.

11:22James Harkin:But, I mean, you've got to be careful. So many times when I'm mid-iron, you hit the little handle underneath that sends the entire thing down. You don't want that.

11:31Dan Schreiber:How do you do that? I've never experienced that. Happens to me non-stop. I've never done that. No one else? No. Can I give you another use for an ironing board? Yeah. If you want to be Pope. Okay. Quite neat. Well, for instance, the most recent guy who was Pope was Robert Provost, Pope Leo XIV. And as a child, he played at being a priest by using the family's ironing board as an altar, according to his brother. So he would get the ironing board up, he would get a load of biscuits and then put them there. And his family would come round and he would give them a Kit Kat and say, body of Christ. Really?

12:06Are you serious? Absolutely.

12:08James Harkin:And again, you can alter the altar as you're growing up. Alter the altar. So it's all good.

12:13Anna Ptaszynski:I mean, they must have thought that was a pretty long shot when he was a kid doing the Kit Kat thing. But that's incredible. They're laughing on the other side of their face now, aren't they? He works in mysterious ways.

12:24James Harkin:This is good news for the world of ironing, because actually the last Pope, Francis, actively announced that ironing needed to stop in certain homes. So there was a question about all these Italian kids that weren't leaving home, and what do I do to get my son a job and get him out of the house? and the Pope said, stop ironing for him. And that was like huge compliments. Like mum's overlooking up. Exactly. Why would he leave home? He's got his stuff being ironed every day by you. You're mollygaling him.

12:50Dan Schreiber:An interesting thing to focus on as Pope, but you know, they focused on worse, I suppose.

12:54James Harkin:It turns out they're all obsessed.

12:57Anna Ptaszynski:Another great world leader who did a spot of ironing in her day, Margaret Thatcher. Really? Even after she was an MP, she would iron her husband Dennis's shirts in Parliament. What? During that? Not on the floor of the House of Commons. Okay.

13:12Dan Schreiber:Just on the dispatch box.

13:13Anna Ptaszynski:There is a desk there, actually, isn't there? Yeah.

13:15Dan Schreiber:I think it's wooden. I think that would be very bad for it. Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right.

13:19Anna Ptaszynski:No, there was a ladies' room, and this was a time when there were fewer female MPs than there are now, so there was a need for women to have their own space environment. And it had an ironing board in it, and she frankly monopolised that iron.

13:33Dan Schreiber:Well, she was a fan of monopolies, yeah.

13:35Anna Ptaszynski:Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That's the best Thatcher Iron and Monopoly's joke you'll hear on any podcast this week. This week. But if you listen to Off-Bedu next week, it kind of stays home.

13:54Anna Ptaszynski:OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that 900 years ago, England beat Scotland in a battle with an earth horn super weapon which scattered the Scots by frightening their cows. A lot to unpack

14:10Dan Schreiber:What's an earth horn?

14:11Anna Ptaszynski:Glad you asked, it's not a common thing anymore This was word of the day On the OED website the other day Highly recommended If you're listening to this, just go over to the Oxford English Dictionary website And see what the word of the day is And this is earth horn I think this was the first and maybe last time it was used Yes, it's a hapax legomenon As in there's only one Mention of it in the whole of literature Wow So it didn't take off basically this earth horn secret weapon, whatever it was. Seems to have been a big horn. Despite working, apparently. Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right.

14:45And the other thing to say as well is it was only mentioned once, and that was in 1338, and it referred to a battle that happened in 1138. Okay.

14:54Anna Ptaszynski:It's like the 200th anniversary of this battle. Finally, we're going to uncover this secret weapon that we used. No one's mentioned it before now. And again, it's not completely clear from the OED source why frightening the cows was a key factor in the end of the battle.

15:10James Harkin:Okay. Well, give us everything we know about it then from the description.

15:14Anna Ptaszynski:No, we don't know a huge amount of it. That's it. I think all the earth horn.

15:17James Harkin:We don't know anything about the earth horn, definitely. We don't know if it was a sound. I mean, horn implies it.

15:21Dan Schreiber:And do we know why earth? Is it made of earth? It comes from the earth.

15:25Anna Ptaszynski:I can't stress enough. This was 900 years ago. As James says, first recorded 200 years later for the first and last time. We really don't know much about it. This is my challenge fact for the week. As I said, it happened in 1138. So what was going on? What was going on was a thousand years of conflict between England and Scotland, on and off. But quite a lot of on. So what I found was the earliest battle recorded between Angles and the Scots slash Picts. That was in 596 AD. Wow. And the last battle between England and Scotland as completely independent kingdoms was, when was it? That was 1547.

16:04This particular one that we're talking about, the Battle of North Aletern, also known as the Battle of the Standards, this was that time when Henry had died, Matilda was maybe going to be our queen, Stephen was maybe going to be the king. There was a whole load of conflict about who was going to take over. And the Scots were on the side of Matilda. and a lot of the barons in England were on the side of Stephen and so there was a big old battle because the Scots wanted to help out because Matilda was the daughter of a Scottish kick.

16:36James Harkin:I read that this battle took place on Calton Moor. Jesus. Isn't that interesting?

16:42Anna Ptaszynski:That is interesting. Moor. Do you want to say that again? Calton Moor. Yeah. You didn't want to stress the cow part.

16:49James Harkin:Well, that was obvious. The moo was going to be a bit more difficult. Yeah.

16:53Anna Ptaszynski:No, I think that's really good, Dan. Yeah, that's very good.

16:55James Harkin:given there were lots of cows at the end of the battle.

16:58Anna Ptaszynski:We talked about this when David Mitchell was on the podcast. This era we did, yeah. If you've got your English history kings and queens ruler, it's the bit that goes willy-willy Harry-Steve. It's the Steve bit, of course, King Stephen.

17:10Dan Schreiber:And if you've got the ruler that goes all the way forward, and just to emphasise how much the Scots and the English didn't like each other back then, and obviously it's all water under the bridge now, but between 1040 and 1745, 33 out of the 36 English monarchs either invaded or were invaded by Scotland which is strong it's a strong record isn't it so it's a long old skirmish I know although it could have all been avoided or the worst bits could have been avoided if it weren't for just a small diplomatic cock up so the worst phase and with all the famous battles like your Bannock Burns and your Mel Gibson's was the 13th and 14th centuries and that was the Wars of Independence and it all kicked off when Alexander III of Scotland dies in the early 1290s.

17:56Dan Schreiber:And there are these two guys, John Balliol and Robert Bruce, who was the grandfather of the famous Robert Bruce.

18:01James Harkin:Sorry, was one Robert the Bruce and the other one was just Robert Bruce? Yeah, that was his middle name. Yeah. Well, you sometimes got to slip that in there to differentiate.

18:09Dan Schreiber:So no, there was a guy called John Balliol. There was a guy called Robert Bruce. Robert Bruce's grandson was also called Robert Bruce. He's the famous one, who for bad reasons we now call Robert the Bruce. I think related to the fact that he was Robert de Bruce.

18:23James Harkin:He's Braveheart, for anyone who knows that movie.

18:25Anna Ptaszynski:This is Mel Gibson's granddad, Robert Bruce.

18:27Dan Schreiber:Exactly. They couldn't decide who was going to be king. So they asked Edward I of England, as their neighbour and friend, as an impartial observer, to say which one of us should be king. Man, does it right. And Edward I thought, great, here's my chance. And he said, OK, I'll do that. But first of all, I need to have legal authority over Scotland to have this kind of authority to decide who's king. And so little legal loophole. He gave himself authority over all of Scotland. And then the rest is history. He just started getting in the way all the time. And what a cock up.

18:56Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. Berwick-upon-Tweed is the... Now, if you're heading north from England to Scotland, it's pretty much the last English town you pass through. If you're heading on the East Coast. If you're heading on the East Coast, absolutely. Sorry, a big fan of the West Coast main line over here. I love the West Coast main line. But for international listeners, let us simplify. I'm just saying it's the last town before Scotland. So, Berwick-upon-Tweed, a very, very northern English town. It has changed hands 13 times over the last thousand years. I mean, mostly, like, centuries ago. And all the times it changed hands, it wasn't just being captured in battles.

19:33Anna Ptaszynski:So in 1174, Scotland gave it to England because William I had been captured, and that was part of the ransom, is like, we want Berwick-upon-Tweed. Then 20 years later, Scotland bought it back because King Richard needed money for a crusade. They're like, what can I flog off? Oh, so Berwick upon Tweed, the Scots love that. For about 200 years, once every 15 years, it changed hands.

19:55Dan Schreiber:Do you think they ever knew? The people in Berwick upon Tweed going about their lives, do you think they ever knew?

19:59Anna Ptaszynski:They just say they're from Berwick. A lot of people there just say, I'm a Berwicker, you know. There's a guy called Derek Sharman, who's a local historian who says this a lot. Derek from Berwick? Derek from Berwick. Derek upon Tweed. He says that basically, he says basically that they're all just Bericas. And actually, if you're from north of the river and south of the river, that's kind of a distinguishable sort of almost nationality as well. That's where the next big civil war is happening.

20:24Dan Schreiber:Edward I, who was, you know, the famous antagonist, the Hammer of the Scots. Hammer of the Scots. Long shanks, lots of nicknames. He is still in Westminster Abbey buried just in a very plain lead casket. not with a normal regalia of English monarchs. Is that to not upset the Scots? It's the absolute opposite, James. It's because... Is it to properly wind them up? It's to really fucking piss them off. No, I think it would give the Scots... It would gratify them, because basically he said, I don't want to be buried properly until the Scots are finally conquered, and they haven't yet finally been conquered, and so no one's yet exhumed him and buried him in a proper basket.

21:03Did they not consider when we beat them in Euro 96-2-1 with that Paul Gascoigne goal?

21:08Dan Schreiber:People were bastering away at Westminster Abbey with spades How interesting Yeah, Edward I The really interesting thing about him Is the Siege of Stirling Castle When he got this enormous trebuchet built So a trebuchet is like a catapult And it was called the War Wolf It was 90 metres tall It took three months to build And the Scots When they saw it sort of trundling up They went, oh shit and they said it's okay we surrender we surrender we surrender and king edward went oh i spent three

21:43James Harkin:months making this now and so he attacked them anyway even though they surrendered yeah it was basically going okay i'm just going to test it though and you're not allowed to leave the castle

21:54Anna Ptaszynski:until the test is over good lord pretty wild well it's a great name the war wolf yeah yeah that is

22:00Dan Schreiber:cool you don't want to waste work like that do you you know you can see its point we'll just wheel it on to the next place. I tell you what, the werewolf was good against this castle, but it was even better up against the castle made of sticks and the castle made of straw. Hey. Get it. I get it. Yeah.

22:16Anna Ptaszynski:One of the chief nobles who led the Scottish rebellions after the first little land grab there, he was called Andrew de Moray or Andrew Murray.

22:24Dan Schreiber:Oh, really? He was like the other William Wallace.

22:27Anna Ptaszynski:He was the one who wasn't William Wallace, basically. That's de Moray. um

22:34Dan Schreiber:bannockburn is where um freedom freedom was one that was the moment for andrew murray here then deceased but

22:41Anna Ptaszynski:was it you or was it william wallace i think i was dead by this point right i think it was an earlier battle where i did very very well by the way but then i got injured and died

22:49Dan Schreiber:it was sterling bridge in fact sadly that so would be on your tubes though andy did very well actually read like a four star battle

23:02Anna Ptaszynski:when you're killed in a fight but you still did all right that's demore so many battles over the over the centuries it's kind of insane scotland had a huge role in what gets called the english civil war which turns out we shouldn't call the english civil war it should be called the war of the three kingdoms okay is that the war of the roses or is it the war of the the roundheads versus cavaliers that one so war of the roses is um ends in 1485 with with Richard III and Battle of Bosworth and Henry VII taking over. What's called the English Civil War is the 1640s, basically. It started partly because Charles I, who was basically a useless...

23:38Anna Ptaszynski:Imagine a useless king. Oh, you fought the Cromwell Kool-Aid, haven't you? He was just big floppy, rough, suspicious continental practices. People worried he was a Catholic. Imagine the ironing it took to get him that rough. He had tried to interfere with the Church of Scotland and he tried to impose his own prayer books on the Kirk in 1637. This went down phenomenally badly. It led to a thing called the Bishop's Wars, where just like Ecclesiastes... They all attack diagonally. Superb. That's the best bishop this week. I don't know. You haven't heard Parenting Hell this week, have you, Andy? And Scotland got so angry about this prayer book difference that they occupied Northern England, and he had to not only back down, and he had to pay expenses, which is so humiliating after a war.

24:26Anna Ptaszynski:Pay expenses?

24:27Dan Schreiber:What, like we bought these train tickets to get down to Leeds? Pretty much, yes. Can you, we've, really? £10.60 at Pratt. It was just a sandwich and a drink

24:36Anna Ptaszynski:that is expensive these days. And so Charles then had to ask for money from Parliament, like, because of the war debt that had been imposed, and that helped kick off the entire Civil War period. And then at the end of it, the English execute Charles, Cromwell comes in, and the Scots are furious, and that leads to another battle because they were so angry about as they saw it their king getting his head chopped off. Do you know this William Wallace period

25:00James Harkin:Robert the Bruce? Robert the Bruce don't hear too much about him these days but he influenced something great in modern popular culture. Someone was named after him. Someone was named after Robert Bruce. Bruce Forsyth. No. Bruce Springsteen? No. Robert Mugabe.

25:18Dan Schreiber:Okay. Are we saying that's popular culture? Oh, his middle name. Winnie the Pooh.

25:28James Harkin:No, it's Bruce, and it is in the world of fiction. Bruce Almighty. No. Bruce. Who's the most famous Bruce? Bruce Dickinson.

25:36Dan Schreiber:The guy from Matilda. The fat kid. Yes, Anna. Bruce Banner from the Hulk. You're so close. Bruce. Superhero. Bruce. Is he Australian? Oh, Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne.

25:47James Harkin:Who's Bruce Wayne? What do you mean, who's Bruce Wayne? Oh, you only know Batman. Okay, so Batman.

25:52Anna Ptaszynski:Bruce Wayne is Batman!

26:03James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1999, the first ever TV ad made for cats was broadcast on ITV and had an estimated viewership of three million cats.

26:18Anna Ptaszynski:Three million?

26:19James Harkin:Three million. Well, the numbers...

26:21Anna Ptaszynski:Because the number you sent around was 7 million.

26:23James Harkin:Yeah, but then I did some additional research. Interestingly, I have 2 million written on mine. I have 2 million as well. I've had to go over my numbers quite a few times. Basically, this was a commercial that was put together by Whiskers, the cat food people. And they wanted to put something together that was specifically for cats. And so they asked someone what would generate a cat's interest. and it turns out an incredibly surreal 40 second animation full of weird ping noises, little sounds, a mouse running up, a line going up and down the screen, very random stuff. And they made a big deal out of it.

26:57James Harkin:It was a big promo thing. And on the 27th of January, 1999, there was an announcement just before it was coming on, a pre-ad to say, we're about to play the first ever ad for Cats. Get your cat. Let's do this. I think it was also announced in like the newspapers and stuff beforehand, because I remember it happening. They had to advertise the advert. It's quite clever, really, because you get publicity out of the fact you're doing an advert. That's very hard to do. It won a lot of awards, basically, for innovation of getting the interest of the people to make sure that their cats were in. Now, the numbers are dodgy, obviously.

27:27James Harkin:1999 was a period where it went from viewership to households, so you don't know how many people would be in a household. So 2.2 people per household, roughly, is what the ratings would suggest were watching. How many cats? Well, let's get to hang on, guys. Don't jump ahead on the numbers, OK? So we know what the numbers were of the viewing figures that night. It was 18 ,520 ,000. That's what we're watching. However, that's viewers, not households, right? Okay, so if we're talking houses that might have a cat in it, we've got to look at houses. Right. Yeah, so let's 2.2 people. So you've got to bring that down, that number, basically split that number in half, right?

28:03James Harkin:Then it wasn't just shown on ITV that night. It was also shown on Channel 4 and Channel 5. so we need to add those in so that's 21.2 million viewers split that in half it's roughly 10.6

28:14Dan Schreiber:i'm not counting the channel 5 viewers because i remember channel 5 in the 90s and it was too blurry to make anything out okay they didn't see any of those images and how many did contain the

28:23James Harkin:cat i suppose well at that time it's estimated that a quarter of all houses in the uk had cats

28:29Dan Schreiber:and then what percentage of households invited their cats into the room to watch when it happened

28:33James Harkin:and do they have one cat or two cats so most houses had 1.6 cats so you then got to add those It was a gruesome time, the 90s. So roughly when you add all those numbers together, in theory, there could be roughly around 3 million cats that were in front of a screen in the rooms. So are you having 3 million as your number? I'm going to go for 3 million because I'm also going to add in the fact it was played in America. And so those numbers are going to add up. Can I say, I think the number might be 3 million and one because I let Harley watch it this week. Oh, really? And if you want to know what she thought of it, then go on my TikTok or Instagram because I'll put the video up.

29:06That's very exciting.

29:07Anna Ptaszynski:A little ad for another format within our show. You're doing what the cat people did. Yeah, that's his thing as James Harkin. Get on there.

29:14James Harkin:Wow, that's very good. It was considered a success. So successful they released it on video, VHS. And I actually... No. I actually found it on eBay. So this is it. The first ever commercial for cats. Oh my God. Officially released by Whiskers. An old VHS. Wow.

29:32Dan Schreiber:Why is everyone calling it the first ever, as though now we are inundated by cat adverts?

29:36James Harkin:Well, perhaps at the time they thought this was going to be massive, right? So the back says, thousands of cats across the length and breadth of Britain, jumping, staring. Could have been thousands of thousands. Thousands of cats. So one in a thousand viewers of the advert had any reaction whatsoever. So yeah, so we don't know the numbers. We don't know. They've just muddied the waters even more. Amazing. That's advertising. Yeah, but it did good for them. It did really good. Oh yeah. You know what else did well for whiskers? Eight out of ten cats.

30:07Dan Schreiber:that's one of theirs yeah what do you mean that's the slogan yeah so there's a tv show eight out of ten cats and eight out of ten cats does countdown but that came from a slogan by whiskers which was eight out of ten cats prefer our product and they ran it for quite a lot of years until the advertising standards authority encouraged them to change it and they changed it to eight out of ten owners who expressed a preference said that their cat prefers it and the problem was that basically they'd been doing this eight out of ten cats for ages and everyone knew at the time and then they went up to nine out of ten cats so they did a survey in 2001 and they thought that actually now it's nine out of ten and when they did that the people at friskies who is another cat food company said oh we're not having this and they went to the asa and they said that this is a biased survey and you know it wasn't a fair reflection eight out of ten owners who expressed

30:59Anna Ptaszynski:a preference that leads to other questions doesn't it how many owners express a preference absolutely yeah that's fair enough but does this mean that jimmy carl has to change the title of

31:06James Harkin:the show as well surely yeah let's do it yeah let's let's get in contact they were very good whiskers by the way with their promotion in 1999 specifically so over in australia there was an aussie rules footballer called gary hocking who changed his name by depot to whiskers and the idea was that as he was playing they had no choice but to say oh whiskers has got the ball they were did they do that or did they just use his old name like that's what happens when football teams changed the name of their stadium to a company name. People just call it the old name. Yep, the AFL were very against calling him whiskers and really stuck to Gary Hocking.

31:41James Harkin:They were paid a couple of hundred grand in order to advertise them generally. And this was a sort of extra move by Gary Hocking because he thought it's going to be funny. And it made news stories. It did the job right. Like that's all that this needs to do. It's like when the snooker player Jimmy White changed his name to Jimmy Brown to advertise HP Sauce. Oh, did he? Yeah. One of us should change our names to something.

32:00Anna Ptaszynski:I've changed my name years ago to Maserati, but no one... They keep asking me to stop. No one here uses it. It's a nightmare.

32:08Dan Schreiber:Videos actually look crap to cats. This TV advert would have looked rubbish because they see so much better than us. They see about 100 frames a second, so we only need to see 20 frames a second for stuff to look smooth to us. And I think TV is about 24, or TV is 30 and films are 24. So to cats, it's just going to look like a series of photographs.

32:26Anna Ptaszynski:So cat videos in general, can you think of a role, a famous role that was inspired by cat videos? Catwoman. Well, there's no fun if you're going to get it immediately. When Anne Hathaway, the actress, she played Catwoman. It's just because we did the Batman thing. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

32:44Dan Schreiber:But Catwoman isn't an actual cat.

32:46Anna Ptaszynski:No, but she's got to justify her fee somehow, Anna. She's going to say, well, I spent a couple of weeks looking at cat videos online. That's another million quid. When Daniel Day-Lewis went for the same party, just sat there licking his ass for three weeks. Thank you, Mr. Day-Lewis, we've actually received enough half mice. We're going with Hathaway. I'm sorry.

33:11James Harkin:She fits the suit better. That's been done by a bunch of them. Tom Holland studied the movements of a spider in order to... Such bullshit. Robert Downey Jr. watched ironing videos non-stop.

33:24Anna Ptaszynski:it's something to say in an interview isn't it you run out of stuff to say in interviews yeah

33:29Dan Schreiber:i read a really good article it was like an inside look at um the waltham pet care science institute at melton mowbray which is the science arm of mars pet care which is where all of our pet food comes from okay mars makes it all they go to such great lengths to look after their cats there and to test um really advanced foods on them they found out that cats prefer asian cuisine because their favourite flavours are, well, you can probably guess. Plum sauce. Plum sauce. The same flavour, yeah.

33:57Anna Ptaszynski:Umami.

33:57Dan Schreiber:Umami. And the new one, kukumi.

34:00Anna Ptaszynski:Kukumi, yeah. I'm sorry, for those of us not up on our flavours, what's that?

34:04Dan Schreiber:So it's, I think it's like fullness and richness. Kukumi. Yeah, they keep adding more. It's not like a flavour so much as an enhanced. It is officially a flavour, but it's like enhances salty things. Is it like MSG? No, that's umami. Yeah. Okay. And once all the cats are tested on at Melton Mowbray at this site, they get taken home and adopted by one of the people who work there. In other words, they get turned into pot pies. Yeah, we know what you mean. They're very good owners to the extent that one of the research scientists called Scott McGrain adopted a cat and then noticed when he took it home that the cat was a bit perplexed by his telly because they had never seen one before.

34:44Dan Schreiber:And since then, they've installed loads of TVs, a TV room for the cats there. Why? So that when they get adopted, they don't get confused by TVs.

34:52Anna Ptaszynski:Is that a massive safeguarding welfare thing for cats being confused by TVs when they go to their forever home? Is that really a problem for them?

34:58Dan Schreiber:The RSPCA is clamping down, yes.

35:00Anna Ptaszynski:Can I just say, Scott McGrane is very much a name you would come up with if you were trying to come up with a name for a Scottish person. And failing.

35:07James Harkin:I do hope someone says, Scott, you've been mentioned on the show this week. Listen in.

35:13Anna Ptaszynski:You know, cats falling off things. Yeah. And flipping the right way up and landing on their feet. They land on their feet. So this was a physics puzzle for much of the 19th century, how it happens. Because there was a scientist called George Gabriel Stokes. James, you did maths. You may have heard of him. Yeah, Stokes Equation. I've heard of that. Yeah, it's about fluid mechanics or something. Okay, perfect. So he was a Lucasian professor of maths at Cambridge. And other holders of the role were people like Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking. So big brain, George Gabriel Stokes. He and his colleague, James Clark Maxwell, another big physics name they were there at the same time and they could not work out right cats if you drop them they fall onto their feet how because that's it's they seem to be violating the law about the conservation of angular momentum which is if something rotates it has to have something to rotate against which rotates the opposite way right yeah got it so how does the cat rotate with nothing to push so like let's say you jump off a diving board yeah you've pushed off against that and you use that kind of momentum to twizz round in the air.

36:17But if the cat's just falling, how do they do that? Yeah, exactly. Can I just ask a further clarifying question?

36:23James Harkin:If I didn't dive off the diving board, if I let myself just fall forward, can I swing around to my back? I think

36:29Anna Ptaszynski:Andy's about to answer. Right. Yeah. But the judges will mark you down for that.

36:37Anna Ptaszynski:I've just proved Maxwell's theorem! Two. Two. No. So this was so interesting. How on earth are they doing it? It turns out what the cats do as they start to drop, it uses its own mass to rotate around. How? It flips in its forelegs, it pulls them in, and that means, like a gymnast, its top half spins faster. Then it flips out its forelimbs and it flips in its back limbs, and now its back half is revolving faster. And it switches back and forth between those two, so it creates its own momentum using its limbs like an athlete. So that is how the cat rotates. And it can do that as quick as falling off

37:20James Harkin:this table that we're recording.

37:22Dan Schreiber:I mean, so quickly, in 1998, there was an Italian researcher who dropped a cat called Esther 600 times and determined that... RSPCA had to get involved at some stage. They're too busy with the telly thing.

37:38Anna Ptaszynski:What are you in for? Introducing a cat to my home without briefing it about the TV. Me? Oh, no, I dropped mine 600 times.

37:46Dan Schreiber:Anyway, came to the brain form conclusion. She could fall on her feet when she was dropped from anywhere between two and six feet, but not from one foot. So it's only from two feet up they can do all this mad weird gymnastics in the air.

37:57Anna Ptaszynski:And I read the same thing, Anna. It was so good. He dropped Esther from the height of one foot 100 times in a row to make sure she definitely couldn't do it. And she didn't land on her feet once.

38:08Dan Schreiber:It's much bigger than the sample size that you statistically need.

38:12Anna Ptaszynski:He did write in his paper, I want to thank the cat Esther for her initial cooperation in this experiment.

38:20James Harkin:So we didn't get an answer to my question. Would if I fell off a diving board, do humans have the muscles to do what cats do? I'll hand over to James.

38:28Anna Ptaszynski:He's got a physics degree. I think that you would not be able to do that. Maybe not fast enough. I would think if you trained for long enough, you might be able to because the physics is there. It is possible. but I think it would take training because you're not flexible enough like we can't shift our bodies like a cat because they have got not extra vertebrae but you know what I mean they can move they can very flexible they're very flexible

38:52Dan Schreiber:I think yeah with training the way I thought of it and I think I skimmed it more than Andy so this is probably wrong but I thought of it as like squeezing a cat like a sponge you know when you squeeze a sponge out you have to turn it in two different directions at once don't you and that's the only way that it's going to be able to twist around its okay so Dan stand up yeah how easy is it for you to twist your top half in one direction and your bottom half in the other direction. Yeah, you see, like, this part... Oh, dear. Uh-oh.

39:21James Harkin:Holy moly. Oh, wow.

39:23Anna Ptaszynski:What's he doing up there? Dan, that is going to be the TikTok craze. Dance craze of 2025. Did you film it, James? Can I make a cameo? That is amazing.

39:33James Harkin:Ow. Sorry about that, Dan. No, that's fine. Do you think if you were sat holding a cat right now and I took a photo and then we put it on your dating profile, people would find you more attractive or less attractive. Let's say women. Okay, well, first off, my wife doesn't know about that cat. So let's... Yeah, I'd say they think you're more attractive.

39:52Dan Schreiber:With a cat? Absolutely.

39:53Anna Ptaszynski:I would say maybe less. Anna?

39:57Dan Schreiber:As the woman in the room, I'm going to say less. Yeah, absolutely. Women view men as less masculine, higher in neuroticism, agreeableness and openness, but less dateable. I wonder if I'm not getting any swipes Friend material Less flexible

40:11Anna Ptaszynski:And is there like a league table of animals Like if I pose with a water vole Am I Or a mink Do you remember When you did your first Edinburgh show And I wanted you to do a poster Where you were completely naked But with a water vole over your privates And we were going to call it Socks and gloves and cock and vole Yeah I do I do why did you never go for that?

40:38James Harkin:why did you not do that?

40:39Anna Ptaszynski:I just ran out of time on the shoot day such a shame I had the vol can I ask James a question? yeah as the cat owner in the room

40:50Dan Schreiber:have done in the past

40:52Anna Ptaszynski:okay but as a current cat owner James would you buy a matching outfit for yourself and your cat? no my cat only wears what God gave her okay

41:00Dan Schreiber:and she insists on being ironed every day so it's very different no I would never buy clothes for animals, really.

41:07Anna Ptaszynski:Then you're part of the nine in ten in your age group who would not buy a matching outfit for yourself and your cat. Whereas a third of 19 to 28-year-olds would do that.

41:19Dan Schreiber:Really? Yeah, that's the Instagram generation, isn't it? Would they be able to get the clothes on the cat, though? That's my question. I don't know.

41:25Anna Ptaszynski:It depends on the clothes, doesn't it, as well? If it's a shapeless sort of bernousse or a muumuu or something, it might be quite easy. I don't know what either of those things are. I don't know why the two items of clothing that came to my mind were a Bernouce or a boo-boo. What are they? It's a Bernouce. It's a sort of North African desert car. It's like Lawrence of Arabia might have got around in a Bernouce. Have you ever seen that show, Mr and Mrs,

41:56James Harkin:where you write it down and your partner's going to have to guess what you said? What two items of clothing has Andy... I'm going to go for shirt and pants. I'm afraid not. He went for Bernouce.

42:11Dan Schreiber:You must be kicking yourself.

42:20James Harkin:Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that America's Nudist of the Year, 1973, who also invented a contraption that allowed him to sunbathe in sub-zero temperatures was a man called Dick Bacon.

42:39Anna Ptaszynski:The name's Bacon. Dick Bacon. What a guy. Dick Bacon is an absolute legend. So I found this in an obituary of Dick Bacon. God damn it. You always find out about these people too late, right? He spent his life on Lake Michigan sunbathing and anyone who has been to Lake Michigan or lives there knows that in the winter it gets very, very cold. But the newspaper said that he set up a series of reflective shields to protect him from the wind and inside the temperature would get high enough for him to tan.

43:15Dan Schreiber:Still going to be pretty cold though, isn't it? And he was naked, wasn't he? He was actually usually bathed in a small swimsuit. Okay. But that was just to keep on the right side of the law and he definitely preferred to be nude. He began his nudism when he was 25. he worked as a live model at the university of wisconsin uh but he didn't want tan lines he thought it was unfair on the people drawing him and that they had to draw in the tan lines so he thought well i'm just gonna not wear any clothes anymore that's amazing and he basically just went

43:43James Harkin:okay how do i make it so that every single day i can be out there all year round so he worked in a brewery he always took the second and third shifts in there so he always had the morning free so he was a morning oh that's interesting yeah so just every day go get the sun as it's going up um he married someone and he had this line that I just absolutely love. He met this girl and she said, what's your name? And he replied, bacon. Wanna strip? And that works on two levels. Yeah. Like a strip of bacon and strip as in take your clothes off. I'm a nudist. Let's go strip. Oh, it's just a wonderful double entendre.

44:15James Harkin:Yeah. It's very strong. That is good. In fact,

44:18Anna Ptaszynski:it's better than fancy some pork. It's better than that. It is better than that. He won nudist of the year in 73, like I said, but he won that by accident. That's too far. He did. He just so happened to be in this place called Naked City when the competition was taking place. He didn't deliberately go there for the competition. And he said after his win, they interviewed him in the newspapers and they said that he was aiming to reach his natural colour. Although the Daily Herald, where I read this, said that he was already a deep red. yeah okay having a natural color it's a bit weird isn't it as in do we have a natural color yeah good point because you turn you it depends whether you've been in the sun or not yeah exactly i feel like my natural color is incredibly pale but that's because i haven't been in the

45:05James Harkin:sunshine well you're looking tan today i would say well i'm i'm trying to sort that out yeah

45:10Anna Ptaszynski:yeah yeah well that's why i've got this bernice with me um he was arrested a lot mr bacon he was yeah for for nude bathing and lewd and lascivious behaviour but he was a campaigner he was saying this isn't harming people this is a natural, healthy almost sporting way of living in harmony with the elements I completely back that.

45:31Dan Schreiber:And he was in very good shape. In fact I was recently on a nudist beach, a partially nudist beach not by choice. Partially nudist beach that's just a beach isn't it?

45:39Anna Ptaszynski:You were on a partially nudist beach not by choice the plot is thickening

45:43Dan Schreiber:I was on a beach where a lot of people were nudist including myself but there were a lot of nudists and it's completely fine but they're not all in amazing shape whereas he was like a gladiator wasn't he?

45:55James Harkin:Yeah I guess he would be if he won all the awards

45:56Anna Ptaszynski:Well he won Mr Nude America he won Mr Nude Apollo Mr Nude Galaxy

46:01Dan Schreiber:Are any of these awards big awards?

46:04Anna Ptaszynski:The Galaxy? Yeah Anna

46:05Dan Schreiber:I think it might be

46:07Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah

46:07Dan Schreiber:You know if you put Fact 50 sun cream on Yes Will it stop your skin aging?

46:13Anna Ptaszynski:I guess so probably

46:14Dan Schreiber:Or make it age more slowly Nothing can stop your skin aging, guys. Well, I would have thought that UV rays might age your skin. And so the lotion might stop that. Yeah, get you more leathery, right? They absolutely do age your skin, but only UVA waves. So what they don't tell you on the sun creams is that when they say the factor, UV rays are split into UVA and UVB. And it's basically about the wavelengths. So UVB have shorter wavelengths. And they're the ones that cause sunburn. And they're the most carcinogenic. so when you've got factor X sun cream it's just blocking the UVB rays or sorry reducing them but it doesn't refer to UVA and they're the ones that cause skin ageing they're the ones that go deeper and make you wrinkly and crusty so you need to look at the star rating as well if you want to not go wrinkly and crusty I've never seen a star rating on my sun cream they often don't have them

47:08Anna Ptaszynski:if they don't have a star rating does that mean they don't protect against the UVA

47:12Dan Schreiber:I believe it does careful

47:15Anna Ptaszynski:Okay, can I run a tanning practice past you guys? Yes, please. Have any of you heard of or you two done testicle tanning? Jesus Christ. Was it last week or the week before when you were talking about perinean tanning? Testicle tanning is completely different. This is actually, it's not sunlight. You don't have to go down to the beach and bury yourself. I do do that, but I always iron mine first. it does take one of those 40 kilogram ions to get them flat

47:49Anna Ptaszynski:this is actually it's not even a real tanning it's a very dubious medical uh thing it's just blasting red light at your knackers and claiming that it'll improve your like testosterone and a load of male energy and hormones and stuff and it's and people are doing this are they i mean their bucket loads not thankfully i don't think it's very popular but it is the kind of thing that a load of dubious americans have basically glommed onto and started saying is is a good idea and it's not well unless you want to save the poor life drawing class which

48:17Dan Schreiber:apparently was dick bacon's motivation you can't draw two shades of skin color well this is very similar to perineum tanning which we did talk about a couple of weeks ago friend of the podcast very scientifically but i wasn't there and so i insist on revisiting it um and there was something i found interesting about this because it's mostly obviously just a TikTok nonsense thing where there's like one person who says it's a really good thing to expose your bum hole to the sun. And after 30 seconds, you get the same benefits you get exposing your body for a day and it's nonsense. And there is Josh Brolin, the actor, put a thing up saying, don't.

48:53James Harkin:So he's Thanos in Avengers. Yes. Yeah. No Country for Old Men. He's in that if you want to picture his face.

48:59Dan Schreiber:Yes. And he put a thing up.

49:01James Harkin:That is the part of him

49:02Anna Ptaszynski:I want to picture. I must have been in this fact. Thanos, more likely.

49:10Dan Schreiber:he said don't try this on your thanos because um i did it and my pocket hole is crazily burnt i mean he obviously didn't he's taking the piss i assume he's not an insane person but what i quite like is that you know conspiracy theories always come from a kernel of truth and the woman who started this said it's an ancient taoist practice to bathe your bum hole in the sun and actually it does come from this idea in Taoism. So Taoism is like ancient Chinese philosophy, basically. And Hui Yin is the collection point of all Yin energy in your body. And that is your perineum. So all of Yin, you know, you've got Yin and Yang, the two opposing forces that work together.

49:52Dan Schreiber:Yin is all gathered in your perineum. And they do believe that it's good to bathe in sunlight and moonlight for wellness. And so, you know, there's a kernel of truth in those bollocks.

50:04Anna Ptaszynski:Brazil, home of great tanning culture. Do you know what the fashionable bikini is to wear in Brazil at the moment? Is it like a full body, like a burkini? But it's very, very stiff so your arms go out like Christ the Redeemer. Oh, wow. It's a starched bannousa. Is it? Well, okay. Like Brazilian, you would think okay, very thongy. It's very thongy.

50:31James Harkin:Oh, is it that Borat one? It's not the mankini. Not the mankini.

50:35Anna Ptaszynski:What's it made of? What fabric is it made of?

50:37Dan Schreiber:Cashmere.

50:38Anna Ptaszynski:No. I love it. I love it. A mink thong. I know. Spider silk. Just one piece of spider silk. Up the crack. Oh, you'll really feel that. The aim of it is to give you incredibly crisp tan lines. So something that blocks all of the... It blocks really effectively. Or like a lead or a hazmat suit. I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you. It's electrical tape. Do you give yourself a Brazilian when you take it off? Well, what you need is this thing, the máquina de fita, the little tape mark. And you go to a salon, they will put, literally tape a bikini onto you and they'll give you a little bit of fabric for your nips and stuff like that.

51:20Dan Schreiber:Of course, because I was thinking like lead is the same as a swimming costume. They all block it. But what you need is for your body not to be able to shift underneath it at all. Is that right?

51:28Anna Ptaszynski:So it's just that one bit of skin that is covered with the fabric.

51:31Dan Schreiber:So you could superglue your swimming costume to yourself as well.

51:33Anna Ptaszynski:Well, look, there are all sorts of roads to the answer, yes. But this is the biggie? There are salons where you just go and people go up to the roof. You pay about eight quid, which includes a breakfast buffet. So I would do this. Eight quid? I know. That's cheaper than a travel lunch. They don't do anything to your nips. You're not going to be beach body ready after a full English. yeah and then people lie there and they spray with water every now and again and that's how you get those incredibly crisp lines hey sugar nips thank you yes sweetie possum yes go on do you know what sugar nips i read this today and i'd never heard it before no i thought it was just

52:10Dan Schreiber:something that how you used it just then me too right partner so sugar nips were like a little pair of scissors you would use and if you had a block of sugar in your house or sugar loaf they would call it in fact sugar loaf mountain just outside rio but they you would have a sugar loaf on your table and you would use your sugar nips to nip off a little bit of sugar wow yeah i'd never

52:31Anna Ptaszynski:heard that before that is a kind that's a because you guys know i like a rare bit of crockery i'm

52:36Dan Schreiber:surprised and disappointed that you weren't familiar with them and in fact don't own a pair andy no and i'm actually now regretting it because i could have bought you some for your birthday

52:43Anna Ptaszynski:i'm gonna hop straight on ebay after this to go with the asparagus tongs and the butter spade Probably when you Google sugar nips. I'll take my chances. I'll take my chances.

53:01James Harkin:Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you very much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on Schreiberland on Instagram. James? My TikTok, no such thing as James Harkin.

53:17Anna Ptaszynski:Andy? I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter M. And Anna, to get to us as a group, they go to...

53:21Dan Schreiber:You can go to Instagram at No Such Thing As A Fish or at No Such Thing on Twitter or email podcast.qi.com.

53:27James Harkin:Yeah, and check out our website. We've got a kick-ass website, No Such Thing As A Fish.com. All our previous episodes are up there. There's lots of merch that you can buy up there. You can see if we're going to be doing any live shows in the coming year. Check it out there. And of course, there's Club Fish, which is our wonderful hidden private members club where we put a lot of bonus episodes up and so on. It's great fun. check it out. Otherwise, just come back here next week. We'll be back with another episode, and we will see you then. Goodbye.