No Such Thing As Billions Of Checkers Boards

8:55Daniel Sloss:Right, one more. You've all done disappointingly well, I'm afraid. The food in the capital is principally Porridge and boiled mutton But the food is sallow and predictable

9:05James Harkin:New York Times

9:07Daniel Sloss:It's the New York Times in 2020 Porridge and boiled mutton was apparently the core of the British food scene Until quite recently Plus 4 out of 4 for everyone I think

9:15James Harkin:Dan, do you Do you own an island in Scotland? By any chance? Do I own one? Yeah, because I was doing some googling about islands generally Because one of the initial facts, Dan That you sent us was about the fact that there's a a bunch of wallabies that are roaming wild on a little island.

9:31Dan Schreiber:The only population of wild wallabies in Scotland is on an island called Incanac.

9:36James Harkin:Yeah, and you know who owns that island? I do not. Kirsty Young of Desert Island Discs. She bought her own island. Her own desert island? It's her own desert island.

9:44Dan Schreiber:And she took wallabies to it. They were there already. To a luxury. Pleat words to Shakespeare and a load of wallabies.

9:50James Harkin:She inherited the wallabies that are already there, which is very exciting.

9:55Daniel Sloss:Do we know how they got there in the first place?

9:57Dan Schreiber:Yes. So I can't remember what year it was, but there was like a Scottish aristocrat lady went to Australia, fell in love with these wallabies. No matter what the locals told her that they were just firemen, she was like, I'll take them home. I'll domesticate them. No. Brought them back to Scotland and very quickly realised that they were just firemen. Didn't have it in her heart to kill them. So it was just like, Jesus got like her butler or her man servant or whatever to like canoe them over to this tiny little, like in the middle of a loch where they've been for like 60 years now, for generations.

10:27Dan Schreiber:and because they've got no natural predators, you can rent a canoe and a kayak, my friends have done it, go to the islands, and the wallabies will just come up to you and hang out with you. And if you camp there, they'll set outside around your fire because they've never been eaten.

10:40James Harkin:Lamb Island, have you heard of Lamb Island? Lamb Island.

10:42Dan Schreiber:Yeah.

10:43James Harkin:I have not. Okay, well that in 2009, that was bought by Uri Geller.

10:48Daniel Sloss:Unfortunately, it's now bent completely in two. It's not a shame.

10:53James Harkin:He thinks that there's something mystical about it, that there used to be witch trials. And there's also a crystal orb that once belonged to Albert Einstein buried on the island. These are all the claims, but it's become a bit of a tourist attraction. So people who rent out boats will do tours around the island of this mystical island. But they're going cheap, you know, if you've got... Yeah, if you've got money in that territory. Yeah, but with rising sea waters, I mean, you know, it's a false economy.

11:19Dan Schreiber:If you're buying an island where sea levels are rising...

11:21Daniel Sloss:I think lakes are usually okay, aren't they? I reckon. And I think Scotland is rising in general. Are we? Because of, yes, because of the ice sheet receding at the end of the last ice age. And I think Scotland is still bouncing back.

11:36Andy McH:On the islands, they have these incredible beaches in Scotland, right? Whereas if you go to Dover, you have big old cliffs. And that's because the entire country is on a slight slant.

11:45Dan Schreiber:But that's because Scottish people are fatter. So we're off on this end. Then it's bringing up the... It's ringing a bingling on that end.

11:51James Harkin:And we kind of always wondered about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:53Dan Schreiber:which is impressive because there's less people in scotland than there are in london it really goes to show just how yeah much we love chocolate this podcast does not agree with that i'm from scotland i can be as racist to my own people as i like

12:08Andy McH:here's an interesting thing that i found out this week in the oxy english dictionary there's three meanings for the word albanian okay number one i bet you can guess cocaine from from from someone from albania right number two someone from scotland because scotland used to be called alba and has been called albania in the 12th century you get british people calling scotland albania is that so yeah and the third one is someone from albany new york is an albanian as well

12:39Dan Schreiber:i hope they're twinned in some way yeah in a confusing way welcome to albania new york also has one of the weirdest venues in the entire world called the egg that is an egg-shaped building from the outside, which is on like three stilts. So you have to get this elevator up to this egg. And it's called The Egg. The Egg Albany. I've played it. It's a lovely venue. Comedy venue? A theater venue.

13:04Daniel Sloss:Can you tell us your best yolks?

13:06Dan Schreiber:Great.

13:09James Harkin:I'm pretty sure I'm going to be invited there. 100 % in. Are you looking for an opener at Wembley?

13:18Dan Schreiber:I'm trying to.

13:19James Harkin:there's so many egg punts going on in my head i'm like don't do it don't do it don't do it let's not come on now come on now um you were just talking about uh albanians as a language uh point um there's a scottish wikipedia don't know if you've ever been on it daniel but uh it's where the articles are sort of translated existing articles are translated into scots into scots yeah um and it's it was getting quite large and then someone discovered that 49 of all the articles that were written were written by a 12 year old kid from america who had never learned the language in the slightest and was making assumptions on what they'd seen online of how

13:59Daniel Sloss:to translate it so this isn't gaelic this is scots yeah different things aren't they yeah that's

14:04James Harkin:right um so it's complete and if anyone with a basic understanding would be like what what is this and from 12 till 19 they wrote 49 of all the articles that existed on scottish wikipedia and if

14:16Andy McH:like someone has written them in like a slightly racist scottish accent yeah yeah great and when

14:24James Harkin:they were told they were they weren't like got me they were devastated they were like i thought i was doing a really good job that's so sweet yeah like oh james mccribbons me bob it's like no we

14:35Daniel Sloss:don't say that we do not i've just realized well the earliest ever maps of scotland ptolemy uh the map of Ptolemy. It was made in the 2nd century AD and it's pretty good. Unbelievably good. Except that... It's on its height. Scotland sticks out to the right instead of going up. And it's as if it's had the Uri Geller treatment. It's really funny. The rest of the mainland goes up. You know, you can see Cornwall, you can see Kent and it tapers up and suddenly it just turns a corner and Scotland just sticks out to the east. And what happened there? An error.

15:07James Harkin:Yeah.

15:07Andy McH:Oh, okay. Should we move on? Yeah. Yeah, we can do one more thing, actually. So the Romans, often not very nice about Britain, but it kind of carries on. So the first rough guide to Britain and the first lonely planet guide to Britain, they were both published for Australian tourists and they were quite insulting to the British, I would say. The Australians were. Yeah, because it was for students a little bit. So but then the British press really kind of went to town in it. So the first rough guide to Britain in 1996 said that the UK had a less than brilliant climate, a laughable indigenous cuisine, and an attitude to social class that is ingrained with the habits of feudalism.

15:49Andy McH:Still true. It's hard to argue, isn't it?

15:53Daniel Sloss:That's typical of someone who was born on the Thames. You'd say that, Dan. I can't believe that.

16:03Andy McH:Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Squarespace.

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16:34Daniel Sloss:James, if you were doing a Squarespace site, what expertise would you showcase?

16:38Andy McH:Well, I would show people how to play the best golf of their life by taking videos of Rory McIlroy and showing them to them and definitely not showing them videos of me.

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17:27Andy McH:4! On with the podcast.

17:31Daniel Sloss:On with the show.

17:36James Harkin:Okay, it is

17:37Daniel Sloss:time for fact number 2 and that is Andy. My fact is, the man responsible for harnessing the power of Niagara Falls also had a pigeon girlfriend.

17:48Dan Schreiber:Many pigeon girlfriends.

17:49Daniel Sloss:Well, we'll get into his love life. Who is he? This is Nikola Tesla. Yes. An incredibly important person in world history, basically. The man who really, more than almost anyone else, maybe accepting Edison, harnessed electricity, created electricity, and just worked out how to distribute electricity and to transport it across long distances. Harnessed Niagara Falls, set up the hydroelectric power station to power, I think it was a, was it Buffalo in New York State? It was a New York City. Yeah, yeah. So he was a really, really interesting guy Born in Serbia And he was a very eccentric man as well And one of the things about him Was that he seems to have lived as a celibate Sort of all his life No one knows he ever had a close relationship with anybody He once fell in love briefly With a young woman called Anna But then nothing came of that And then later in life He had a pigeon girlfriend

18:51Andy McH:What does that mean, Andy?

18:52Daniel Sloss:To have a pigeon girlfriend? He would feed the birds outside the New York Public Library. As you do to your wife. Tuppence a bag. And the pigeons would approach in flocks. But there was one special pigeon which came every day. And he said she was beautiful. That one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere. She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon. I loved her as a man loves a woman and she loves me. And when she was ill, he knew about it. she would come to his room and stay with him for days and then this is so sad this bit he said when that pigeon died something went out of my life and I knew my life's work was finished quite something I mean he was very eccentric in his later years but he had a real attachment to this bird it's so sweet and that was when he lived in

19:36Dan Schreiber:a hotel in New York because Thomas Edison hugely fucked him over when he first came over he was like if you ever come to if you ever come to New York I'll have a job for you and then Tesla that came over on the boat and Edison was like, oh, if you can fix this machine, I'll give you this amount of money. So Tesla not only fixed the machine, fixed it faster and made it, and put vast improvements on it. And then when he asked Edison for the money, Edison said, oh, you clearly just don't get the American sense of humor. And that started the rivalry between him and Edison. The problem was Edison, being American, and especially the height of imperialism and capitalism, would patent everything, whereas Tesla refused to patent any of his stuff Furley Doors because he was a true firm believer that all energy should be free, especially if it was harnessed in that way.

20:24Dan Schreiber:And it took him being screwed over by America so many times before he finally understood that some things had to be patent. But he didn't do enough of it. And so when he died, he died penniless. And this is one of the few conspiracy theories I believe in and subscribe to.

20:37Andy McH:For the listener, Dan was looking the other Dan straight in the eye now.

20:41Dan Schreiber:like when he died apparently like the fbi whatever the back but back in the 1800 version of the fbi was went around to his house and confiscated a bunch of things because there are like rumors that he was inventing a death ray he predicted telephones wireless telephones before they were ever invented like like almost a century before there was a box with a bunch of tubes and wires which he said just took electricity out of like the ether like the air just around right and it was able to generate this vehicle for like eight hours in a row that thing was confiscated from his hotel and they've never seen it again nobody knows what it was how it created that now obviously it could be rumor over time all this stuff i'm telling you it's it's big american government it's the indiana jones warehouse yeah it's gone into that yeah but i think you know i didn't know

21:32James Harkin:that side of his story that he went penniless at the end of his life and that he was dating pigeons and that he was a bit odd. And the New York Times, if you go into the New York Times and you put his name in and you bring it to the years that he was alive, the headlines come out like a really eccentric, he almost sounds very sort of like Trump-like with his claims. I've got a headline here at July 11th, 1933. Dr. Tesla at 77, seldom sleeps. Inventor says his health and mind are better than ever. Expects to live beyond 140. Like he was making all the, and the death theme thing was.

22:03Daniel Sloss:Then he said that he attributed we did that to drinking very good whiskey, among a few other things. And when Prohibition came in, he said, oh, well, now I'm only going to live to 130. Nightmare. He was brilliant.

22:13James Harkin:I love him. The year after, Tesla at 78, Bear's new death beam, this is the one you're talking about, Dan, invention powerful enough to destroy 10 ,000 planes 250 miles away. He says the apparatus will kill without trace. But he also thought that that was going to be world peace after he invented that, right? Yeah, defensive weapon only, he says.

22:32Andy McH:Yeah, he called it a peace ray, I think. And the idea is like, what's the point of having a war if Tesla can just press a button and all your planes blow up? So everyone's going to become friends.

22:41James Harkin:Yeah, it's a peace ray, guys.

22:44Dan Schreiber:Also, all of this will be anti-Tesla propaganda because Edison deeply wants to discredit him because Tesla's alternating current was infinitely better than direct current. Because it requires less generators over distances. that tesla's electricity was vastly superior and edison didn't like that so what edison did to smear tesla was got like a full-size elephant got tesla's alternating current ran it through the elephant and killed it in front of like 10 000 people being like this is how dangerous all of this stuff is so then as a rebuttal to that i think it was like a couple months later that was when tesla did like a literal festival of lights and light bulbs throughout new york city where there's that famous shot of him walking through the Tesla coil where it's touching him because that was him proving that you could touch electricity and that Edison's understanding and pitch of what direct current was was a lie.

23:43Daniel Sloss:Edison comes across as a bit of a hound. A piece of poo, if you don't mind me saying that. Well, we don't use strong language on this podcast, but I think that... I mean, I'm almost going to propose him as an enemy of the podcast with Mark Twain. Oh, wow. I don't know. I mean, obviously, he was very important in lots of ways, but he electrocuted a lot of other animals as well to prove, supposedly, that Tesla's stuff was dangerous. Really? Okay.

24:06Dan Schreiber:Yeah, he was, like, the first, for me, the first thing of, like, what America really is, which you can say it's about freedom, you can say it's about opportunity. What it is, is it's somebody getting rich the fastest, and they're doing everything they can to stop anyone else competing with that.

24:21Daniel Sloss:Yeah.

24:21Dan Schreiber:There is a Twain link, actually.

24:23Daniel Sloss:We don't like Mark Twain on this show, Dan, just so you know. Okay. But one thing Tesla designed was, an oscillating electrotherapy machine. And the idea was it would help people digest their food from the outside. So it's a... A poo-joo-joo. A poo-joo-joo.

24:40Dan Schreiber:From the outside.

24:41Daniel Sloss:Have you been reading my notes? That's what...

24:46Daniel Sloss:Yeah, poo-joo-joo. And Tesla let Mark Twain try this and sort of strapped him into it and did not tell him that the need to relieve yourself comes quite quickly.

24:58Andy McH:It basically vibrates you, right? Is that what it was? It shuggles you. It drizzles you.

25:02Daniel Sloss:And Twain had to rush off in some distress to the nearest loo.

25:06Andy McH:Can I do a poo Tesla fact then? Yes. This is modern. So 40 % of Tesla owners, so people who own Tesla cars, think that birds deliberately poo on their cars.

25:19James Harkin:Interesting.

25:21Andy McH:They did a survey of, they asked people whether birds deliberately poo on the cars and they also did a survey of all the cars and saw how often or how frequently birds poo on all the different cars and they found that 40 percent of tesla people think that the birds deliberately poo on there but actually they don't

25:40Dan Schreiber:feature in the top 10 of brands most pooed on wow so it is all in their heads oh okay good you think that's just like guilt from i think so that's what i think buying your toothbrush from a nut

25:53James Harkin:did you say you have a tesla yes so do you have you ever noticed an abundance of pigeon shit on

25:58Dan Schreiber:you no but the pigeons is the pigeons that's what i'm saying is it a mark of respect is it sort of saying yeah for my old boy yeah exactly for the yeah for the only human man that loved us

26:10James Harkin:yeah yeah he did um the the pigeon thing with tesla like he didn't just date them he nursed them as well he spent a lot of money inventing sort of braces if they hurt themselves so one broke a wing. He invented a sort of brace to make sure that the injured bird was okay. Yeah, big old fan. Such an interesting man. He likes it.

26:30Dan Schreiber:Pigeons are just don't get me wrong, in terms of birds they're not seagulls. If you're looking after seagulls, I think you should go to jail. Nobody's rescuing the bastards of the coast. Pigeons I sort of get, but they're not.

26:45Daniel Sloss:People do get into pigeons though, in quite a way. So sometimes I walk through St. James's park which is in the middle of london and there are a lot of pigeons there and it's where people congregate and put food on their heads or their shoulders or their knees or their toes

26:58Andy McH:so the pigeons land on them yeah do they that's people watching home alone too too much yeah i

27:03Daniel Sloss:don't i don't love it and there used to be loads in trafalgar square it used to be pigeons hundreds of pigeons like flocking around the place yeah and then i think the mayor was it ken livingston introduced hawks yeah dealt with the problem pretty quickly i'll tell you that yeah but there

27:19Andy McH:a lot of places think they're vermin don't they yeah but i just recently was in cappadocia in turkey and they have pigeon lofts everywhere because they wanted the pigeons to live there because they would use the poo for fertilizer and they also used it to make frescoes in their churches that's cool but yeah they would deliberately have them there but a lot of places like in um Regina, California, it's illegal to own more than 90 pigeons. And of your allotted 90 pigeons, only 50 of them may be more than a month old. It's very specific. Whoa. Wow.

27:52Daniel Sloss:So the rest you have to row out to an island and leave them there. Yeah. And then flying, following the comeback. Shit! Famously homing bird. Just take these pigeons into the woods.

28:07Dan Schreiber:Maybe I have to move to the woods.

28:09Andy McH:Maybe that's the only way. 90 is quite a threshold. Yeah, but you can't really cull them. You can use hawks and stuff, but in Basel in Switzerland, they had 20 ,000 pigeons, and then from 1961 to 1985, they killed around 100 ,000 every year, but the population stayed stable because when you kill them, they just reproduce and get more and more until they get to their nice level, which is the amount that they have enough food for.

28:34Daniel Sloss:There you go. Tezel, when he was a child,

28:36Andy McH:he once fell headfirst into a vat of boiling milk, and he felt a lot yeah he was like really clumsy you would say so was he like a genius but if you

28:46James Harkin:watched his life it was like mr bean yeah was he just constantly right yeah he was quite

28:51Dan Schreiber:dyspraxic i guess i went to his uh childhood home did you really yeah yeah yeah so i get to perform out in croatia and serbia and there's a big argument between croatia and serbia about where he's from because obviously that was back in you could think it was yugoslavia back then so there's a debate about whether he's serbian or whether he's croatian one of them's have named an airport after him he's on another one is the ones their currency and stuff right so he went to his uh childhood home which they need to when i say they need to do it up i'm not suggesting doing the house up but like there's like this really small tiny town nothing near it and they'll take it around and be like yeah he fell off it he was struck by lightning allegedly he fell off that roof came down there was in a coma for a couple of days and that's where he had a lot like visions and stuff a lot of his creations he would say came from visions he was having in his head and then he would invent these things which is where the conspiracy theories come in of like you know when he was nine years old he said he was going to invent this thing and then 30 years later he dead and he's all from the vision so when he was 30 and he was having these visions right for things he was going to create 30 years people are like well he was obviously kind of do that huh um just like the original except and i i the reason i love him is i think there is something deeply, deeply fucking honorable for like this man who did not want to patent anything.

30:04Dan Schreiber:He was like, all of this stuff deserves to be free. This would benefit society. There's no benefit to charging people from this. And the fact that the first place that that idea was kicked out of him was he arrived on the shores of America. And they went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely. Here, let us introduce you to capitalism. Yeah. To the eighth degree. You're going to die alone in the richest city in the world. You will have a girlfriend. Yeah. We're just going to have a lovely pair of breasts.

30:42James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first Swedish translation of Lord of the Rings inspired two follow-up works. The first, by Tolkien, was on how not to translate his books. And the second was by the Swedish translator on how Tolkien was actually a dark wizard Nazi. Jeez.

31:03Andy McH:Yeah, it was... They didn't get on then. It was really bad.

31:06James Harkin:So this was a translation that was done by Åker Ålmarks. He was a Swedish translator. Did really big books in his time. So he was a very respected translator. Took on the job of doing Lord of the Rings. and it came out and it was just panned. Locally, it was panned. People thought that the translation just added descriptions that shouldn't have been there. The way he phrased certain sentences just didn't run nicely. When you read them in isolation, they don't seem like big changes, but apparently when they're all smashed together in these gigantic books, it really becomes obvious. And so Tolkien took issue with it to the point of writing a guide called Guide to the Names in the Lord of the Rings and actively used examples from the Swedish translation.

31:49Daniel Sloss:to show what you shouldn't do. It's interesting because Tolkien was a philology world master. He was a linguist. He just studied language deeply for 50, 60 years before writing these books. So of course he's going to have thoughts.

32:03Andy McH:But do you think he wouldn't have spoken Swedish? I don't think so, no.

32:07Daniel Sloss:But he knew when the names had been changed. That was one big bugbear. He wrote, in principle I object as strongly as is possible to the translation of the nomenclature at all. Even by a competent person.

32:20Andy McH:But then if you're translating, you don't necessarily need to change the names, do you? That's what got him so angry.

32:27Daniel Sloss:But what if someone has a really silly sounding name? They're meant to have a grand name in English and they've got a silly sounding name. Oh, that makes sense. And actually, I didn't know this. And I did read all the books as a teenager and I loved them. They're supposedly a translation. Like the whole Lord of the Rings. He has to explain why it's in English.

32:42Andy McH:Were they in like Hobbit language before? Yes, it's the story the Hobbits told.

32:47Daniel Sloss:There's something called the Red Book of Westmarch Which was written by the Hobbits And it's kind of, I love a framing device Where someone says I've just translated this from the From the original which is all in Hobbit That's why we have words in here like Sausage or whatever

33:01James Harkin:It's clever, he was a clever guy

33:03Daniel Sloss:I think he was clever

33:04James Harkin:Well, Olmarchs doesn't think so Olmarchs wrote a book called Tolkien and Black Magic It didn't get a big distribution So you have to go into certain libraries In order to get it out and it was never translated into English. But the blurb reads roughly, it comes to the attention, especially during the last few years, the multitude of Tolkien societies have denigrated to a kind of Ku Klux Klan with the worship of open violence, crude orgies, alcohol and drug abuse. Crude orgies? Crude orgies.

33:32Daniel Sloss:Oh, that's the worst kind of orgy.

33:33James Harkin:Oh, well, yeah.

33:36Dan Schreiber:Pinkies up, boys. Up a bit of class near the ass.

33:41James Harkin:So I found someone who's got a Tumblr account called Upon the Foremost Ship, who went to read the book. And this is the only thing, really, that I can find out about the details. They say that the first chapter of the book is, quite frankly, unreadable. All he does is list a bunch of evil or cultish organizations and claim that the Tolkien fans and Tolkien are like that. The next chapter is called The Half-Witted Old Man Tolkien. Never refers to him just as Tolkien. He always calls him Old Man Tolkien. And then he starts having a crack at the book itself. So in the later chapter, he starts saying that the hobbits are forever children with no adult supervision that walk around barefoot in the woods and he says Bilbo specifically has this never-ending birthday party.

34:21James Harkin:So crap.

34:26Dan Schreiber:It's such a violent way to not be able to take criticism.

34:29Daniel Sloss:I know, right? I think Holmark, the translator, was so annoyed because, I'm not to excuse it, but he, obviously for years and years, people were telling him over and over and over what a bad job he'd done, which I think he probably had. And then at one point, some years later, a fire happened at his house. Yeah. And he blamed the Tolkien fans. He said that it was arson by... Really?

34:55James Harkin:He really became... I mean, it's possible that he got a lot of flack to make him paranoid to think that. But he even put conspiracy theories into the book itself. So as you go further along, he says, oh, it's all very obviously Tolkien for the first bit. But then the kind of style changes. And he thinks C.S. Lewis wrote the rest of the book. Interesting. lord of the rings yeah yeah he thinks you only get to a certain point then they were mates and they were part of uh they were in the inklings yeah the spread eagle in oxford they would sit and read these things out at the pub yeah um it's a wild book are you a fan daniel uh i'm a massive fan of

35:29Dan Schreiber:fantasy yeah but i and the reason i am is from lord of the rings movies they came out when i was like 11 years old and they blew my mind and then i tried reading them when i was 14 or 15 which at the time they were so different from the movies that that that annoyed me and I it's something I'm going to revisit now but now that I have a four-year-old son where I'm just like we're getting close to being allowed to show him I know they say 12 he's seeing it when he's oh yeah no my

35:58James Harkin:three-year-old did all of the Avenger movies uh like it's fine well I guess but my question with

36:02Dan Schreiber:that is like I it's not about I don't care about the content but the first time he watches Lord Lord of the Rings, I need him to have the attention span for it to be two and a half hours and for him to understand that it is the greatest movie series ever.

36:16Daniel Sloss:Oh, you'll be showing him the abridged versions then. I'll be doing the most boring stuff

36:22Dan Schreiber:being like, did you know that Viggo Mortensen broke his foot while kicking the helmet of the Uruk-hai in The Two Towers and that scream is genuine. That's a real fact from the movie that every Lord of the Rings fan knows. that's very good, I didn't know that it's such a mean fact now that it's the most if you watch that movie with anyone he genuinely breaks his foot and the scream is real

36:47Daniel Sloss:because I remember him kicking a helmet I don't remember the scream

36:50James Harkin:was it him as well who had to climb all the mountains to do the shoots because he was afraid of flying Sean Bean no way

36:58Dan Schreiber:refused to climb up to the top of the mountains in Fellowship of the Ring so they've got lots of footage of just Sean Bean by himself climbing up a mountain in full Boromir gear through the snow. And they're like, well, this is actually this actually rules.

37:12Daniel Sloss:Wait, he climbed up because he was afraid of flying? Yes.

37:15Dan Schreiber:But climbing bears its own risks. Yes, but it's more the, it was the helicopters.

37:21Andy McH:I was going to say, how did he get to New Zealand? From Yorkshire.

37:27Daniel Sloss:But if you get your cloak in the rotor blades, I completely understand the peril.

37:30Dan Schreiber:Also, when the hobbits were like, why don't we just get the eagles to fly us to Mordor. It was actually Boremir being like, no, no, no, no, I think we should

37:37Daniel Sloss:walk there.

37:39Dan Schreiber:I think the eagles is a stupid idea.

37:42Daniel Sloss:Oh dear, that's so funny.

37:43Dan Schreiber:And also to any nerds, to any non-nerd nerds, people who say, why didn't they fly the ring to Mordor? What were the last words that Gandalf the Grey said before he died?

37:58Daniel Sloss:Oh, he says fly, doesn't he? Before he goes down into the thing with the Balrog.

38:01Dan Schreiber:He says fly, you fools. It was a secret plan that he had, that he was taking them through to get to the Eagles. He couldn't tell anyone because Saruman is everywhere. Can we just watch the rest of it, please? I'd like to be there to see you absolutely ruin these films for your boy. God, I'm my dad with Star Wars. No!

38:23Daniel Sloss:You could have cheered up your son by getting him a little present because in 2021, some developers attempted to launch the JRR token, a cryptocurrency currency based, not based on, but lamely punned after Tolkien but it was blocked by the estate. Despite the fact they got the actor who played Pippin in the movies to make a video endorsing.

38:47Andy McH:What about the refuse firm from Brighton called Lord of the Bins who were told to change their name?

38:54Daniel Sloss:Obviously they're protective because people will take the mickey otherwise.

38:57Andy McH:Yeah, there was also, like this year, there was a company who were making, it was like a burger van thing called Lord of the Fries. And Tolkien's estate took them to court, even though it's obviously based on Lord of the Flies by William Golding. But they said that they might be trying to pass it off as a Lord of the Rings because people are more familiar with Lord of the Rings than they are with Lord of the Flies. They lost. Why did they?

39:21Daniel Sloss:Okay, so it is, because Golding, I don't know when he died, but I think he will still definitely be in copyright. Yeah, no, well, they're not bothered. Okay, they're fine. Lord of the Flies, people.

39:29Andy McH:There's another, not like a translation, but a different version of Lord of the Rings by a Russian guy called Kirill Yeskov. And it's called... Where Saruman's the goody. Absolutely right. Is it? Yeah. It's called Posledny Kosyenesets, which means the last ring bearer. And it's about that basically Mordor is a rational, progressive industrial society. And they're being crushed by the elites of the West who come over and take over. and it's actually like in russia you can get it for sure and in other parts of europe you can but they've never made it in an english-speaking country because they think they're going to get

40:08James Harkin:sued well they've from what i've read they've they've never released it there's been a translation done and if you dig online yeah i found the translation right yeah yeah but yeah it's never been commercially released apparently it's really like it's a good parody it's apparently it's a pretty good book a pretty good fantasy alternative reality interesting kind of thing um do you know

40:25Daniel Sloss:why Tolkien came up with The Hobbit in the first place? The whole book? Yeah, it's through boredom. So he was a teacher at the time, and he was not well off. He and his wife didn't have much money at all, and he took on the job of marking school exam papers. You could do that if you were a teacher at the time. You could just say, right, I'll sign up for a batch and you got paid per paper that you marked. The boredom prompted him to write the sentence just on a scrap bit of paper in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. and he later said I did not I did and do not know why just sort of and he had obviously studied language as a huge deal because hobbit is an old word and you know all the names are sort of ancient words and he'd read a lot of myth from his early childhood he had a really tragic early childhood but it just sort of happened wrote that I do like the idea that he writes hole in the ground was a

41:14Andy McH:hobbit and the rest of it just writes itself yeah yeah yeah exactly he had a big problem I think

41:19Daniel Sloss:because a lot of the way he wrote it was trying to make certain things sound archaic and ancient. But in some European languages, that's just the way sentences work. Like the German sentences are the other way up. In his pen, he's just waiting for the main verb. And so if Tolkien has written, wise are the ways of the blah.

41:39Andy McH:So does that mean that Yoda doesn't work in German?

41:43Daniel Sloss:Yoda's the only normal talking guy in those films. And everyone else. Germans love him. like he gets straight to the point

41:50Andy McH:and it's a noun feeling we love that easy to comprehend Yoda is that's very funny interesting you know it's weird

41:59James Harkin:with all the litigations that go on and we thought we had Ella Alshamahi on this show she's an anthropologist paleo-anthropologist and there was a hominid that was found that it was very short and so they were known as the hobbits and the estate got in touch saying you can't call them hobbits even as part of your yeah it's pretty wild to the length that they go which is surprising then that for the last 50 years or so, still in print is the book Board of the Rings, which was the Harvard Lampoon book. So the creators of National Lampoon started in Harvard and they wrote this book, which was an outright...

42:33James Harkin:Yeah, I think I read it when I was... Or I read bits of it when I was younger. So you've got Bilbo and Frodo, where Dildo Bug End and Fritto Bugger, Goddamn for Gollum. And they've never been out of print. They've sold millions globally. it's been translated.

42:48Daniel Sloss:Is that American laws? Or parody laws? You know, sometimes you're protected if it's...

42:52Dan Schreiber:Yeah, because it's so clearly a parody. I guess so, yeah.

42:56Andy McH:Interesting. We mentioned C.S. Lewis earlier. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is dedicated to someone called Lucy, who was the daughter of his friends. And he sent the copy to her mother and father, Owen and Maud Barfield. And Maud was so worried that people would read it, and then kids would go into wardrobes and get stuck. That is such... she made him change it so if you read it whenever the kids go into the wardrobe they're always really careful to leave it ajar for when they come back out again oh that's so so you changed

43:25Dan Schreiber:it within it i really like the fact that somebody in c.s lewis's life was like you need to change the story so that kids don't lock themselves in cupboards whereas everyone in jk rellum's life was like yeah and then they just run into a fucking wall at a train station just keep that in

43:42Daniel Sloss:Not only keep that in, put that in every book and make it like a really big part.

43:47Dan Schreiber:It's for nine-year-olds. These books are for nine-year-olds. Make sure Stephen Fry does it in an audiobook and describes that happening every time.

44:01Andy McH:Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.

44:05Daniel Sloss:Hello, everybody. Just to let you know, we are sponsored this week by Aura.

44:09Andy McH:Aura, yes. aura are the digital frame company now and the mother's day is coming up uh and yes normally i'd buy my mom a nice bunch of flowers or something but what if i could give her a photograph of some

44:23Daniel Sloss:flowers it's not just that james it's a rolling carousel of all the photos of flowers you could ever imagine uh aura frames is an incredible digital photo frame where you can upload photos photos to the frame. So if you give your mum one of these, she will be able to see what you've been up to. You can say, oh, I would love to send this photo to mum and you can do it and it'll appear on her frame. It's a very, very cool way of doing it.

44:49Andy McH:Yeah, absolutely. They are really amazing. We advertised these guys a little while back and we now have three of them in various different relatives' houses because there's free unlimited storage. You can personalise your gift when you buy one of these aura frames and a gift box is included as well it's so easy to use i definitely

45:08Daniel Sloss:would recommend it absolutely unlike flowers uh they don't need their water changing after a week in fact don't water them at all don't water them at all that's yeah i should i should have said that um it's a fantastic personalized gift so for a limited time you can save on the perfect gift by visiting aura frames.co.uk to get 35 pounds off aura's best-selling carver matte frames named the top frame by the independent by using the promo code fish at checkout that's aura a u r a frames

45:37Andy McH:dot co dot uk promo code fish this deal is exclusive to listeners so order yours now to get it in time for mother's day support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply on with the show on with the podcast okay it's time for a final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that in the 1950s the alabama drafts champion proposed to the twin sister of the world drafts champion with the aim of creating a family of drafts geniuses yeah she declined so i've been reading about this guy called marion tinsley and i think he is better than anyone else in the world at one thing which is drafts more than anyone in history has been better at anything than everyone else in the world

46:27Daniel Sloss:oh wow that's a big claim

46:28Dan Schreiber:wow I reckon

46:28Daniel Sloss:I think you might be right

46:29Dan Schreiber:I think I can go on outdo you this is going to sound like a stretch we know you're good at comedy Dan

46:38Daniel Sloss:this is not like

46:42Dan Schreiber:we just think the person who's second best is not far from you

46:45James Harkin:no

46:49Dan Schreiber:Tiger Woods oh yeah Tiger Woods my favourite star about Tiger Woods So the way golf works is there's budget tournaments. There's four majors, or the big ones, there's four of them a year. In a 10-year period, if you were to total up Tiger's score in all four of these majors every year, four tournaments over 10 years, his score was 112 under par. So 112 shots under par. In second place was Phil Mickelson over those same 10 years with a score of plus 121. That was second place. So like that's, Phil Mickelson was like the greatest player of his generation. Unfortunately, he played at a time when the greatest ever to interest.

47:34Andy McH:A hundred percent. I agree that Tiger Woods was by far the best golfer of his era, but this guy from 1948, when he took up checkers or drafts until he died in 1994, he only lost nine games. Whoa. Two of them were against a computer. Yeah. And by the way, when he played the computer, who could calculate 3 million positions per minute and looked 21 moves ahead and had been loaded with every game he had ever played, he played the computer 49 times and he beat it 4 -2. Right. With all the rest were ties. This guy is just unbelievable. He's so great. He's amazing.

48:14Daniel Sloss:Of those defeats, you said he lost nine games. So two of those were to the computer. Two of them were trivial errors. He just, oh, you know, sort of like, we call it a fat finger error, you know. There's one time between 1950 and 1992 that he was outplayed. Right. He was probably a bit poorly at the time or something. It's just, it's unbelievable.

48:37James Harkin:Do you know what drove him to do all this? What the fire was inside of him? The pigeon. He loved a pigeon. He loved a pigeon.

48:43Dan Schreiber:His parents could only afford a chess board But not the chess piece

48:49Daniel Sloss:We've got some Pontefract cakes But they've gone off So we're not going to eat them

48:52Andy McH:Half of them have gone off in turns

48:56James Harkin:The origin story It all comes back to him being Absolutely furious and pissed off With an old lady called Mrs. Kershaw Who beat him in a game And beat him game after game He still talked about it in interviews afterwards Oh how she'd cackle He would like be seething about it and he went into a local library in America and he found all the books and he learned all the things and studied the hell out of it and that was it. That was the moment for him. He was Mrs. Geruchel. Classic masculinity, baby.

49:22Andy McH:Yeah, yeah. He used to do blindfold checkers. So you've probably heard of blindfold chess like Magnus Carlsen can play chess blindfolded amazingly well as can they all really. Blindfold checkers is way harder because you're only using half the board because you only use the white squares, right? And there's fewer pieces but they're all identical and so you can't say well the horse is here and the castle's over here and the queen's over here they're just blobs on a board and to remember where everything is wow yeah it's just absolutely incredible that is incredible there was a guy who was one of the greatest at

49:57James Harkin:the time some say the second best while he was uh still playing called derrick oldbury and he says this guy tinsley was to checkers what leonardo da vinci was to science what michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music and what Daniel Sloss is to comedy.

50:14Dan Schreiber:I'm glad he had that foresight.

50:18Daniel Sloss:It's crazy. He was such an interesting man. He retired for 12 years because there was no competition at one point and they kept having world championships, but they sort of said, well, obviously, Varian is the best. You're sort of playing to be...

50:31James Harkin:Yeah, the second best. Effectively, yeah. It's what David Letterman said about Robin Williams when he suddenly went into movies and stopped doing stand-up, he was like, we all collectively as stand-ups just went, well, let's just pretend that didn't happen. Because he was so good. It was such a whirlwind. It was like,

50:48Andy McH:that's just changed the game. But in 51 years of play, he won about$100 ,000 in prize money in total. Yeah. It's not that much money. It's not big, is it? It's weird, isn't it?

50:58James Harkin:I just thought that it would have been a multi-billionaire, yeah.

51:02Daniel Sloss:This thing with the computer where he later on was playing against a computer called Chinook. It was developed by a young computer programmer called Jonathan Schaefer who was fascinated by two things, drafts and computers. When Tinsley played against Chinook, he loved it. He said it made him feel like a young man again because he could play so well that playing against a human was so trivial. He first played Chinook in 1992. They had a set in 92 and then another set in 94 and then very sadly he realised he was terribly ill during the 94 games and he died not long after that. But in 1992, when they first played Man Against Machine, it made some clever little move.

51:41Daniel Sloss:And he said, you're going to regret that. And to see that, to see that that was an error on the board, a human would have had to look, as Tinsley did, 64 moves ahead. Wow.

51:54Andy McH:The thing about checkers and drafts is it's quite simple. If you look one move ahead and your opponent looks two moves ahead, they'll beat you. But then if you look three moves ahead, you'll beat them. Because it's quite a simple game. it's all about looking what happens next and what happens next what happens next right so if he can look 64 moves ahead you'd have to be able to look 65 to beat him right and when he beat this computer people said you know how how on earth did you beat the computer and he said well humans programmed the computer and god programmed me yeah he was quite religious he was very religious wasn't he

52:26Dan Schreiber:and he was a did he um yeah that checks out like yeah if you're getting that good at checkers you're not getting laid he said he said to a newspaper reporter that he read he said i haven't seen a

52:40Andy McH:checkers marriage that worked out it's a very rare woman who could be married to a real student of

52:45Daniel Sloss:checkers well that's being polite at least it's saying the problem is probably more with me than

52:50James Harkin:i think which is fair i love i do love that someone who thought of themselves as so good that humans were not part of the scene anymore for them it's so funny he's like i'm gonna have

53:01Dan Schreiber:to start banging pigeons.

53:02James Harkin:I'm so unbelievably good at Chequers. My favorite fact about him is that he died in a town called Humble. No. Humble, Texas.

53:13Daniel Sloss:Well, he was in a way, he said there's a sort of Christian concept called the fellowship of suffering. I hope the Tolkien estate didn't hear about that.

53:23Daniel Sloss:He said there was a sort of Chequers fellowship of suffering. You know, it's grinding to go through it. And also he said he couldn't have much of an ego because every time he said i play drafts to an adult they would say oh my little boy plays drafts you should give him a game that'd be nice and he's saying well i i think i'll win

53:44Dan Schreiber:yeah it's like being really good at fifa yeah i'm sure the greatest people player in the world

53:49Daniel Sloss:is 37 years old and that's sad master players of which we've established there are a few but one amazing sort of Don champion. They develop these things called cooks, which are moves which throw your opponent off, apparently. And they've all got names. I love this. Because you don't start... You know chess, you start with... An opening. An opening. The Queen's Gambit. Precisely, yeah. In checkers, I think you don't do that. What did you say they were called? These are called cooks, which people do. As in C-U-C-K? No. Cook old. Cooks. Cooks. Like a person who cooks food.

54:28Andy McH:Oh, like a cook. Like cook.

54:30Daniel Sloss:Yeah, yeah. Because I'd say cuck for what you're describing.

54:33Andy McH:I'm sorry, in my hearing they're the same. Like cuck and cuck are the same word. Ready, steady cuck.

54:44Daniel Sloss:But basically, you don't start in the starting position when you play competitive checkers. You draw a three-move opening from a stack of approved openings, and that gives one player a tiny advantage. and then if you make a mistake, your opponent compounds. Because this thing that Jonathan Schaefer, the computer guy, worked out, in 2007, he solved checkers. Do you want to hear? There was a mystical story about what happened.

55:06Andy McH:Sorry, did he work out that whoever goes first wins?

55:09Daniel Sloss:He worked out that if both players are perfect, they draw. Okay, great. But if you have these approved openings, then one player has a tiny advantage. Understood. So he'd been working on this for many years, running hundreds of computers around the world, playing through all the permutations to work out, basically to finish checkers. And in 2007, they knew the end was pretty near, and they were getting closer and closer to having completed the calculations for it. And there'd been some kind of power outage. And he was furious, because if that's happened, you need to restart them all, you need to do everything.

55:41Daniel Sloss:It's just really a laborious process, he said. And he opened the screen, and he saw the word, ta-da! And it's what he'd programmed in way ago, years ago, when he'd started working on these calculations and that was the sign that you've finished it. You've worked it out. It's just so nice that he programmed it in. It turns out it was a draw.

56:01Dan Schreiber:It's all eureka moment that he programmed it himself.

56:04Daniel Sloss:I know, and he'd forgotten he'd done it. He'd forgotten he put it down.

56:08James Harkin:That is very cool. Checkers, as I know it, hugely popular game over in the States particularly. Yeah, there's lists that you can read are like the most popular board games that you can get and it usually comes in seconds. at least according to fun.com after um mousetrap yeah what do you think it's after mousetrap board game for americans yeah favorite board game shoots and ladders oh maybe sick in my mouth um yeah i would say monopoly yeah it comes in according to fun.com it comes in third uh underneath checkers the top is chess right and uh they say that over 50 billion units have been sold of Chequers games going back, because it's a very ancient game, it's thousands of years.

56:54Andy McH:50 billion?

56:55James Harkin:That's a big number. Hang on, that's

56:57Daniel Sloss:everyone alive on the planet today owning eight sets each.

57:01Andy McH:Yeah, we've all got eight sets. I'm not sure how many humans have been alive, because population is...

57:07Daniel Sloss:Yeah, I think that's one for every person who's ever lived.

57:10Dan Schreiber:I've definitely owned more than... That's true. You've got to remember back in the days, before we had phones, you know when you went to the airport, you would get like a magnetic checkers set there. Every pub would have one. That's like, you know, three or four. That's one per pub. Right?

57:24Andy McH:I reckon I've had at least three or four as a kid. Yeah.

57:28Dan Schreiber:In my childhood, I would even say, like, given Christmas presents, birthday presents, before Xbox and stuff, I probably owned up to ten. Come on. Yeah. This is, we would be wading through checkers sets.

57:40Daniel Sloss:We would notice there would be a commission to deal with the problem. This is crazy.

57:47James Harkin:50 billion just numbers pouring out of you take it up with the boffins at fun.com because this is

57:53Andy McH:a solid number

58:01James Harkin: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're all online I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram James

58:12Andy McH:my Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin Andy at Andrew Hunter M Dan, where are you?

58:17Dan Schreiber:I'm on Instagram. I'm sure I've got other stuff. Just my name. Just put his name in.

58:23James Harkin:Yeah. And if you want to go see Andy and Dan play live at Wembley this November. Yes. 28th. Give us the details. 28th of November.

58:32Dan Schreiber:28th of November at Wembley, Oval Arena. Obviously, biggest gig of my life.

58:39James Harkin:You can also get to us as a group on podcast at qi.com. So send us any emails there. if you send us some facts that's going to make its way to our monday show little fish if you send any thoughts about new ideas that we should be incorporating into our shows any just general bits of feedback and he's going to bring that to drop us a line you can find drop us a line as part of club fish so go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish you'll find all the different tiers that you can get involved with there uh or just come back next week because we'll be back again here with another episode we'll see you then goodbye

59:14Thank you.